
Authenticity, Language and Interaction in Second Language Contexts

Authenticity, Language and Interaction in Second Language Contexts
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Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781783095315 |
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Publisher: | Channel View Publications |
Publication date: | 04/20/2016 |
Series: | Second Language Acquisition |
Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
Format: | eBook |
File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Janice McGregor is Assistant Professor of German at Kansas State University, USA. Her research interests include second language learning and use, study abroad and intercultural dimensions of language learning and use.
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Authenticity, Language and Interaction in Second Language Contexts
By Rémi A. van Compernolle, Janice McGregor
Multilingual Matters
Copyright © 2016 Rémi A. van Compernolle, Janice McGregor and the authors of individual chaptersAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78309-531-5
CHAPTER 1
Introducing Authenticity, Language and Interaction in Second Language Contexts
Rémi A. van Compernolle and Janice McGregor
Aim and Rationale of the Volume
The notion of authenticity has been a central, if variably interpreted, construct in much applied linguistics and second language (L2) research since the early 1980s, when Canale and Swain (1980) proposed an extension of Hymes's (1972) concept of communicative competence to the domain of L2 teaching and testing (see also Celce-Murcia, 2007; Leung, 2005; van Lier, 1996; Widdowson, 2007). In broad terms, discussions of authenticity typically center around the extent to which some use of language aligns with the lexicogrammatical conventions and/or sociolinguistic and pragmatic practices of native speakers of the language that learners are studying, in contrast to the (perceived) less-than-authentic representation of the language in pedagogical materials and classroom discourse. In addition, some treatments of authenticity in L2 contexts focus more on origins of language use: for example, pedagogical language is authentic classroom language, and L2 learner language is authentically the learner's language.
Drawing on work in philosophy, MacDonald et al. (2006) discuss these two broad types of authenticity as authenticity of correspondence and authenticity of genesis (see Cooper, 1983), respectively. Authenticity of correspondence refers to the extent to which the use of language corresponds to some perceived (and perhaps idealized) norm or convention. Authenticity of genesis refers to the idea that the use of language is authentic in terms of its origins, irrespective of its correspondence to some notion of norms or conventions. MacDonald et al. argue, however, that applied linguistics research has for too long focused on one or the other of these conceptualizations of what authentic language is, and that it is time for the field 'to synthesize these two accounts of authenticity' (MacDonald et al., 2006: 251). The objective of this volume is to respond to MacDonald et al.'s (2006: 251) critique of the 'one-sidedness' of L2 and applied linguistics research by showcasing original scholarship that synthesizes the concepts of authenticity of correspondence and authenticity of genesis as a dialectic – that is, as a unified whole – with specific focus on language teaching and communicative interaction in which at least one participant is using an L2/additional language.
An understanding of what counts as authentic language and interaction has important implications for L2 teaching and assessment, and the question of who counts as an authentic (native and/or L2) speaker can help researchers and teachers to understand learners as people (van Compernolle, 2014). Indeed, in our own research in classroom language teaching and pragmatics (van Compernolle) and study abroad (McGregor), we have often had to resolve (perceived) tensions between authenticities of correspondence and genesis (Cooper, 1983; MacDonald et al., 2006) with regard to the following questions: Does authentic learning in the classroom or in study abroad mean that students approximate native speaker conventions, or do they contribute to the authenticity of their language use and interactional practices in ways that may diverge with, but are no less authentic than, their native speaker counterparts? Can we conceive of L2 learners as authentic speakers of the language even if, in comparison to idealized conceptions of monolingual native speakers, they do not fully 'master' the grammatical, phonological, pragmatic and sociolinguistic aspects of the language they are studying? Can classrooms and language learning materials be conceptualized as authentic in their own right, or must they correspond to some type of language used beyond formal educational settings? This volume is an attempt to answer some of these questions by bringing together different scholars working in a variety of contexts and with several languages (i.e. Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish).
The remainder of this introductory chapter has two principal objectives. First, we present a brief overview of some of the key concepts and challenges of exploring authenticity in language and interaction in L2 contexts. Secondly, we contextualize the contributions included in the volume in relation to these concepts and challenges.
Key Concepts and Challenges
Although the contributions to this volume address the issue of authenticity from a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, three principal themes are common across all of them in one way or another: (1) What is authentic language? (2) Who is an authentic speaker? and (3) How is authenticity achieved?
What is authentic language?
As noted above, the view of authentic language that we adopt in this volume is one that attempts to unify the traditional, and bifurcated, notions of authenticity of correspondence and authenticity of genesis (Cooper, 1983; MacDonald et al., 2006). We can summarize our position as follows: authentic language entails patterns of language and meaning that are recognizable within and across communities of speakers and that are appropriated as one's own. This perspective recognizes that language users certainly have ownership over their language and the linguistic choices they make (authenticity of genesis), but at the same time, any speaker's linguistic practices can only be meaningful to the extent that they are interpretable by one's interlocutors (authenticity of correspondence). Language users have agency, but agency is socioculturally mediated (Ahearn, 2001) and is therefore afforded and constrained by historical, contextual and material circumstances, including what counts as a recognizable (or acceptable, appropriate, correct, etc.) pattern of language (van Compernolle, 2014).
This perspective on authenticity certainly poses challenges for language learning and teaching scholarship and practice. As Leung (2005) has pointed out, although approaches to communicative language teaching have since the 1970s emphasized contextually sensitive language use in authentic contexts, language-learning materials still typically follow a structural syllabus. This means that even if so-called communicative tasks (e.g. role plays) are included, grammatical forms – and a perceived correct sequencing of their teaching – typically determine the content of such materials. While Hymes's (1972) ideas regarding communicative competence, and their appropriation in L2 teaching and testing by such scholars as Canale and Swain (1980) and Bachman (1990), advocated for the investigation and understanding of language use in specific social and cultural contexts, Leung (2005: 127) notes that we have arrived at a 'scaled-down universalism' compared to what was originally intended. The social realm 'now resides in pedagogic projects of the "authentic" (native) speaker and "expert knower"' (Leung, 2005: 127). In this way, what constitutes real language in communicative language teaching approaches, and who speaks this real or authentic language, has been simplified and flattened as an idealized version of the L2, a version that often ignores geographic, social and stylistic variation in communicative practices (van Compernolle, 2014). We echo Leung's (2005) concern over reductive conceptions of authenticity that idealize a single form of language as the authentic variety. There are certainly many different patterns of language and meaning that are recognizable within and across communities. And there are certainly many ways in which these recognizable patterns may be appropriated and challenged by language learners.
Who is an authentic speaker?
A common conception of an authentic speaker – both in linguistic scholarship and outside the academy – is the monolingual native speaker of a given language. This is certainly the view that Chomsky (1965) at least indirectly espoused in his formulation of generative linguistics, which has been highly influential in several domains of linguistic inquiry for the past five decades. The problem with this view is that the idealized monolingual native speaker does not reflect sociolinguistic reality (Eckert, 2003). Variation in language across time, community and context is a linguistic fact. Likewise, native speakers do not hold a monopoly on authenticity (Leung, 2005). Our view of authentic speakers, therefore, is an extension of our conception of authentic language. An authentic speaker is a person who has appropriated patterns of language and meaning that are recognizable within and across communities of speakers of the language. Learners do not become authentic by emulating perfectly an idealized native speaker of the language they are learning, but instead forge their identities as authentic speakers in multiple and variable ways that may align with, or diverge from, expected norms from one individual to the next, and from one context to the next.
How is authenticity achieved?
Authenticity is not a state of being that is achieved once and for all time; rather, it is a non-telic process – authentication (Bucholtz, 2003) – which is achieved between people from moment to moment. Consequently, authentic speakers do not exist as such. Rather, they authenticate themselves, and are authenticated by others, in their communicative practices. This is because the individual life project must be viewed as a perpetually modifiable and dynamic process, not a bounded product (Blommaert & Varis, 2013). Speakers collaboratively manage talk-in-interaction and therefore interpret, and make judgments about, their interlocutors' utterances. Speakers' interpretations and judgments necessarily inform their own language choices in interaction. In this way, individuals orient to particular sets of features (i.e. recognizable patterns of language and meaning) that are representative of particular identities when aligning with, or rejecting, particular ways of being. An important part of L2 development therefore involves the appropriation of socioculturally relevant metapragmatics (Silverstein, 2001) – that is, knowledge and understanding of the social-indexical meanings of linguistic practices – in addition to developing the ability to use L2 patterns.
We use the term appropriation here as a shorthand device for the process of picking up a resource and making it one's own. Our understanding of authentication in this sense is inspired by the maxim found in Vygotsky's (1986) work that sign meaning develops. Put simply, humans may acquire signs (e.g. linguistic forms) quickly and rather easily in a first step, but the real work of development involves 'a process of coming to understand the meaning and functional significance of the sign forms that one has been using' (Wertsch, 2007: 186). L2 authenticity develops as learners connect the patterns of language (i.e. sign forms) they have appropriated to the meanings and functional significance of those patterns (i.e. metapragmatics) in different sociocultural contexts.
Overview of the Contributions
In addition to this Introduction and our Conclusion at the end of the book, the current volume includes nine original chapters that address L2 authenticity in a variety of second (or additional) languages – Chinese, French, German, Japanese and Spanish. The contributions are arranged from those that focus on classroom language learners to contexts of study and residence abroad.
Rémi A. van Compernolle and Ashlie Henery's chapter describes and explores the challenges of evaluating L2 French pragmatic appropriateness and authenticity in computer-mediated strategic interaction scenarios. Focusing on second-person address patterns (i.e. tu versus vous), they respond to MacDonald et al.'s (2006) call to conceptualize authenticity as involving both correspondence and genesis, arguing that pragmatic authenticity is achieved when the performance corresponding to a recognizable pattern of language is mediated by a recognizable metapragmatic meaning that a learner has appropriated as his or her own (i.e. authenticity of genesis).
The next chapter, by Lawrence Williams, examines the authenticity of L2 French textbook grammatical explanations and reports on a pilot project involving concept-based instruction. In a first step, the author analyzes several textbooks' presentations of auxiliary verb choice for compound past tense (i.e. avoir 'to have' versus être 'to be' in the passé composé), finding that the explanations are unsystematic and reflect neither authentic uses of auxiliary verbs nor the meanings they create in communication. In a second step, Williams shows how a concept-based approach to teaching auxiliary verb choice in relation to transitivity can improve students' understanding of appropriate auxiliary verb choice in terms of meaning and increase their confidence in choosing between avoir and être.
In the last chapter dealing with classroom language learners, Rémi A. van Compernolle explores the concept of sociolinguistic authenticity by presenting two contrastive case analyses of advanced US university-level learners of French. Expanding on recent work in variationist sociolinguistics, the author argues that sociolinguistic authenticity involves three dimensions: (1) performance abilities, including quantitative patterns of variation; (2) metapragmatic knowledge of social rules and evaluations of linguistic variants; and (3) attitudes toward, and personal preferences for, variable speech forms. The analysis – which focuses on the two learners' variable speech patterns, performances on a sentence versions task and responses during a language awareness interview – shows that authenticity can be achieved in divergent ways because learners can orient to, and evaluate, variable speech patterns differently.
The focus on contexts of learning beyond the classroom begins with Naoko Taguchi's chapter, which explores the learning of Japanese speech styles during study abroad. She begins by problematizing the authenticity of discourse completion tasks as an instrument for measuring pragmatic competence, and then moves on to compare study abroad participants' performances on an oral discourse completion task with their verbalizable knowledge of normative, or conventional, pragmatic practices. Taguchi reports that the learners made strong gains during their sojourn abroad in terms of appropriate speech act performance. However, she also takes a critical look at several discrepancies between pragmatic performance and pragmatic knowledge. Drawing on interview data, Taguchi addresses two common sources of such discrepancies: linguistic difficulty and dynamicity of language in interaction. In some cases, pragmatic norms are known, but are not used in online speech because learners find them too linguistically challenging, and they therefore opt for simpler forms, even if they are less appropriate. In other cases, learners' performances do not align with perceived, or idealized, conventions because they recognize that language is dynamic, and variable, both across and within contexts.
In the following chapter, Wenhao Diao investigates peer Mandarin socialization in a Chinese college dorm. Her focus is on how gender, sexuality and youth are authenticated in and through linguistic practices between American students and their Chinese peers. Through close analysis of recorded interactions, Diao shows how the social meaning of sociolinguistic practices, such as affective sentence-final particles, is made visible to the American students by their Chinese interlocutors (e.g. men using too many affective sentence-final particles 'sound gay'). This is the kind of language use and knowledge of language that is typically not taught in formal, structured educational environments. Rather, as Diao points out, students are socialized into these culturally based understandings of the social-indexical functions of language, and they can be used as ways of authenticating L2 identities.
Julieta Fernández's chapter offers a critical perspective on the perceived authenticity of out-of-class interactions during study abroad. Her study focuses on US university learners who were studying in Argentina and who had access to local hosts and conversational partners. Fernández shows that learners may not always be positioned as legitimate (viz. 'authentic') Spanish speakers by their local hosts, who engage in accommodation strategies in order to mitigate perceived deficiencies in the language. In addition, learners themselves can resist patterns of language that may be authentic in terms of correspondence but do not align with their desired L2 identities (i.e. authenticity of genesis).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Authenticity, Language and Interaction in Second Language Contexts by Rémi A. van Compernolle, Janice McGregor. Copyright © 2016 Rémi A. van Compernolle, Janice McGregor and the authors of individual chapters. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Contributors,1 Introducing Authenticity, Language and Interaction in Second Language Contexts Rémi A. van Compernolle and Janice McGregor,
2 Evaluating L2 Pragmatic Appropriateness and Authenticity in Synchronous Computer-mediated Strategic Interaction Scenarios Rémi A. van Compernolle and Ashlie Henery,
3 Authenticity and Pedagogical Grammar: A Concept-based Approach to Teaching French Auxiliary Verbs Lawrence Williams,
4 Sociolinguistic Authenticity and Classroom L2 Learners: Production, Perception and Metapragmatics Rémi A. van Compernolle,
5 Learning Speech Style in Japanese Study Abroad: Learners' Knowledge of Normative Use and Actual Use Naoko Taguchi,
6 Gender, Youth and Authenticity: Peer Mandarin Socialization Among American Students in a Chinese College Dorm Wenhao Diao,
7 Authenticating Language Choices: Out-of-Class Interactions in Study Abroad Julieta Fernández,
8 Authenticating Practices in Chinese Homestay Interactions Sheng-Hsun Lee and Celeste Kinginger,
9 Metapragmatic Talk and the Interactional Accomplishment of Authenticity in Study Abroad Janice McGregor,
10 Focus on Form in the Wild Gabriele Kasper and Alfred Rue Burch,
11 Conclusions and Future Directions Rémi A. van Compernolle and Janice McGregor,
Index,