Part 2: Some key issues in applied linguistics
Sociocultural and ecological theories in applied linguistics
Many applied linguists whose work involves them in the field of additional language learning have developed ways of thinking about the process which draw on ideas, from disciplines such as psychology and education, where learning is conceived of as significantly inter- as well as intra-individual. '... [Slpecifically human forms of mental activity are not processes that occur invisibly inside someone's head but are instead the activity of socio-historically constituted people engaged in the historically situated activity of living' (Dunn and Lantolf 1998: 427). Particularly influential here is the work of Vygotsky and his sociocultural theory of mind, which has been taken up by a number of applied linguists- see, for example, Lantolf 2000a, Lantolf and Pavlenko 1995, Smagorinsky 2001.
A further development in culturally situated accounts of language use and language learning, to which some of the same researchers have contributed, makes use of the metaphor of ecology. Rejecting the implications of likening language learning either to the input-output process associated with machines and computers, or to the linear acculturation process associated with a period of apprenticeship, ecological approaches invoke a concept of language learning as 'a nonlinear, relational human activity, co-constructed between humans and their environment, contingent upon their position in space and history, and a site of struggle for the control of power and cultural memory' (Kramsch 2002a: 5).
This much more global view of what applied linguists are interested in takes us beyond applicable descriptions of language itself, and accounts of language learning and use as intersubjective practices. Here we consider a selection of the ways in which the discipline intersects with the study of social institutions and issues of power.
