Building the sociolinguistic environment through talk-in-interaction

Abstract

In this chapter we focus on how patterns of language alternation are constructedcollectively by two learners during their participation in two pedagogical tasks,one through English and the other one through Catalan. Choosing a languageand switching to and from a language are procedures participants employ asresources to make sense of their actions (Gumperz, 1982; Auer, 1984). Throughtalk-in-interaction students build the social and discursive context in whichtheir language choices and alternation make sense.During our ethnographic fieldwork we could observe that Spanish emergedas a lingua franca in informal conversations in and out of classrooms, but alsothat in the classroom learners also orient towards the ‘medium of instruction’(Gafaranga, 2000). Kunitz and Markee (2016) point-out that Ethnographyof Communication does not offer methodological precisions for decidingwhich aspect(s) of context may legitimately be used to interpret whathappens at every moment in a particular interaction. In this sense, it may beuseful to combine the broad perspective of the sociolinguistic environmentdocumented by the ethnographic field work with a narrower sequential analysis of talk-in-interaction.Gumperz’s notion of contextualisation cues (1982) is crucial in this regard.It offers the possibility of examining the speakers’ orientations during the coconstruction of the tasks at hand and of observing the linguistic resources usedduring interactional activities. In plurilingual conversation, language choicesand language alternations are one of these contextualisation cues, as they signalmodifications in the course of the interaction. As our data was collected inschools, milieus where language policies determine which languages are to beused as means of instruction and communication in the classrooms, we couldargue that those policies have an impact on learners’ language choices. However,we will illustrate this is not always the case. Our analysis will demonstrate thatthe study of language alternation could explain how learners envisage theirparticipation in the two tasks we study here.