English 344: Tuesday, April 5

I read Firth and Wagner's article "On Discourse, Communication, and (Some) Fundamental Concepts in SLA Research, partly because I am interested in the social aspects of language and partly because I have recently read David Block;s "The Rise of Identity in SLA Research, Post Firth and Wagner (1997)," an article that looks at the changes in SLA research in the ten years between the first article's publication the second's publication.

Although only 14 years ago, I was surprised at some of the assumptions that some lines of SLA research had regarding native and nonspeakers along with aspects of L2 communication. From the underlying claims that native speakers are omniscient figures to the mindset that encounters between NS and NNS are always problematic, the article surprised me at what some researchers were basing their research--and thoughts--on. I also found it interesting that communication in one strand of research--communicative success--was viewed as transferring thoughts from one person's mind to another, with seemingly no mention of the social aspects involved with this. As the authors note at another point, "For SLA, the learner identity is the researcher's take-for-granted resource," and many merely focus on the foreign learner's linguistic definiciencies (a pessimistic way to go about doing research if one asks me).

Luckily, much about SLA research appeared to change since the publication of Firth and Wagner's article, according to Block. The author wrote that there had been an increase in publications since that first publication based on assumptions that L2 learning and identity were interrelated. He mentioned numerous areas of research that has since expanded:  How information technology mediates lives, the relationship between social practices and communities of practice, how different power relations affect individuals, etc., etc. This makes me wonder at the power of research:  Was Firth and Wagner's article the catalyst of this push for more social research? Did they simply write the the right article at the right time, as that scale was about to become more even in relation to social class and cognitive ability?

Finally, I am also interested in one area that Block says needs more research, that of identity and social class. Unfortunately, social class and L2 learners are often interconnected in this country, so I feel this issue is extremely important. Has there been an influx in research on this in the past four years since Block's publication? What is, once again, the power of one research article??