Discourse Patterns in First Language Use at Hcme and Second Language Learning at School: an Ethnographic Approach

Literature / 51

Definitione of context may be narrow or wider but as long as they include
the 'assumptions about what participants know or take for granted', they
refer to the culturally-constructed repertoire that reflects the
regularities of life within a society, with a particular social structure,
ideology, conceptual systems, ecology, history etc.

This background provides a definite direction and structures our
expectations about what is going to take place ... all this tacit
knowledge has its origins beyond the individual, and it is its
sociocultural basis that forms the interpretive background of our
individual minds. <Hundelde,1985:310-311).

The Vygotskian theory not only provides a philosophical base to these
recent developments in linguistics and ethnography, but offers an
explanation of the mechanisms by which culture is transformed into
cognition via language, with its differentiation between spontaneous and
scientific concepts and his focusing on the mediational capacities of
signs. Human beings use signs to organize and plan sign-using activity
itself: whether oral or written, 'language becomes its own context'
(Hickmann,1985:240; Vertsch,1985b).

Considering the choice of the unit of analysis, Cole (1985a:153) finds a
close 'correspondence between the Soviet concept of activity and the
anthropological notions of event or context'. Vhat constructs like
'literacy event' (Heath,1983), 'literacy practice' (Street,1984), 'speech
event' (Saville-Troike,1982), 'speech economy and speaking performance'
(Bauman and Sherzer,1974), 'participation structure’ (Philips,1972) have In
common is the attempt to consider as object of study the microcosm of
individuals engaged in a social activity in certain situational contexts
for certain functions. The emphasis is not simply on behaviour but on the
knowledge necessary to produce that behaviour: it is in this respect,
among others, that contemporary anthropological research fits well with
socio-hlstorical theory:

Because the statement of functional relevance considers relations
between parts and the whole, such work involves systems thinking.
It is in this sense that ethnographic work is 'holistic', not
because of the size of the social unit but because units of
analysis are considered analytically as wholes... .
(Erickson,1981:19).

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