The papers in this volume all articulate a keen awareness of the shift in sociolinguistic economies caused by online technologies. We now live in an online-offline nexus of communication, and realizing this invites changes in the ways in which we traditionally view and imagine the foundations of our disciplinary approaches. In reviewing the…

Language has featured prominently in contemporary social theory, but the relevance of this fact to the concerns of Applied Linguistics, with its necessary orientation to practical issues of language in context, represents an ongoing challenge. This article supports the need for a greater engagement with theory in Applied Linguistics. It considers…

This article argues that while there exists considerable overlap and potentially productive dialogue between political theory and language policy scholarship, any such effort will be hampered by the dominant approaches to political theory that assume individualistic and instrumentalist conceptions of language. Augmenting the language ideologies…

Sociocultural theories consider language learning as a social practice examines students as active participants in the construction of learning processes. This study investigates sociocultural theories' central concepts, which includes peer interaction and feedback, private speech, and self-efficacy. The present study is a case study of twenty…

From 1890-1914, Argentina received a large influx of Italian immigrants who wanted to "hacer la América," or live the American dream of economic prosperity. With Italian immigrants representing nearly half of all immigrants entering Argentina, the government strived to create a new sense of Argentine pride and nationalism. The objective…

This paper discusses recent trends in language pedagogy that emphasize movement from a psycholinguistic to a more sociocultural view of language teaching and learning. Nourished primarily by sociocultural theory and Hinton's (2002, 2003) efforts to promote the stabilization of indigenous languages, the author presents Narrative Language…

One of the key concerns of educators is to come to know what works in language teaching and under which conditions (Intercultural) Communicative Competence can be furthered. This concern is even bigger among professionals experimenting or willing to experiment with new media. Following socio-constructivist theories of learning (Vygotsky, 1978) and…

Recent work integrating Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) with Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) forms a basis for systematizing action research in higher education. This basis strengthens what are often otherwise its methodological weaknesses, namely, the disconnection between analysis and subsequent plans for action and the…

Although Firth and Wagner (1997) did not explicitly discuss the issue of identity in second language acquisition (SLA) research, their article was symptomatic of a general trend to open up SLA to social theory and sociological and sociolinguistic research, which in turn led some researchers to explore links between second language (L2) learning…

Discusses three positions regarding the definition of sociolinguistic theory: (1) sociolinguistic theory is proper linguistic theory; (2) sociolinguistic theory is an accumulation of mini-theories; and (3) sociolinguistic theory as social theory. (Author/VWL)

The centrality of the notion of social identity to current work on language learning reflects a renewed theoretical and political concern for the social dimension of language learning. Discusses the ways in which current work in this area involves conflicting points of view or misses the opportunity to connect with other relevant work. (JL)