This week’s articles and selections from the text book all focused on similar themes, but it wasn’t until I read the last section in Holliday that I really began to connect the dots. The brief summary of Shumann’s theories on social and psychological distance from the 1970s really tied everything together for me. The concepts that really struck me in these readings were the affects of social cues and what Shumann calls social solidarity.
Something I had never considered before is the extreme difficulties of an immigrant dealing with culture shock, or - more specifically - changes in social cues. Not only do recent arrivals need to learn the vocabulary, grammar, and complicated idioms of the second language, they also have to learn what is different about their new home’s social cues. These cues can have a tremendous impact on the success of a conversation with a member of the “target language” group, as in the example of the college student requesting a letter of recommendation from an advisor. To this, Peirce adds in her “Social Identity, Investment, and Language Learning” the added layer of difficulty of not only understanding the social cues of the target language, but also understanding its “rules of use” and how those rules support the dominant group in the new society.
When a teacher of language learners takes all of this into account, the task of effectively preparing one’s students for successful communication seems unreasonably daunting. Peirce included in her article some excellent examples of teaching strategies to use in their classrooms to assist students with these problems, such as investigating opportunities to interact with native speakers, reflecting on interactions with target language speakers, and recording in a diary events that are surprising or unusual to ask about later. Although I do not teach non-native speakers, I did realize that these strategies could very easily be applied to other general education settings, as well. For example, I have a student who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s. This child has just as much, if not more, difficulty in interpreting social cues and understanding the “rules of use” in his culture. The recommending teaching strategies for language learners could be used to help him learn to understand and get along with his peers.
Back to the effects of Shumann’s theories on my understanding of these concepts, I was also intrigued by his theory of social distance and the effect that social solidarity has on it. It’s interesting to think about how mutual the language acquisition process has to be: the newcomers and natives have to be almost equally willing for learning to take place in order for it to be successful. The former group has to be receptive to learning and using the target language while the latter group has be to receptive to teaching and understanding their new neighbors. What strikes me most about this is how much it also applies to general education. Not only do students need to be curious and eager to learn; their teachers need to also be willing to understand each student and his or her unique needs and abilities. In so many ways, ESL education is very closely related to general education.
I have not yet mentioned the second article for this week, “Language and Identity.” The most interesting part of this text was a statement made by Richard Bauman: “Individual identity is the outcome of a rhetorical and interpretive process in which interactants make situationally motivated selections from socially constituted repertoires of identificational and affiliational resources and craft these semiotic resources into identity claims for presentation to others.” (p 35) What I like about this statement is that it concisely explains a very complicated process. And I hope I am interpreting the “situationally” part correctly, but it really gets to the heart of what I think of my identity: I really feel that, perhaps more so than others, strategically choose from a variety of personal identities depending on the situation. In fact, everyone does this to a certain extent, particularly teachers, and I like to see it included in an identity theory that does not specify that the selections must be made due to culture shock, as was suggested in one of last week’s articles.
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