This quote opened the Introduction to the first edition of Learning English at School: Identity, Social Relations and Classroom Practice (LEaS), an ethnography in which I reported my observations of a group of initially six, and finally four, children in whose homes Polish, Punjabi or Chinese was spoken. I observed these children in their classrooms, from the beginning of their kindergarten year (when most of the children were five years old) to the end of Grade 2 (when most were seven years old). While a common understanding of language learning at the time was that learners needed to acquire cultural and linguistic scripts (as McDermott put it above), I wished to examine what the experience of learning English at school was like for children who spoke other languages in their homes, through the lenses of then-emerging sociocultural theories and empirical research, to see if there were additional ways to understand these matters.

Much of the second/additional/foreign language education research literature I read before writing the 2000 book saw linguistic and cultural systems (scripts) as individually acquired; this work was centrally concerned with such questions as who was learning/acquiring what and how much. Psychology, linguistics, and later the hybrid field, psycholinguistics, maintained that language learning was an ‘interface between learners’ mental processes and the grammatical system of the target language’ (Breen, 2001: 173). Language learning from this perspective was individual acquisition of language structures. This strain of second language acquisition (SLA) research continues today and researchers continue to be interested in individual learners’ cognitive and psychological processes and their consequences for acquisition of distinct language systems.