Discursive Practice in Language Learning and Teaching (review)

Since the 'social turn' (Block, 2003) in the field of second language acquisition and the recognition that language cannot be studied independently of social context, there has been a growing interest in language learning and teaching as discursive practices. Drawing on his decades of sociolinguistic research and teaching practice, Richard Young has produced a text that promises to elucidate how constructs of context, discourse, and practice inform contemporary understandings of language learning situations.

The book is the sixth volume of the Language Learning Monograph Series edited by Lourdes Ortega. Ortega contributes a forward that effectively frames the text, noting how Young's work 'expands the intellectual landscape of SLA' by providing a synthesis of knowledge developed in diverse fields of language, acquisition, and interaction (p. viii). Indeed, the strength of Young's synthesis is revealed in the first chapter as Young defines practice as 'the construction and reflection of social realities through actions that invoke identity, ideology, belief, and power' (p. 1). He goes on to present Practice Theory as a framework through which to extend the definition of 1) discourse by including multimodal and societal meaning-making systems, 2) practice by including all performance in context, and 3) context by including both a broad social view and a historical perspective of the language learning situation. In the second chapter, Young provides a thorough review of the fields of language learning and applied linguistics in terms of their approach to the study of practice.

Chapters 3 and 4 form the centrepiece of Young's work as they explore the concepts of context and discursive resources, respectively, and especially focus on the ways in which they are interrelated. In chapter 3, Young draws on concepts of discourse advanced by Mikhail Bakhtin and James Paul Gee to broaden the scope of context in the ethnomethodological tradition, focusing on how different approaches treat the basic questions where?, how?, when?, who?, and why?. He argues that educational researchers need to move beyond the narrow conception of context offered by conversation analysis to understand the effects of personal histories, identities, and historical and global social forces on talk in interaction. This review of methodology begins to sketch out a map of the terrain of social context that will enable applied linguists to more effectively orient their work.

Chapter 4 moves away from a focus on context and toward a focus on the verbal, interactional, and non-verbal discursive resources employed by participants in language exchanges. Here, Young skilfully draws on Erving Goffman's participation framework to reveal the social organization of participants in a practice. Even as he draws on systemic functional grammar to examine verbal resources, conversational analysis to examine interactional resources, and Charles Goodwin's semiotic theory to examine non-verbal resources, Young never lets the breadth of the discussion obscure his focus on the search for the connection between language and context. This chapter also reveals an imbalance in the literature in the study of these three discursive resources. Verbal and interactional resources are described in more detail than non-verbal resources, inspiring some readers to wonder which type of research could provide further depth to the non-verbal frame.

While not all the theory or research reviewed in the first two chapters of the text relate directly to language teaching and learning, the final two chapters demonstrate how the preceding literature review and methodological framework materialize in the classroom. The foci on language testing, critical pedagogy, and identity make this final section of the text a uniquely comprehensive account replete with important insights for pedagogy.

Young's text is highly relevant to a Canadian context and frequently cites Canadian-based research, most notably Kelleen Toohey's work.

It is important to note, however, a certain disparity that becomes evident at times in the text. Translations of different foreign-language transcriptions are treated in different ways. In particular, English translations of Spanish transcriptions are relegated to the endnotes, whereas English translations of transcriptions in other...