Social Networking for Language Education

M. Lamy,K. Zourou

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137023384
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

Social networking is now one of the ways in which anyone can set out to learn or improve their language skills. This collection brings together different sets of learning experiences and shows that success depends on the wider environment of the learner, the kind of activity the learner engages in and the type of learning priorities he or she has.

Part I

The Wider Ecology of Language Learning with SNS

1

An Ecological Analysis of Social Networking Site-Mediated Identity Development

Jonathon Reinhardt and Hsin-I Chen

Introduction

There is no doubt that students abroad make use of social networking sites (SNS) to connect to old friends at home and new friends in their new contexts. SNS like Facebook have boomed in popularity in recent years – according to the Facebook Newsroom Key Facts page in November 2012, over 1 billion people around the world use the service, with over 580 million using it daily and 81 percent of its users outside North America. Observing this ubiquity, applied linguists have claimed that social networking holds great potential for second language (L2) learning (for example Blattner and Fiori, 2009; McBride, 2009; Reinhardt and Zander, 2011; Stevenson and Liu, 2010), but have not yet undertaken much research grounded in empirical data on how L2 learners actually use SNS outside the classroom. Moreover, little research examines SNS practices from a longitudinal, developmental perspective (although see Reinhardt and Zander, 2011; Choi et al., 2011) in the context of a study abroad experience.

Examining SNS use in experiences abroad may provide insight into how L2 users adjust to and are socialized into, new communities and situations. Language socialization (Duff, 2008; Ochs, 1988) has been used as a framework for examining the interrelationship between social, linguistic and identity practices in face-to-face communities (Pavlenko and Norton, 2007). Several scholars (for example Black, 2008, 2009; Lam, 2000, 2004, 2009; Thorne and Black, 2007) have combined socialization with a social-constructivist framework to examine online activity by L2 users, in order to capture its intentional, agentive aspects. In this post-structural conceptualization, online activity involves literacy practices that afford (Gibson, 1979; van Lier, 2000) the development of new identities and affiliations. Other scholars have followed with analyses of SNS use, noting that ‘within a particular site like Facebook participants can choose among diverse socially recognized ways afforded by the site for accomplishing self-identity presentation and interaction with friends by generating, communicating and negotiating meanings with others’ (Knobel and Lankshear, 2008, p. 269). Going further, because the traditional concept of ‘community’ does not allow for the agency of the SNS user, some have found a more commensurable concept in Anderson’s (1991) ‘imagined community’ used in conjunction with the concept of ‘investment’ (Kanno and Norton, 2003). In this framework, social symbolic activity can be understood in terms of ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu, 1991). For L2 users, ‘an investment in the target language is in fact an investment in the learner’s own identity’ (Norton and Gao, 2008, p. 110).

In step with this research, we undertook an analysis of the SNS practices of a Chinese student completing her doctoral work in applied linguistics in the USA, over a two-year period from when she first arrived.¹ Because a SNS is ‘a symbol system of unprecedented scope, sophistication and complexity’ (Knobel and Lankshear, 2008, p. 258), we frame our analysis in an ecological perspective, where mediated social and symbolic activities are seen in terms of potentials for action, or affordances (Gibson, 1979). We combine quantitative focus on longitudinal frequency of use with qualitative analysis of SNS posts that index the dynamic and interactional development of an intercultural, multilayered identity. By means of the analyses, we seek to provide insight into how students abroad might use SNS to socialize into new identities and affiliations. We first present a literature review of the theoretical and methodological frameworks used, followed by a description of the participant, the data and the procedures used. We then present the results with interpretation and discussion interspersed.

Literature review

In the following section, we first review the literature on language socialization, investment and imagined communities. We then discuss how these concepts have been applied to studies of L2 use and learner development. Finally, we focus on studies using these concepts in online contexts.

Language socialization, investment and imagined communities

With origins in anthropological traditions, language socialization conceptualizes language learning and enculturation as inextricably intertwined activities (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984; Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986). From this perspective, linguistic and cultural knowledge are mutually co-constructed and are mediated by linguistic and symbolic activity. Language use is thus both the means and end of the socialization process (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984). Second language (L2) socialization acknowledges that additional languages are also learned via socialization (Duff, 2012; Watson-Gegeo, 2004). Duff (2012, p. 564) describes L2 socialization as the processes involved when L2 learners ‘seek competence in the language and, typically, membership and the ability to participate in the practices of communities in which that language is spoken’, although they ‘may not experience the same degrees of access, acceptance, or accommodation’ (Duff, 2007, p. 310) in the new communities as normally experienced in first language (L1) socialization.

Because ‘socialization’ is a broad theoretical rather than a methodological concept, others have developed and used commensurable constructs in conjunction with it. For example, inspired by Bourdieu’s (1977) work on social capital, Norton Peirce (1995) proposed the notion of ‘investment’ to capture the socially and historically constructed relationship of the language learner to the target language and the changing social world (Norton Peirce, 1995; Norton and Gao, 2008). Learners, as active social agents, invest themselves in the target language and project multiple desired selves and identities in the communities for positive return that increases the value of their social and cultural capital (Norton, 2000). According to Norton (2000), the two main driving forces for learner investment are present agency and envisioned future identities.

In conjunction with investment, the notion of ‘imagined community’, first proposed by Anderson (1991), refers to ‘groups of people not immediately tangible and accessible, with whom we connect through the power of the imagination’ (Kanno and Norton, 2003, p. 1). Imagination, according to Wenger (1998), is a form of engagement in communities of practice and a mode of belonging to a community. ‘Imagined community’ thus captures the complex, dynamic relationship between language learners, identity and community and foregrounds the role of learners’ actual and desired affiliations, current self-positioning, choices of investment and ways of engagement in the community (Pavlenko and Norton, 2007). Consequently, ‘the people in whom the learners have the greatest investment may be the very people who provide (or limit) access to the imagined community’ of the learner (Pavlenko and Norton, 2007, p. 671).

L2 users, investment and imagined communities

Several studies have discussed the complex interrelationships between the learner’s imagined communities and his/her language learning practice. For example, Chang (2011) examined how two non-native English speaker (NNS) international graduate students made various investments in their current and future learning practices. These included seeking funding opportunities, developing social networks, overcoming language barriers and strengthening different kinds of disciplinary competences. Chang concluded that the two NNS students took active roles in making investments by engaging in varying English learning practices that depended on their personal academic trajectories before, during and after their doctoral study in the USA, their respective learning goals and the disciplinary culture of their immediate and imagined communities. Gu (2008) examined three Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners and their identities in two communities in China: a community of urban dwellers and a Christian community. Gu concluded that while the three learners exercised their own agency and appropriated English language use in the two communities, they responded to and participated in the same community in different ways depending on their personal histories and identities as English learners, which in turn contributed to their negotiation and conflict between self-identification and being positioned in the communities.

Haneda (2005) examined the literacy practices and engagement of two university students in an advanced Japanese literacy course and found that the two students invested themselves in various writing/speaking activities differently, according to imagined identities and memberships in imagined past, present and envisioned future communities. Jim, a Japanese heritage learner, engaged in Japanese literacy practices with the desires to align with his imagined community of high school English teachers in a local community, while Edward, a native English-speaking student, participated in literacy activities with the career goal of being a successful business executive in an international, multilingual community. In a study of immigrant parents in Canada and their attitudes towards bilingual French-English education and French immersion programs, Dagenais (2003) found that the parents viewed multilingualism as a valuable resource, an investment and a means of securing their children’s access to various imagined language communities, both locally and globally and to maintain economic and political power.

While these aforementioned studies provide evidence for the interconnectedness among learner investment, identity and language practice, little research explores Internet-mediated communities and examines language learners’ learning trajectories, envisioned identities and memberships and participatory patterns in these virtual communities of practice. As mentioned above, imagination, a mode of belonging to a community (Wenger, 1998), can exist independently of ‘territorial context’ (McMillan and Chavis, 1986, p. 247) and an imagined community can be formed virtually as with the four qualities/conditions: (a) membership, (b) the community’s influence on members and vice versa, (c) reinforcement of the individual’s identity by community membership and (d) shared affective connections. In this view, virtual participation in online communities can be seen as a form of investment that individuals make by extending their imagination in order to access imagined communities. It should also be mentioned that the increased role afforded to the imagination in social life by the processes of globalization complicates our understanding of the concept of community (Ryan, 2006). Technology, as Norton and Kamal (2003) argue, provides crucial access to a larger imagined community. The increasing capacity and ubiquity of communication technology have influenced the scope of imaginable communities. Individuals can extend their imaginations into virtual communities that go far beyond physical spaces (Kanno and Norton, 2003).

L2 users in online communities

While much attention has been focused on the learner involvement and enculturation process in face-to-face communities, Internet-mediated communities that go beyond immediate face-to-face social networks such as SNS have not been extensively explored for their potential in shaping the interdependency of learner identity, socialization and language learning (Pavlenko and Norton, 2007). With the growth of the Internet and computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools, Web 2.0 technologies (for example blogs, wikis and social networking) have altered the ways in which language is used and how information is presented (Williams, 2009). The Internet and digital tools have challenged the traditional view of literacy and literacy learning as acquiring fixed, rule-governed, monomodal, static linguistic products and redefined ‘literacies’ as sociocultural, multimodal, dynamic, fluid social practices (Reinhardt and Thorne, 2011).

In order to understand socialization and participation in imagined online communities, it is important to investigate issues of whether and the extent to which, new digital literacy practices promote new forms of identities through hybrid linguistic practices in online environments. For example, Lam (2004) studied the language used by t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I The Wider Ecology of Language Learning with SNS
• Part II Pedagogies and Practitioners
• Part III Learning Benefits and Challenges
• Part IV Overview
• References
• Index