toward a sociocognitive approach to second language acquisition

Toward a Sociocognitive Approach toSecond Language AcquisitionDWIGHT ATKINSONGraduate School of EducationTemple University Japan2-8-12 Minami AzabuMinato-kuTokyo 106-0047JapanEmail: [email protected]

This article develops the notion of a sociocognitive perspective on second language acquisition(SLA), proposed as an alternative to the cognitivism pervading the field. By sociocognitive, Imean a view of language and language acquisition as simultaneously occurring and interac-tively constructed both “in the head” and “in the world.”

First, I develop a view of language and its acquisition as social phenomena—as existing andtaking place for the performance of action in the (socially-mediated) world. Second, I describethe cognitive nature of language and its acquisition, focusing especially on recent develop-ments in connectionism. Third, I introduce sociocognitive views of language and posit a socialinterpretation of connectionism as bridging the gap between cognition and social action.Fourth, I discuss sociocognitive perspectives on first language acquisition. Fifth, I describe thecognitivist biases of much SLA research, then suggest how sociocognitive approaches can helpovercome them. I end by considering implications of the perspective I develop in this paper.

Theorists and researchers tend to view SLA as a mental pro-cess, that is, to believe that language acquisition residesmostly, if not solely, in the mind. (Davis, 1995, pp. 427–428)

Most SLA researchers view the object of inquiry as in largepart an internal, mental process. (Long, 1997, p. 319)

SLA has been essentially a psycholinguistic enterprise, domi-nated by the computational metaphor of acquisition. (R.Ellis, 1997, p. 87)

It is fair to say that the dominant theoretical influences [inSLA] have been linguistic and psycholinguistic. . . . Whilemore socially oriented views have been proposed from time totime, they have remained relatively marginal to the fieldoverall. (Mitchell & Myles, 1998, p. x)

Much of what we identify as our cognitive capacitiesmay . . . turn out to be properties of the wider, environmen-tally extended systems of which brains are just one (impor-tant) part. (A. Clark, 1997, p. 214)

Individual effort and sociocultural activity are mutuallyembedded, as are the forest and the trees, and . . . it is

essential to understand how they constitute each other.Rather than according primacy to the role of socioculturalactivity or of the individual, the aim is to recognize theessential and inseparable roles of societal heritage, socialengagement, and individual efforts. (Rogoff, 1990, p. 25)

A RECURRING IMAGE COMES TO MIND WHENI read much second language acquisition (SLA)research and theory. It is the image of a singlecactus in the middle of a lonely desert—the onlything except sand for miles around. The cactussits there, waiting patiently for that rare cloud topass overhead and for that shower of rain to comepouring down. Like the solitary cactus, thelearner in mainstream SLA research seems to sitin the middle of a lonely scene, and, like thecactus, the learner seems to wait there for life-giv-ing sustenance (or at least its triggering mecha-nism)—input—to come pouring in. At that pointthe real action begins, and we watch the learnermiraculously grow and change.

A contrasting image sometimes also occurs tome, though more often when reading in fieldsother than SLA, such as language socializationand cultural anthropology. This is the image of a

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tropical rainforest, so densely packed and thickwith underbrush that it would be hard to movethrough. This forest is constantly wet with humid-ity and teeming with life, sounds, growth, anddecay—a lush ecology in which every organismoperates in complex relationship with everyother organism. Each tree grows in and as a resultof this fundamentally integrated world, develop-ing continuously and being sustained through itsinvolvement in the whole ecology. And this imagesatisfies me at a deeper level, because it corre-sponds to how I (and others) believe languageacquisition “really works.”

In this article, I undertake a critique of the“lonely cactus” view of SLA and offer in its placea perspective that integrates learners, teachers(not necessarily or perhaps even usually of theclassroom variety), acquisitional contexts (bothof situation and of culture, e.g., Halliday &Hasan, 1989; Malinowski, 1923; Ochs, 1990), andsocial practices, products, tools, and worlds (e.g.,Berger & Luckmann, 1966; A. Clark, 1997; Gee,1992; Wertsch, 1985). I argue that our obsessionwith the decontextualized, autonomous learnerhas prevented us from conceptualizing SLA as asituated, integrated, sociocognitive process—a view-point that will bear real fruit in attempts to un-derstand the complex phenomenon of SLA.

In order to reach this goal, however, one muststart some way back. As SLA theorists (e.g.,Gregg, 1988) have pointed out, studying SLAwithout first defining the substance and scope ofthe L and the A is a haphazard endeavor. Muchof this article will therefore be devoted to estab-lishing what I mean by the two foundational con-cepts language and its acquisition, as a necessaryprerequisite to focusing the discussion explicitlyon SLA. More specifically, the staging, sequenc-ing, and relative emphasis of the exposition willbe: (a) language and language acquisition as so-cial phenomena, (b) language and language ac-quisition as cognitive phenomena, (c) languageas a sociocognitive phenomenon, (d) languageacquisition as a sociocognitive phenomenon; and(e) second language acquisition as a sociocogni-tive phenomenon.1

LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE ACQUISITIONAS SOCIAL PHENOMENA

Obviously but nontrivially, language is so-cial—a social practice, a social accomplishment,a social tool. People use language to act in andon their social worlds: to convey, construct, andperform, among other things, ideas, feelings, ac-tions, identities, and simple (but crucial) passing

acknowledgments of the existence of other hu-man beings. None of these activities makes senseapart from a fundamentally social environ-ment—All language is language in use, to para-phrase M.A.K. Halliday. Language has broughtmanifold evolutionary advantages to our species,allowing us the possibility of both workingsmoothly and efficiently in groups, and critiqu-ing and improving them. The social nature oflanguage is not incidental to its existence andongoing use—it largely if not completely ex-plains them (e.g., Elman et al., 1996; Seiden-berg, 1996). To the degree that we are cogni-tively predisposed to learn and use language, itis because as a social tool it allowed those whooriginally took advantage of it (in however ru-dimentary a form) an edge in survival over thosewho did not. And language as a species-wide ca-pability continues to yield multiple advantagesto human beings.

In the defining moment of 20th-century lin-guistics, Chomsky took structuralism to its logicalextreme, completely abstracting language fromits social setting and declaring its ontological (orat least methodological) self-sufficiency. By re-ducing the social out of language he was able toproduce an idealized pseudolanguage aboutwhich some “facts” could be explained using thetools of logic and calculus. Yes, speakers of En-glish certainly do use question transforma-tions—and arguably quite often do not, generallyspeaking, in oral discourse—but to base a wholelinguistic theory on a handful of such phenom-ena belies the reductiveness and abstractness ofChomsky’s model of language.2

In fact, grammar (rightly understood) is itselfa social accomplishment and social tool. Thus, arecent volume in Cambridge’s Studies in Interac-tional Linguistics series (Ochs, Schegloff, &Thompson, 1996) investigates the many ways inwhich grammatical features both function so-cially and are influenced by and shaped in inter-actional context:

Grammar is part of a broader range of resources—or-ganizations of practices, if you will—which underliethe organization of social life, and in particular theway in which language figures in everyday interactionand cognition. In this view, the involvement of gram-mar in such other organizations as those of culture,action and interaction has as a consequence that mat-ters of great moment are missed if grammar’s orderis explored as entirely contained within a single, self-enclosed organization. Grammar’s integrity and effi-cacy are bound up with its place in larger schemes oforganization of human conduct, and with social in-teraction in particular.3 (p. 3)

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More specifically, the authors in this volumeinvestigate how “grammar organizes social inter-action” (p. 33; e.g., how grammatical structurecontributes to conversational turn-taking); how“social interaction organizes grammar” (p. 36;e.g., how grammatical structure varies, changes,and is emergent across social settings and socio-historical time); and how “grammar is a mode ofsocial interaction” (p. 38; e.g., how people co-construct utterances using grammar as a sharedresource).

Beyond grammar, a brief sampling of phenom-ena which socially-oriented linguists have at-tempted to account for—and which, I would ar-gue, deserve a central place in any valid,comprehensive approach to language and its ac-quisition—include:

1. Politeness, identity, and presentation of self. Amajor use of language is to negotiate and main-tain relationships between people. This includesits central role in presenting and performingidentities, or socially expressive versions of theself (e.g., Brown & Levinson, 1987; Gee, 1990;Goffman, 1959; Peirce, 1995; Tannen, 1986).

2. Perspective taking and contextualization cueing.All language in use incorporates markers of howit is to be interpreted (e.g., Gumperz, 1982;Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, & Svartvik, 1985).Thus, the string I hate you, while not devoid of(socially-structured) lexical and grammaticalmeaning, would usually be incomprehensible asa spoken utterance without at least some of thefollowing (which typically co-occur): intonation,loudness, voice quality, and emphasis (but seenext point).4

3. Language-in-context. Of central importance toa truly social understanding of language is whatelse goes on vis-à-vis the languaging event thatcontributes to its situated significance. To compli-cate usefully the example given to support theprevious point, if the I hate you is accompanied bya passionate embrace, changes in the intonationcontour may not be needed to gauge the intentof the statement. Language never occurs apartfrom a rich set of situational/sociocultural/his-torical/existential correlates, and to separate itout artificially is to denature it. Recent researchon the complex implicatedness of speech withgestural systems, eye gaze and head movement,bodily orientation, and the manipulation of ob-jects (e.g., Goodwin, 2000; Goodwin & Goodwin,1992; Kendon, 1992; McNeill, 2000; Ochs et al.,1996) is highly suggestive in this regard. Dis-course analysts and anthropologists (e.g., Fair-clough, 1992; Gee, 1990; Hutchins, 1995;

Pennycook, 1994, 1998; Street, 1984, 1993) havealso dealt with the profound sociohistorical im-brication of written and spoken language in sys-tems of social and cultural practice, hierarchy,professional specialization, and power.

4. Turn-taking, participation structures, and oppor-tunity structures. The mechanisms and ideologiesby which participation in language activity is so-cially apportioned are central to the notion oflanguage as a social phenomenon (e.g., Sacks,Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). They also varymarkedly according to cultural norms of lan-guage use and the distribution of power in society(e.g., Bourdieu, 1991; Edelsky 1981; McDermott,1988; Ochs, 1988a; Philips, 1983; Tannen, 1993;Tannen & Saville-Troike, 1985).

5. Speech as an interactional accomplishment. Anumber of scholars (e.g., Goodwin, 1986, 1987,2000; Lerner, 1996; Ochs, Schieffelin, & Platt,1979) have shown how oral language is struc-tured across individuals, rather than by indi-viduals operating autonomously. A persistentcontention has been that the individual is not theappropriate unit of analysis when examining lan-guage and associated behavior from a truly socialpoint of view (e.g., Bakhtin, 1990; Rogoff, 1990,1998).

6. Social indexicality. Overlapping and possiblysubsuming several of the categories already men-tioned, the notion of indexicality, broadly con-strued, suggests the all-important use of languageto orient oneself and others in the (socially-medi-ated) world. Far beyond the perceived oddities oftraditional indexicals—e.g., personal pronounsand deictic expressions—social indexicality seesvirtually all linguistic referrings as underspeci-fied, and, therefore, as taking their meaning asmuch from their contextual (and sociocontextu-ally-construed) surroundings as from their literalsense (Hanks, 1996; Ochs, 1990, 1992, 1996).

Other phenomena that a valid approach tolanguage-in-the-world would have to account for,but which cannot be explicated here, include:social knowledge of and participation in speechevents, sociolinguistic (including register) vari-ation, and the organization and “addressivity”(Bakhtin, 1990) of discourse. None of the lin-guistic features or functions mentioned to thispoint should be considered add-ons to a basicframework for understanding language—on thecontrary, they comprise part of the core set ofphenomena that such a framework needs to ex-plain.

Just as surely as language is social, so is itsacquisition. As with other social practices, new-

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borns are actively inducted into “languaging”(Becker, 1988) from day one, or almost certainlybefore (Foster, 1990; Locke, 1993, 1995). Thisis not to suggest that infants are not cognitivelypredisposed to language-related phenomena—to human voices and faces (e.g., Bower &Wishart, 1979; Eimas, 1975), for instance, or pro-nounced intonation contours (Snow, 1995)—orthat children themselves are anything less thanactive participants in the first language (L1) ac-quisition process. What it does suggest is thatsuch cognitive potentials are realized in (andsuch dynamic actors supported by) extremelyrich, nurturing social activities and contexts.Quite opposed to the Chomskyan “poverty of thestimulus” argument, a first principle of L1 ac-quisition should therefore be the richness of thecontext, that is, the deep, multiplex embeddingof language activities in the lush social worldthat surrounds most children, and which, in thewords of Bourdieu (1991), “instead of telling thechild what he [sic] must do, tells him what heis, and thus leads him to become durably whathe has to be” (p. 52). Thus, whereas communi-cative intentionality as we know it cannot be at-tributed to newborns and early infants,caregivers often interpret their behaviors as in-tentional (Foster, 1990; Smith, 1988) and act onthat basis. As Newson (1979, cited in Foster1990) expressed it: “Human babies become hu-man beings because they are treated as if theyalready were human beings [italics added]” (p. 16).

A second principle of L1 acquisition shouldtherefore be the social input (or insertion—Gee,1995) principle. In opposition to the notion ofinput as linguistic information presented to andactivating the language learning automaton (i.e.,the lonely cactus view), input is used here to de-note that the child herself is input/inserted intoan ongoing stream of social interaction that sup-ports her language development at every turn.Gee (1995) generalized his nearly identical “in-sertion principle” of L1 acquisition to all kinds ofcomplex learning:

The insertion principle: Efficacious learning of a newcomplex system is a process involving socially sup-ported and scaffolded insertion into an activity thatone does not yet understand. (p. 336)

Gee (1995) also described additional princi-ples by which L1 acquisition takes place vis-à-visits rich social environment. Among them are:

The routine principle: Early insertion into an activityone does not yet understand requires that the activitybe to a certain extent repeated and routinized or

ritualized. Rituals “freeze” meaning for the learner’sobservation. (p. 336)

The public principle: The meanings of the parts of newsystems, whether words, visual symbols, actions, orobjects must initially be rendered public and overt, sothat the learner can see the connection between thesigns and their interpretations. And this is done, infirst language acquisition and other forms of learn-ing, by the ways in which words, actions, and socialinteraction are integrally intertwined. (p. 337)

The context-variability principle: In learning the parts ofa new system, the learner will initially tie meanings tospecific contexts or experiences. Appreciating widermeaning is a matter of having multiple experiences,not (just) learning “general rules,” and mastery re-quires practice at varying aspects of meaning so as toactively fit them to the context of use. People whoknow only “general meanings” and cannot vary thesein context neither know the system, nor are theyacquiring it in a useful way. (p. 346)

A substantial literature on child language so-cialization now exists that details the manifold,diverse ways in which language is shaped for andby acquirers into the dynamic, creative social sig-nifying system that it is. The basic assumptionunderlying socialization in general is that “chil-dren come to share the world view [and socialpractices] of their community through the ar-rangements and interactions in which they areinvolved, whether or not such arrangements andinteractions are intended to instruct them” (Ro-goff, 1990, p. 98). Consequently, early languagesocialization studies focus on language learned“through intensive . . . contact under conditionsallowing maximum feedback such as we find inhome and peer settings” (Gumperz, 1982, p.139). Given the highly active stimulus-seeking na-ture of children, this makes the “conservative[ly]”estimated 12,000–15,000 hours of intensive con-tact between average caregivers and children overtheir first years together (Larsen-Freeman, 1991,p. 336; for similar estimates see N. C. Ellis, 1998;McLaughlin, 1987) a period in which a seeminglyimpossible amount of learning-in-context cantake place.

Although language is clearly internalized in asense during L1 acquisition, however, it neverceases to be part of the learner-as-social mem-ber’s set of interactively constructed social tools,practices, and experiences, and, in this way andothers, continues to be held jointly with the so-cial world. In fact, I will argue below that toomuch has been made of the internal/externalopposition—the division between the cognizingindividual and the social (or socially-mediated)world.


LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE ACQUISITIONAS COGNITIVE PHENOMENA

To say that language is social is in no sense todeny that it is also cognitive. Humans have evolu-tionarily highly-developed brains, and language,to some substantial degree, is stored in, compre-hended by, produced by, and therefore reflectsthe basic design features of the human brain. Infact, the human cognitive apparatus is much moreof a virtuoso language performer than rather cut-and-dried functional portrayals typically allow (al-though, as will be explained further below, its ef-fective performance can only take place by virtueof a rich, interactive fund of social knowledge, ina rich social/interactional context). Thus, in theact of conversing, we not only store and retrievelinguistic and contextual information “online” al-most instantaneously and normally with great ac-curacy, but we also produce, comprehend, moni-tor our production and comprehension, plan ournext contribution, and perform myriad other op-erations (e.g., adopt various politeness strategies,negotiate turn-taking, anticipate what others aregoing to say, integrate different modes of lan-guage and symbol system use such as reading, ges-turing, eye gaze, and body orientation with speak-ing) virtually all at the same time. It is smallwonder then that some psychologists have begunto redefine intelligence in terms of the amazingthings all (or at least many) humans do cogni-tively—including, notably, in their use of lan-guage—rather than in terms of intelligence mea-sures which place individuals in rigid hierarchiesof difference and deficit (Scribner & Cole, 1981;cf. Gee, 1990; Gould, 1981).

Several recent cognitive theories of languageand grammar have presented interesting contraststo Chomskyan linguistics in the important rolesthey give to context and use. Thus, Hopper (1988)coined the term emergent grammar to describe aview of grammar as “a vaguely defined set of sedi-mented (i.e., [more or less] grammaticized) re-current partials whose status is constantly being re-negotiated and which cannot be distinguished inprinciple from stategies for building discourses” (p.118). He went on to give evidence from writtenMalay of the ways such discourse phenomena asforegrounding and backgrounding substantiallyshape the grammar that is used to enact them.Other scholars proposing cognitively focused butcontext-driven and noncomponential approachesto grammatical knowledge include Becker (1979;1988), Langacker (1987), C. J. Fillmore, Kay, andO’Connor (1988), and Seidenberg (1996). Theirtheories all have in common the notion that gram-

mar does not represent a single, logical, a priorisystem whose basic existence and implementationfor communicative purposes is irrelevant to itscognitive status.

Language acquisition as well is obviously a cog-nitive phenomenon. Cognition and language de-velop hand in hand in early childhood, and lessdramatically into the later years—in several impor-tant senses their development never ceases (e.g.,Kemper, 1987). Cognitive predispositions towardlearning and using language (Foster, 1990; Locke,1993, 1995) are clearly also present at the begin-ning of life—infants truly do seem to comeequipped with either linguistic protoknowledgealready built in, or cognitive systems primed tolearn an amazing amount linguistically in a shorttime. Operating principles, parameter setting,bootstrapping, and child-directed speech are allattempts to account for the incredible amount oflanguage awareness children display early in life,and for how they so quickly complexify it.

One recent cognitive attempt to explain L1acquisition is connectionism (e.g., Plunkett, 1995;Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986; cf. N. C. Ellis,1998). Connectionist theories depend on thecomputational modeling of language (and otherkinds of) learning via the gradual buildup ofrichly internetworked association potentials atthe neural level which are selectively and simulta-neously activated in specific patterns to performcognitive activities, including language produc-tion and comprehension.5 Connectionist L1 ac-quisition models appear to account for how vari-ous complex language systems such as theEnglish past tense verb-marking system (e.g.,Plunkett & Marchman, 1993; Rumelhart &McClelland, 1986) can be learned over time with-out assuming innate linguistic knowledge. Al-though much effort has gone into establishingthe modeling of this particular grammatical sys-tem as a paradigm example of connectionism’spower, connectionist researchers have investi-gated other linguistic domains as well. Thus, El-man (1992) and others have modeled connec-tionist systems that correctly assign syntacticcategory labels after exposure to a range of syn-tactic strings, and Stemberger (1992) “has of-fered a connectionist model as a plausible ac-count of the characteristics of child phonology”(Leonard, 1995, p. 590).

A major strength of connectionist approachesto L1 acquisition is that, unlike their innatistcounterparts, they appear to account for empiri-cally determined hallmarks of the acquisitionalprocess. These hallmarks include: in the acquisi-tion of the lexicon, semantic overextension and

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underextension (e.g., Barrett, 1995; Gruendel,1977) and the “vocabulary burst” often seen inchildren during their second year (e.g., Bates,Dale, & Thal, 1995; Nelson, 1973); overgenerali-zation of past tense verb endings (e.g., Brown,1973; Marchman & Bates, 1994); the comprehen-sion-production lag in language acquisition (e.g.,E. V. Clark, 1983; Plunkett, 1995); and U-shapedgrowth in a number of areas (e.g., Brown, 1973;Plunkett, 1995).

Just as importantly, perhaps, connectionist re-searchers have modeled interdomain language ac-quisition. Thus, Bates et al. (1995) discussed theefficacy of connectionism in accounting for the“continuity hypothesis” (cf. Foster, 1990) relatingearly lexical development to early grammaticaldevelopment in English. They pointed out that inthe past tense morphology-learning simulationsmentioned above there is “temporal asynchrony”between the acquisition of discrete lexical formsand the emergence of a rule-like system that cor-rectly assigns past tense inflectional endings topreviously unseen verbs:

In the early stages of learning, the system appears tolearn each mapping from present to past tense byrote, with no generalization to novel lexical forms. . . .As instances of present/past tense mapping accumu-late, some dramatic nonlinear changes are observed:the rate of learning accelerates markedly, overgener-alization errors start to appear, and the system startsto provide a default mapping to novel items. . . . Su-perficially, the network behaves as though it hasswitched from one mode of learning (rote) to an-other (rule). And yet there are no structural discon-tinuities in the system itself, or in the one-verb-at-a-time nature of the input. . . . Simply put, grammaticalgeneralizations (i.e., rulelike behaviors) do not ariseuntil this system has acquired enough instances tosupport those generalizations. When the requisitenumber of items has been acquired, dramaticchanges can take place, even within a single system.(Bates et al., 1995, pp. 118–119)

Connectionist approaches to language acquisi-tion thus have the potential to tell us much aboutthe cognitive mechanisms implicated in L1 acqui-sition. In addition, they have characteristics—tobe discussed in the following two sections of thisarticle—that allow the cognitive and social as-pects of language use and acquisition to be tiedmuch more closely together than previously.

LANGUAGE AS A SOCIOCOGNITIVEPHENOMENON

In describing the social and cognitive attributesof language to this point, I have purposely tried

to keep them separate. In actual fact, however, agrowing number of linguists, anthropologists, de-velopmental psychologists, and language acquisi-tion researchers do not accept such a dichotomy(e.g., Gee, 1990, 1992; Halliday, 1978; Hanks,1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Ochs, 1992, 1996;Rogoff, 1990).6 Along with these scholars, I con-sider the social and cognitive aspects of languageto have co-evolved from the beginning, andtherefore to function interdependently—if notinseparably. In this section, I will try to describehow the social and the cognitive work together inthis way.

A number of linguistic phenomena can, in fact,only be accounted for if the cognizing individ-ual’s linguistic knowledge is seen to be abetted by,actuated within, and broadly continuous with arich social context. Researchers (e.g., Goodwin,1986, 1987; Lerner, 1993, 1996; Ochs et al.,1979), for example, have described the interac-tional accomplishment of propositions across indi-viduals—the remarkable ability of individuals tocontribute jointly to the expression of a singleidea or action. Such a feat is possible only in thepresence of joint cognition—a form of intersubjec-tivity created and maintained on the basis of bothshared (and highly-articulated) cognitive knowl-edge of the activity being engaged in, and a worldthat gives such activity a social purpose, a conven-tional shape (e.g., a participation structure), andan approximately agreed-upon means of linguis-tic expression.

Among socially-oriented linguists, conversationis frequently considered the paradigm speech ac-tivity within the human language-making capacity(e.g., Ochs et al., 1996). One of the foremostcharacteristics of conversation is its jointly-accom-plished nature, whether within or across utter-ances. Thus, topic nomination by one party oftenleads to multiple utterances on the topic (whichitself may be subtly negotiated and modified inthe interaction) by both the nominator and otherparties, leading eventually to the expression of abroadly-shared perspective, if only for the dura-tion of the interaction (e.g., Goodwin, 1981,1986, 1987). Likewise, conversational storytellingis a highly co-constructed sociocognitive activity,with different parties exercising influence overthe story’s course through their responses, bysharing more actively in its co-construction, oreven by taking it over as it proceeds (Goodwin,1986, 1987; Mandelbaum, 1987).7 The effectiveuse of any language, in fact, crucially assumes thepreexistence and interactionally-achieved devel-opment of shared sociocognitive perspec-tives—thus a basic precondition for effective lin-


guistic reference (e.g., nominal, deictic, or defi-nite reference—H. H. Clark & Marshall, 1981;H. H. Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986) is that lan-guage users actively co-construct and adopt acommon referential ground (Hanks, 1996).8

It is necessary at this point to consider in moredetail how the cognizing individual and the so-cially-constructed and mediated world make theirintegrated contributions to linguistic activity inthat world. In order to do so, I will adopt a con-nectionist understanding of cognition, but onethat extends rather directly into the social world,and vice versa. My account substantially followsthat of Gee (1992).

As described previously, connectionism positsthat meaning/knowledge exists largely in poten-tial form in the human cognitive apparatus. Thatis, rather than having prebuilt cognitive struc-tures, or schemas stored in the brain, all thatexists is the potential for such structures to beformed basically online through the activation ofvarious networks of neural associations. Thus,meaning (or its material substrate) is distributedacross a large number of neurons, all of whichhave varying probabilities of firing in concertwith other neurons, depending both on the na-ture of the input stimulus and on what has beenexperienced in the past—and thus what connec-tions have been previously trained/socialized toactivate together. For instance, while walkingalong a New England country road on a sunnysummer day, a passing stranger’s “Hi!” or “Niceweather we’re having”—suitably accompanied byeye contact, a smile, a certain affective disposition(at least to the extent of desiring to communi-cate), the orientation of the speaker’s face towardthat of the (assumed) recipient of the utterance,delivered in a suitably friendly tone at a sociallyacceptable distance while enacting a socially ap-propriate identity, and so forth—will, in princi-ple, activate in the recipient a set of previouslysocialized neural connections leading to the ho-listic understanding that this is the speech act wecall a greeting. Quite probably, it will also resultin neurally-based and highly-patterned action bythe recipient, comprising, among other things, areciprocal physical orientation, affective stance,facial expression, tone of voice, and utter-ance—what we call a response.

What I first want to highlight in this example isthe interactive, “outside-in” (Shore, 1996) natureof the sociocognitive event. Without the rich con-tribution of social (signifying) practices and toolssuch as facial expression, physical orientation,voice quality, language, social scene (an isolatedNew England byway), and social actors (strangers

approaching each other), neither cognition itselfnor the resulting speech event could have takenplace. Put a bit more metaphorically, perhaps, theacts of cognition described in this example aresubstantially continuous with the socialworld—they do not start in the head, althoughthe head is certainly involved, nor do they end inthe head, because the output is social action. Nordo the social (signifying) practices involved sim-ply take on their meaning once they arrive in thehead; instead, they come with meaning already,in a sense, built in—just as language carries withit meaning that is only “borrowed” (Bakhtin,1990) in specific instances of language use. Thepoint here, then, is that cognition is not a privateactivity that occurs exclusively in the confines ofan independent, isolated cerebral space, butrather that it is at least a semipublic activity, pro-duced as part of a substantially open system.Whenever we participate in social activity, we par-ticipate in conventional ways of acting and beingthat are already deeply saturated with signifi-cance.

Gee (1992, p. 12) gave the following exampleof how cognition (or at least knowledge) is both“in the head” and “in the world”:

Consider the way people move around a city. Somepeople undoubtedly have quite impressive “maps” ofthe city in their heads, others have less completeones, and some people have quite impoverishedones. However, people do not need to have any veryfull representations in their minds . . . since the struc-ture of the city, out in the world as it is, determines agood deal of their movement. . . . People’s “knowl-edge” of the city is stored, in good part, out in the cityitself. Their “city schema” . . . is not just made up ofthings in their heads, it is also composed of the struc-tures in the city itself, as well as physical maps (andthings like public transportation schedules) that peo-ple can read. (p. 12)

Thus, meaning resides (partway) in socialproducts (e.g., cities, maps, country roads, cars),social practices (e.g., greeting somebody, read-ing, baking a cake, playing the role of teacher orstudent in a classroom), and social tools (e.g.,language, literacy, computer programs, methodsof navigation), even as it resides (partway) in thehead.

A second, slightly different aspect of the coun-try road greeting example that I want to highlightis the profoundly integrative nature of the socio-cognitive event. That is, language activity and itscognitive correlates always occur as integral partsof larger sociocognitive wholes. Thus, withouteach of the following occurring and being cog-nized in relation to one another—socially signify-

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ing facial expressions and physical orientations,affective stance, a conventionalized social scenein a social setting with a social purpose per-formed by social actors, and the effective deploy-ment of the social tool of language—the activityof exchanging greetings could not have takenplace. An important strength of connectionism isthat it can account for such complex intertwin-ings of sensory and affective modalities, emer-gent cognitive structures, social phenomena, andlanguage ability and use in the accomplishmentof social activity. It does so in terms of the inter-actions of various sets of activated neurons—ofneural networks that work together because ofprevious exposure to similar experience com-plexes (e.g., Gee, 1992, chap. 2; Strauss & Quinn,1997, chap. 3). From this viewpoint, language perse is not the privileged and separate summumbonum, but rather an integral element of socio-cognitive activity, the ultimate purpose of whichis to perform situated action-in-the-world.

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AS ASOCIOCOGNITIVE PHENOMENON

Equally good arguments for the sociocognitivenature of language come from the circumstancesof its acquisition. A well-established finding in L1acquisition research is that external context playsa crucial role early on. In early acquisition of thelexicon, for instance, it is vital that children beable to link particular sounds, words, and phrasesrepetitively to the appearance of particular ob-jects or to the occurrence of particular actions(Barrett, 1995; see also Gee, 1995, described pre-viously). To say that linguistic form is simplybeing “input” into an autonomous languagelearning system at this point would be inaccurate;at minimum, both the form and the object/ac-tion are being cognitively represented in somekind of associative relationship. The widely ac-cepted notion of event representation (e.g., Barrett,1995; Nelson, 1986) goes one step further, pro-viding a richer and, from a sociocognitive per-spective, more plausible view of early languageacquisition. It postulates that children alreadyhave cognitively well-developed, organized asso-ciations of activity sequences, actors, and objects(along with open slots by which some actors andobjects may be substituted for by others) ontowhich different words are initially mapped, andwithin which they thereafter become substantiallyintegrated.

Nor is it just any external context that earlylanguage development depends on. Rather, social-interactional routines (e.g., Barrett, 1995; Gee,

1995) provide both the framework and the con-tent through which basic context-language formassociations are made and internalized. Gee’s(1995) routine principle and public principle, de-scribed earlier, capture important facets of howsuch routines provide repetitive, public, andhighly-structured opportunities for infants to con-nect specific utterances with specific semanticcomplexes. Coordinated activity of infant andcaregiver is central in this kind of routine—de-spite the fact that intentionality cannot be strictlyattributed to infants, as aggressively stimulus-seek-ing organisms with a natural attraction to interac-tive and repetitive behavior (Locke, 1993) theylearn to play their part early on. More specifically,the related notions of scaffolding (e.g., Ninio &Bruner, 1978), vertical constructions (Scollon,1976), zone of proximal development (e.g., Cole,1985; Vygostky, 1978), socializing attention(Zukow-Goldring & Ferko, 1994), and proposi-tions across individuals and utterances (Ochs etal., 1979) all reconceptualize the child and thecaregiver as an interactional unit in their accom-plishment of sociocognitive tasks that the childcould not perform independently, and, therefore,as a central mechanism of developmental growth.

It is generally thought that as L1 developmentprogresses, context becomes a less important partof the acquisitional scheme. Thus, whereas chil-dren’s early utterances are tied closely to the hereand now (Foster, 1990), they become progres-sively less so as time goes on. This finding is oftentaken as evidence that some sort of basic lan-guage learning machinery has kicked fully intogear and is now operating on a fairly systematicand autonomous basis.

Although it is no doubt true that qualitativechanges take place once linguistic knowledgereaches a certain critical mass for children, con-nectionist theories of cognition and language ac-quisition suggest that much if not all learning isaccomplished not by progressively greater separa-tion of the knowledge being acquired from theexternal world and other domains of cognitiveknowledge, but by their increasing integration. Ifthis is the case, then it might be more accurate tosay that context, rather than disappearing fromthe scene altogether, partly “comes inside.” Thatis, as has been widely posited by neo-Vygotskiansociocultural theorists (e.g., Lantolf & Appel,1994; Wertsch & Stone, 1985), the fundamentaldynamic of acquiring language (as well as other“higher mental functions”) is that formerly exter-nalized/social knowledge is substantially recon-figured as internalized/cognitive knowledge. Butscholars who have recently attempted to link cog-


nition via connectionism more closely to the so-cial and cultural world (e.g., Gee, 1992; Shore,1996; Strauss & Quinn, 1997) might take excep-tion to the implications of the Vygotskian claimthat language is, to some degree, gradually loos-ened during development from its moorings insocial life. Rather, from this newer perspective, itmight be more accurate to say that social life isnow becoming articulated at a cognitive level inthe development of cultural models (Gee, 1992;Holland & Quinn, 1987; Shore, 1996)—modelsthat owe both their origins and their continuedactivation and use directly to their social exist-ence—and that in this important sense the cogni-tive and the social are growing progressivelycloser together.

If this version of connectionism is even ap-proximately correct, then the notion of “decon-textualized language”—so important in descrip-tions of later language and literacy learning andearly success and failure in schooling—is perhapsneither useful nor accurate. That is, if context istaken to be only the immediate social and physi-cal setting of language behavior in the here andnow—the context of situation first described byMalinowski (1923) and later elaborated by Halli-day (in Halliday & Hasan, 1989, chap. 1)—suchlanguage behavior might well be seen as thor-oughly decontextualized. But if context is morewidely construed as context of culture (Halliday &Hasan, 1989; Malinowski, 1923; Ochs, 1990)—in-volving the increasing cognitive interarticulationof cultural models with social practices, socialproducts, and social tools (including, crucially,how to deploy them effectively)—then to think oflanguage as becoming progressively more decon-textualized and autonomous in the course of itsacquisition may be fundamentally misguided.

Event representations in early L1 acquisition,although sometimes claimed to be relatively tem-porary and evanescent, suggestively resembleearly and relatively unarticulated schemas ormental models (or, in connectionist terms, net-works of neural associations out of which suchschemas/models are formed basically online).Whether or not they provide a skeletal base forthe later articulation of sociocultural knowledgein the form of cultural models, schemas, frames,or scripts (Cole, 1985), their early existence doessuggest a sort of continuity of sociocognitive pro-cesses—the progressive “thickening” of “knowl-edge in the head” by “knowledge in theworld”—the basic outside-in dynamic describedby Shore (1996) and alluded to above. Put yetanother way, any organism’s progressive adapta-tion to its environment is a hallmark of develop-

mental growth. The gradual approximation bydeveloping humans of what is “in the head” towhat is “in the world” is just such an adaptivedynamic.

Gee (1992; following C. J. Fillmore, 1975) de-scribed the cultural model associated with the lexi-cal item bachelor. According to Gee, the dictionarydefinition of bachelor as unmarried male is only rudi-mentarily related to the dense linkings of associa-tions that fall within the culturally construed un-derstanding of bachelor. For one, bachelor invokesan idealized, culturally normative view of mascu-line sexuality. Thus, Roman Catholic priests,young boys, homeless men, and so forth, seem tofit into the category only problematically. Like-wise, when contrasted with the term spinster—itsapparent gender counterpart—bachelor seems tocarry with it the cultural presupposition that sin-gle men become progressively more eligible anddesirable marriage partners as they grow older (orat minimum their eligibility never ceases),whereas women become progressively less so.

Although not all connections in the complexweb of potential associations with the word bache-lor need be activated on every occasion of its use,the point is that such a rich, articulated back-ground exists, and that this background is locatednot only in cognitive but also social space. Itmight also be pointed out that examples of thetype I have given in this article cannot even beginto approximate the extremely rich, complex, andhighly-articulated kinds of sociocognitive knowl-edge that most humans are privy to simply byvirtue of their lived experience and sociogeneticinheritance. To mention just one further (andmore or less linguistic) element that must figureimportantly in such highly developed knowledgecomplexes vis-à-vis language use, consider thegrowing realization among linguists that statisti-cal-collocational relationship between variouslinguistic features is a major principle in the syn-tagmatic and paradigmatic organization of lan-guage-in-use and its acquisition (e.g., Saffran,Aslin, & Newport, 1996; Seidenberg, 1996;Stubbs, 1996, chap. 2). Such knowledge is easilyaccounted for in terms of connectionist networks(Seidenberg, 1996), and would obviously be heldin joint, if variable, ownership with one’s socialmilieu. Taken together with the other kinds ofknowledge I have so far mentioned and exempli-fied, it suggests “a semantics . . . more like anencyclopedia than a dictionary, [which] incorpo-rates the view that linguistic categories exist inrelation to ‘particular structured understandingsof cultural institutions, beliefs about the world’”(Hanks, 1996, p. 244, including a quotation from

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C. J. Fillmore, 1985). Although this formulationmay still assume something of the traditional di-vide between the social and the cognitive I havebeen arguing against, it also captures some of theinterpenetration and connectivity I am trying toportray.9

SLA AS A SOCIOCOGNITIVE PHENOMENON

Let me summarize the main argument of thearticle as developed to this point: Neither lan-guage acquisition nor language use—nor evencognized linguistic knowledge—can be properlyunderstood without taking into account theirfundamental integration into a socially-mediatedworld. Beyond simply saying that the cognitiveand the social interact, I use recent research inlinguistics, anthropology, language acquisition,and cognitive science—work I have necessarilyhad to rely on, because so little of its kind has yetbeen done in the field of SLA—to argue that theyare mutually constituted. It is commonplace forcognitively-oriented and socially-oriented lan-guage researchers to assume (at least for workingpurposes) the separability of their domains. I ar-gue instead that these two domains cannot use-fully be separated: The coinage “sociocognitive”(e.g., Ochs, 1988b) is adopted to represent thisdistinct perspective.

With its beginnings in the cognitive psychologyrevolution of the 1960s (e.g., Brown, 1973; Cor-der, 1967), the field of SLA has adopted, by andlarge, a highly cognitivist view of second languagelearning (e.g., Breen, 1985; Crookes, 1997; Firth& Wagner, 1997). By cognitivist, I mean a perspec-tive that places SLA mainly within individualheads and that sees individuals therefore as radi-cally autonomous language acquirers (Penny-cook, 1997). Even where social variables appearto enter in, from this perspective, they do so onlyas indirect influences on the acquisitional process(R. Ellis, 1994).10

Although this shared perspective has provideda (very) roughly common ground for inquiry inSLA, it comes at the cost of denaturing reduction.If the development of “languaging” depends ongreater engagement with and adaptation to the(socially-mediated) world—or, more accurately,on the progressive interarticulation of the socialand the cognitive—then a SLA based substan-tially on such master concepts as input, the (ide-alized) learner, and a “lonely” version of cogni-tion is an impoverished endeavor.

Others have, of course, made similar pointsfrom time to time, and in recent years main-stream SLA has been increasingly criticized for

this reason (as seen, in part, in the quotationsbeginning this article). But Breen’s (1985) pleato researchers and teachers to treat second lan-guage classrooms as cultural scenes is still one ofthe most eloquent statements of the problem:

Given that we wish to understand how the externalsocial situation of a classroom relates to the internalpsychological states of the learner, the metaphor ofthe classroom as provider of optimal input or rein-forcer of good strategies is inadequate. It reduces theact or experience of learning a language to linguisticor behavioural conditioning somehow independentof the learner’s social reality. Not only is SLA re-search currently offering us a delimited [sic] ac-count of language learning, reducing active cogni-tion to passive internalisation and reducinglanguage to very specific grammatical performance,the mainstream of SLA research is also asocial. Itneglects the social significance of even those vari-ables which the investigators regard as central. Thepriority given to linguistic and mentalistic variablesin terms of the efficient processing of knowledge asinput leads inevitably to a partial account of the lan-guage learning process. The social context of learn-ing and the social forces within it will always shapewhat is made available to be learned and the inter-action of individual mind with external linguistic orcommunicative knowledge. Even Wundt, the first ex-perimental psychologist, believed that he could notstudy higher mental processes such as reasoning, be-lief, thought, and language in a laboratory preciselybecause such processes were rooted within authenticsocial activity. (pp. 138–139)

Likewise, Vygotskian researchers (e.g., Hall,1997; Lantolf, 2000; Lantolf & Appel, 1994) haveargued against the reductive cognitivism of thefield. Lantolf and Appel (1994), for example,criticized a view of the language learner “as asolipsistic biological organism whose cognitivepowers simply unfold or ripen with the passage oftime, rather than as someone who experiencesproductive participation in joint activity” (p. 11).Discourse analysts Firth and Wagner (1997) alsooffered a broad critique of SLA research as “indi-vidualistic and mechanistic”—as based on a per-spective that is:

weighted against the social and the contextual, andheavily in favour of the individual’s cognition, par-ticularly the development of grammatical compe-tence. This has led to an imbalance of adopted theo-retical interests, priorities, foci, methodologies,perspectives . . . resulting in distorted descriptions ofand views on discourse, communication, and inter-personal meaning—the quintessential elements oflanguage. Moreover, this has occurred even in SLAwork that is concerned with discourse and interac-tion. (p. 288)


Although I do not agree with elements of Firthand Wagner’s argument, their general claim thatmainstream SLA is lopsidedly cognitivist—andthat much of its current practice virtually com-pels a view of language as radically disconnectedfrom its natural environment, even in studies thatseem to investigate language use in that environ-ment—is, in my opinion, all too accurate.11

Taking the just-mentioned critiques of SLA aspart of a larger critical endeavor, I would like todelineate my own understanding of some keyconcepts in the field, and indicate where I findthem at odds with a sociocognitive perspective.

Input

As dramatized at the beginning of this paper, Isee the notion of input in mainstream SLA ascoming fairly close to that of a switch or trigger,whether one adopts a Universal Grammar per-spective or not. At least one can say that input isof interest in this approach mainly as a stimulusactivating an autonomous cognitive learning ap-paratus, which is assumed to perform certain(often unclearly-specified) processing opera-tions. In this way, the stimulus is converted intosome kind of internal grammatical repre-sentation, which finds, over time, its proper rela-tionship with other such representations in arule-governed structuralist system that is virtuallyimmune to nonlinguistic influence. Even SLAstudies of input modification and interaction (seebelow), which focus nominally on language-in-use, seem to adopt this scenario—or somethingquite like it—as their underlying “central dogma”(Crick, 1988).

Much of this characterization is problematicfrom a sociocognitive perspective. If knowledgeof the world, including linguistic knowledge, isorganized in the form of “actional wholes”(Hanks, 1996, p. 245, where actional refers to thefundamental purpose of language to contributeto the carrying out of action in the world), it ishard to imagine how such knowledge would de-velop via decontextualized internalization. Thedeveloping grammatical system as I have de-scribed it furthermore lacks any motivation otherthan perhaps a purely genetic one, which is whyits description is often pervaded by an odd sort ofanomie, in my opinion—it just is because it is. AsI have tried to make clear, any approach to lan-guage and its acquisition which ignores or dis-misses the basic functionality of language for hu-man beings in society is lacking in descriptive andtheoretical adequacy.

Interaction

Most SLA researchers who study “interaction”do so mainly for the sake of understanding itsconditioning effect on input. This is made clearby Gass (1998):

The goal of my work (and the work of others withinthe input/interaction framework . . .) has never beento understand language use per se . . . but rather tounderstand what types of interaction might bringabout what types of changes in linguistic knowledge.(p. 84)

This is truly a pale reflection of the study ofauthentic human (linguistic) interaction, as Lid-dicoat (1997) noted:

What is missing . . . [in] the study of interaction in L2contexts is interaction between people who have apreexisting relationship, who are interacting for thepurpose of engaging in that relationship, and whoare engaged in interaction in which their options forparticipating are not constrained by institutionalroles.12 (p. 314)

In other words, what is missing in mainstreamSLA is any concern whatsoever for the dominantforms of interaction in the world, and for thoseinteractions qua interactions. The term thereforeseems to be a misnomer, given the fact that thefocus of work that purportedly studies it is stilllanguage-in-the-head. Again in the words of Lid-dicoat: “Essentially, what is happening here [inthe contrived interactional settings favored inmainstream SLA] is an interaction designed to allowthe NNS to produce a language sample [italicsadded]” (p. 315). From a sociocognitive perspec-tive this is hardly interaction at all.

The Language Learner

To put it bluntly, the language learner in main-stream SLA is something like an automaton, in-teresting only in the sense that it houses a discretelanguage learning system. This view is well at-tested in writing on the goals of SLA; to restatethe words of Long (1997), cited at the beginningof this article: “Most SLA researchers view theobject of inquiry as in large part an internal,mental process” (p. 319). If SLA is about lan-guage-learning human beings, they are thereforehuman only in a derivative sense—analogous,more or less, to the attenuated manner in whichlanguage is considered “creative” by Chomskyans.

As noted previously, I frequently find the read-ing of SLA research to be almost an exercise insurrealism—based, I believe, in the just-men-tioned contradictory “present absence” of human

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beings. Human beings as I know them, whetherpeople on the street, students I teach and workwith, professional colleagues, or those I am closeto and love, appear to act, think, and feel in waysand for reasons entirely different than those mosttypically featured in SLA research. Case studies,diary studies, and (mostly earlier) work that fo-cuses on authentic interaction and language use(e.g., L. W. Fillmore, 1979; Saville-Troike, 1988;Schmidt, 1983; Schmidt & Frota, 1986) are someof the exceptions I know of in this regard—andthey are admirable exceptions.

(Scientific) Methods

From the start, SLA was “scientized” by its prac-titioners (Block, 1996). This was partly because itadopted cognitive psychology and linguistics as itssource disciplines (e.g., Crookes, 1997; Mitchell& Myles, 1998). As time went on, however, a sec-ond good reason for seeing SLA as science be-came apparent: Academic politics and prestigefavored doing so, especially if SLA was therebydissociated from the low-status occupation of lan-guage teaching (Schachter, 1993). Although thismove may have brought a certain amount of re-spect-by-(dis?)association to the field, recentcharges of “science envy” (Block, 1996) or “phys-ics envy” (Lantolf, 1996) are, in some respects,not far off the mark. The idea that one can studyinherently social phenomena by applying meth-ods and approaches originally developed to de-scribe the behavior of inanimate objects has beenwidely critiqued, starting as far back, perhaps, asWundt (see quotation from Breen, 1985, givenabove). Strong arguments have also been madeto the effect that quantitative scientific method-ologies, because they neutralize by design what isvariable and individual (in human behavior orotherwise), produce epiphenomenally uniformaccounts (e.g., Daston, 1995; Hacking, 1981; Por-ter, 1995). That is, uniform results have been ar-gued to be substantially an artifact of methodolo-gies which, in a sense, presuppose them—forexample, by statistical generalization or strict con-trol of “extraneous” variables. Although such cri-tiques have been widespread in the social sci-ences over the past 20 or so years, it is of morethan passing interest that defenders of main-stream scientized SLA (e.g., most of the contribu-tors to Beretta, 1993) tend to rely for their argu-ments more on the (nonempirical) philosophy ofscience, than on actual, empirical accounts of sci-entific behavior (e.g., Collins, 1985; Gilbert &Mulkay, 1984; Latour & Woolgar, 1986; Traweek,1988).

Cognition

In mainstream SLA cognition is a “lonely” pro-cess taking place within an autonomous languagelearning organism. Its forte is the processing ofinput/construction of linguistic knowledge. Itserves as a bank of internal linguistic knowledge,or competence, which most often has only anindirect connection to language performance.Even non-mainstream areas of SLA that focus onlanguage performance, such as interlanguagepragmatics, sometimes seem to assume this view(e.g., Kasper, 1997).

Language

Where language is reduced substantially togrammar, and its use largely to the provision ofinput, there exists a reductiveness approachingthat of Chomksy’s influential vision. From a socio-cognitive perspective, however, language is anabundantly rich resource for getting on in theworld—for performing social action. Language isintricately but dynamically interwoven with hu-mans’ other means of ecological adaptation andactivity, and removing it from that context comesat a real cost.

Beyond simply defining a sociocognitive ap-proach to SLA negatively by criticizing SLA ortho-doxy, however, I would also like to provide a viewof what it is, or, more accurately, what it could be.One thing is clear: Such a perspective does notyet exist in SLA. For this reason, it will be possibleto go just so far in conjuring up its image.

First, a sociocognitive approach to SLA wouldtake the social dimensions of language and itsacquisition seriously. Interaction in sociocognitiveSLA would have its full sociocognitive signifi-cance and constitute a foundational concept.Language is learned in interaction, often withmore capable social members. Classroom teach-ers are part of this group where second languagesare concerned, but only a part—peers, mentors,role models, friends, family members, and signifi-cant others can also fall into this category. Al-though interaction might not include conversa-tion in all cases, it would certainly entail the deep,holistic investment of learners in learning activi-ties, and would see those learners as active agents,not passive recipients.

Second, language and its acquisition would befully integrated into other activities, people, andthings in a sociocognitive approach to SLA. Theywould be seen as integral parts of larger sociocog-nitive wholes, or, in Gee’s (1992) term, Discourses:“Discourses are composed of people, of ob-


jects . . . and of . . . talking, acting, interacting,thinking, believing, and valuing, and sometimes .. . writing, reading, and/or interpreting . . . . Dis-courses are out in the world, like books, maps,and cities” (p. 20). In other words, languagewould be seen in terms of its rich ecological/con-textual/relational “worldliness” (Pennycook,1994) and complexity rather than its simplicity,parsimony, and autonomy.

Third, language and its acquisition, from a so-ciocognitive perspective, would be seen in termsof “action” and “participation”—as providing anextremely powerful semiotic means of perform-ing and participating in activity-in-the-world (Ro-goff, 1990, 1998; Lave & Wenger, 1991). It is justbecause language serves this vital function, onecould say, that it exists and that people acquire it:One does not usually acquire a language in orderto acquire it, or talk about it, or provide data forSLA researchers. One acquires a language in or-der to act, and by acting, in a world where lan-guage is performative. This is exactly why andhow children learn their first language, and itaccounts as well for most of the second/addi-tional language learning going on in the worldtoday. It is an extremely unfortunate matter thatwe have some influential myths suggesting other-wise—for example, that SLA takes place primarilyin cases where students are taught something dis-crete called language (Gee, 1990), or that SLAtakes place within isolated heads whose only mo-tivation is creative construction.

Finally, a sociocognitive perspective shouldnot, strictly speaking, exclude. As an approach tolanguage, it is fundamentally cognitive and funda-mentally social. A sociocognitive perspective doesnot diminish a view of language as one or theother—it argues for the profound interdepen-dency and integration of both. Thus, although Ihave described a cognitivist view of SLA as “im-poverished,” that is not the same as saying it iswrong. In fact, I believe that cognitivists havecontributed to our understanding—however ten-tative and partial at this point—of SLA. But iflanguage is in the world at the same time as it isin the head, then we need to account for itsintegrated existence, rather than adopt positionsthat reduce the life—the humanity—out of lan-guage.

A NOTE ON NEO-VYGOTSKIANSOCIOCULTURAL THEORY IN SLA

Given the increasing popularity of a non-main-stream form of SLA theory—neo-Vygotskian so-ciocultural theory—which tries to address some

of the same problems with mainstream SLA re-search discussed in this article, I would like herebriefly to indicate where I believe my approachdiffers from this one and is not simply reducibleto it.

A major claim of Vygotsky—and a claim thatseems typically to be assumed or endorsed bycurrent neo-Vygotskian SLA researchers (e.g.,Lantolf, 2000)—was that language appears, devel-opmentally speaking, first on the interpsychologi-cal plane (i.e., as social speech) and only after-wards on the intrapsychological plane (i.e., asinternalized or inner speech). There is thus agradual process of internalization whereby a fullyexternalized social practice becomes a substan-tially internalized cognitive practice (e.g., Lan-tolf, 2000; Lantolf with Pavlenko, 1995). In fact,according to Vygotsky, this is how people learn tocognize—how “higher mental development” oc-curs: “Any higher mental function was externalbecause it was social at some point before becoming aninternal, truly mental function [italics added]” (Vy-gotsky, 1981, p. 162).

In a recent major statement of socioculturaltheory in SLA, Lantolf (2000) has echoed Vygot-sky’s view:

Internalization is in essence the process throughwhich higher forms of mentation come to be. Inter-nalization then assumes that the [original] source ofconsciousness resides outside of the head and is infact anchored in social activity. At first the activity ofindividuals is organized and regulated (i.e., medi-ated) by others, but eventually, in normal develop-ment, we come to organize and regulate our ownmental and physical activity through the appropria-tion of the regulatory means employed by others. Atthis point psychological functioning comes under thevoluntary control of the person. (pp. 13–14)

From this point of view, we could say that lan-guage is sociocognitive in a manner of speaking,but only or most substantially in its developmentalprofile (see also Kirshner & Whitson, 1997, for asimilar critique). That is, language starts social,but becomes substantially cognitive as develop-ment proceeds: in the words, once again, of Lan-tolf (2000), “The convergence of thinking [i.e.,the cognitive] with culturally created mediationalartifacts [i.e., the social] . . . occurs in the processof internalization, or the reconstruction on theinner, psychological plane, of socially mediatedexternal forms of goal-directed activity” (p. 13).For some neo-Vygotskians this may be a sufficientexplanation of both language development anduse in toto, given that for Vygotsky, “to under-stand behavior means to understand the history of

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behavior [italics added]”(cited in Cole, 1993, p.9).13

But my own argument—as developed on a step-by-step basis in this article—is that although lan-guage may perhaps be seen from some points ofview as more or less internalized and self-regu-lated—as the property of an individual, cognitiveself—in actuality it always and everywhere existsin an integrated sociocognitive space. In terms ofthe above-given formulation of Vygotsky (1981),I would therefore argue that, contra his view,language (no matter what its stage of develop-ment) never takes on an “internal, truly mentalfunction” at all. Rather, it is always mutually, si-multaneously, and co-constitutively in the headand in the world. Certainly, at critical points indevelopment, language may seem to “come in-side”—but if one end of language, so to speak, isembedded in cognitive space, the other end isjust as strongly embedded in social space.

In actual fact, this use of spatial and object-ori-ented metaphors to describe language hardly suf-fices, but I hope at least to have indicated what Ibelieve is a basic difference—certainly at least interms of emphasis—between what I propose hereand what many neo-Vygotkians assume or areproposing in their SLA work. There are otherdifferences—for instance, the artificial tasks andconditions that have historically obtained in Vy-gotskian research, and the need in such researchto break behavior down into component partswhile at the same time professing holism (e.g.,Wertsch, 1998; see also Kirshner & Whitson,1997). But the first-mentioned difference is themost important one, and from it many of theother differences proceed. This is not to say thatI do not value or respect research being done inthis framework in the field, nor that it has notcontributed significantly to my own thinking onSLA.

CONCLUSION

What, then, are some of the implications of asociocognitive view of SLA? Here I will speculatebecause, as I have already pointed out, no suchcoherent view yet exists. In the interim, I will takemy cues largely from pedagogically-oriented L1research on situated cognition, social linguistics,and learning-as-participation (e.g., Gee, 1990,1992; Kirshner & Whitson, 1997; Lave & Wenger,1991; Rogoff, 1990, 1998; Wenger, 1998; cf. Atkin-son, 1997). I should also note that although sev-eral of the implications described below are inareas that are already receiving attention in sec-

ond language education, they have not yet inmost cases been closely linked to SLA theory.

One implication of a sociocognitive approachto SLA is that teaching is valuable, and that learn-ing and teaching go hand-in-hand (a view thatmainstream SLA, incidently, has yet to agreeon—Crookes, 1997; R. Ellis, 1997). But teachingin this view is also often incidental: If one learnsby participating in specific and meaningful socialactivity, then co-participants are often one’steachers. The expert-novice (or master-appren-tice) metaphor emanating from studies of situ-ated cognition is a useful thinking tool in thiscontext, exactly because it emphasizes learningthrough active and increasingly knowledgeableparticipation in a particular “community of prac-tice.” But this metaphor should not be taken toimply that learners and those they learn from areprofoundly separated. As already noted, peerscan be teachers, depending on the situation, andthe same is true for all others with whom we havesocial relationships. If we consider that most ofthe additional language learning going on in theworld today is of this nonformal variety, then wehave a more realistic notion of teaching, and howteaching and learning interact. If, as second lan-guage teachers, we can harness more of the rangeof teaching situations that actually take place inthe world outside the classroom (e.g., Atkinson,1997, 1998; Hawkins, 1998), then we will be ableto utilize more fully the teaching and learningpotential of all human beings.

A second implication of a sociocognitive ap-proach to SLA is intimately related to the viewthat language and its acquisition are not radicallydisconnected from the rest of the world. Lan-guage-in-the-world suggests a richness and powerfor it that extends well beyond the transfer ofinformation from brain to brain. A sociocognitiveapproach to SLA promotes and reinforces manyconnections to other realms of inquiry and prac-tice, such as: culture (e.g., Atkinson, 1999;Kramsch, 1993); schooling (e.g., Poole, 1992);identity (e.g., Peirce, 1995); power, politics, andideology (e.g., Fairclough, 1992; Gee, 1990, 1992;Pennycook, 1994); discourse (e.g., Firth & Wag-ner, 1997); social ecology (e.g., Capra, 1996;Schumacher, 1997); and embodied action-taking(e.g., Goodwin, 2000). When one considers thedeep involvement of second/additional lan-guages in world politics, exploitative capitalism,and globalization (e.g., Pennycook, 1994, 1998;Phillipson, 1992), then a very real gain is realizedin the intrinsic consequentiality of studying,learning, and teaching them. We need and canhave a SLA—not to mention approaches to sec-


ond language teaching—with real potential forchanging the world, rather than being radicallyseparated from it.

A third implication of the sociocognitive studyof SLA concerns research methods for studyingthe learning and teaching of second/additionallanguages. Although individual-aggregating sta-tistical and experimental methods have a place inSLA, studying real humans in real human con-texts and interactions, including classrooms, en-tails methodologies that do not denature phe-nomena by removing them from their naturalenvironments and breaking them down intocountable component parts. Qualitative researchapproaches that attempt to honor the profoundwholeness and situatedness of social scenes andindividuals-in-the-world, such as ethnographicmethods (e.g., Holliday, 1996; Lazaraton & Davis,1995; Ramanathan & Atkinson, 1999), will have acentral place in this endeavor. One further im-portant advantage of such methodologies is thatthey are less likely to reproduce the theory-prac-tice divide—the asymmetrical division of laborbetween (classroom) teachers and researchers. Inthe suggestive phrasing of Holliday (1994), “theteacher cannot afford to be anything but a re-searcher” (p. 31) where broad sociocognitiveconnections are acknowledged between the class-room and the outside world. Likewise, class-rooms, among other kinds of learning situations,can be studied via these methods as complex so-ciocognitive activity systems in their own right(Breen, 1985; Holliday, 1996).

Fourth and finally, sociocognitive approachesto SLA will provide a means by which secondlanguage learners can be seen as real people,doing something they naturally do—not as mereresearch subjects, or mere students, or mere sitesfor language acquisition. Perhaps the theme Ihave emphasized above others in this article isthat thought, feeling, and activity in the socialworld are brought together in the form of humanbeings actively operating as part of that world. Itis therefore fitting to give the last word to Laveand Wenger (1991), two scholars who have donemuch to promote this view:

Participation in social practice . . . suggests a veryexplicit focus on the person, but person-in-the-world,as member of a sociocultural community. This focusin turn promotes a view of knowing as activity byspecific people in specific circumstances.

As an aspect of social practice, learning involves thewhole person: it implies not only a relation to specificactivities, but a relation to social communities—it im-plies becoming a full participant, a member, a kind ofperson. . . . Activities, tasks, functions, and under-

standings do not exist in isolation; they are part ofbroader systems of relations in which they have mean-ing. These systems of relations arise out of and arereproduced and developed within social communi-ties, which are in part systems of relations amongpersons. The person is defined by as well as definesthese relations. Learning thus implies becoming adifferent person with respect to the possibilities en-abled by these systems of relations. To ignore thisaspect of learning is to overlook the fact that learninginvolves the construction of identities. (pp. 52–53)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

James Paul Gee first introduced me to many ofthe ideas developed in this article. I would like tothank him, as well as A. Vishnu Bhat, MichelleBurnham, Joan Carson, John Hedgcock, HirokoItakura, Robert B. Kaplan, Wakako Kobayashi,Claire Kramsch, Ilona Leki, Takako Nishino, andNirmal Selvamony, for their critical commentsand encouragement in what has been a drawn-out writing/publishing process. David Beglar,Suresh Canagarajah, George Kamberelis,Genevieve Patthey-Chavez, and Vai Ramanathanalso generously read and commented on earlierdrafts. I would further like to thank the MLJ edi-tor, Sally Sieloff Magnan, and the four anony-mous reviewers for their thoughtful editing andcomments. This article is dedicated to the mem-ory of Matha Bean.

NOTES

1 The sociocognitive approach developed here takesits lead from a wide variety of disciplines and ap-proaches: cognitive and cultural anthropology (e.g.,Hanks, 1996; Shore, 1996; Strauss & Quinn, 1997); soci-ology (e.g., Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Goffman, 1959;Sacks et al., 1974); social linguistics (Gee, 1990, 1992);sociolinguistics and language socialization studies (e.g.,Hymes, 1972; Ochs, 1988a, 1988b, 1990, 1992, 1996;Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986); neo-Vygotskian socioculturaltheory (e.g., Lantolf, 2000; Lantolf & Appel, 1994; Vy-gotsky, 1981; Wertsch, 1985, 1998); studies of situatedcognition/learning and communities of practice (e.g.,Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Kirshner & Whitson,1997; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1990; Wenger,1998); cognitive science and connectionism (e.g.,Churchland, 1996; A. Clark, 1997; Elman et al., 1996;Rumelhart & McClellan, 1986; Seidenberg, 1996); L1acquisition (e.g., Bates et al., 1995; Foster, 1990;Plunkett, 1995); SLA (e.g., Breen, 1985; Firth & Wagner,1997; Peirce, 1995); and studies of conversation andinteraction (e.g., Goodwin, 1986, 1987, 2000; Lerner,1993, 1996; Ochs et al., 1996).

The term sociocognitive has been used in a variety of

Dwight Atkinson 539

contexts in a number of different disciplines, some ofwhich are listed above. My own first exposure to theterm came in a graduate class in sociolinguistics taughtby Elinor Ochs, one of the main proponents of some ofthe views I develop here (e.g., Ochs, 1988a; Ochs et al.,1996).

2 As this is a historical description, I do not refer tomore recent Chomskyan formalisms. In fact, however,Chomsky’s basic theory of language (as opposed to itsever-changing formal realizations) has remained re-markably stable over the years (e.g., Chomsky, 2000).

3 This same basic point is at least implicit in Hymes’s(1972) original conceptualization of communicativecompetence, which I regard as foundational to a socio-cognitive view of language.

4 The point has even been made (e.g., Goffman,1959) that, given an utterance in which the proposi-tional content and the nonpropositional content are inconflict, the latter is usually taken as the final arbiter ofmeaning.

5 Implicit in most definitions of connectionism is thenotion of parallel distributed processing—often taken to beits virtual synonym. Parallel (vs. serial) processing in-volves the simultaneous carrying out of large numbersof computational events (vs. the step-by-step nature ofserial processing), whereas distributed (versus central)processing indicates that cognitive computational activ-ity is spread out over a large number of neurons/neuralconnections, rather than having to depend on any oneor a small number of them.

6 This approach is part of a broader critique acrossthe social sciences of mainstream psychology as thestudy of “lonely cognition,” instead of self-in-context(e.g., Gergen, 1985; Hutchins, 1995; Lave & Wenger,1991; Rogoff, 1990, 1998). A deeper and more philo-sophical critique of the self is a major theme in post-modernist and poststructuralist thought (see, e.g., At-kinson, 1999) but is beyond the scope of this article.

7 At the same time, participants hew closely to theconventional story structure and register of narratives,or if they do not are usually brought into line.

8 Deixis is perhaps the paradigm example here, butthe same basic claim can be made across linguistic do-mains and systems (Hanks, 1996; Ochs, 1992).

9 In general, the descriptions given in this section areincomplete as they stand in that they do not sufficientlycapture the bidirectionality of influence and interpene-tration of social and cognitive processes. Because I ampartly focusing on cognition here—specifically as it con-cerns the issue of “decontextualized language”—I havenecessarily had to downplay the reciprocal influence ofthe cognitive on the social, as well as the continuous andintegrated nature of feedback between them. To givetwo examples by way of atonement and the restorationof holistic bidirectionality: (a) The design of our cogni-tive apparatus fundamentally influences the way we per-ceive things, so that social practices and products mustbe preadapted to our cognitive-sensory capabilities; and(b) Gee’s (1992) description of the sociocognitive sche-mas of cities demonstrates profound sociocognitive in-terpenetration and interaction. In fact, although I will

not seek to articulate them here, substantial areas of theinterpenetration of cognitive and social phenomenamust operate much more dynamically and dialecti-cally—perhaps along the lines of Giddens’ (1979) no-tion of structuration (see also Atkinson, 1999). Thus, itcan be said that individuals and social groups not onlyprogressively adapt to their environments, but that theyalso actively construct those environments in many andvaried ways. Larsen-Freeman’s (1997) third meaning ofthe term “dynamic” (p. 148) in describing languagefrom a chaos/complexity perspective—although it stillseems to depend in some senses on the much-ques-tioned notion of linguistic rules—captures something ofthe interactivity, feedback-sensitivity, and constructed-ness of “languaging” (Larsen-Freeman herself uses theterm grammaring) I am trying to get at here. In general,I find Larsen-Freeman’s discussion of chaos/complexitytheory vis-à-vis SLA inspirational in its potential for refo-cusing the field.

10 This view seems problematic if one is to definelanguage more broadly than a set of grammatical formsand rules. How would one account for the acquisition ofnorms of politeness (e.g., Brown & Levinson, 1987; Tan-nen, 1986), for instance, other than by appealing to thedirect effect of social factors? Tannen has shown invarious publications that politeness is an aspect of lan-guage that is central to its use and functionality—everybit as important as the grammatical features more stan-dardly studied in SLA.

11 Two SLA researchers whose work has been largelywithin the cognitivist tradition seem recently to haverealized the reductionism inherent in that tradition. R.Ellis (1997)—partly cited at the beginning of this arti-cle—and Crookes (1997), respectively, state: “SLA ingeneral has paid little attention to the social context ofL2 acquisition, particularly where context is viewed non-deterministically (i.e., as something learners constructfor themselves). SLA has been essentially a psycholin-guistic enterprise, dominated by the computationalmetaphor of acquisition” (R. Ellis, 1997, p. 87).“Though cognitive psychology [as a source disciplinefor SLA research] was to be preferred to its dominantpredecessor [i.e., behaviorism] because it was (purport-edly, at least) about people (rather than rats), it was along time before I began to understand that it . . . couldbe seen as a sociocultural construct . . . that reflected atleast to some extent the presumptions of the societies inwhich it developed. That was why it was fundamentallyan individualist psychology that treats people as isolates”(Crookes, 1997, p. 98).

It is noteworthy that both of these statements weremade in articles discussing the relevance of SLA to sec-ond language teaching.

12 Although any claim that participation in interac-tion between familiars is not constrained by institutionalroles is highly questionable (e.g., Bourdieu, 1984), Lid-dicoat is clearly making a distinction here between whatconversation analysts call “ordinary conversation” andwhat they call “institutional interaction” (for more onthis distinction, see Drew & Heritage, 1992).

13 If this is not an understanding of language shared


by all neo-Vygotskians (e.g., Rogoff, 1998; Wertsch,1998), it still seems a dominant emphasis among neo-Vy-gotskians who study SLA, as seen in the Lantolf quota-tions given earlier in this section. To me, this emphasisrepresents a particularly literalistic interpretation of Vy-gotsky’s original thought.

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Modern Language Association Publication Prizes:Biennial Competitions 2003

The MLA announces deadlines for submissions for its 2003 Biennial Prizes Competitions. For moreinformation contact the Office of Special Projects: (646) 576-5141; [email protected].

MLA Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition: For single or multiple volumes. At least one volumemust have been published in 2001 or 2002. 1 May 2003

Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters. For single or multiple volumes; at leastone volume published in 2001 or 2002. 1 May 2003

Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures: For a book on thelinguistics or literatures of the Slavic Languages. 1 May 2003.

Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature: For a translationinto English of a book-length work of literary history, criticism, theory, or philology. 1 May 2003.

Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Work of Literature: For a translation into English of a book-length literary work. 1 April 2003.

Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies: For a work on any phase of Italian literature orculture or comparative literature involving Italian. 1 May 2003.

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