This is our third jointly authored project, to be presented this July at the meetings of the International Pragmatics Association in Reims, France. Our papers discuss the creation of membership in classroom discourse communities and its consequences for language students and their learning processes. Students come for a few hours a week and are not in contact with the wider culture of the foreign language. In the process, we are analyzing the discursive practices of teacher-fronted, small group and paired task configurations, their repercussions for the building of individual and group identities, and the development of sociocultural and pragmatic competence in the two settings. Our findings indicate that interaction at the micro level creates group identities that affect the perception of peers and teacher.
Teachers create and impose identities on learners, affecting their ability and motivation to learn.
We've concluded that interactional practices of students with their peers have an equally important role in making the classroom a learning community. One of the most important contrasts that can be drawn is that of the assumed homogeneity of the Spanish content class versus the heterogeneity of the ESL content class. This simple variable severely constrains how identity is displayed and developed at the micro level. It is assumed that the foreign language class has the possibility of utilizing the shared cultural schema of the students, and that the ESL class has no such possibility. Because the challenges of the two settings are distinct, the teachers' ability to direct participant roles varies, and group interactions are affected.