Art Un ticle I.1 ited Sta In the ates News - Woodring College of ...

By focusing on the dialectic between structure and agency, practice theory gives equal weight tomacro-level structures (i.e. gender, class, race) and micro-level factors (i.e. an individual’sagency and capacity to resist). From this perspective, culture is seen not as a set of characteristicsas it is in cultural difference theory, but rather as a process, continually being constructed inpractice. Individuals are not seen as passively accepting the conditions in which they live andfunction. Instead, they are given agency to counter the determining structures, though they muststill do so while functioning within those structures. Through agency, individuals may have theopportunity to create a different vision for the culture in which they function, and ultimately, acton that vision in ways that challenge the status quo. However, at the same time, there arepressures on the individual to conform to the culture as currently practiced.A consideration of practice theory gives rise to the need for a sixth principle in our socioculturalmodel - awareness of cultural productions. As stated above, cultural productions are the actionsthat an individual takes both within and against the cultural confines in which he/she findshim/herself. This perspective implies that each CLD student will react in different ways to theacademic and social settings in which he/she finds him/herself. Students from nearly identicalcultural backgrounds may react to their school environment in very different ways based on arange of factors, including their interpretation of the power structure in place in the classroom orschool, their interactions and place in the social hierarchy of their peer group, or the opinion ofthe value of education held by individual family members.Given these individual idiosyncrasies, each student will determine the arenas in which she willattempt to conform to the culture of the classroom and school, and those arenas in which she willresist the system. The importance of these avenues of resistance cannot be overstated, because itis through this resistance that transformation of the cultural norms that govern the educationsetting can occur.Thus, awareness of cultural productions is an important principle in considering culturallycompatible academic settings for CLD students, because it calls into question the entire notion ofcultural compatibility. While there are, without question, certain cultural norms that will befound in the majority of the members of a given cultural group, the very nature of being a CLDstudent means that one will be thrust into a dynamic cultural milieu that will challenge and alterthe beliefs inherited from one’s heritage culture. An awareness of cultural productions meansthat a teacher will not make assumptions about a student’s academic needs, desires orpreferences based on cultural overgeneralizations. Rather, the teacher will attempt to get to knoweach student as an individual, to understand why the student accepts and rejects the aspects of theschool’s culture that he or she does, and perhaps even work with the student to transform thoseaspects of the social and academic setting that he or she opposes.ConclusionAs a framework, we have outlined what we mean by a sociocultural model of second languageacquisition. This model takes pieces from several areas of study: existing research done inunderstanding the specifics of how humans process and learn language, principles grounded inbeliefs about cultural difference, and emerging theories related to how individuals work bothwithin and against structural norms to both conform to and resist their cultural and linguisticidentities.© 2008 Dr. Catherine CollierAll Rights Reserved123