Social Aspects of Interlanguage

Social Aspects of Interlanguage

The prevailing perspective on interlanguage is psycholinguistics. Three different approaches to incorporating a social angle on the study of L2 acquisition are :

1.     Interlanguage as consisting of different ‘styles’ which learners call upon under different conditions of language use.

2.     How social factors determine the input that learners use to construct their interlanguage

3.    How the social identities that learners negotiate in their interactions with native speakers shape their opportunities to speak and learn an L2

Interlanguage as a stylistic continuum

a.    Elaine Tarone

She had proposed that interlanguage involves a stylistic continuum. She argues that learners develop a capability for using the L2 and that this underlies ‘all regular behavior’. At one end of the continuum is the careful style (when learners are consciously attending to their choice of linguistic forms, as when they feel the need to be ‘correct’). At the other end of the continuum is the vernacular style (when learners are making spontaneous choices of linguistic form, as is likely in free conversation). Tarone also has number of problems :

1.  Learners are not always most accurate in their careful style and least accurate in their vernacular style.

2.  The role of social factors remain unclear

b.   Howard Gile

He had proposed accommodation theory. This seeks to explain how a learner’s social group influences the course of L2 acquisition. He suggest that when people interact with each other they either try to make their speech similar to that of their addressee in order to emphasize social cohesiveness (a process of convergence) or to make it different in order to emphasize their social distinctiveness (a process of divergence)

The Acculturation model of L2 acquisition

John Schuman

He had proposed acculturation model. It is built around the metaphor of ‘distance’. Schuman proposed that pidginization in L2 acquisition results when learners fail to acculturate to the target-language group, that is, when they are unable or unwilling to adapt to a new culture.

The main reason for learners failing to acculturate is social distance (It concerns the extent to which individual learners become members of a target-language group and therefore achieve contact with them). In such cases, he suggest psychological distance (It identifies a further set of psychological factors, such as language shock and motivation).

There are two problems with such a model

1.    It fails to acknowledge that factors like ‘integration pattern’ and ‘attitude’ are not fixed and static but, potentially, variable and dynamic, fluctuating in accordance with the learne’s changing social experiences.

2.   It fails to acknowledge that learners are not just subject to social conditions but can also become the subject of them.

Social Identity and Investment in L2 Learning

Bonny Peirce

The notion of social identity is central to the theory. A learner’s social identity is ‘multiple and contradictory’. Learning is successful when learners are able to summon up or construct an identity that enables them to impose their right to heard ant thus become the subject of the discourse. This requires investment, something learners will only make if they believe their efforts will increase the value of their ‘cultural capital’

L2 acquisition involves a ‘struggle’ and ‘investment’. Successful learner are those who reflect critically on how they engage with native speakers and who are prepared to challenge the accepted social order by constructing and asserting social identities of their own choice.