Week 3 comment on TQ Social Identity, Investment, and Language Learning

I was really happy to find that the passage with lots of theories comes out with a concrete case. It does help with my understanding of the abstract theories. Through the case they study in, I got not only a very clear idea about what are the research questions and the theories they used, as well as the analysis which address the question, but I know how a kind of survey should be like and what to focus on different topics.

First of all, let’s start with several concepts concerning SLA. We know that this article is a discussion of the complications of the study for classroom teaching and current theories of communicative competence (p9). Some argues that SLA theorists have not adequately addressed how relations of power affect interaction between language learners and target language speakers (p9). Other theories of SLA focus on social rather than individual variables in language learning (p11). And also the three defining characteristics of subjectivity, outlined by Weedon, are: the multiple nature of the subject, subjectivity as a site of struggle; and subjectivity as changing over time (p15).

When I read the story from Eva, I first thought it was funny and little bit ridiculous, but later on, after reading the following the parts, I know such situation would probably happen at the very beginning of the study for ESL learners. And Eva was described as the l2 speaker who is unmotivated with a high affective filter, and she might be portrayed as a poor language learner who has not developed sociolinguistic competence (p10). This reminds me of the first article I read in the class which says that the L2 learners are defined as the deficient communicators who struggle to overcome an underdeveloped L2 competence and strive to reach the target competence of an idealized native speaker.

What I am thinking is that the great social culture gap between the language learner group and the target language group might really requires the learners to struggle to interact with the members of the target language community. Here comes my own story, I have two roommates who are native speakers. When I chat with them, spontaneously they want to talk with me in a very suitable way of our “international conversation”, I can easily know what they talk about and what they want to express to me, even though I always come across with lot of vocabularies beyond my fields. It seems that we have no problems of communication. But everything changes when they begin to talk to each other or when they exchange the ideas about the TV shows or stories of their friends. I am totally stucked and dropped out of the conversation. This let me think about the theories appears in the article saying that the L2 learners should enhance their communicative competence, that is to say to fight for their rights to speak.