Rationale for the Colloquium

For some time, researchers in applied linguistics have recognized the importance of access to and participation in second/foreign/heritage (L2) communities as essential aspects of language learning (e.g., Norton Reference Norton2000; Pavlenko & Lantolf Reference Pavlenko, Lantolf and Lantolf2000). This research often seeks to understand how L2 learners negotiate their participation in academic contexts (e.g., McKay & Wong Reference McKay and Wong1996; Miller Reference Miller2003; Morita Reference Morita2004), while a smaller number of studies focuses on contexts beyond classroom walls (e.g., Lam Reference Lam2000; Norton Reference Norton2000; Black Reference Black2008). 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 links 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 under-theorized. Accordingly, this colloquium sought to address this gap by taking up the following question: what is the relationship between in-the-classroom language practices and engagements with the L2 beyond-the-classroom?

Themes

A dominant theme in the papers that examined the EFL contexts of Japan and Chile was a mismatch between the status of English as a language of economic opportunity and the lack of opportunity to use English as a language for communication outside of the classroom. This theme calls into question the rationale upon which educational policies requiring English as a language for international education is built.

In their analysis of interviews with Japanese learners of English, Sandra Lee McKay (San Francisco State University) and Ryuko Kubota (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) found that the discourses of English as an international language in Japan often promoted English language learning as a way to participate in an imagined global community. However, they argue that this imagined community is resided in only by economically advantaged elites, distanced from the local linguistic reality. McKay & Kubota found more opportunity for L2 learners of Portuguese to use their L2 in Japan, and yet, very few instructional resources are available for Japanese learners of Portuguese. Similarly, Julia Menard-Warwick (University of California, Davis) reported that Chilean English teachers found few opportunities to link their classroom practices with their students’ experiences beyond the classroom walls. Though most of her participants reported almost no opportunity to use English outside of schooling contexts, Menard-Warwick did find a strong interest in English language popular music, television, and film. Rather than viewing English as a language to be used for communicative purposes as a global lingua franca, then, the Chilean teachers and their students invested in English as consumers of English language popular culture.

The other three papers in the colloquium focused on contexts in which L2 speakers had much greater access to using the L2 outside of the classroom. However, these papers also illustrated many gaps between assumed goals of learners and learners’ chosen forms of participation in L2 communities, including resistance to ‘target-like’ linguistic competence in the L2, and ambivalence toward engaging in the cultural practices of the new community.

Noriko Ishihara (Hosei University) examined how learners of Japanese in Japan resisted following the pragmatic norms they had been taught in their language classrooms in the United States. She found that L2 learners sometimes intentionally used language which would distance themselves from L1 Japanese speakers in order to achieve their own interactional goals. Her study also illustrated how the teaching of L2 pragmatics can take learners’ subjectivity more fully into account to help fill the gap between instructional practices and learners’ actual L2 use. In the context of L2 learners of English in the United States, John Hellermann (Portland State University) examined how community college learners used issues from daily life in their classroom to provide opportunities for meaningful discussion with their classmates, rather than with L1 speakers of English. Finally, Jane Zuengler (University of Wisconsin, Madison) discussed immigrant and minority youths’ responses to nationalist discourses connected to American cultural identities. Both in and outside of school contexts, she found that the youth found ways to resist and reconstitute ‘being American’.

In sum, the five papers suggest that more attention to the connections among L2 learning, teaching, and use could serve to inform language policy decisions and to improve pedagogical practices in classroom contexts.