Accessing the Target Language Community
المؤلف:
Tara Goldstein
المصدر:
Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual School
الجزء والصفحة:
P114-C6
2025-09-30
243
Accessing the Target Language Community
Mr. Kendall and Timothy's belief that seeking out opportunities to practice with English speakers will help English speakers improve their skills is supported by many theories of what makes a good language learner. As explained by critical applied linguist Bonny Norton, these theories have been developed on the premise that language learners can choose what conditions in which they will interact with members of the target language and the learner's access to the target language community is a primarily function of the learner's motivation.1 Norton critiques this set of assumptions, suggesting that speakers of the target language have the power to influence when ESOL speakers can speak, how much they can speak, and what they can speak about.2 Support for this critique comes from one of our own play writing workshop sessions.
During a discussion on the some of the difficulties associated with learning English, Marilyn, a White, Canadian-born student who used English as a primary language, suggested that a person's attitude was important to the process of language learning. Marilyn's family had hosted in their home several visiting students from Japan. She talked about the impressive progress one of these students had made after deciding that she would pursue new friendships with English-speaking people and use English as much as possible while in Canada. Marilyn then contrasted this first student's language-learning experience with that of another student who chose to socialize with other Japanese students and frequently used Japanese during her stay. This second student did not make nearly as much progress learning English as the first student did. Speaking up in response to these comments, Cathy, a Hong Kong-born Chinese student, told Marilyn that it was often difficult to pursue new friendships with English-speaking people. English-speaking people must want to be friends with you, she told Marilyn and the rest of the group, before you can become friends with them.3 Given that the pursuit of interactions with English-speakers can be difficult, providing ESOL students with access to sites where such interactions are possible is important. One of the playwriting workshop's most valued outcomes for many of the students was the opportunity to "make new friends" with people who had been classmates, but not friends. Such a finding supports one of the recommendations made by parents who were interviewed for the 1995-1996 Quality Assurance School Review, discussed in the Introduction. These parents felt that Northside's extracurricular program was one of the better sites to foster social interaction among students from different linguistic, cultural, and racial groups and that more noncompetitive or "just-for-fun" activities should be provided at the school.
1 See Norton Peirce (1995, p. 12).
2 See Norton (2000, p. 2).
3 For similar findings in an Australian high school context, see Miller (1999).
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