Friday, October 21, 2011

P. Duff & S. Talmy (2011) Language Socialization Approaches to Second Language Acquisition

[This is one of the articles compiled for a class for my graduate students in the autumn/winter semester in 2011/2012.]

Patricia A. Duff & Steven Talmy (2011) "Language Socialization Approaches to Second Language Acquisition" in Dwight Atkinson (ed) Alternative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (Routledge) [Paperback, Kindle Edition ] (pp. 95-116)


p. 95

Q: How are language socialization approaches different from cognitivist SLA studies?

Q: Can you define and give examples of the following concepts: culture, social knowledge, ideologies, epistemologies, identities and subjectivities, affect, and sociolinguistic routines?


p. 96

Q: What do the authors mean when they say "language is fundamentally redefined from a language socialization perspective"?


p. 97

Q: How can language learners/users be viewed as "sociohistoricall, socioculturally, and sociopolitically situated individual with multiple subjectivities and identities"?

Q: What is the major difference between L1 socialization and L2 socialization?

Q: What are "agency, contingency, unpredictablity, and multidirectionality in terms of learners and their language learning trajectories"?


p. 98

Q: Explain the bidirectional (and multidirectional) relationship between new members and old members of a community in the reproduction of existing L2 cultural and communicative practices.

Q: How can "unanticipated outcomes" arise in L2 socialization processes?

Q: What does ethnography investigate?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnography

Japanese students may refer to my book guide page on qualitative researches.
http://ha2.seikyou.ne.jp/home/yanase/qualitative.html

Here is another guide of mine to qualitative researches written in Japanese.
http://yanaseyosuke.blogspot.com/2007/09/110.html


p. 99

Q: Give your examples to the four types of data resources.

Q: What is the focus group as a research method?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_group

Q: What is the stimulated recall as a research method?
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1502138?seq=1


p. 100

Q: Why does language socialization research often pay more attention to the interactional and linguistic processes than to outcomes?

Q: What is the criticism by Schecter and Bayley when they say that language socialization researches are "more restricted and deterministic" and "static, bounded and relatively unidirectional"?


p. 102

Q: What are the difference between language socialization as topic and language socialization as method?

Q: Why do the authors believe the calling for "gold standards" may be premature and overly restrictive?


p. 103

Q: How do the authors compare the paradigmatic debate within language socialization researches with the debate in the mid-1990s among cognitivist SLA researchers?

Q: What are the three differences between cognitivist SLA and L2 socialization research (Read the first paragraph of the section of "Supporting Findings").


p. 104

Q: What would Ortega's (2009) access and participation probably mean?
Ortega (2009) Understanding Second Language Acquisition Trans-Atlantic Publications, Inc.


Q: How is ethnomethodology here different from ethnography that appeared before?
Here's a quick answer.


Both ethnography and ethnomethodology are terms found in the sociological and anthropological fields of study and can refer to methods of research. Ethnography a method of research, while ethnomethodology is a subdivision of sociology that focuses on the way that human beings in different societies construct their social orders.

Ethnography
Ethnography is used primarily in cultural anthropology and is the preferred method used to study human beings' ways of life due to its unobtrusive nature. It enables anthropologists and sociologists study the link between behavior and culture and how this changes over time. An ethnography is highly detailed description of social life in a small number of cases.

Ethnomethodology
Ethnomethodology is an alternative approach introduced by Harold Garfinkel to sociological inquiry. Ethnomethodology concerns itself with the everyday methods employed by people by drawing from the shared knowledge and reasoning of the society to respond to their environment. It seeks to describe the methods used in the production of social order.

Method of Research
A major difference between the two terms is that ethnography has a structured method of research while ethnomethology doesn't. The collection of information by ethnographers is conducted through a process called "participant observation," in which researches immerse themselves as much as possible in the daily life of the culture being studied. Details of their observations are recorded from the "native's point(s) of view" without the researcher imposing his own cultural interpretations to the data, according to the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Anthropology department. In contrast, ethnomethology doesn't have any formal research methods.

Field of Research
Another major difference is that ethnomethology is a field of research, unlike ethnography. Ethnomethology is the study of methodology, the way people make decisions and act and the methods they use to create a social order. Ethnography is not a field of research but a methodology used in other sociological fields. For example, an ethnomethologist would incorporate ethnography used by sociologists to study other cultures.

http://www.ehow.com/info_8578392_difference-between-ethnography-ethnomethodology.html



Q: How is language socialization different from Conversational Analysis (CA) in terms of its theory of learning?

Q: How are language socialization studies different form identity theories?
Post-structural feminism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structural_feminism
Third-wave feminism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_feminism


p. 109

Q: The authors say that power in language socialization "is not a fixed or assured attribute of those who are older, more experienced, and so on, but can also be demonstrated by novices who contest practices or demonstrate expertise or understanding lacking in their mentors." Explain what they mean by using the concepts of contingency and multidirectionality.

Contingency

1.dependence on chance or on the fulfillment of a condition; uncertainty; fortuitousness: Nothing was left to contingency.
2.a contingent event; a chance, accident, or possibility conditional on something uncertain: He was prepared for every contingency.
3.something incidental to a thing.



p. 110

Q: What do you think of the authors' assessment of Complexity Theory?

Q: How is language socialization different from neo-Vygotskian sociocultural theory and related sociocognitive and ecological accounts of learning?

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