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

A variationist perspective 69
L2 acquisition, and fully describe the social and cognitive factors that underlie
this relationship.
Theoretical and practical implications
This chapter has presented empirical evidence from variationist research
showing that social setting affects both the L2 input provided to learners, and
those learners’ variable interlanguage use and acquisition over time. It has
shown that social setting affects L2 input in three ways: whether learners get
linguistically and conversationally adjusted L2 input (whether interlocutors
feel it is rude to provide it); whether helpful negotiation of meaning occurs in the
L2 (whether social dominance in a relationship prevents noticing and accurate
identifi cation of the cause of a communication problem); and whether learners
notice corrective feedback and incorporate it into their subsequent language
use (whether the social setting encourages a focus of attention on meaning as
opposed to form, and whether uptake is affected by the learner’s belief that
the interlocutor is a model to be emulated). It has shown that social setting
affects learners’ interlanguage production (or use) in code-switching, in the
use of linguistic variants tied to attention to form vs. meaning, and to attested
sociolinguistic process of change in their appropriation of ‘voices’—language
varieties tied to prestigious or minority group social roles and identities.
Variationists have developed a detailed model of bilingual sociocognition
that explains these fi ndings and others in detail (for a detailed discussion,
with empirical examples, see Preston 2000, 2002; Fasold and Preston 2007).
This model of bilingual sociocognition generates several testable hypotheses
about the relationship between specifi c social and linguistic variables and very
specifi c elements of L2 learner language. In this model of the bilingual brain,
there is a separate grammar for each language known, and each grammar is
used in accordance with empirically established sociolinguistic principles. In
using each grammar, the speaker has the capacity to systematically shift the
frequency of production of specifi ed variants of linguistic forms in response
to a range of empirically identifi ed contextual variables, both linguistic (such
as formal characteristics of the input) and social (such as diverse interlocutors
and topics). This model predicts that in each grammar (including the native
language grammar) some styles and registers (typically those internalized earliest)
are implicitly acquired (as in ‘change from below’), while other speech
styles (typically those internalized later in life, as at school) are explicitly
learned (as in ‘change from above’). These later-learned native language styles
are not as ‘deep’ in cognition as those acquired earlier, meaning they are not
as easily accessed, and may require more conscious attention and control
when they are used. In the same way, the entire grammar of a second language
can be expected to be less ‘deep’ in cognition than the entire native language
grammar, meaning that it is not as easily accessed and may be characterized by
relative uncertainty on the part of the speaker. (This view of learner language
as less deeply embedded than the native language accords with the views of
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