Lyman Campbell, Version 1.0, July 2006
This introduction follows naturally from Thomson’s (2005) Introduction to the Sociocultural Dimension, in which the author developed a picture of the language learner as a growing participator involved in a process of unfolding as a person within the experience of host people. He argued against reifying language, that is, viewing a language as an inanimate object to be acquired, separable from the life that people construct and experience (live) by means of that language. Language gives the developing child a particular way to make sense of experience, to build stories, including the moment-by-moment story of life as they live it. Thus, to “learn a language” is to get on the inside of that lived life, and grow within it. The shared life consists of discourses, both lived “discourses” (rational sequences of actions) and spoken discourses (dialogues, narratives, expositions). Actions of cooking, and talk about cooking, for example, flow together in the ongoing practice of cooking, which in turn interfaces with many other life discourses. Through a wide range of discourses, lived and spoken, members of a people group continue to create and maintain the world that they experience. The system of the discourses by which a sociocultural group constitutes it’s life we will term, following Thomson, their languaculture (which Thomson adopted from Agar, 1994), and we will speak of each languacultural group as living in its own languacultural world. Human events happen within a languaculture, not independently of it. Physical events are not experienced in a neutral, uninterpreted manner, as though members of two different languacultural groups can observe the identical goings on, and simply see them through different lenses. Rather, they are given meaning and connected together by the means made available through the particular languaculture. People then, are not passive observes of experience, but active “life-makers”. As host people actively co-construct their world, the growing participator attempts to join them in that process. There is no language apart from participation in life, and life as humans experience it and recall it is only possible because of the role of talking, listening, and related activities…