Language socialization in the absence of language and society? A case study of how students of a large public American university in the Midwest construct sociocultural and language knowledge inside and outside of their Russian language classroom.

摘要

This study represents an ethnographic account of what it means to learn the Russian language in a sociocultural sense outside of Russia, in fact, in a classroom in a large public American university in the Midwest. Analyzed data included fieldnotes of classroom observations and interviews with four focal students and their teacher. The findings are presented in the light of the theoretical framework based on the works of Mikhail Bakhtin and Lev Vygotsky. The social work performed by the students and related to learning Russian was considered as a cultural practice in Vygotskian understanding, i.e., as organization of one's thinking that results in the social activities of taking a foreign language class and looking for other opportunities to use the language of choice. The nature of this practice was described based on Bakhtinian understanding of dialogue and monologue in culture. Students' practice of learning a foreign language proved to be dialogic, i.e., constantly evolving in a dialogue with multiple individually interpreted societal discourses related to classroom culture, the concept of an educated person, relationships between Russia and America, etc. Students' and teacher's interactions within the classroom and with the researcher during the interviews were described as constrained by social speech genres, monologic in nature, i.e., following rather rigid and closed forms of Initiation, Response, and Evaluation (IRE) and creating a cultural narrative in a conversation. Based on these findings, the study provides both theoretical and pedagogical implications. It joins the literature discourse related to the notions of culture, practice, and socialization along the lines of a postmodern perspective building on Bakhtinian and Vygotskian ideas. For individual teachers who deal with the concept of culture in their classrooms everyday, it provides an insight into understanding culture as a multidimensional phenomenon co-constructed in a dialogue, but a dialogue often constrained by the monologic genres of classroom interaction, and helps them think of new ways of creatively weaving cultural knowledge into their unique pedagogies.