Invited Colloquium I

"Language learning in and out of the classroom:
Connecting contexts of language use with learning and teaching practices"
Organizer: Christina Higgins (University of Hawai'i at Mānoa)
Discussant: Alan Firth (Newcastle University)

For some time, researchers in applied linguistics have recognized the importance of access to and participation in L2 communities as essential aspects of language socialization and identity formation among L2 learners (Norton, 2000; Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000). Most of this research seeks to understand how L2 learners negotiate their participation in academic contexts (Duff, 1995, 2002; McKay & Wong, 1996; Miller, 2000; Morita, 2004; Willet, 1995; Zuengler, 2003), while a smaller number of studies focuses on contexts beyond classroom walls (e.g., Black, 2008; Lam, 2000; Norton, 2000). While both bodies of research have offered insights into the affordances and obstacles to participation faced by L2 learners, little research thus far has focused on the linkages between instructed contexts of L2 learning and L2 use in other contexts. Given this state of affairs, it is possible to argue that the relationship between instructed language learning and L2 use outside of classroom contexts is radically undertheorized and underresearched in the field of applied linguistics. Accordingly, this colloquium seeks to address this gap in the field by taking up the following question: What is the relationship between in-the-classroom language practices and engagements with the L2 beyond the classroom? The findings reported by the colloquium participants illustrate a dramatic range of intersectionality between academic contexts of learning/teaching and non-academic contexts of L2 use, and the presenters discuss the implications of these linkages and non-linkages for deepening the connections between L2 learning, teaching, and use.

Paper 1: Language learning as membershipping in classroom communities of practice
John Hellermann, Portland State University
Paper 2: The pragmatics of identity negotiation: What is the relevance of native-speaker norms for L2 use?
Noriko Ishihara, Hosei University
Paper 3: Language learning in rural Japan: EIL/EILF discourses and the local linguistic ecology
Sandra McKay, San Francisco State University and Ryuko Kubota, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Paper 4: Chilean English teacher identity and popular culture: Three generations
Julia Menard-Warwick, University of California-Davis
Paper 5: The new world: Language acquisition and use as transnational
Jane Zuengler, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Paper 1: Language learning as membershipping in classroom communities of practice
John Hellermann, Portland State University
A common theme in immigration debates in the popular media is that by living in the U.S., adult immigrant learners of English have ample opportunities to learn English by using it, by participating in English-language cultural activities and social institutions. Research has shown us that such opportunities are not available for all immigrants to the U.S. (Norton, 1998, 2001). While we know that classroom settings provide for formal instruction of English, instruction which can increase learners’ proficiency in structural aspects of the language, institutions such as community college ESL classes can also make up for the lack of opportunity for meaningful language use outside the classroom. Classroom settings can provide opportunities for repeated use of situated language (Kanagy, 1999; Ohta, 2001) that is not the result of explicit instruction, such as opening or disengaging from face-to-face interactions (Hellermann, 2007, 2008). In my contribution to the colloquium, I will show examples from community college ESL classrooms where non-instructed language use, afforded by learners as co-participants in a common endeavor, becomes a resource for language learning. The research draws on data from four years of classroom video recordings that focused on learner-learner classroom interaction and three years of in-home interviews with a subset of learners from the classroom. On a macro level, we see how issues for daily life become relevant topics and provide opportunities for discussion. On a micro level, we see how mundane, human-human interaction is a catalyst for practices of talk-in-interaction – a requirement of English language use outside the classroom. These empirical findings provide evidence for the classroom as a community of practice (Lave, 1991). The findings also provide support for a situated perspective of language learning as the change in learners’ participation in the classroom community of practice and in the community of practice that might be glossed as ‘English language users’.
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Paper 2: The pragmatics of identity negotiation: What is the relevance of native-speaker norms for L2 use?
Noriko Ishihara, Hosei University
In regard to the teaching of pragmatics in the L2 classroom, it has been argued that language educators should assist learners to understand others’ intentions and produce utterances that will approximate their own pragmatic intentions (e.g., Thomas, 1983; Kasper & Rose, 2002). This presentation investigates whether this fundamental principle of L2 pragmatics is actually practiced in the current L2 classroom by comparing learners’ descriptions of what is taught in classrooms with how they use language beyond classroom walls. I examine the use of both L2 English and L2 Japanese use outside of the classroom, drawing from two qualitative studies that investigated L2 speakers’ resistance to adopting perceived native-speaker norms (Ishihara & Tarone, in press; Ishihara, in press). In authentic and imagined cross-cultural interactions in the L2, speakers sometimes deliberately opted out of what they were taught as a community norm as part of their identity negotiation. They also resisted these norms to create distance between themselves and the L2 community. Some of them contrasted their pragmatic choice with a community norm that they were taught in the L2 classroom which followed the native-speaker model. Learners’ explanations of their own pragmatic choices showed the complexity of their positionings and identities that were “imposed,” “assumed,” or “negotiated” (Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004) in co-constructed discourse. In some of the cases, native-speaker norms were irrelevant to their pragmatic choices or had little impact on their decisions. For pedagogical implications, I argue that knowing the range of native-speaker norms and pragmatic variability can be of benefit to learners, but I also argue that the pragmatics of language production should be each learner’s own prerogative. The presentation will conclude with the introduction of culturally sensitive teaching of L2 pragmatics and classroom-based assessment that take learners’ subjectivity more fully into account as a possible way to help fill the gap between instructional practices and learners’ actual L2 use.
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Paper 3: Language learning in rural Japan: EIL/EILF discourses and the local linguistic ecology
Sandra McKay, San Francisco State University and Ryuko Kubota, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
The discourses surrounding English as an international language (EIL) or English as international lingua franca (EILF) are often framed from a macro-perspective, stressing linguistic imperialism caused by the global spread of English (e.g., Phillipson, 1992), the social impact of a global language (e.g., Crystal, 1997) the linguistic effects of language contact (e.g., Kachru, 2005), and the ultimate loss of language diversity (Nettle & Romaine, 2000). Meanwhile little attention has been paid to the discourses of EIL/EIFL in relation to the local linguistic ecology (Mufwene, 2002). Such ecology, increasingly affected by both global and rural-to-urban flows of people, often illustrate a complex interplay of languages in countries like Japan, where English has little communicative necessity and yet is taught as a de facto required subject. Focusing on a rural Japanese city with a growing population of non-English-speaking (especially Portuguese-speaking) immigrant workers, we explore how the discourses of EIL/EIFL are reflected in local Japanese residents’ views about English vis-à-vis local linguistic diversity. Drawing on extensive interviews with language learners, a community survey on immigrant workers, and participant observation in classrooms and community groups, we conclude that local residents, by buying into the discourse of EIL/EIFL, have limited views of what is “international,” while failing to support multilingualism in the community. The discourses of EIL/EILF often promote English language learning as a way to participate in an imagined global community. However, this imagined community is resided in only by economically advantaged elites, distanced from the local linguistic reality. We close by advocating language policies and programs that are based on a critical assessment of the local linguistic ecology, one in which an international language may not be relevant.
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Paper 4: Chilean English teacher identity and popular culture: Three generations
Julia Menard-Warwick, University of California-Davis
Recent discussions on English as an International Language (EIL) have highlighted the important role played by English language popular culture for the identities of diverse global citizens who learn and use English (e.g. McKay, 2002; Pennycook, 2003). However, these “transcultural flows” (Pennycook, 2005) are often examined as a recent phenomenon tied to economic globalization and the proliferation of Internet content. Moreover, there has been little attention to connections between popular culture and teacher identity. As part of a binational study on English language teacher identity conducted between 2004 and 2006, I conducted life history interviews with 15 practicing and prospective Chilean English teachers ranging in age from early 20s to early 60s. All had learned English as adolescents or adults, all were fluent English speakers, and all were strongly committed to their profession, but many of them had never travelled to an English-speaking country. As I explored their investments in the English language (Norton, 2000), and in English language teaching, a sense of connection to English language popular culture (from the Beatles to the Lord of the Rings) stood out as a significant theme in most of the interviews I conducted, across the generations. Moreover, popular culture was frequently cited as the best way to interest the current generation of young Chileans in English language study. In this presentation, I will illustrate similarities and differences between generations of Chilean English teachers in their investments in English popular culture, as influenced by the historical eras through which they have lived in Chile, from the dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s to the current national immersion in the global economy. I will examine discursive connections between these investments and their English teacher identities, and conclude by outlining these teachers’ perspectives on popular culture and English language pedagogies.
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Paper 5: The new world: Language acquisition and use as transnational
Jane Zuengler, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Increasingly in the literature, conceptions of globalization foreground how people, many of whom are experiencing new languages and cultures, engage in a dynamic process involving physical and/or virtual migration. This movement may be back and forth across literal geographic borders, but just as often can involve people in a transcultural, transnational “movement” across diverse texts and modes of communication while remaining within the same physical setting. Pennycook (2007) addresses this phenomenon in referring to “transcultural flows.” Such “flows,” however, whether actual and/or virtual migration, do not simply replace local processes of communication, he argues. That is, the global does not replace the local; such binaries are problematic as they do not capture what is in fact a much more complex process. The local is itself dynamic. Warriner (2007: 211)) similarly criticizes “the (overuse) of dichotomies . . . in the globalization literature.” We must start recognizing that “identifications, allegiance, relations, and processes are simultaneously bounded (i.e. territorialized) and unbounded (i.e.deterritorialized)” (Warriner, 2007: 211). This presentation addresses the important question of how the transcultural/transnational is constituted in and by immigrants and other language learners in their communication. And, it asks how are those meanings and identifications that are “territorial”/local/national co-constructed as well? The data come from an ongoing microethnographic (Garcez, 1997) study of immigrant, refugee, and minority children’s communication in an after-school community center. Children from Sudan, Togo, and Laos interact, in homework activities, games and play, and at the computer, with each other and with their predominantly African-American peers at the center. Several “telling case” examples of the communication will provide the focus of discussion. The presentation will conclude with implications for future discourse microanalytic work as well as implications for understanding and encouraging the children’s language development in light of our recognizing the transnational without ignoring the local/national in their discourse.
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