The Critical Moment: Language Socialization and the (Re)visioning of First and Second Language Learning
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THE CRITICAL MOMENT: LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION AND THE (RE)VISIONING OF FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING
INTRODUCTION
A Japanese graduate student studying at an American university, Keiko struggled with the details of English grammar in writing academic papers. Despite 12 years of formal study in English and a Master’s degree in the UK, Keiko continued routinely to write phrases such as “. . ..political shifts of the international aid towards . . .” (Bronson, 2005). In fact, her most persistent problem was use of “the,” which seemed to randomly appear or be omitted in her sentences. She received volumes of teacher feedback on all drafts. Her professors tried nearly every strategy in the ESL repertoire to help Keiko achieve a more native-like proficiency in academic English. Improvement in her awareness of the problem and her ability to appropriately self-edit her drafts finally occurred when interventions based on Language Socialization (LS) assumptions were enacted. The older Second Language Acquisition (SLA) approach might have identified Keiko’s problem as “fossilization”—a term still current among ESL practitioners—and performed an intervention based on error analysis. Fossilization, however, is an unhelpful cover term for disparate phenomena that add up to nonlearning in even advanced students (see extensive review in Han, 2004). In contrast, discourse-based analyses reveal the complexity of the given/new distinction that underlies native English competence in article usage (Chafe, 1994). But can fossilization, functionality, or discourse-based interlanguage error analysis in and of itself explain what was really going on with Keiko? Is there something missing in grammatically oriented SLA assumptions that we need to consider in order to help a student like Keiko who, in all other respects, is extremely bright and successful? Keiko’s case suggests the need for a wider and deeper sociocultural/ political perspective on how human beings learn, experience, and use language and culture. The evolving criticalist (defined below) approach to LS theory not only situates all languaculture (the intersection of language and culture; Agar, 1994) in the holistic contexts of everyday life, but focuses on the roles of gender, race, ethnicity, and power in local P. A. Duff and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 8: Language Socialization, 43–55. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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M . C . B R O N S O N A N D K . A . WAT S O N - G E G E O
(immediate) and remote (societal) structural levels of influence on language attitudes, rights, learning, and performance. We highlight the importance of critically oriented LS theory for SLA, while distinguishing among the diverse research programs and perspectives that claim a space under the LS umbrella. We will return to article usage by Keiko to demonstrate that LS research can vary in how fully it embodies the emergent LS paradigm— for example, in the level of detail at which language-learning and associated contexts are represen
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