Social context and cognition in SLA: a variationist perspective elaine ...

A variationist perspective 65
Interlanguage variation and acquisition
Tarone and Liu (1995) report a longitudinal study of ‘Bob’, a 5-year-old Chinese
boy learning English L2 in Australia. Liu audiotaped Bob over a period of two
years in three social settings. Bob produced different levels of sentence complexity
and different stages of questions in three different social settings. Social
settings were defi ned in terms of interlocutor and the topics Bob normally talked
about with each interlocutor: (1) interactions with his teacher in class, (2) interactions
with his fellow students at desk work in class, and (3) interactions at
home with the researcher, who fi lled a role as ‘Chinese uncle’—described in Liu
(1991) as someone a child can play with, tease, and argue with. In Setting (3),
the researcher and Bob spent a good deal of time on the fl oor playing with Lego
and coloring; their discourse focuses on these activities.
Bob took few risks in Setting (1) with his teacher because his role as a
student did not permit him to; he was most focused on being accurate in this
setting. Looking at one interaction with his teacher, on 30 November 1987,
we see that Bob does not initiate turns; he only responds to the teacher’s
initiations, and he produces simple sentences and sentence fragments with
her. Note also that Bob does not initiate any negotiation of meaning with his
teacher; he produces no clarifi cation requests, for example, and he responds
only minimally to his teacher’s.
(6) Session 59 (30 Nov. 1987) lines 8185–227
t1: Bob what can I do for you?
bob: I want to publish a book.
t1: You want to publish a book. OK.
bob: This one. Ay. I’m now put in there.
t1: Now what did you do about your story, my friend?
bob: Zoo.
t1: Do you want me to write it or you write it?
bob: You write it.
t1: You want me to write it. Now which cover would you like?
Blue one or orange one? Which color?
bob: Blue one.
t1: What size do you want it? Do you want it this big or that big?
bob: This big.
t1: This big. OK. Right. So we have that size. Now do you want
to write it or do you want me to write it?
bob: You write it.
t1: Me to write it. OK. You want to put some pictures in it too?
bob: Yeah.
t1: So we need some white paper and some paper for pictures.
Have you got your stories?
bob: Yeah. About zoo.
t1: What?
bob: Zoo.
04_Batstone_Ch04.indd 65 1/27/2010 10:40:49 PM