1. Introduction: the fate of the individual in the social turn
Since the early 1990s, the word ‘social’ has been used with increasing frequency in publications on language learning. It is difficult to say exactly when this began. In 1985, Michael Breen published a seminal paper on the ‘social context for language learning’, by which he primarily meant the foreign language classroom (Breen Reference Breen1985). In 1991, Lily Wong Fillmore proposed a model of ‘language learning in social context’, by which she primarily meant the school and community settings in which young immigrant children in the United States learned English (Wong Filmore Reference Wong Fillmore and Bialystok1991). In 1994, James Lantolf introduced the world of language learning research to ‘sociocultural theory’ (Lantolf Reference Lantolf1994). In the following year, Bonny Norton Pierce published a paper on ‘social identity, investment and language learning’ that drew on ‘her reading in social theory’ (Norton Pierce Reference Norton Pierce1995: 9). Battle lines were drawn in 1997 in a special issue of The Modern Language Journal, in which Firth & Wagner's (Reference Firth and Wagner1997) critique of SLA research was accompanied by a number of critical responses. By the early 2000s, David Block was able to announce that SLA was in the midst of a ‘social turn’ (Block Reference Block2003), Zuengler & Miller (Reference Zuengler and Miller2006) asked whether cognitive and sociocultural SLA were separate worlds, and a special issue of The Modern Language Journal on Firth & Wagner's contribution to the field suggested that the reconceptualization of SLA in social terms was largely complete (Lafford Reference Lafford2007).
A key move in the social turn was an opening up of language learning research to theories and writers from beyond the field of linguistics (Block Reference Block1996; Lantolf Reference Lantolf1996). Concepts such as ‘socialization’, ‘sociocultural theory’, ‘activity theory’, ‘situated learning’ and ‘communities of practice’, ‘social identity’, ‘linguistic capital’, ‘social realism’, ‘ecology’ and ‘complex systems’ are now routinely referenced in the literature. The proliferation of these concepts in recent years is testimony to a reluctance to settle on any one dominant sociological account of language learning, in favour of experimentation within what might be called a broadly social orientation. This was notable, for example, in Kramsch's (Reference Kramsch and Kramsch2002) collection of papers on ‘ecological perspectives’ on language acquisition and language socialization, in which all the contributors adopted social perspectives, but few were explicitly ecological. It is also evident in a recent attempt to establish common ground within a ‘transdisciplinary framework’ for SLA research by a group of North American researchers who go by the name of The Douglas Fir Group (2016).
It is a moot point whether the social turn in language learning research is now complete, or whether there is yet more to come. At present, published work that explicitly adopts ‘brand name’ social approaches remains in the minority. On the other hand, the proposition that language teaching and learning are social processes, or at least processes that take place in a social context, is now almost taken for granted. My concern in this paper, however, is with the fate of the ‘individual’ in the social turn. This concern began with an observation that, although socially oriented researchers were critical of the ‘individualism’ of mainstream SLA, qualitative case studies of individual learners had become a preferred approach to empirical research. This apparent paradox was explored in Benson & Cooker (Reference Benson and Cooker2013), in which a number of socially oriented researchers were invited to discuss their approaches to the ‘applied linguistics individual’ in theory and practice. In this paper, I want to push this agenda a little further by suggesting that this focus on qualitative studies of individual learners has in some ways transformed the ‘social turn’ in language learning research into an ‘individual’, a ‘person-centred’ turn.
Before I continue, however, I should declare a personal interest. As a researcher who is allied to a view of autonomy in language learning that is rooted in the right of individuals to control their learning, my suggestion that we are in the midst of a person-centred turn may be wishful thinking. The social approaches of the 1990s were built, in part, on a rejection of the ‘individualism’ of mainstream SLA. Norton Pierce's (Reference Norton Pierce1995) reconceptualization of motivation as ‘investment’, for example, was cast as part of a broader social reconceptualization of individualistic concepts in language learning research. Debate on the social character of autonomy was already underway in the 1980s and Little's (Reference Little1991) Vygotskyan view that autonomy implied ‘interdependence’, not ‘independence’, is widely accepted in the field. Nevertheless, there have also been calls to replace the ‘individualistic’ concept of autonomy with the more ‘social’ concept of agency (Toohey & Norton Reference Toohey, Norton, Palfreyman and Smith2003; Duff & Doherty Reference Duff and Doherty2015). This is a matter for another paper. What I see in this interest in agency, however, is principally a re-insertion of the individual into language learning research, which suggests that the idea of an ‘individual turn’ may turn out to be a little more than wishful thinking on my part.
2. Ways of seeing
The aim of this paper, however, is not just to argue that socially oriented researchers are beginning to pay more attention to individual learners. The aim is, instead, to offer an account of this change in terms of longer-term processes of interaction between research methodologies and theoretical approaches. To this end, I draw on the title of John Berger's (Reference Berger1972) Ways of seeing, a highly influential television series and book of the 1970s. As a Marxist art critic, Berger argued that, contrary to thinking within the art establishment, European oil painting from the Renaissance through to the nineteenth century did not depict the world as it was. Instead, realist painters mostly depicted the world as their ruling class patrons wanted it to be seen. Painting was, in other words, a way of seeing the world that represented and reproduced ideologies that supported class and gender privilege. Borrowing the idea of ‘ways of seeing’ as metaphor for inquiry into relationships between theory and methodology, I am particularly influenced by Berger's argument that:
Seeing comes before words. . . . It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. (Berger Reference Berger1972: 7)
The argument that I want to consider is that research methodologies imply certain ‘ways of seeing’ the people that language learning researchers are interested in. While there has been much discussion of the ways in which theoretical choices influence choices in research methodology (e.g., King & Mackey Reference King and Mackey2016), there has been much less consideration of how research methodologies influence theory. Here, this is treated not as a matter of conceptualization (Kibler & Valdés Reference Kibler and Valdés2016), or how we think of language learners, but of perception, or how learners are made visible when they are placed under the lens of various research methodologies.
3. Three eras in applied linguistics research
In order to know where we are now and where we may be going, it is helpful to know where we have come from. I will now offer an interpretation of the history of language learning research that is based on ways of seeing language learners in three different eras of applied linguistics. The era of the ‘invisible learner’ begins in the late nineteenth century and runs through to the late 1960s. The era of ‘learner-centredness’ begins in the late 1960s and runs through to the early years of the twentieth century. The era of ‘person-centredness’, which is the era that I believe we are now entering, dates back to the early 2000s, although its character as an era of person-centredness has only become clear over the past few years. The dating of these eras is sure to be challenged for two reasons. First, there is a good deal of overlap between them and the seeds of the later eras often date back into the earlier ones. Second, the later eras have not replaced the earlier ones, but they are instead layered upon them. We are, in effect, now living in all three eras simultaneously, just as non-representational styles of painting co-exist with non-realist and realist representational styles in the present day.
3.1 The invisible learner
The era of the invisible learner was essentially the period in which applied linguistics developed as the application of insights from linguistics research on the best ways to teach foreign languages. To illustrate the invisibility of the learner during this period, I refer to a book by the Danish linguist Otto Jesperson entitled How to teach a foreign language (Jesperson Reference Jesperson1904). This book was first published in English translation in 1904 and it was reprinted many times up to the 1960s. (My own copy is the 12th impression published in 1961). An influential book for more than 50 years, Catford (Reference Catford1998: 467) described it as being ‘among the best guides that a beginning teacher had’. It is largely based on insights from structural linguistics combined with common sense observations on teaching technique. While the book offers a good deal of solid advice on curriculum design and teaching strategies that remains relevant today, one of its most striking characteristics from a modern perspective is the complete absence of the word ‘learner’. When the people who learn languages are mentioned, the word ‘pupils’, and occasionally ‘boys’, is used. However, these words are used infrequently and always in the plural. To illustrate how they were used, the following extracts are taken from a rather untypical page on which ‘pupils’ is used four times and ‘boys’ once. To set the extracts in context, Jesperson is describing what we might now call a priming activity for a reading comprehension task, in which the teacher asks a series of simple questions using words from the reading text.
‘. . .it is important, especially in the beginning, for the teachers to ask the pupils as many questions as possible in order to accustom them to the exercise, so that they may take part intelligently and fluently.’
‘. . .after a little practice, on the part of both the teacher and the pupils, the exercise really proceeds very rapidly.’
‘It is not assumed in this exercise that the pupils have committed the piece to memory, but of course the exercise itself tends to make them thoroughly familiar with it.’
‘In order to give the pupils confidence, and in order not to require too much of them immediately, the teacher can in the first few lessons allow them to keep their books open. . . . Then they can be told to close their books.’
‘. . .it is also well for the teacher to direct the same question to several boys in succession. . .’
(Jesperson Reference Jesperson1904: 102)
These extracts illustrate how, when language learners were visible, they were generally seen as recipients of instruction, and not as the active participants in the language learning process who came to the fore in the 1970s. The aim is for the learners to participate ‘intelligently and fluently’ in the activity, but the agency is distributed between the teacher and the exercise. In an implicitly behaviourist fashion, the exercise acts upon the pupils almost without their being aware of its influence. It is the exercise and the teacher's skillful handling of it that cause learning, while the role of the pupils is simply to do as they are told. In making these points, I want to emphasize that I do not mean to criticize Jesperson or other applied linguistics of the time. The invisibility of the learner in their work was simply the norm in an era in which it was assumed that good language learning depended on a scientific understanding of the structures of language and teaching technique.
3.2 Learner-centredness
The learner-centred era was, as its name suggests, characterized by an intense focus on ‘the learner’ and ‘the language learning process’. It is difficult to say exactly when this era began, although it was undoubtedly associated with the introduction in the 1960s of new concepts and methods from psychology and sociology, via the intermediary disciplines of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. In North America, the rise of SLA research, with its concerns regarding cognitive processes and individual differences in language learning, was probably the most significant moment in its development. In Europe, the rise of communicative approaches to language teaching played an equally important role in focusing attention on what language learners needed to learn. The journal Studies in Second Language Acquisition was first published in 1978, and Applied Linguistics, which did much to foster learner-centred approaches to language learning research in Europe, was first published in 1980. This was also an era in which a host of new concepts came into the field, many of which contained the words ‘learning’ or ‘learner’: the learning process, learning styles and preferences, learner errors, learner strategies and beliefs, learner's needs, learner autonomy, learner training and development, and learner-centredness itself. The word ‘learner’ was also prominent in a number of important books of the period, such as Nunan's (Reference Nunan1988) The learner-centred curriculum, Tarone & Yule's (Reference Tarone and Yule1991) Focus on the language learner, and Breen's (Reference Breen2001) Learner contributions to language learning.
Reflecting on the origin of the concept of learner-centredness in language learning research, Wenden (Reference Wenden2002: 32) argued that it ‘grew out of the recognition that language learners were diverse’. This is an interesting observation when it is set against the way of seeing language learners in Jesperson (Reference Jesperson1904). Jesperson's use of the words ‘pupils’ and ‘boys’ calls to mind a class of eager, uniformed schoolboys, seated behind their desks in neatly arranged rows. Jesperson's book was clearly aimed at schoolteachers. However, this is not explicitly stated, possibly because it did not need to be stated. Foreign languages were mostly taught in schools in the first half of the twentieth century. Wenden's observation that learner-centredness recognized the diversity of language learners, on the other hand, reflects the rapid growth and globalization of language teaching from the 1960s onwards. Growth in the number of language learners created a diversity of contexts for language teaching and learning (especially in tertiary and adult education) and a corresponding diversity of purposes. This diversity meant that the people who actually did the learning could no longer remain invisible in research, and it was against this background that the figure of ‘the learner’ emerged.
The learner-centred era was characterized by two main innovations in applied linguistics research methodologies: experiments and psychometric survey instruments (Catford Reference Catford1998). Experimental SLA studies aimed to reveal universal cognitive processes underlying language learning. Survey instruments were designed more with the aim of identifying ‘individual differences’ among learners, and were used to categorize learners according to attributes such as motivational orientation (Gardner Reference Gardner1985), learning styles (Reid Reference Reid1987), learner beliefs (Horwitz Reference Horwitz, Wenden and Rubin1987), and their use of learning strategies (O'Malley & Chamot Reference O'Malley and Chamot1990; Oxford Reference Oxford1990). However, the use of these methods highlighted an ambiguity in the concept of ‘the learner’, which at times referred to specific learners and at other times to a more abstract entity. Persistent concerns with the generalizability of research findings reflected the uncertainties that learner diversity had created. These uncertainties were resolved by the creation of a generalized ‘learner’, who personified processes that were common to all learners. There was also a degree of ambiguity in the term ‘individual differences’, which submerged the individuality of actual learners under a variety of psychological and social contextual factors.
While learner-centredness was a step forward from the days when learners’ contributions to language learning were barely acknowledged, the identity of ‘the learner’ was repeatedly questioned. Introducing a report on a study of the ‘foreign language learning process’ based on written introspective accounts by experienced language learners, Pickett (Reference Pickett1977: 7) observed drily that in spite of the increased focus on the learner, there was ‘still a great reticence about actually asking the learner what goes on inside of him’. Rampton (Reference Rampton1991) critiqued the ubiquity of the concept of the learner in applied linguistics and suggested that it was linked to the goal of producing an account of SLA that would stand above diversity and be available for widespread reference. Riley (Reference Riley, Palfreyman and Smith2003: 96) described the language learner identity as ‘an abstraction, a simplified representation or personification of the learning process, devoid of any truly individual and social dimension’.
The ambiguity of the individual in individual differences research was also critiqued. Williams, Burden & Al-Baharna (Reference Williams, Burden, Al-Baharna, Dörnyei and Schmidt2001: 171) questioned approaches to motivation research that sought to ‘identify and isolate within-person variables’ and proposed a ‘more holistic view of the human individual learner as a seeker after meaning’. Larsen-Freeman (Reference Larsen-Freeman2001) observed that individual differences had been largely sidelined in the search for common factors in the SLA process. Having summarized the research to date, she observed that the influence of contextual factors on individual difference was a vexing question, because of the need to take account of learners’ construal of the context. ‘Ironically’, Larsen-Freeman concluded, ‘those calling for a more social perspective on SLA may actually contribute to foregrounding the uniqueness of individual learners engaged in SLA in different contexts’ (p. 24).
Larsen-Freeman (Reference Larsen-Freeman2001) was, I believe the first to recognize the paradox of the individual in socially oriented approaches to applied linguistics. In a chapter in the same volume, Lantolf & Pavlenko (Reference Lantolf and Pavlenko2001) also recognized this paradox, but in a somewhat different way. Arguing from the perspective of Activity Theory, they critiqued SLA for its treatment of language learners as ‘processing devices’, arguing that they should instead ‘be understood as people, which in turn means we need to appreciate their human agency’. As agents, they argued, ‘learners actively engage in constructing the terms and conditions of their own learning’ (p. 145). Lantolf & Pavlenko's insistence on treating language learners as ‘people’, which implied attention to their individual histories (the chapter also argued for a biographical approach to language learning research), is the starting point for my contention that the social turn might best be understood as the point of origin for an era of ‘person-centredness’ in language teaching research.
3.3 Person-centredness
To treat language learners as ‘people’, or as ‘agents’, is to treat them as individuals, albeit within a social conception of individuality. It may be helpful, therefore, to look more closely at the sense in which learner-centred approaches to SLA have been seen as ‘individualistic’. Drawing on work by Kelleen Toohey & Bonny Norton, who have written a good deal about individualism in SLA from a social perspective (Norton Reference Norton2001; Toohey & Norton Reference Toohey, Norton, Palfreyman and Smith2003; Toohey Reference Toohey, Barfield and Brown2007), I have identified three senses in which this term is used. First, SLA individualism is a matter of viewing learners as ‘individuals who act, think, and learn in accordance with innate, specifiable characteristics, independently of the social, historical, cultural and political-economic situations in which they live’ (Toohey & Norton Reference Toohey, Norton, Palfreyman and Smith2003: 58). Second, individualism involves the treatment of constructs such as motivation and autonomy as attributes of individual learners, rather than as relationships between learners and their social contexts. As Toohey & Norton (Reference Toohey, Norton, Palfreyman and Smith2003: 58) argue, autonomy should be understood ‘not so much as individualized performance but as socially oriented agency’. Third, it is a matter of treating individual agency as causal, while failing to recognize that agency itself is socially constituted. Toohey (Reference Toohey, Barfield and Brown2007: 232), for example, having commented on acts of agency by two learners that she had observed, added that the learners were ‘not agentive or autonomous on their own’, because ‘the social settings in which they participated both imposed constraints on, and enabled their agency’. In all three senses, the essential objection to the individualism of SLA lies in the abstraction of attributes and behaviours from the social contexts and social processes in which they are embedded. Arguably, individualism is the wrong word to describe this process, which is essentially one in which the individuality of actual learners is erased.
From a social perspective, the methodological alternative to SLA individualism is to focus on language learning as a social process in its social contexts. However, this unavoidably entails a more intense focus on individual learners. The social turn has been associated with a methodological turn toward qualitative approaches to research and, in particular, individual case studies. This has even been the case where the theoretical premises imply that the focus should fall on the social situation, rather than on individuals. Norton's (Reference Norton2000, Reference Norton2001) oft-cited work on language learning and identity, for example, adopted a social perspective on identity derived from Lave & Wenger's (Reference Lave and Wenger1991) work on situated learning, which Norton (Reference Norton2001: 160) described as being ‘centrally concerned with the relationship between learning and the social situation in which it occurs’. However, Norton's research took the form of five individual case studies. Similarly, studies of second language socialization are most often studies of the socialization of individuals, rather than studies of the situations in which socialization takes place. Indeed, individual case studies have become a preferred method of collecting data and of presenting research findings across a range of social approaches, where the focus is typically on the individual in social context, rather than the social context itself.
This preference for individual case studies has, I believe, had a significant influence on the visibility of the individual in applied linguistics research. To continue the analogy with painting, the experimental and questionnaire survey methods of the learner-centred era tended to produce the kinds of rough line sketches that portrait artists often use to lay out the basic shape of a portrait. One can see that this is a sketch of a person, but not a particular person. Ethnographic, narrative and other forms of qualitative research, however, have now produced a rich database of individual case studies that look much more like fully fleshed-out portraits of identifiable individual learners. The more we learn about these learners’ experiences of language learning, the more visible their individuality becomes, and the more concepts such as agency, identity and the self become concepts of interest in socially oriented research (Mercer & Williams Reference Mercer and Williams2014; Peters et al. Reference Peters, Gao, Miller and Vitanova2015).
In order to distance itself from SLA, the social turn initially accounted for the individuality that became visible in individual case studies as yet another social phenomenon. For example, although the concept of ‘agency’ clearly points to the contribution of individuals to social processes, Ahearn's (Reference Ahearn2001: 112) definition of agency as the ‘socioculturally mediated capacity to act’ has been almost ritualistically adopted as the norm for socially oriented research. The addition of the phrase ‘socioculturally mediated’ to what is, in effect, a straightforward definition of the term agency (i.e., the capacity to act) seems to serve more as a talisman to ward off individualism than as a clarification of meaning. However, in light of the growing visibility of the individual in research, there is a tendency to acknowledge an overemphasis on the social determination of language learning behaviour. Discussing the emergence of agency as a key concept in language socialization, Duff & Doherty (Reference Duff and Doherty2015) comment that earlier research focused on children and often positioned them as passive individuals who ‘were socialized by’ the communities in which they lived. They argue that this may have led to a ‘misunderstanding’ that learners had little opportunity to exercise agency in language learning and that ‘experts’ were the primary socializing agents for ‘novices’ (p. 56). Having identified a number of references to agency in the earlier literature, they go on to develop the concepts of ‘self-socialization’ and ‘self-directed socialization’ to account for the ways in which highly motivated adult and adolescent language learners ‘plan and exert their agency in various ways to achieve their goals’ (p. 55). This renewed interest in individual agency is, as Duff & Doherty demonstrate, a consequence of the publication of numerous individual case studies in which this agency has been made visible to the point where it is now difficult to ignore.
There can be no doubt that, following the various reconceptualizations that have emerged during the social turn (Lafford Reference Lafford2007), applied linguistics has moved beyond learner-centredness into a new era. This might be called the ‘social’ era. However, socially oriented research appears to be moving in the direction of a more balanced view of the social and the individual, in which a focus on individuals in social context can be recognized for what it is: a focus on individuals. To call this an ‘individual’ era might well be accurate, but the word ‘individual’ may be too compromised by its history in applied linguistics to serve this purpose. The era that we are now entering might, therefore, be best described as one of ‘person-centredness’, a term that I base on suggestions from Kramsch (Reference Kramsch and Kramsch2002) and Lantolf & Pavlenko (Reference Lantolf and Pavlenko2001) that we view learners as people, and not as computers or processing devices, and Ushioda's (Reference Ushioda2011: 203) more recent call for motivation research to focus on ‘motivating the person, not the learner’. Berger (Reference Berger1972) argued that seeing comes before words, but as researchers we tend to ‘see’ in words, rather than images. To draw a contrast with the earlier extracts from Jesperson's (Reference Jesperson1904) guide to language teaching, I want to conclude with an extract from a more recent paper that is written in a very different style. The following extract is taken from Anna de Fina's afterword to a collection of papers on agency in second language learning. De Fina is describing how the contributors to the collection see language learning.
[T]he learning and acquisition of languages are seen as deeply embedded in intricate social interactional encounters and practices in which learners participate, often carrying the baggage of highly personal backgrounds, complex motivations, anxieties and desires. These practices are, in turn, part of wide social processes and networks that underlie them in a variety of ways. (De Fina Reference De Fina2015: 271)
What strikes me most about this passage is the image of the learner that is painted by phrases such as ‘deeply embedded’, ‘intricate’, ‘highly personal’, and ‘complex’: a picture that is rich in detail and complexity, in which the learner as ‘person’ is hard to ignore.
4. Conclusion
The reimagining of the history of applied linguistics that I have offered in this paper and, more importantly, its imagining of the current role of the individual in socially oriented approaches to research may well reflect my own personal history within the field. Few readers will have lived through the era of the invisible learner as applied linguists. I experienced it myself (invisibly) as a secondary school learner of French, Latin, and German. Some readers, like myself, will have lived through the era of learner-centredness as language teachers and researchers. Others will know only the social turn and what I have chosen to call the era of person-centredness. These and other perspectives will no doubt be sources of productive disagreements on the historical aspects of the paper. I am most concerned, however, with the implications of how we saw language learners in the past for our ways of seeing them in the present and future. In that respect, the paper is no more than a provisional sketch of current tendencies that may develop in a number of different directions. How we will see language learners in the future, and indeed what we will call them, are fascinating questions that only time will resolve.
Phil Benson is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, with more than 30 years’ experience of language teaching and teacher education in North Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, and Australia. His main interests in teaching and research are in learner autonomy and out-of-class learning. Pursuing these interests has led him into research on long-term narratives of language learning, study abroad, and informal language learning using digital media and popular culture resources. He has a preference for qualitative research methods and is especially interested in narrative inquiry as an approach to language teaching and learning research.
