Defining language and culture

Defining language and culture


Chapter 1
A sociocultural perspective on
language and culture
This chapter:
• describes current perspectives on the nature of language and culture in the field
of applied linguistics;
• traces the lineage of some of the more significant assumptions on which current
understandings are based;
• offers a list of additional readings on the topics covered in this chapter.
1.1 Introduction
Few would disagree that the study of language use is the central concern of
applied linguistics, but opinions differ in how such study is to be conceptualised.
Some have argued (see, for example, Pennycook, 2001, and Widdowson, 2000)
that, until recently, much of what has taken place in applied linguistics is
better understood as ‘linguistics applied’, a subset of the fi eld of linguistics
in which knowledge about language is used to address language-related
concerns such as language teaching and language policy decisions. From
the ‘linguistics applied’ perspective, language is considered to be a set of
abstract systems whose meanings reside in the forms themselves rather than
in the uses to which they are put. The contexts from which data are taken are
considered useful places from which to locate and extract linguistic elements.
But, at the same time, they are treated as ancillary to the analysis.
Investigations taking a ‘linguistics applied’ approach involve overlaying
linguistic forms on instances of language use and interpreting their meanings
in light of the structural frameworks. That is, concern is not with the
concrete act of using language but rather with the forms themselves as
objects of analysis in their own right. As Widdowson (2000: 22) notes: ‘The
TEACHING AN 6 D RESEARCHING LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
process whereby these forms interrelate co-textually with each other and
contextually with the circumstances of their use is left largely unexplored.’
Quote 1.1
On the nature of linguistics applied
So long as linguistics was defined along traditional and formal lines, as the
study of abstract systems of knowledge idealized out of language as actually
experienced, the task of applied linguistics seemed relatively straightforward.
It was to refer such abstract analysis of idealized internalized I-language back
to the real world to find ways in which externalized E-language could be
reformulated so as to make it amenable to benevolent intervention.
Widdowson (2000: 4)
In recent years, as concerns with the limitations of this approach for
under standing language experiences have grown, the fi eld of applied linguistics
has become far more interdisciplinary, extending its purview to
other disciplines, such as communication, cultural psychology, linguistic
anthropology, linguistic philosophy and social theory, in search of new
ways to address concerns with language use. These explorations have been
fruitful, yielding theoretical and methodological insights into the nature
of applied linguistics activity that differ fairly substantially from those
embodied in the more traditional ‘linguistics applied’ approach typical of
earlier applied linguistics research.
Current views consider the fundamental concern to be the ‘pragmatically
motivated study’ (Bygate, 2005: 571) of social action – the use of language
in real-world circumstances – with the dual goal of advancing our understanding
of how language is used to construct our sociocultural worlds and
using this understanding to improve our worlds. Analytic primacy is not
language per se, but the ways in which language is used in the accomplishment
of social life. Central to the transformation of applied linguistics
activity is the reconceptualisation of two concepts, language and culture,
considered fundamental to the task. While current understandings of these
concepts derive from an assortment of scholarly interests, they are bound
together by a sociocultural perspective on human action. We look more
closely at some of the more signifi cant assumptions embodied in this
perspective in the following sections.
1.2 Language as sociocultural resource
A sociocultural perspective on human action locates the essence of social
life in communication. Through our use of linguistic symbols with others,
SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON LANGUAGE AND CULTURE 7
we establish goals, negotiate the means to reach them, and reconceptualise
those we have set. At the same time, we articulate and manage our individual
identities, our interpersonal relationships, and memberships in our
social groups and communities.
A great deal of research on communication makes it apparent that
much of what we do when we communicate is conventionalised. In going
about our everyday business, we participate in a multiplicity of recurring
communicative activities in which the goals, our roles, and the language
we use as we play these roles and attempt to accomplish the goals, are
familiar to us. On a daily basis, we give and take orders, request help,
commiserate, chat with friends, deliberate, negotiate, gossip, seek advice
and so on. We participate in such routine activities with relative ease and
can easily distinguish one activity from other. For example, we can usually
tell when the utterance ‘What are you doing?’ is meant as a prelude to
an invitation and when it is meant as a reproach. Likewise, if we hear
the utterance ‘That’s a great pair of shoes’, we can anticipate with some
accuracy the communicative event that is taking place, and construct an
appropriate response.
The knowledge we use to help us navigate through our communicative
activities comprises sets of communicative plans, that is to say, ‘socially
constructed models for solutions of communicative problems’ (Luckmann,
1995: 181). These plans lay out for us the expected or typical goals of an
activity, the typical trajectories of social actions and the prosodic, linguistic
and interactional resources comprising the actions by which such goals are
realised. They also lay out the role relationships that are likely to obtain
among those involved in the activity. The plans are constructed and shared
by the members of the sociocultural groups to which we belong, and are
maintained and modifi ed in our uses of them as we engage in the activities
constituting our daily lives. Because we share the plans with other members
of our sociocultural groups and communities, they provide some common
ground for knowing what we can each appropriately, or conventionally,
say and do. In other words, the plans help us to synchronise our actions
and interpretations with others and to reach a mutual understanding of
what is going on (cf. Levinson, 2006b; Luckmann, 1995). It is through such
everyday, conventionalised communicative activities, or language games
(Wittgenstein, 1963), that we experience the world. Thus, they constitute
dynamic, vital forms of life.
In this view of language as social action, language is considered to
be fi rst and foremost a sociocultural resource constituted by ‘a range of
possibilities, an open-ended set of options in behaviour that are available to
the individual in his existence as social man’ (Halliday, 1973: 49). Options
for taking action in our communicative activities include a wide array of
linguistic resources such as lexical and grammatical elements, speech acts
and rhetorical structures, and in the case of oral language use, structured
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patterns for taking turns and phonological, prosodic and paralinguistic
resources such as intonation, stress, tempo and pausing.
Concept 1.1 Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of language games
The term language games is commonly attributed to the Austrian philosopher,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose views on language are best captured in Philosophical
Investigations (1963). According to Wittgenstein, language games are established,
conventionalised patterns of communicative action. These patterns,
which are agreed upon and shared by members of a culture group, embody
particular defi nitions of the situation and meanings of possible actions
and, more generally, particular ways of knowing, valuing and experiencing
the world.
More formalist views of language consider these resources to be fi xed,
invariant forms that we take from stable, bounded structural systems. In
contrast, a sociocultural perspective considers them to be fundamentally
social, their essence tied to their habits of use. That is, rather than a prerequisite
to individual use, the shape or structure of our resources is an
emergent property of them, developing from the resources’ locally situated
uses in activity. Structures, then, do not precede use, but arise as a consequence
of use.
This view is captured most clearly in the notion of emergent grammar,
originally proposed by Paul Hopper (Hopper, 1987; Hopper and Thompson,
1993). According to Hopper, rather than being fi xed units enabling
communication, language structures are more appropriately understood as
dynamic, mutable by-products of it. It is through their frequent, routinised
uses in specifi c sociocultural contexts that the symbolic means by which
we take action develop into ‘a minimally sorted and organized set of
memories of what people have heard and repeated over a lifetime of
language use, a set of forms, patterns, and practices that have arisen to
serve the most recurrent functions that speakers fi nd need to fulfi ll’
(Ford et al., 2003: 122).
At the same time, while the various shapes of our linguistic resources
develop from past uses, the specifi c forms they take at particular points in
time are open to negotiation. However, the degree of negotiation that is
possible at any communicative moment is dependent on at least two factors:
the frequency of the resources’ past uses and the amount of institutional
force behind them. The more frequently the linguistic resources are used, or
the more institutional force there is behind their use, the more systematised
or codifi ed their shapes become. The more systematised the resources are,
the more invisible their sociohistorical roots are. The system is then treated
as if it had a life of its own, existing apart from any context of use, and
apart from its users. Any individual language use becomes measured against this
universal yardstick with the assumption that there is an inherent correctness
to the shape the forms take.

Quote 1.2
Emergent Grammar
The notion of Emergent Grammar is meant to suggest that structure, or
regularity, comes out of discourse and is shaped by discourse as much as it
shapes discourse in an on-going process. Grammar is hence not to be understood
as a prerequisite for discourse, a prior possession attributable in identical
form to both speaker and hearer. Its forms are not fixed templates, but are
negotiable in face-to-face interaction in ways that reflect the individual speaker’s
past experience of these forms, and their assessment of the present context,
including especially their interlocutors, whose experiences and assess ments
may be quite different.
Hopper (1987: 142)
1.2.1 Dialogue as the essence of language use
As the structures of our linguistic resources emerge from their real-world
uses, so do their meanings. That is, the linguistic resources we choose to
use do not come to us as empty forms ready to be fi lled with our personal
intentions; rather, they come to us with meanings already embedded within
them. These meanings, however, are not derived from some universal,
logical set of principles; rather, as with their shapes, they are built up over
time from their past uses in particular contexts by particular groups of
participants in the accomplishment of particular goals that, in turn, are
shaped by myriad cultural, historical and institutional forces.
The linguistic resources we choose to use at particular communicative
moments come to these moments with their conventionalised histories of
meaning. It is their conventionality that binds us to some degree to particular
ways of realising our collective history. However, while our resources come
with histories of meanings, how they come to mean at a particular communicative
moment is always open to negotiation.
Thus, in our individual uses of our linguistic resources we accomplish
two actions simultaneously. We create their typical – historical – contexts of
use and at the same time we position ourselves in relation to these contexts.
Our locally situated uses of our linguistic resources are what Bakhtin (1981,
1986, 1990) calls utterances, double-sided acts, which respond to the conditions
of the moment and anticipate what is to come. It is in our utterances
that we fi ll the linguistic resources with our own voices, negotiating their
conventional meanings in light of the communicative task at hand. Together
TEACHING AN 10 D RESEARCHING LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
their conventional meanings and our uses of them exist as inseparable
parts of a dialogue, and are in a continually negotiated state of ‘intense and
essential axiological interaction’ (Bakhtin, 1990: 10).
Concepts 1.2 and 1.3 Mikhail Bakhtin’s notions of dialogue and
translinguistics
The concepts of dialogue and translinguistics are central to the linguistic philosophy
of the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin. According to Bakhtin, meaning
is located neither solely in our linguistic resources nor in each individual’s
mind. Rather, it resides in between these two interdependent spheres, in the
interaction, the dialogue, that is realised in our lived moments of social action.
Translinguistics is the name Bakhtin gives to the study of the dialogue obtaining
between our linguistic resources and the ways in which we use them to
respond to real-world circumstances. Of particular signifi cance in translinguistics,
Bakhtin argues, is the study of our everyday, mundane communicative actions,
since they are the source of individual innovation and social change.
From this perspective, then, the meaning of language does not reside in
the system of linguistic resources removed from their contexts of use and
communities of users. Nor does it reside in our individual use of them as
we engage in activities particular to our sociocultural worlds. Rather, language
meaning is located in the dialogic relationship between the historical
and the present, between the social and the individual. We come to understand
the conventional meanings of the resources only in terms of how
they are used at particular moments of time. Conversely, our understandings
of the concrete, here and now uses of language are developed only
in terms of the positioning of the resources against their conventional.
Bakhtin’s notion of dialogicality captures well this relational character of
meaning.
Quote 1.3
The relation between language use and meaning
There are no ‘neutral’ words and forms – words and forms that belong to ‘no
one’; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions
and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an
abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception
of the world. All words have the ‘taste’ of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a
party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day
and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived
its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions.
Bakhtin (1981: 293)
SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON LANGUAGE AND CULTURE 11
The excerpt below, taken from Hall (1993a: 209), illustrates the dialogic,
or relational, nature of meaning.
Husband: Take these shirts to the cleaners tomorrow, will you?
Wife: (stands and gives military salute by raising hand to forehead ) Yes, sir.
As noted by Hall, the military salute and verbal utterance used by the
wife to respond to her husband’s request are typically used together in
a military context by someone in a subordinate position to mark the
other as a superior. If we bring their expected meanings to this context,
we may conclude that the woman is using them to create a similar
military-style, hierarchical relationship with her husband and thereby
mark or index her understanding of this subordinate position. Alternatively,
she can be using the conventional meaning of the salute and verbal
utter ance not to recreate their conventional context of use, and her role
in it, but to mark her stance towards an utterance that she considers
inappropriate. It might be, for example, that she hears the utterance as a
directive instead of a request. She may regard a request as more suitable
to the situation, and so uses the salute and verbal response to convey at
the same time both her interpretation of her husband’s utterance and her
offense towards it.
Either way, there is a dialogue between the meaning conventionally
associated with the salute and verbal response and their use by the
woman in this particular communicative moment. Only by examining the
dialogue obtaining between the conventional meanings of the linguistic
resources used by the husband and wife, and their uses of them at this
particular time, can we derive a full understanding of the activity – of
the shapes and meanings deriving from the locally situated uses of the
resources, of the participants and their relationships to each other, and
of how each views his or her place within that particular communicative
moment – and of the role that language plays in constructing one’s social
worlds.
In positing dialogue as the core of language study and the utterance
as the fundamental unit of analysis, Bakhtin erases any a priori distinction
between form and meaning, between individual and social uses of
language. Just as no linguistic resource can be understood apart from its
contexts of use, no single utterance can be considered a purely individual
act, ‘a completely free combination of forms of language’ (Bakhtin, 1986:
81), whose meanings are created on the spot. Rather, it can only be understood
fully by considering its history of use by other people, in other
places, for other reasons. Thus, rather than being considered extraneous
to the study of language, dialogue in its encounter between historical
meaning and individual motivations at a particular moment of action is
considered its essence.

1.2.2 Single- and double-voiced utterances
Important to understanding this dialogic relationship obtaining between
the personal and social meanings embodied in our language use is the
degree of authority attached to the conventional meanings of our linguistic
resources. As we noted previously, our linguistic resources come to us
already laden with meanings that have been developed in their histories of
use. These histories of meanings determine in part the degree of force that
our voices will have in using the resources towards our own ends.
Useful for understanding the links between the historical meanings
of our resources and our individual uses of them are Bakhtin’s concepts of
single-voiced utterances and double-voiced utterances (Bakhtin, 1981;
Morson and Emerson, 1990). According to Bakhtin, single-voiced utterances
consist of resources whose meanings are unquestioned, non-negotiable
and thus resistant to change. The more institutionalised the meanings of the
resources, the more authoritative their voices are likely to be. The more
authoritative their voices, the more invisible their histories become, and the
more resistant they are to individually motivated innovations. Instead, the
resources take on a life of their own, and become defi ned as a distinct,
internally coherent, logical system of meanings and values. When we use the
resources to take action in our worlds, they come not only with their authoritative,
decontextualised meanings, but their values as well. As their users,
we become defi ned by the values thought to be inherent within them.
For example, cross-cultural research has shown that although the pattern
of turn-taking across languages is universally constructed as one-speaker-ata-
time, there are in fact slight differences in gap length between turns across
languages. These differences lead to subjective perceptions ‘of dramatic or
even fundamental differences’ (Stivers et al., 2009: 10587) of those whose
turn transition timing is different from the mainstream. Even very slight
variations to the timing of turns can lead to perceptions of the turn takers
as ‘quiet’ or ‘noisy’, and even ‘rude’ and ‘uneducated’. Similar stigmatised
evaluations are made of users of other linguistic resources that are considered
different from mainstream use.
What is invisible is the fact that such institutionalised versions of linguistic
resources are social facts, ‘not inherent and universal, but local,
secondary, and projected’ (Hymes, 1980: 112). In other words, mainstream
uses of linguistic resources, and the values associated with them, are the
construction of particular groups who historically have had a considerable
amount of sociopolitical authority behind them. It is their unquestioned
use over time by groups with such authority by which resource meanings
are institutionalised. In addition to propagation of the resources through
their continued and unquestioned use by such groups, written documents
such as dictionaries, grammar books, style manuals and etiquette guides
serve as primary means for institutionalising resource meanings.
SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON LANGUAGE AND CULTURE 13
Concepts 1.4 and 1.5 Single- and double-voiced utterances
According to Bakhtin, single-voiced utterances are those with authority, those
whose sociohistorical meanings are invisible to the speaker. The individual
speaks as if the words she uses had a life of their own apart from any context
of use. In contrast, in double-voiced utterances the sociohistorical meanings
of words are visible to the speaker, and she can choose to use the words in
two ways. In passive double-voiced utterances, the individual chooses to use
the words as others before her have used them, that is, with their conventional
meanings. In active double-voiced utterances, the individual uses the
words not as they are meant to be used, but for her own purposes. That is,
she uses the conventional meanings in such a way as to assert her own voice
in their use.
It is not the case, however, that the meanings of our resources always
go unquestioned. Rather, we often make conscious choices about the language
we use and, in so doing, we decide on ‘a particular way of entering
the world and a particular way of sustaining relationships with others’
(Duranti, 1997: 46). Utterances in which we acknowledge the conventional
meanings of our resources, and use them with volition to respond to the
conditions of the moment, are what Bakhtin calls double-voiced utterances.
On the one hand, we can consciously choose to use the conventional meanings
associated with the resources in predictable ways; that is, we use our
resources in such a way as to create their typical contexts of use. If we come
across an individual in a public area, for example, and we wish to establish
some kind of interpersonal contact with that person, we can create such
a context with the utterance ‘Hi, how are you today?’ This utterance is
typically associated with a greeting among friends or acquaintances and its
use at that time with that person helps to create such a context. Bakhtin
calls these passive double-voiced utterances.
We can also choose to use our resources in unexpected ways. Bakhtin calls
these active double-voiced utterances. In such utterances, we use our
resources not so much to create the particular set of conditions typical of
them, as to use their histories of meaning to create our unique positioning
towards a particular communicative moment. The following, taken from a
public billboard displayed shortly after the acts of terrorism experienced by
the USA in New York City and Washington, DC in autumn 2001, is an
example of an active double-voiced utterance.
Don’t make me have to come down there.
– God
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For many social groups, the utterance ‘Don’t make me have to come
down there’ evokes a typical role-relationship between a parent and a child,
and a typical situation in which one or some children are misbehaving. The
utterance by the parent serves to admonish the children for their behaviour.
While the consequences for ignoring the warning are not stated, it is implied
that they will be dire if the actions do not stop. In the billboard message,
the attribution of the utterance to a divine being, believed by many to be the
supreme protector of all humanity, evokes a similar context of use. In this
case, the utterance ascribes to God the role of scolding parent to a world
fi lled with badly behaved children. One does not have to be a believer in
the existence of a higher presence to appreciate how the conventional
meanings embedded in language can be used to create a unique stance
towards any locally situated communicative moment. It is important to
note that what makes an utterance passive or active depends not just on the
user’s intentions. It also includes the response it engenders, the relationships
existing among the particular participants and the history of intentions
embedded in the resources themselves.
Quote 1.4
The nature of voice
Each large and creative verbal whole is a very complex and multifaceted
system of relations . . . there are no voiceless words that belong to no one.
Each word contains voices that are sometimes infinitely distant, unnamed,
almost impersonal, almost undetectable, and voices resounding nearby and
simultaneously.
Bakhtin (1986: 124)
In sum, in a sociocultural perspective on human action, language is
viewed at one and the same time as both an individual tool and a sociocultural
resource, whose use on a day-to-day basis is conventionalised,
shaped by the myriad intellectual and practical communicative activities
that constitute our daily lives. In using language to participate in our
activities, we refl ect our understanding of them and their larger cultural
contexts and, at the same time, create spaces for ourselves as individuals
within them. The meanings that our individual uses of language assume
at those moments draw from their historical, conventional meanings in
relation to their situated, immediate contexts of use. Hence, different uses
of language embody different meanings.
This perspective rejects the idea that literal or decontextualised meaning
exists apart from the use of a linguistic resource. There is no word, no use
of a resource that can be considered unprejudiced, independent of its users
or contexts of use. Instead, our words come to us already used, fi lled with
SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON LANGUAGE AND CULTURE 15
the evaluations and perceptions of others. Their meanings emerge from
the juxtaposition of their past uses with our locally situated uses of them
in the present. Thus, when we use language to act in our social worlds, it
cannot be said that we ‘use our own words’. Rather, in our actions we make
use of available meaning-laden resources to construct our worlds as we
would have them be at that moment.
would have them be at that moment.
Wittgenstein (1963: 12) captures the contextualised character of our
linguistic resources when he states: ‘If you do not keep the multiplicity of
language-games in view you will perhaps be inclined to ask questions like:
“What is a question?” – Is it the statement that I do not know such-andsuch,
or the statement that I wish the other person would tell me . . . ? Or
is it the description of my mental state of uncertainty?’ Here, in linking
language meaning to its contexts of use, Wittgenstein makes apparent the
interdependence of meaning in the here-and-now and historical meaning,
of individual meaning and meaning based in community. ‘Not what one
is doing now, but the whole hurly-burly, is the background against which
we see an action, and it determines our judgment, our concepts and our
reactions’ ( Wittgenstein, 1980, no. 629).
One fi nal point needs to be made. As noted earlier, there is nothing
essential to our linguistic resources themselves that makes their meanings
more privileged or authoritative. Rather, their authority develops from their
past uses. It follows then that language is inherently ideological. As Bakhtin
argues, in the language we choose to use at any particular moment we
make visible our attitudes and beliefs towards the communicative moment,
towards those with whom we are communicating, and towards what we
believe our social positioning is within our sociocultural worlds. Only by
examining our language use at particular moments of time in relation to
its history can we reveal the varied ways in which we create our voices in
response to the larger social and political forces shaping our worlds.
1.3 Culture as sociocultural practice
The notion of culture has always been considered an important concept
in applied linguistics. However, in studies taking a more traditional
‘linguistics applied’ approach it is often treated as its own logical system
of representa tional knowledge, located in the individual mind, and existing
independent of language, when it is treated at all. The basis of the
system is assumed to be an abstract, universal structure for organising and
generating the know ledge. When exposed to culture-specifi c data, provided
by the physical world, the mind is thought to generate systems of
knowledge that are specifi c to a particular culture group. Hence, while
the underlying formal structures of culture are assumed to be universal, the
TEACHING AN 16 D RESEARCHING LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
actual substance generated by the formal structures is considered to be fairly
homogeneous static bodies of knowledge consisting of accumulated and
classifi able sets of thoughts, feelings, values and beliefs. By virtue of their
group membership, and their innate possession of the formal structures
needed to process culture-specifi c data, individual members are assumed to
have full and equal possession of these sets of knowledge. Thus, any pattern
detected across individuals is automatically assumed to refl ect their cultural
affi liations (cf. Sarangi, 1994).
In addition to an assumption of cultural homogeneity, the more traditional
perspective assumes knowledge acquisition to be unidirectional, transmitted
by, but fundamentally unrelated to, language. That is, while language may
be used as a way to uncover the culture-specifi c bodies of knowledge, it is
not deemed to have any infl uence on their development or, more generally,
on the abstract structures by which the information is organised. Thus, the
primary, if not only, role that language is thought to play is representational.
In other words, language can only refl ect cultural understandings; it can not
affect them (Goodenough, 1964; cf. Williams, 1992).
A sociocultural perspective of culture stands in marked contrast to this
more traditional view. Rather than viewing culture as systems of fi xed bodies
of knowledge possessed equally by all members of well-defi ned culture groups,
current understandings view it as ‘recurrent and habitual systems of dispositions
and expectations’ (Duranti, 1997: 45). More concretely, culture is
seen to reside in the meanings and shapes that our linguistic resources have
accumulated from their past uses and with which we approach and work
through our communicative activities. As noted earlier, in our activities with
others, we rely on these expectations to make sense of the moment and
work towards the accomplishment of our communicative goals.
Because we are members of multiple groups and communities, we take
on and negotiate multiple cultural identities, and in our roles, participate
in myriad cultural activities. At any communicative moment, through our
linguistic actions, we choose particular ways to construe our worlds, to induce
others to see our worlds in these ways, as we create and sustain particular
kinds of relationships with them and thus make relevant some as opposed
to other identities.
Quote 1.5
Culture as embodied action
In fact, there is not much point in trying to say what culture is. What can be
done, however, is to say what culture does. For what culture does is precisely
the work of defining words, ideas, things and groups. We all live our lives in
terms of definition, names and categories that culture creates. The job of
studying culture is not of finding and then accepting its definitions but of
SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON LANGUAGE AND CULTURE 17
To locate culture one must look not in individual mind, as an accumulated
body of unchanging knowledge, but in the dialogue, the embodied actions,
‘discursively rearticulated’ (Bhabha, 1994: 177) between individuals in particular
sociocultural contexts at particular moments of time. This perspective
of culture as a dynamic, vital and emergent process located in the discursive
spaces between individuals links it inextricably to language. That is to say,
language is at the same time a repository of culture and a tool by which
culture is created. In making visible the mutual dependency of language and
culture, current understandings overcome the analytic separation of the
‘linguistics applied’ approach. Because culture is located not in individual
mind but in activity, any study of language is by necessity a study of culture.
1.4 Linguistic relativity
Current views of language and culture as mutually shaping forms of social life
owe a great deal to ideas found in linguistic anthropology, and in particular,
to the idea of linguistic relativity as found in the work of American linguistic
anthropologist Edward Sapir (1985[1929]) and, more prominently, in that
of his student Benjamin Whorf (1956). Sapir’s ideas came mainly from his
study of different American indigenous languages, which led him to posit
a dynamic relation between language and culture.
Whorf also studied Native American languages, in particular Hopi.
Infl uenced by Sapir’s work as well by his experiences as a claims agent for
an insurance company in the fi rst half of the twentieth century, Whorf ’s
work on language and his ideas on linguistic relativity are encapsulated in
what has come to be called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. This hypothesis
proposes that patterned, structural components of specifi c languages regularly
or habitually used by members of culture groups contain particular
meanings that are systematically linked to the worldviews of the groups
whose languages they are. Thus, they infl uence the way group members
view, categorise, and in other ways think about their world. Since different
culture groups speak different languages, individual worldviews are tied to
the language groups to which individuals belong. To state it another way, if
individual thought is shaped by language, individuals with different languages
discovering how and what definitions are made, under what circumstances
and for what reasons. . . . Culture is an active process of meaning making and
contest over definition, including its own definition. This, then, is what I mean
by arguing that Culture is a verb.
Street (1993b: 25; emphasis in the original)

likely to have different understandings of the world. A signifi cant contribution
of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is that it links individual thought
to larger, culturally based patterns of language and thus posits an interdependent
relationship between language and culture.
Quote 1.6
The relationship between language and culture
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world
of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of
the particular language which has become the medium of expression for
their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially
without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental
means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of
the matter is the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the
language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar
to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which
different societies lie are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with
different labels attached.
Sapir (1985[1929]: 162)
Quote 1.7
Benjamin Whorf ’s view on linguistic relativity
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories
and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there
because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is
presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized
by our minds – and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.
We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significance as we
do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way
– an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified
in the patterns of our language.
Whorf (1956: 213)
1.5 A socially constituted linguistics
A similar connection between language and culture can be found in the
work of Dell Hymes (1962, 1964, 1971, 1972a, b, 1974), another linguistic
anthropologist. Hymes developed a conceptualisation of language
SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON LANGUAGE AND CULTURE 19
as context-embedded social action in response to linguist Noam Chomsky’s
(1957, 1965) theory of language. In keeping with a formalist perspective,
Chomsky conceptualised language as a fi xed, universal property of the human
mind containing internalised sets of principles from which language-specifi c
grammatical rules could be derived, and thus describable in context-free,
invariant terms.
Hymes regarded this view of language as too restrictive in that it did not,
in fact could not, account for the social knowledge we rely on to produce
and interpret utterances appropriate to the particular contexts in which
they occur. He noted, ‘it is not enough for the child to be able to produce
any grammatical utterance. It would have to remain speechless if it could
not decide which grammatical utterance here and now, if it could not connect
utterances to their contexts of use’ (Hymes, 1964: 110). It is this social
knowledge, Hymes argued, that shapes and gives meaning to linguistic forms.
Because involvement in the communicative activities of our everyday lives
is usually with others who share our expectations, these links are often diffi -
cult to see. However, although it may be diffi cult to perceive their vitality,
they cannot be considered insignifi cant to the accomplishment of our
everyday lives. Thus, Hymes called for a more adequate theory of language
that could account for the sociocultural knowledge that we draw on when
using our linguistic resources so that they are considered structurally sound,
referentially accurate and contextually appropriate within the different groups
and communities to which we belong.
Quote 1.8
Socially constituted linguistics
The phrase ‘socially constituted’ is intended to express the view that social
function gives form to the ways in which linguistic features are encountered
in actual life. This being so, an adequate approach must begin by identifying
social functions, and discovering the ways in which linguistic features are
selected and grouped together to serve them.
Hymes (1974: 196)
1.5.1 A socially constituted approach to the study of language
and culture
Arguing for a socially constituted linguistics in which social function is
treated as the source from which linguistic features are formed, Hymes
developed an approach to the study of language he called the ethnography
of speaking. In contrast to more formal descriptions of language as inherently
coherent systems, the focus of Hymes’s approach is on capturing the
conventional patterns of language used by members of particular sociocultural
TEACHING AN 20 D RESEARCHING LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
groups as they participate in their everyday communicative activities, with
the goal of such research being not to seek ‘the replication of uniformity,
but the organization of diversity’ (Hornberger, 2009: 350).
A great deal of research, particularly in the fi elds of linguistic anthropology,
communication, and education, has used this approach to investigate
a wide range of communicative events and activities of many different
groups and communities. These have included descriptions of the conventional
patterns of language for enacting such mundane activities as service
encounters (e.g. Bailey, 2000), gossiping (e.g. Brison, 1992; Hall, 1993a, b),
leave-taking (e.g. Fitch, 2002), dinner-time talk (e.g. Blum-Kulka, 1997)
and television talk shows (e.g. Carbaugh, 1988). Also subjects of investigation
are institutional activities such as classroom teaching and learning
(e.g. Cazden et al., 1972; Foster, 1989), professional communication (e.g.
Duchan and Kovarsky, 2005) and other workplace activities (e.g. Sarangi
and Roberts, 1999).
Quote 1.9
The conceptual base of an ethnography of speaking
Now it is desirable . . . to take as a working framework: 1. the speech of a
group constitutes a system; 2. speech and language vary cross-culturally in
function; 3. the speech activity of a community is the primary object of attention.
A descriptive grammar deals with this speech activity in one frame of
reference, an ethnography of speaking in another. So (what amounts to a
corollary, 3b), the latter must in fact include the former.
Hymes (1962: 42)
Concept 1.6 Ethnography of speaking
As proposed by Hymes, an ethnography of speaking is both a conceptual
framework and a method for conducting language study. Presuming a systematic
link between language use and context, this approach considers the communicative
activity, or what Hymes termed the communicative event, a central
unit of analysis. Analytic attention is given to describing the components of
communicative events and the relations among them that participants make
use of to engage in and make sense of their social worlds and, in turn, to link
their use to the larger social, cultural, political and other institutional forces
giving shape to them. More recent formulations of this approach to the study
of language refer to it as ethnography of communication to capture a more
encompassing understanding of the variety of resources, in addition to language,
that are used in communication. Leeds-Hurwitz (1984) provides a
useful summary of the history of both terms.
SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON LANGUAGE AND CULTURE 21
Literacy activities of various groups and communities have also been the
subject of ethnographies of communication. Ahearn (2000), for example,
studied the literacy practices of young Nepali women, focusing in particular
on their use of love letters in courtship. Radway (1984) explored the role
that reading romance novels played in the lives of a group of women. Taking
more of a wide-angle ethnographic approach, McCarty and Watahomigie
(1998) studied both home and school literacy activities in American Indian
and Alaskan native communities. Similarly, Torres-Guzman (1998) investigated
literacy activities in Puerto Rican communities, Dien (1998) looked
at similar activities in Vietnamese American communities, and Barton and
Hamilton (1998) explored the activities constituted in the everyday lives of
a group of adults in England. More recently, Ivanicˇ and Satchwell (2007)
investigated the academic literacy practices of college-level students and
how these practices interacted with literacy practices in other domains of
the students’ lives. Findings from these and other studies have shown that
literacy activities do indeed vary, in some cases considerably, from community
to community. As these groups differ – and as the social identities
of the readers and writers differ within the groups – so does the value that
is placed on literacy activities and the communicative conventions used to
engage in them.
The differences in literacy practices notwithstanding, the principal
assumption of literacy underlying the various strand of literacy studies
remains the same. Literacy is defi ned not as ‘a technology made up of
a set of transferable cognitive skills, but [as] a constellation of practices’
(Ivanicˇ, 1998: 65), each made up of particular arrangements of skills and
ways of reading and writing that are tied to their contexts of use. Likewise,
the ethnographies share the goal of making visible the linguistic resources
and communicative plans shared by group members and used to engage
in their socioculturally important communicative activities. In addition to
adding to our knowledge of cultural groups, studies taking an ethnography
of communication approach to the study of language and culture have
contributed a great deal to current educational practices. These practices
are discussed more fully in Section II. Chapter 8, in Section III, provides
more details on the ethnography of communication approach to the study
of language and literacy practices.
1.5.2 The recent turn in studies of communicative activities
In the past decade or so, applied linguistic studies of communicative events,
particularly those realised through face-to-face interaction, have moved
beyond general descriptions of the linguistic resources needed to engage in
them to more detailed descriptions that show the moment-to-moment interactional
coordination by which the communicative context is created. This
move has come about in part by the incorporation of methods for analysing
TEACHING AN 22 D RESEARCHING LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
conversation developed by the discipline of conversation analysis (CA).
CA began in the fi eld of sociology over forty years ago as an offshoot of
ethnomethodology, an approach to the study of social life that considers
the nature and source of social order to be grounded in real-world activity
rather than regulated by universal standards of rationality (Garfi nkel, 1967;
Heritage, 1984). That is, social order is a local achievement, mutually produced
by participants as they engage in activity with each other. Asserting
a fundamental role for interaction as ‘the primordial site of human sociality’
(Schegloff, 2007: 70), CA takes as its main concern the study of talk-ininteraction,
and more particularly, ‘the analysis of competence which
underlies ordinary social activities’ (Heritage, 2004: 241). More details on
this particular approach to language study are given in Chapter 8.
For our purposes, it is suffi cient to note that fi ndings from CAinspired
studies have been useful in revealing the multitude of interactional
methods such as turn-taking patterns and repair strategies that we have at
our disposal for sense-making in our communicative activities. Examples
of recent studies include Mori’s (2002) analysis of the resources used by
a pair of university learners of Japanese to accomplish an instructional
activity, Mondada’s (2004) study of the multilingual resources drawn on by
participants in an international medical setting and Hellermann’s (2008)
study of the social actions occurring in and around instructional tasks in
an adult ESOL classroom.
In addition to drawing out the shared understandings that members rely
on to make sense of each other’s actions in talk-in-interaction activities,
interest has developed in uncovering the variability of resource use. A
criticism of early ethnographies of communication noted that ethnographic
descriptions of communicative events often gave the impression that
individual members’ participation was always consensual, always orderly.
Assuming a more dynamic understanding of community and language
use, more recent studies have examined how individual members use the
resources of their communicative activities to challenge the status quo or
to reinforce particular ideologies. In terms of challenging existing conditions
of language use, Hall’s study (1993c) revealed how one Dominican
woman was able to manipulate the conventional opening to the activity
of gossiping as practised among her peers in such a way as to positively
transform the nature of her involvement in the activity. Typically, the
opening of the gossiping event was signalled with the utterance ‘tengo una
bomba’ (I have a bomb), the purpose of which was to inform the others
that a story about the scandalous behaviour of another was about to be
told. When this particular woman used it, however, what often followed
was not a story about someone’s impropriety, but a humorous anecdote in
which she was the central fi gure. Her unconventional use of the utterance
to take the stage, so to speak, generated a great deal of humour among the
other participants, and thus helped to raise her status within the group. At

the same time, it solidifi ed her identity as a knowledgeable insider to her peers.
In terms of reinforcing ideologies, the study by Blommaert et al. (2006)
of three Belgian classrooms for newly settled immigrants revealed how
teachers’ instructional activities served to disqualify rather than to capitalise
on students’ uses of linguistic and literary resources that the teachers
perceived to be non-standard.
As for literacy practices, the term New Literacies Studies has been
coined to refer to studies that take a more critical stance towards practices
constituted not only in educational settings but also in social and
pro fessional groups and communities outside of schools across a range of
geographical contexts (for examples, see the edited volumes by Martin-
Jones and Jones, 2000, and Street, 2004). The studies go beyond Hymes’s
basic ethnographic approach in that they seek to make visible the power
relations embedded in and across the various practices, by asking ‘ “whose
literacies” are dominant and whose are marginalized or resistant’ (Street,
2003: 77).
Also included in this strand of ethnographic research are studies of
the multimodal literacy practices engendered by the continuing expansion
of information and communication technologies. Of particular interest are
the skills and strategies by which individuals use these technologies to make
sense of and participate in their communities both within and across geographical
boundaries. The study by Lam and Rosario-Ramos (2009) is one
such example. They examined how teenaged immigrants in the United States
used digital media to engage in social networking and to design and share
information on local, national, and transnational events with peers and others
living in their countries of origin. They found that these digitally based,
multilingual literacy practices situated the youths in a ‘transnational circuit
of news and ideas’ (p. 186) that exposed them to narratives, experiences,
values, and expectations from different social communities. This exposure,
in turn, helped to foster in the youths an ability to see things from multiple
perspectives. The pedagogical signifi cance of the fi ndings from the various
strands of research inspired by Hymes’s ethnography of communication is
discussed in Section II.
1.5.3 From linguistic relativity to sociolinguistic relativity
Without a doubt, Hymes’s theory of language and his approach to the study
of language use have made signifi cant contributions to our understanding
of the pragmatically based, mutually constitutive nature of language and
culture. A less visible but equally signifi cant contribution of his work is the
advancement of our understanding of the concept of linguistic relativity. Like
Whorf, Hymes sees language and culture as inextricably linked. However,
by giving primacy to language use and function rather than linguistic code
and form, Hymes transforms Whorf ’s notion of linguistic relativity in a
TEACHING AN 24 D RESEARCHING LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
subtle but signifi cant way. More to the point, in asserting the primacy
of language as human action, the source of relativity becomes located in
language use, not language structure.
Quote 1.10
The priority of sociolinguistic relativity relative to
the notion of linguistic relativity
With particular regard to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, it is essential to notice
that Whorf’s sort of linguistic relativity is secondary, and dependent upon a
primary sociolinguistic relativity, that of differential engagement of languages
in social life. For example, description of a language may show that it expresses
certain cognitive style, perhaps implicit metaphysical assumptions. But what
chances the language has to make an impress upon individuals and behavior
will depend upon the degree and pattern of its admission into communicative
events. . . . Peoples do not all everywhere use language to the same degree,
in the same situations, or for the same things; some peoples focus upon
language more than others. Such differences in the place of a language in the
communicative system of a people cannot be assumed to be without influence
on the depth of a language’s influence on such things as world view.
Hymes (1974: 18)
Recent crosslinguistic research in cognitive linguistics (e.g. Levinson,
2003; Slobin, 1997, 2003) provides compelling empirical support for the
notion of sociolinguistic relativity by revealing substantive links between
thought and language use. For example, differences across languages in
terms of how spatial relationships are described have been linked to different
cognitive styles among speakers of these languages (Majid et al.,
2004). Encapsulating these fi ndings is cognitive linguist Dan Slobin’s
concept, which asserts that languages afford users with preferred perspectives
for encoding their lived experiences. That is, the language one uses
helps shapes one’s conceptual understandings about the world. The link
between language use and cognition is discussed in greater detail in
Chapter 3.
Quote 1.11
Thinking-for-speaking
The language or languages that we learn in childhood are not neutral coding
systems of an objective reality. Rather, each one is a subjective orientation to
the world of human experience, and this orientation affects the ways in which
we think while we are speaking.
Slobin (1996, p. 91, emphasis in the original)
SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON LANGUAGE AND CULTURE 25
1.6 Systemic functional linguistics
One last source to note from which a notion of language as contextembedded
social action draws is the work of British-Australian linguist
Michael Halliday (1973, 1975, 1978; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004). Like
Hymes, Halliday views language not as a system of abstract, decontextualised
rules but rather as fundamentally social, constituted by a set of resources
for meaning-making. He thus locates the meanings of language forms in
their systematic connections between the functions they play and their
contexts of use. Also like Hymes, Halliday considers the essential role of a
theory of language to be to explain the social foundations of the language
system. Thus, his work has been concerned primarily with the development
of a systemic functional linguistics (SFL) theory of language, the specifi c
aim of which is the articulation of ‘the functionally organised meaning
potential of the linguistic system’ (1975: 6). That is, it seeks to describe the
linguistic options that are available to individuals to construct meanings in
particular contexts or situations for particular purposes.
Quote 1.12
Halliday’s theory of language
The key claim in SFL is that the system itself is functionally organized to address
the highly complex social need to make and exchange meaning. That is, in
this perspective, the linguistic system realizes culture because it is a social
semiotic modality that functions in and through social processes to enable
socially constituted subjects to exchange meanings.
Williams (2008: 62)
To make these connections between language use and context visible,
Halliday proposed an analytic framework consisting of a set of three interrelated
functions. The fi rst function is the ideational, which is concerned
with the propositional or representational dimensions of language. The
second is the interpersonal, which is concerned with the social dimensions
of language, and more specifi cally how interpersonal connections are
made and sustained. The third function is the textual, which is concerned
with the construction of coherent and cohesive discourse. According to
Halliday, all languages manage all three functions. Also part of the framework
is a set of three components for describing situation types. The fi rst
component, fi eld, refers to the setting and purpose. Tenor, the second
component, pertains to the participants’ roles and relationships and the
key or tone of the situation. The third component, mode, refers to the
symbolic or rhetorical means by which the situation is realised, and
the genre to which it is most appropriately related.
TEACHING AN 26 D RESEARCHING LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
According to Halliday’s theory, meanings of the linguistic resources used
by individuals in particular situations can be linked to the conventionalised,
or systematic interactions between the three components of the situation
and the three language functions: fi eld interacts with ideational, tenor with
interpersonal, and mode with textual. This knowledge comprises the communicative
plans with which individuals approach their communicative
activities, and they use their shared understandings of a situation in terms
of fi eld, tenor and mode to anticipate the language forms and meanings
likely to be used.
Quote 1.13
On the explanatory value of systemic functional
linguistics
Given an adequate specification of the situation in terms of field, tenor and
mode, we ought to be able to make certain predictions about the linguistic
properties of the text that is associated with it: that is, about the register, the
configurations of semantic options that typically feature in this environment,
and hence also about the grammar and vocabulary, which are the realizations
of the semantic options.
Halliday (1975: 131)
Like Hymes’s approach to the study of language, SFL has engendered
much empirical research. The directions taken, however, differ somewhat
in that the focus of studies from the perspective of SFL is on describing
functions of particular linguistic features as they are realised in a variety
of texts. For example, Young and Nguyen (2002) employed SFL analytic
methods to compare the linguistics features used to present a scientifi c
topic in a 12th grade (high school) physics textbook with those in a teacher
discussion of the topic. Their fi ndings revealed some striking contrasts in
how scientifi c meaning is constructed across the two modes.
SFL also differs from ethnographies of communication in that, although
there has been some consideration of oral communicative activities, as shown
in the study by Young and Miller, up until recently, much of the analytic
attention has been on written genres. With the increasing recognition of
the multimodal nature of literacy, and the fact that ‘language alone cannot
give us access to the meaning of the multimodally constituted message’
(Kress, 2003: 35), contemporary SFL research has extended its analytic focus
to include a range of modes such as, for example, images, gestures, and
animated movements in addition to the more traditional oral and written
modes. SFL as an approach to research is addressed in Chapter 8.
Despite differences in the approaches and analytic foci, fi ndings from
myriad investigations using theoretical frameworks that draw on the work

SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON LANGUAGE AND CULTURE 27
of both Hymes and Halliday make apparent in empirically interesting and
compelling ways the socially constituted nature of language. Pedagogical
implications of current research from these perspectives are addressed in
Section II.
A last point to make is that a sociocultural perspective of language and
culture does not draw the same distinction between competence and performance
as the traditional Chomskyan perspective does (cf. Crowley, 1996).
In the latter perspective, competence and performance are considered
to be two distinct systems: the formal and the functional. A sociocultural
perspective makes no such distinction. Rather it takes as fundamental the
existence of one system, a system of action, in which form and meaning –
knowledge and use – are two mutually constituted components.
Quote 1.14
Differences between traditional ‘ahistorical’ and
sociocultural approaches to the study of language
. . . it is clear that the decontextualised, ahistorical approach to language must
be called into question by a method which does not seek for an abstract
structure but looks instead for the uses, and their significance, to which language
is put at the micro- and macro-social levels. And this is not just a question
of turning away from langue to parole, or from competence to performance,
since that would be to accept the misleading alternatives on offer in the
established models. The new approach would seek and analyse precisely neither
abstract linguistic structure nor individual use but the institutional, political and
ideological relationships between language and history. . . . In short, it would
consider the modes in which language becomes important for its users not
as a faculty which they all share at an abstract level, but as a practice in which
they all participate in very different ways, to very different effects, under very
different pressures, in their everyday lives.
Crowley (1996: 28)
1.7 Summary
Incorporation of developments in fi elds historically considered outside the
main purview of applied linguistics has helped the fi eld to reconceptualise
two essential concepts: language and culture. In contrast to traditional
views, which consider language to be structural systems transcending their
users and contexts of use, sociocultural conceptualisations see language as
dynamic, living collections of resources for the accomplishment of our social
lives. These collections are considered central forms of life in that we use
them not only to refer to, or represent, the world in our communicative
TEACHING AN 28 D RESEARCHING LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
activities. They are also forms of action by which we bring our cultural worlds
into existence, maintain them, and shape them for our own purposes.
Current understandings have also transformed the way we view language
meaning. While we can and do use our resources to realise personal intentions,
our intentions alone do not give them their meaning. Nor is meaning
inherent in the forms themselves. That is to say, we cannot pull resources
from their contexts, dust off any contextual residue, and then claim to know
their meaning. Doing so only renders them lifeless. Instead, the meanings
that reside in our linguistic resources are dynamic, emerging from the
dialogic interaction between our uses of them at particular moments in
time, and their conventional meanings, determined by their prior uses by
other individuals, in other communicative activities, and at other times. The
specifi c components of language then are considered to be fundamentally
communicative, their shapes arising from their uses by individuals to
construct and enact certain social identities as they engage in activities
particular to their sociocultural worlds.
Also transformed is our understanding of what it means to know language.
From a sociocultural perspective, to know language does not mean
to know something about it. It is not a body of information about forms
and meanings that we fi rst accumulate and then use in our communicative
activities. Rather, to know a language means ‘knowing how to go on, and
so is an ability’ (Shotter, 1996: 299). Tying language knowledge to social
action in this way makes visible its mutually dependent, inextricable link
to culture. It is through the ways we live our lives, and through our social
actions, that culture is made and remade.
Quote 1.15
The study of language use
We must study how, by interweaving our talk with our other actions and
activities, we can first develop and sustain between us different, particular ways
of relating ourselves to each other . . . And then, once we have a grasp of the
general character of our (normative) relations both with each other and to our
surroundings . . . we should turn to a study of how, as distinct individuals, we can
‘reach out’ from within these forms of life, so to speak, to make the myriad
different kinds of contact with our surroundings through the various ways of
making sense of such contacts our forms of life provide. Where some of the
contacts we make, perhaps, can elicit new or previously unnoticed reactions and
responses from us, to function as the origins of entirely new language games.
And it is these fleeting, often unremarked responses that occur in the momentary
gaps between people as they react to each other – from within an established
form of life – that must become the primary focus for our studies here, for it
is in these reactions that people reveal to each other what their world (their
‘inner life’) is like for them; and can also, perhaps, initiate a new practice.
Shotter (1996: 299 –300; emphasis in the original)
SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON LANGUAGE AND CULTURE 29
Ultimately, then, from a sociocultural perspective on language and culture,
what we pursue in our research endeavours is not a theory of linguistic
systems. Neither is it a theory of universal culture. Rather, the aim is the
development of a theory of social action that is centrally concerned with how
we live our lives through our everyday communicative activities, through
our language games. To do this requires our attention to the explication of
‘the relationships between human action, on the one hand, and the cultural,
institutional, and historical situations in which this action occurs on the
other’ (Wertsch et al., 1995: 11). A discussion on research possibilities made
possible by this perspective is taken up more fully in Section III. In the
next chapter, we examine current understandings of the concept of identity
and its link to language use, and in Chapter 3 we review current theoretical
insights and empirical fi ndings on language and culture learning.
Further reading
Coiro, J., Knobel, M., Lankshear, C. and Leu, D. (eds) (2009) Handbook of Research on
New Literacies, New York: Routledge. The aim of the volume is to provide direction
to new literacies research by making visible the signifi cant issues, theoretical perspectives
and methodological frameworks guiding current research on new literacies.
Chapters are written by leading scholars from such areas as social semiotics and
multimodality, ethnographies of new literacies, multimedia studies, and computermediated
communication.
Joseph, J., Love, N. and Taylor, T. (2001) Landmarks in Linguistic Thought II: The Western
Tradition in the Twentieth Century, London: Routledge. The text presents the contributions
of key twentieth-century scholars such as Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Sapir
and Whorf to the development of thinking about language and communication.
Linell, P. (2009) Rethinking Language, Mind, and World Dialogically, Charlotte, NC:
Information Age Publishing. Linell provides a comprehensive overview of dialogical
theories of communication, examining topics such as self and others in the social
construction of meaning, utterance, interactions and texts. Although the concepts
are complex, the text is eminently accessible.
Young, R. (2008) Language and Interaction: An Advanced Resource Book, London: Routledge.
This book offers an up-to-date synopsis on a view of language as social action. It
brings together key readings and materials to cover a range of pertinent approaches
and methodologies for the study of language and interaction. It also offers a variety
of tasks to help readers further develop their understandings.
Voloshinov, V.N. (1986) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, New York: Seminar
Press. Although there is some dispute over the author of this text – some claim that
the book was written by Bakhtin, others claim it was constructed as part of the
‘Bakhtin Circle’, a group of contemporaries of Bakhtin that included P.N. Medvedev
and V.N. Voloshinov – the ideas presented here form a large part of the core
assumptions on language and mind from a sociocultural perspective