2.2. Language learning opportunities

With a recognition that successful language learning depends not only on the volition of individual language learners but also on opportunities available to them, Melinda Martin-Beltran (Reference Martin-Beltran2006) examined the nature of interaction between language-minority and language-majority students in a dual-immersion bilingual education environment. The author argued that the nature (and not merely effects) of interaction within dual-immersion environments needs to be better understood. Her rich and detailed study does not disappoint; it extends our understanding of the ways in which language teaching and language learning take place by vividly capturing and demonstrating for the reader patterns of interaction, language use, affordances, and moments of language exchange. Martin-Beltran's watchful attention to metalinguistic talk in classroom contexts offers educators and researchers valuable insight into the intricate and constructive nature of this type of talk. To carry out her study of thirty 5th-grade students and their teacher over a school year, the author developed a methodology inspired by ethnographic studies, discourse studies, and L2 acquisition research from a sociocultural perspective. She captured students' natural interactional practices in the context of their schoolwork, equipping six focal students with portable tape recorders and microphones. In her dissertation, she compares the language experiences of three of her focal students in order to describe the social and linguistic landscape of the school and to understand the obstacles to and opportunities for language exchange.

In order to focus on what students did with language and how they perceived language, she looked at language-related episodes (Swain & Lapkin Reference Swain and Lapkin1998), instances of students explicitly discussing language use, for instance, offering alternatives, negotiating, questioning, and collaboratively rephrasing. Her research sheds light on how young learners talk about and think about language while engaged in academic tasks.

The implications drawn from this study were significant. The author found students serving as languaculture informants in terms of both linguistic (syntax, semantics, phonology, crosslinguistic comparisons) and social discourse (sociopragmatics) features made explicit during student interactions. She also focused attention on the ways in which the nature of activities, physical arrangements, and classroom participation created or constrained affordances for language exchange. For instance, she identified some pedagogical practices that supported language exchange – these included collaborative writing activities, co-authorship, teachers redirecting students to rely on each other as resources, reading and writing aloud (hence making reading and writing public and communicative acts), attention to timing, and the creation of a social space for hybrid language practices. She similarly found examples of missed opportunities, affordances for interaction that were not taken up, and she examined why students chose not to invest in these opportunities. Particularly noteworthy was her examination of the discursive construction of proficiency, which was reified through accommodation practices, resistance to participation, and public declarations, and worked to constrain further opportunities for interaction and, consequently, language learning.

Martin-Beltran highlighted compellingly the complexity and importance of attending to the co-construction of metalinguistic and sociopragmatic knowledge, which requires learners to grapple with multiple layers of linguistic and social understanding (such as formality, politeness, register, and social position). The study is provocative and contributes to understanding about SLA by redirecting the focus from individual learning to collective activity and helping us to understand how language learning affordances are shifted and constructed throughout interactions with others.

2.3. Non-native English-speaking teachers

At the forefront of a wave of doctoral research on English teachers who speak an L1 other than English – a group that indeed represents the majority of teachers of English worldwide – is the doctoral dissertation of Lucie Moussu (Reference Moussu2006). An extensive and skillfully designed study of attitudes and beliefs about non-native English-speaking teachers in Intensive English Progam (IEP) contexts, Moussu's (Reference Moussu2006) study is one of the earliest Ph.D. dissertations to ask questions about the assumed superiority of native English teachers throughout the multiple layers of those who participate in IEPs: ESL students, teachers, and administrators. Moussu used a quantitative design and surveyed 1040 ESL students, 96 teachers, and 21 administrators from 25 IEPs. Questionnaires were translated into students' native languages.

She explored ESL students' attitudes towards native English-speaking teachers (NEST) and non-native English-speaking teachers (NNEST) looking at variables that influenced their responses, such as gender, class subject, level, expected grade, and teacher's native language. Acknowledging that attitude is a dynamic construct that may be reported differently at different times, she further examined the influence of time by comparing beginning- and end-of-semester responses. The questionnaires for the 96 teachers (18 NNESTs and 78 NESTs) examined their self-perceptions about proficiency and teaching skills. The IEP administrators were asked their opinions about and experiences with NESTs and NNESTs.

Some of Moussu's findings confirmed earlier literature, yet some unexpected findings surfaced. While students held more positive opinions towards NESTs, they were more likely to be favorable towards NNESTs if they had an NNEST teacher and furthermore were likely to be favorable the longer their exposure to the NNEST teacher. For instance, students taught by NESTs seemed to believe that only native teachers could be good teachers, but students taught by NNESTs realized that NNESTs could be good teachers. After a semester with an NNEST, students were more likely to agree that they understood their teacher's pronunciation, less likely to agree that ‘All ESL teachers should speak with a perfect American accent’ (p. 203), and more likely to agree that they could learn English just as well from an NNEST as from an NEST. Moussu notes that these findings have significant implications for hiring practices at IEPs, commenting that ‘the less exposure to NNESTs students have, the more prejudiced they could be towards NNESTs’ (Moussu Reference Moussu2006: 86).

Of the teachers surveyed, NNESTs were less confident in their teaching ability than NESTs, particularly in Speaking, Culture, and Writing/Composition classes. While NNESTs reported less confidence in their linguistic and teaching skills, they nonetheless believed that having an NNEST teacher could be an asset.

Administrators surveyed identified NNESTs' strengths, including pedagogical skills, high standards and expectations, and service as good role models. The study identified three major weaknesses that IEP administrators perceived in NNESTs: (i) ‘foreign accent’, (ii) ‘overdependence on didactic presentation of grammar’ or ‘focusing too much on grammar,’ and (iii) lack of self-confidence.

As Moussu discussed the implications of her study for teacher education, she noted a need for World Englishes, sociolinguistics, and NNEST issues to be addressed and for collaboration and two-way mentoring between students of different linguistic backgrounds to be supported. She suggests that IEPs develop clear hiring criteria and a more intense focus on support systems for all new teachers.

This large-scale quantitative study has provoked many questions that beg deeper exploration, and the author offers well-developed suggestions for further research. One example of in-depth qualitative work that complements Moussu's study is Gloria Park's (Reference Park2006) dissertation, which provides access to more contextualized and detailed understanding of the professional complexities that surround non-native identity. In her narrative analysis, Park offers rich portraits of five East Asian women in U.S. TESOL programs, engaging with themes of marginalization and privilege and developing implications for teacher education.

2.4. Second/foreign language pragmatics

Noriko Ishihara's (Reference Ishihara2006) innovatively designed study and cleverly theorized dissertation extend the boundaries of current understandings of pragmatics. In it, the author challenges assumptions that have remained in some of the literature on cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics, including the belief that conforming to or emulating the pragmatic conventions of the L2 is the preferred choice for all learners. The dissertation comprises three separate studies, each working in concert with the other two to create a cohesive picture. In ‘Study I, Emulating and resisting pragmatic norms: Learner subjectivity and foreign language pragmatic use’, seven advanced Japanese learners at a large university in the Midwestern region of the United States, all of whom had exposure to Japanese culture, were interviewed about their subjectivity and pragmatic choices that they made in earlier elicitation tasks. Their pragmatic use was elicited through discourse tasks, including imagined situations and role-plays. For the most part, they conformed to what they perceived to be L2 pragmatic norms, but in some instances they intentionally diverged. Through interviews and follow-up e-mails, Ishihara used stimulated-recall questioning techniques as she sought to answer the question: how do learners explain their deliberate pragmatic choices to accommodate to or resist perceived FL pragmatic norms? Participants' explanations included, for instance, a resistance to keigo (Japanese honorifics) and gendered language because these delineated a social hierarchy that was contrary to their personal and cultural values.

‘Study II, Centering second language (SL) speakers' experience: A study of SL speakers' resistance to pragmatic norms of the SL community’, was a phenomenological inquiry that further investigated L2 speakers' resistance to perceived L2 norms. Using six interviews with pragmatically competent L2 English and Japanese speakers, Ishihara examined the ways in which participants knowingly deviated from perceived L2 norms that conflicted with their own standards as she unraveled the meanings that these acts of resistance carried for the speakers. Participants sometimes described the rejection of a perceived pragmatic norm as an expression of their values, culture, or cultural identity and indicated that their resistance was an expression of their own subjectivities or an attempt to maintain distance from the L2 community.

With ‘Study III, A web-based curriculum for pragmatics instruction in Japanese as a foreign language: An explicit awareness-raising approach’, Ishihara addresses the need for explicit L2 pragmatics instruction with a web-based curriculum for intermediate/advanced learners of Japanese. The self-access curriculum she describes, implemented in a third-year Japanese course, uses sample dialogues (audio with transcripts) to provide explicit awareness-raising tasks related to the five most researched speech acts: apologies, compliments/responses to compliments, requests, refusals, and thanks. Learners' reflective journaling indicated that their awareness of L2 speech acts was enhanced to varying degrees.

Collectively, the three studies carry implications for language teaching, language learning, and teacher education. Ishihara identifies a need for language educators to develop increased sensitivity towards learners' subjectivities and respect for learner agency, keeping in mind that learners' pragmatic investments may remain in cultures other than the L2. She suggests that the aim of pragmatics instruction be that learners develop a good understanding of norms, but that resistance or emulation of those norms remain the learner's prerogative. Pragmatic production should not be evaluated solely on the basis of native speaker norms. She draws on the notions of ‘explanatory pragmatics’ (Richards & Schmidt Reference Richards and Schmidt1983; Meier Reference Meier, Martínez, Usó and Fernández2003) and ‘critical cultural literacy’ instruction (Kramsch Reference Kramsch1993) as desirable ends, suggesting that teachers should ensure that learners are fully aware of the meanings of the pragmatic conventions mean and the consequences of ignoring them, but that learners are not coerced into following them.

2.5. Applied learner corpus analysis

Jonathon Reinhardt's (Reference Reinhardt2006) dissertation connects the acquisition of pragmatic norms to teaching authority. With more and more universities developing teaching preparation courses for international teaching assistants (ITAs), increased attention is being paid to the language features particular to genres such as lecturing and conducting office hours. For Reinhardt, the office hours genre signifies ‘a microcosmic representation of one-on-one teacher–student educational discourse’ (p. 6) because it asks teachers to use culturally shaped language that exercises their authority and imposes their will, such as directing, giving advice, and making suggestions. Reinhardt embarked on one of few studies within the newly emerging field of applied learner corpus analysis, exploring the ways in which learners and expert speakers used directives in the context of office hours.

Reinhardt's study embedded within a social-functional framework a constellation of five interrelated studies: (i) a grounded analysis of directive constructions, (ii) a comparison of learner and expert use based on the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE; see Simpson et al. Reference Simpson, Briggs, Ovens and Swales2002), (iii) a genre analysis of features of office hours discourse, (iv) an analysis of individual directive usage by three learners, and (v) an experimental study of an instructional unit in which directives usage is taught.

Through his initial analysis of transcriptions of ITA classes, Reinhardt identified several categories of lexical-level items that index directive force, including modals and periphrastic modals, irrealis devices, imperative forms, and directive vocabulary including verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. These transcriptions from ITA training classes form the basis of ITACorp, a corpus of authentic ITA samples, developed and designed by Reinhardt to be to be housed and publicly available at The Pennsylvania State University. The author's comparison of expert and learner usage indicated that ITA directive usage differed significantly between experts and learners. Because ITA learners were reluctant to be perceived as authoritarian, they used certain constructions less frequently than experts, especially constructions that appealed to listener involvement or independence. The author found a lack of connection among ITAs' socialization within their schooling, the content of their ITA preparation courses, the social contexts of their departments, and the visions they articulated of the academic professional identities they aspired to.

This dissertation serves as an effective applied example of usage-based language pedagogy and offers researchers a sound model of corpus analysis of pragmatic usage. Overall, the project carries far-reaching and well articulated implications for ITA preparation, usage-based materials design, corpus-based pragmatics and politeness research, and the field of applied learner corpus analysis.

2.6. Corpora and on-line reference tools in language learning

With language students turning with increasing frequency to corpora and on-line reference tools in FL classrooms, language teaching researchers and educators are progressively more interested in identifying technologies that assist language learners and in understanding the effects of such tools on language teaching and learning. One dissertation that represents an extension of this line of research is Kyosung Koo's (Reference Koo2006), in which the author examined participants' use of a corpus (a collection of authentic and well contextualized samples of language production) as a reference tool in conjunction with dictionaries as they paraphrased English newspaper articles.

Koo asked his subjects, 10 Korean graduate students with advanced English proficiency, to paraphrase a newspaper article and then observed the ways in which they used reference tools to carry out the task. He intended to answer research questions about ESL learners' reasons for consulting a concordancing program while writing in English, the type of information that learners looked for in the corpus, the strategies that learners used while consulting a corpus, complementarity between corpora and dictionaries, the effects of using a corpus on written work subsequently produced, and learners' attitudes towards corpora. All subjects were computer literate but none had ever used a corpus. Participants used English Gigaword, a corpus of articles from English language newspapers. For the study, the corpus from only one newspaper, The New York Times, was used. Students used the concordancing program students MonoConc Pro, which displays key words in context (KWIC) and can display word counts and frequencies of collocations (words that appear together frequently). Subjects were asked to paraphrase a 550-word newspaper article: ‘North Korea Rejects U.S. Demand to Scrap Its Nuclear Programs’, from The New York Times on March 28, 2004. They were permitted to use on-line Yahoo Korean Dictionaries, which include English–Korean, Korean–English, and English dictionaries and an English thesaurus.

The computer screen was recorded while subjects interacted with the concordancing program and dictionaries and typed their text on the screen, then Koo asked questions about their decisions and process while they watched the recorded screen interactions. The stimulated recall sessions were digitally audio-recorded.

Koo found that participants used the concordancing program for a number of purposes, including collocations (usually words or phrases following a verb, most frequently verb + preposition combinations), definitions, context, and parts of speech (which they deduced by looking at the words nearby). They looked for a variety of information within the concordancing program, including prepositions, authentic samples, and context in which search terms were used. They used dictionaries to look up definitions, parts of speech, and sample sentences. Subjects' most frequently used strategy was to combine reference tools; the second most common strategy was to use a collocation frequency list in MonoConc; and the third was a specific search word. The reference tools were found to increase grammaticality, with subjects applying their findings 81 percent of the time. Koo offers detailed data illustrating the ways in which MonoConc sometimes led to errors.

Using a researcher-developed survey to measure students' attitudes towards the effectiveness, helpfulness, and ease of using MonoConc, Koo determined that students agreed that the corpus was more effective than a dictionary in improving writing and for finding the correct usage of vocabulary and phrases, and was more useful for writing than reading. Most would recommend the corpus to other international students.

Koo's study highlights a new perspective on corpus linguistics, one in which corpora are used not only to support linguists' understandings of how language is used, but also educators' understandings of how corpora can be used to support language learning. It further helps language educators, many of whom are witnessing a dramatic increase in students' use of on-line dictionaries and concordancing programs in academic writing, to understand the effects of these technologies on their students' language learning.

2.7. Corrective feedback within computer-mediated communication (CMC)

This dissertation brings together two fields that command the interest of language educators. The first, corrective feedback, is a long-standing favorite of new and veteran researchers, while the other, computer-mediated communication, has rapidly gained prevalence in recent years. Shannon Sauro's (Reference Sauro2007) study explored two different approaches to corrective feedback administered in a written synchronous CMC context. The first approach was to provide corrective feedback that reformulated the error in the form of recasts, and the second was to provide metalinguistic information about the nature of the error.

An intact class of 23 high-intermediate–advanced adult learners of English in a Grammar and Translation class at a Swedish university were randomly assigned to three groups, one for each type of corrective feedback and one control group, and were randomly paired with native English-speaking graduate students. In task-based text chat, learners were given corrective feedback on the omission of the zero article with non-count nouns of generic reference. Sauro identified this form as difficult to master because of the low perceptual salience of incorrect forms, lack of communication breakdown as a result of the error, and opacity of the form–meaning relationship.

No effect of the treatment was apparent for gains in L2 knowledge over time, for immediate gains in production accuracy, or for long-term gains in production accuracy. However, Sauro found that participants receiving metalinguistic information about the error demonstrated immediate gains in the development of target form knowledge. Her results section offers the reader thorough descriptions of chat sessions, balanced analyses of factors influencing whether learners took up or overlooked individual instances of error correction, and connections to previous literature that effectively situate her findings in relation to related research. Findings suggest that CMC may provide an effective context for focused corrective feedback on target form errors for at least short-term development of target forms among advanced learners. Sauro's study is important in helping educators to question their intuitive sense of how direct or detailed error correction in various contexts should be.

Like Sauro's study, Maria Teresa Camblor-Portilla's (Reference Camblor-Portilla2006) dissertation offers an informative analysis for language educators who wonder about the effectiveness of various forms of error correction. Camblor-Portilla examined whether exposure to different types of written feedback (implicit, explicit, interactive, and no feedback) affected the use of L2 input differentially. While no one treatment produced results that were statistically significant, Camblor-Portilla noted higher levels of awareness of the target form.

2.8. Teacher feedback

Just as Sauro's study engages with questions about feedback, so too does Peter Clements' (Reference Clements2006) dissertation, although with quite a different approach. Clements takes an expansive perspective on teacher feedback and commentary on L2 students' writing, not looking specifically at identifying which types of feedback are empirically most effective in improving writing, but rather examining the relationships between teacher commentary, student writing, and the discursive frameworks that these texts develop within. Clements studied two sections of an eight-week academic writing course for L2 students in an IEP program at a Japanese English-medium university, developing his theory of response at three levels: a textual level (response as discourse and genre), an interpersonal level (response as dialogic interaction), and a social level (response as enculturation into communities of practice).

Clements first carried out a discourse analysis of a large corpus of written comments, then developed case studies of student writing and faculty response during the course. He collected commented-upon drafts and conducted ongoing interviews with the two teachers and four focal students, two from each class. His other data sources included surveys and video-taped observations of classes. The research questions focused on the patterns and variations in teachers' written commentary across drafts and students, students' response to teachers' feedback, and the points of agreement and disconnect between teachers and students. In addressing these questions, the study aimed to illuminate the connections between writing, response, teachers' and students' backgrounds and goals, the social roles that they enacted throughout the course, and the institutional context of the comments.

Clements' analysis of teacher feedback in relation to the complex layering of individual teachers' attitudes, personal and professional backgrounds, pedagogical goals, and institutional contexts convincingly demonstrates the complexity of the discursive interactions underlying seemingly simple written comments. Similarly, he viewed students' responses to comments as equally complexly situated within their own investments, histories, and philosophies, and he interpreted written comments as always in dialogue with other social, institutional, and classroom texts.

Findings highlighted the importance of feedback channels other than written comments, such as regular tutorials, conferences, and in-class discussions of students' writing, especially those that allow students to arrive at decisions about writing dialogically. Clements' analysis also pointed to the importance of recognizing the individual and subjective nature of response, meaning that guidelines for responding to students necessarily defy standardization.

2.9. Language socialization

Language socialization research that surfaced during the period under study extended recent research that has begun to take into account the multidirectional and co-constructed nature of language socialization (Garrett & Baquedano-López Reference Garrett and Baquedano-López2002). In one excellent example, Jing Lei (Reference Lei2007) examined the ways in which six second-generation Chinese-American adolescents in the process of ethnic revitalization explored multiple identities through heritage language learning. Her research questions asked about the role of language learning and use in changes in self-identification, linguistic and non-linguistic factors that contribute to weak ethnic identification, the influence of rebirth and revitalization of identity on use of Chinese and English, and Chinese American bilinguals' construction and display of different identities through language-mediated practices.

Using discourse analysis and ethnographic methods, Lei offered detailed descriptions of how language learning takes place throughout diverse settings: prepared shows, language classrooms, parties, media, and interpersonal contacts. She then demonstrated the ways in which her participants constructed, negotiated, and redefined themselves through language-mediated social interactions, developing multiple, fluid, and contingent identities across different social settings. She argued that Chinese language education serves as both an ideological and instrumental investment.

Lei found families and peer groups to be the most important factors in socializing children and also suggested that Chinese television, the Internet, and music played significant roles. She highlighted the importance of idiomatic expressions in Chinese cultural development, noting that the metaphorical language in Chinese idiomatic expressions requires deciphering the indexical relationship between linguistic form and its socio-cultural meaning. In her discussion of the implications of her study, she suggests the need for a focus on connections between extra-curricular activities (storytelling contexts, skits) and heritage school curricula, and greater collaboration between public schools and heritage language schools. An anomaly among the dissertations discussed here, Lei's study was conducted in a Department of Anthropology. I include it because it sheds important light on broader social factors influencing language learning and teaching in heritage language school contexts, and offers important educational implications.

Another remarkable dissertation that explored language socialization in a heritage language learning context was Li Jia's (Reference Jia2006) study. Jia explored the language socialization of Chinese- and American-born Mandarin learners at a heritage language school in the southwestern United States, examining the ways in which members of a small Chinese community contributed to the maintenance of Chinese language and culture in home and school contexts. This study is notable because of the author's engagement with the role played by children as active and selective agents in their own socialization.

2.10. U.S. resident L2 adolescents' (Generation 1.5) academic literacy

Recent years have seen a flourishing of new research situated at the intersection of composition studies and ESL (cf., Clements Reference Clements2006, section 2.8. above). Noting a dearth of research on secondary schools and adolescent writers within discussions of academic literacy, Christina Ortmeier-Hooper (Reference Ortmeier-Hooper2007) conducted case studies of the writing experiences of five U.S. resident adolescent L2 (sometimes referred to as ‘Generation 1.5’) students during their first year of high school. Her study is important in drawing on and making explicit theoretical connections between language education and the fields of literacy and composition studies. Ortmeier-Hooper looked at how academic tracking and institutional labels shaped the positionality of L2 learners in U.S. high schools. She examined the ways in which curricular practices in the teaching of writing reaffirmed institutional categories and explored the dynamics surrounding her participants' resistance to and acceptance of these labels.

Her study was situated in two high schools in the northeast region of the United States. Over 11 months, she met with her five 14- and 15-year-old participants on a biweekly basis, conducted classroom observations, and surveyed teachers. She asked about the consequences of ‘ELL’ (English language learner) identity on academic literacy development and about how students struggled with their identities as L2 writers on the written page.

Ortmeier-Hooper found the label ‘ELL’, as it was socially constructed within schools, to be associated with vulnerability, deficiency, and a lack of intelligence. These representations were evident throughout the school context, including in the school newspaper, in discourses surrounding school performance on standardized tests, and in language use by students themselves. She noted that the writing curriculum in her study focused on what she termed ‘survival genres’, the very basics that students needed to pass the federally and state-mandated tests. ‘Survival genres’ are curricular genres that are directly connected to class-based activities and classroom instruction (such as the five-paragraph essay), and they emphasize writing-to-demonstrate rather than writing-to-communicate, such as writing sentences to demonstrate understanding of a specific grammar rule or term, capitalization, or punctuation. Ortmeier-Hooper used the term ‘arhetorical writing instruction’ to describe instruction that focused solely on form and procedure and paid no attention to rhetorical considerations such as audience, genre, and purpose. She noted that pressure to teach to the test meant that writing instruction focused primarily on surviving the test, underscoring a sense of ELLs as vulnerable and cognitively incapable of richer assignments and discourse.

An eye-opening section of this study is Ortmeier-Hooper's careful analysis of literacy competencies and what she calls ‘building blocks’ of academic literacies that she observed participants bringing to their writing. Both in and out of school, students were engaged in literacy and rhetorical competencies in English; for instance, they demonstrated genre awareness, rhetorical analysis, and digital literacy. She details vivid examples gleaned from her participants' writing: deliberate emulation of stylistic strategies gleaned from L1 books, storytelling techniques and other cultural literacies, bilingual weblogging (which, in one example, supported the creation of a hybrid identity and provided access to a social network of similar adolescents), textual borrowing from pop culture and video games, competencies shaped by political and social activism, creative arts, and other forms of literacy and rhetorical savviness. These were not, however, usually picked up and used in the classroom.

In her well-argued conclusion, Ortmeier Hooper suggests, inter alia, extending theories that take into account connections between writing and identity, particularly to acknowledge a more socially situated view of writing, greater attention to the placement and instruction of U.S. resident L2 students in the first year of college, the establishment and promotion of writing centers in high schools, and greater support for secondary school teachers in teaching writing. Furthermore, Ortmeier-Hooper's work highlights a need for more attention to the education and training of mainstream secondary English and ELL teachers in current research on L2 writing and, similarly, a need for more inclusive writing pedagogies and curricula that highlight an awareness and knowledge of linguistically and culturally diverse student writers.

Like Ortmeier Hooper, Cecil Terrell Jordan (Reference Jordan2006) examined the intersection of composition and ESL. Jordan's analysis of oral, written, and on-line student writing is significant for its consideration of the current global context in which meanings of English are understood to be increasingly multimodal and intercultural in nature.

2.11. Language ideologies and language learning

During 2006–2007, language teaching research saw rich ethnographic studies that contributed to understandings of how language ideologies intersect with language acquisition. One example is the work of Peter Sayer (Reference Sayer2007), who situated his study in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. In the context of a major social movement that ballooned out of a teacher's strike, Sayer connected teachers' ideologies about English to local social ideologies and then to teaching practices. Using participant observation over thirteen months with teachers in their classrooms, schools, homes, and other social spaces, he specifically looked at how the teachers constructed themselves as legitimate speakers. With thick description in classic ethnographic tradition, Sayer depicted the complexity of the social topography he described, detailing violent clashes between teachers and police that closed the public schools and kept Sayer from conducting classroom observations for many months. The study departed from conventional anthropology in Sayers' attempts to face his own subjectivities, to engage with ethical challenges of his method, and to grapple with his authority as a blond, blue-eyed, native speaker of English to represent the perspectives of indigenous Oaxacans.

The primary participants in this study were three focal working-class Oaxacan teachers, all in their first three years of teaching, all pedagogically committed to communicative approaches to language teaching. Sayer conducted 128 observations with the three focal teachers and another 25 with seven non-focal teachers. He carried out 66 interviews, of which he categorized 25 as formal. After he began his initial data analysis, he developed a questionnaire in situ, the Language Ideology Inventory, surveying 59 novice teachers in order to better understand how representative the ideologies of his focal participants were of the rest of the Oaxacan English teaching force. The most interesting, and yet not surprising, theme that Sayer identified connected English language teaching ideologies directly to the phenomenon of U.S. migration, in both a physical, literal sense and also more broadly conceptualized to include investments and imagined communities that teachers draw upon in their practice. In this study, teachers' and students' visions of an imagined life in the U.S. shaped classroom teaching content. The teachers connected English to opportunity, believing that English could open doors for their students, although they simultaneously expressed concerns about English proficiency becoming commodified and students becoming cheap laborers for corporate and government interests. The author perceived the spread of English to be a public goal, understanding the Mexican government to be pursuing a policy of macroacquisition (Brutt-Griffler Reference Brutt-Griffler2002) of English, which is attempting to promote the widespread acquisition of English among its citizens. However, because English is not used widely within Oaxaca, opportunities for meaningful interaction are not available to language speakers.

Meanings of legitimacy arose from two areas of concern – the ways in which teachers justified their professional practice, the spreading of English as a process that expands social opportunities for language learners, and the ways in which they constructed themselves as having the cultural and linguistic authority to teach English. Sayer engaged with the tension between mimicry (Bhabha Reference Bhabha1994), which is the longing to emulate the colonizer (in this case by creating identities of mimic-native-speakers), and the teachers' desires to act as legitimate peripheral participants in the community of practice of Oaxacan ESL teachers. While dominant discourses implied that legitimacy as an English language teacher comes from time spent in the U.S., Sayer provided examples of the teachers in the study sometimes being able to redefine a legitimate teacher as one who has the same conditions and constraints as her students and yet is able to serve as a good language model. He concluded with connections to the larger project of critical language awareness within TESOL, pointing out a need for teachers to be supported in developing an awareness of the ideological content of their practice and in recognizing the multiple ways in which the process of learning English can either liberate or subjugate language learners (or simultaneously both liberate and subjugate).

Also fleshing out the ways in which language ideologies intersect with language teaching were Eunjin Park (Reference Park2007) and João José Pinheiro Rosa (Reference Pinheiro Rosa2006). Park's study of language socialization practices in three-generational Korean American families illustrated how ideologies of deference to authority and recognition of status are transmitted through informal language teaching in the home. Pinheiro Rosa's thesis examined the ways in which Cape Verdeans grapple with their national state of diglossia, with Portuguese remaining a language of official discourse and Creole lacking official status although it is spoken by the entire population. Using focus group interviews, life history interviews, archival research and classroom observations, the author developed a critical analysis of the processes that allow competence in Portuguese to structure access to social capital. These three dissertations are effective in highlighting for educators the degree to which processes of language learning are neither neutral nor disinterested.

2.12. Conversation analysis and the preschool years

Bethany Muller (Reference Muller2006) observed that while many studies have focused on teacher–student or parent–child discourse, language learning resulting from child–child interaction in bilingual contexts has been neglected in the broader literature. Her dissertation analyzes the functions of four-year-olds' L2 speech with particular focus on the use of repetition, attention getting, and private and social speech. One of numerous doctoral scholars who embedded their research in sociocultural theory during the year under study (see also provides summaries of doctoral work by Martin-Beltran Reference Martin-Beltran2006 (see section 2.2 above) and Lee Reference Lee2006 (see section 2.15 below)), Muller sought to understand how peer interactions influence the acquisition of Spanish by English-speaking preschoolers in a dual-immersion elementary school in New Mexico.

Methodologically, Muller's study brought together conversational analysis and ethnographic practices as she examined the ways in which language dominance and language choice shaped peer group interaction among young L2 learners. Her data sources were observations over three months, teacher surveys, parent home language surveys, and cooperative group interventions. For this last data source, she directed students to complete an activity that did not require adult guidance, aiming to understand how features of child discourse passed from child to child. Data were coded according to such factors as utterance length, code-switching within utterance unit, function of utterance (for example, expressive, attentional, private speech), and use of repetition.

Comparing L1 and L2 speech across functions, she found four categories to be specific to functional speech: attentional, private speech, word play, and expressive functions. Attentional language was the most popular form of L2 utterance, possibly indicating that the primary motivation for L2 production in a peer group is to get the attention of another child. She further noted that ESL speakers used English for both academic and social purposes, while L2 Spanish was used almost exclusively for academic purposes.

Muller concluded that allowing children to converse in a peer group setting should not only be permitted but should be viewed as a language learning strategy, a means to expand L2 pragmatic skills, and an opportunity to provide naturalistic opportunities for L2 use. She notes a need for attention to the differences between L2 Spanish and L2 English in the sociohistorical context of the southwestern United States. In noting that functions of L2 speech differ between older and younger learners, Muller has highlighted the need for research that explores how best to support language learning of children of different age groups, an argument underscored by Martin-Beltran's (Reference Martin-Beltran2006) doctoral dissertation of 5th grader peer interaction.

2.13. Phonological acquisition and parsing

Annie Tremblay (Reference Tremblay2007) conjectured that a robust theory of L2 phonological acquisition needs to examine both the acquisition of abstract grammatical knowledge and the development of parsing procedures, in part because the input needs to be parsed before it can feed the language learning mechanisms. Her exploration of the acquisition and processing of L2 word stress therefore draws its theoretical framing from two fields that are not typically united for this purpose, theoretical linguistics and experimental psycholinguistics. Tremblay chose to study Canadian French learners of English because the two languages differ in their phonetic realization of stress, both in the prosodic structure that underlies stress placement and in the role that stress plays in word recognition.

Her 107 participants, who included 29 intermediate, 29 low-advanced, and 18 high-advanced L2 learners of English and 31 native speakers of English, were recruited from universities in the Montréal and Ottawa areas. The English learners were all 9 or 10 years old when they were first exposed to English and reported a wide variation in the amount of English immersion they had experienced. Participants completed four experiments: (1) an AXB perception task, which tested the acoustic perception of stress, (2) a nonsense-word production task, which tested the acquisition of the trochaic (i.e., stressed-unstressed) foot and the alignment of its head with heavy (i.e., bimoraic) syllables, (3) a cross-modal word-identification task, which determined whether L2 learners could use stress to recognize English words, and (4) a vocabulary production task, which tested whether L2 learners' accurate production of stress is a reliable predictor of their ability to use stress in word recognition. The native English speakers did not complete the vocabulary production test (4) because it was assumed that their production of stress would be accurate.

Tremblay found that although the L2 learners could all perceive stress acoustically, and most had acquired the trochaic foot, they did not align the head of the foot with heavy syllables. She further found that some of the L2 learners were able to use stress to recognize words in English. However, those who used an iambic foot in English or who produced incorrect stress patterns did not use stress to recognize English words, which implies a relationship between target-like knowledge of foot structure and processing of stress. The findings highlight the complexity of the interplay between L2 knowledge and L2 processing, and suggest that the development of parsing procedures may be affected by the acquisition of prosodic representations.

2.14. Task complexity and interactional approaches

Ana Maria Nuevo's (Reference Nuevo2006) study of the effects of task complexity on L2 learning makes a theoretical contribution to interactional approaches to L2 development. Nuevo noted that although the literature on task complexity has recently included reasoning demand (or the extent to which learners are required to reason) as a dimension of task complexity, empirical work has addressed neither qualitative differences in task performance that result from differential reasoning demands, nor potential L2 learning opportunities that reasoning demands may provide. In her dissertation Nuevo examined L2 learning opportunities that arose from carrying out tasks with varying levels of reasoning demands, which she defined as the extent to which learners reasoned to attain a task's goal. Using oral tasks and grammaticality judgment tests in a pre-test/post-test design, Nuevo measured interaction-driven learning opportunities and development of English past tense and locative prepositions. Her 113 participants, adult immigrant English learners in an intermediate-advanced integrated skills ESL course, were separated into three groups within intact class groupings. Participants in the first group carried out high-complexity tasks, those in the second group, low-complexity tasks, and the third group no tasks. Nuevo examined the relationship between task complexity and L2 learning opportunities, and subsequently L2 development.

Learning opportunities that she measured were: interactional modifications, other repetition (imitation), self-repair, noticing a linguistic deficiency, hypothesis formulation, and metalinguistic talk. She measured L2 development through oral tasks and acceptability judgment pre-tests, post-tests, and delayed post-tests. Nuevo noted that learners used more recasts, metalinguistic talk, comprehension checks, and other repetitions and took up more recasts in the low-complexity narrative tasks than in the high ones. Learners engaged in high-complexity tasks tested more hypotheses and used more comprehension checks than those in low-complexity tasks. The high-complexity group's development of locative prepositions, as measured through the oral production test, was significantly higher than the control group's, although a parallel improvement did not occur on the grammaticality judgment test. There was no significant improvement between groups in the past tense on either the oral production test or the grammaticality judgment test.

These findings suggest that task complexity may be a determining factor in learning opportunities afforded in task-based interaction and therefore hold important implications for language teaching, particularly task-based teaching. Nuevo's detailed descriptions are a starting point for teachers who want to explore what L2 learning opportunities occur more frequently under different task complexity conditions. Detailed examples support and illustrate Nuevo discusses the theoretical implications of her study which include refinement of the cognition hypothesis (Robinson Reference Robinson2005) in a way that accounts for interlocutor role and understanding of how task condition affects the amount of negotiation under different task complexity conditions.

2.15. Private speech

Jina Lee's (Reference Lee2006) study examined L2 learners' use of private speech, looking not only at private speech as a mediational tool but also at dialogic aspects of private speech. Her seven participants, five women and two men students enrolled in an intermediate biology class at a Midwestern university, were all in their early or mid-twenties. She video- and audio-recorded each of them as they studied alone for three hours in preparation for an exam in a private room. One video camera captured study materials, another the larger picture including the participant. The two video-recordings were digitized into picture-in-picture format to allow Lee detailed observation of the data. Lee then watched each video with the participant while interviewing her or him. She audio-recorded and transcribed the recall sessions, then used conversation analysis to analyze them.

In her analysis of participants' private speech, she observed her participants using self-regulatory functions, notably establishing meanings to themselves, mental rehearsal to retrieve verbal data, monitoring and planning their own activity, and expressing feelings. Her participants appeared to be using language alteration not as a socially embedded code-switching behavior but rather as a mediational tool. Lee illustrated ways in which private speech is dialogic. For instance, her participants used interactional discourse structures such as question–answer sequences, repair sequences, and reactive sequences, demonstrating that an individual in private speech can take on the role of both addressor and addressee. She concluded that private speech originates from social speech. This study is significant in supporting understanding of L2 learners' private speech as a dynamic mediational tool in L2 literacy. Lee recommends that language teachers encourage private speech as a mediational tool in classrooms, and she suggests that observing students' private speech may be one way for teachers to inform themselves about their students' individual learning.