cohesion - European Centre for Modern Languages

Such work, addressing the cognitive and motivational aspects of interpersonal
behaviour linked to the social mind, shows how strongly culture and communication
feature in our minds and even ultimately how this impacts on our brains, biologically as
well as intellectually (Valsiner and van der Veer 2000; Forgas, Williams and Wheeler
2001). We start to see that, as language educators, one of our central claims that culture
is intimately and deeply part of all communication is receiving remarkable
documentation from diverse sources. More and more the isolated person is
disappearing from the sciences.
This is deeply true of epistemology, the science of how we come to know what we
know. In longstanding work on activity, Barbara Rogoff (1990, 2003) has conducted
many close studies of “socially situated activities” which focus on our socially
constituted practices. These identify how both the routine of activity and the problemsolving
dimensions of activity depend on social and negotiated interaction. And
therefore talk, in the form of the conversation.
Some pointers for language teaching
This work seems to me to provide clues to productive ways of thinking about social
cohesion and its links to language learning and language use. Engagement in common
problem solving but also in routine everyday tasks when it is guided by overall learning
principles, one that Bateson calls the “metalogue”, assists in engendering a sequence of
social identities.
First, there is often the imagined community of practice in which individual differences
are dissolved in the practice of engaging in shared activity or common tasks. In the
course of running an activity whose essential problem has been solved, individuals
seem to experience actual community and cohesive identities – the shared mind.
Ideally, but not inevitably, this can remain, cognitively and experientially, as
“remembered identity”. Engaging in shared participation in tasks requires the
negotiative compromises.
Language learning and language use are inescapable and central to this project, but not
language learning that remains at the formal level of grammar, or even of teaching
foreign cultures for admiration. Investing language learning with the practices of
fostering social cohesion aims to insert within pedagogy practices that forge a sense of
social cohesion via shared activity, in projects of conversation and communication that
forge links across differences. This is a kind of shared activity-based language work.
The temptation is to locate such activity-based language learning around tasks that
highlight joint citizenship projects, or community responsibility projects, and while
these are worthwhile it is more important to make activity-based collaborative learning
a practice throughout language learning.
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