Discourse Based Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition

Abstract

Editorial Discourse Based Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition All the research in this volume is discourse based in that it views language not only as wads and a system of grammatical rules mastered in isolation, but as a set of practices used in interaction. The research here explores those practices by close examination of spoken discourse and builds on the assumption that wwds and an entire language attain their meaning through the ways in which they are used, and the tasks they are meant to accomplish. These are ideas which are not new to the field of linguistic anthropology, where culture and communication are seen as intimately connected (cf. Duranti, 1994), or conversation analysis, which views conversational practices as the infrastructure of human sociality (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974); Not surprisingly, much of the work in this volume is guided by conversation analytic and linguistic anthropological aip^oaches. The article builds explicitly on Dell expanding his by Marianne Celce-Murcia, Zolt^ DGmyei and Sarah Thurrell Hymes' (1974) notion of communicative competence model to provide a new j)erspective on second language learning. multi-leveled theoretical The resulting exploration for seaxxl language acquisition research; research comprise the rest of this volume. framework suggests rich areas of some examples of such on second language acquisition reveals that language and its grammar, but c^tain kinds of interactional pattems that go with that language. Joan Kelly Hall's discourse analysis in a Spanish foreign language classro(Mn examines the notion of interactive competence. Her article suggests that, over the course of discourse-based perspective A even in the classroom, students learn not only the time, while language skills grow, interactive skills in this particular classroom by the way in which discourse pattems develop in classroom talk. In a similar vein, Numa Markee examines classroom discourse pattems in an ESL class and reveals the classroom-specific, teacher centered nature of question and answer pattems that develop even when students are engaged in group work. Maikee applies conversational analytic methods to L2 classroom discourse, to show how (as Mehan (1979) has for LI classrooms) L2 are actually hindoied teachers and their students orient to the social organization of the classroom, and not to that of natural cwiversation. As both Markee and Hall reveal, if second language students' only exposure to a second language occurs in the language Issues in Applied Linguistics ISSN 1050-4273 Vol. 6. No. 2 1995 1-3 Regents of the University of California