Mind, Language, and Epistemology:

Toward a Language Socialization

Paradigm for SLA
KAREN ANN WATSONGEGEO
School of Education
University of California, Davis
81 Bonnie Lane
Berkeley, CA 94708
Email: kawatsongegeo@ucdavis.edu
For some time now second language acquisition (SLA) research has been hampered by un-
helpful debates between the cognitivist and sociocultural camps that have generated
more acrimony than useful theory. Recent developments in second generation cognitive sci-
ence, first language acquisition studies, cognitive anthropology, and human development re-
search, however, have opened the way for a new synthesis. This synthesis involves a reconsid-
eration of mind, language, and epistemology, and a recognition that cognition originates in
social interaction and is shaped by cultural and sociopolitical processes: These processes are
central rather than incidental to cognitive development. Here I lay out the issues and argue
for a language socialization paradigm for SLA that is consistent with and embracive of the
new research.
WEAREATTHEBEGINNINGOF APARADIGM
shift in the human and social sciences that is revo-
lutionizing the way we view mind, language, epis-
temology, and learning, and that is fundamen-
tally transforming second language acquisition
(SLA) and educational theory and research. This
paradigm shift is being stimulated by new re-
search in the cognitive sciences (Churchland,
2002; Fauconnier & Turner, 2002; Levy,
Bairaktaris, Gullinaria, & Cairns, 1995; Rumel-
hart, McClelland et al., 1986; Schwartz & Begley,
2002; Solso & Massaro, 1995; Spitzer, 1999;
Varella, Thompson, & Rosch, 2000), human and
child development (Burman, 1994; James &
Prout, 1997; Jessor, Colby, & Shweder, 1996;
Lewis &Watson-Gegeo, 2004; Mayall, 2002; Shon-
koff & Phillips, 2000; Wozniak & Fischer, 1993),
first language acquisition and socialization (Gib-
son, 1982; K. Nelson, 1996; Schieffelin & Ochs,
1986; Seidenberg, 1997; Slobin, 1985; Watson-
Gegeo, 2001), cognitive anthropology (Chaiklin
& Lave, 1996; Gumperz & Levinson, 1996; Hol-
land&Quinn, 1987; Lave &Wenger, 1991; Shore,
1991; Strauss & Quinn, 1997; Watson-Gegeo &
Gegeo, 1999a), cognitive linguistics (Ungerer &
Schmid, 1996), and the critical social sciences, in-
cluding cultural and cross-cultural psychology
(M. Cole, 1996; L. M. W. Martin, Nelson, & To-
bach, 1995; Segall, Dasen, Berry, & Poortinga,
1999; Sinha, 1997; Stigler, Sweder, & Herdt,
1990).
The shift is also prompted by the flow of re-
search from the periphery to the center of politi-
cal power. Third wave feminist studies (Alcoff &
Potter, 1993; Bhavnani, Foran, & Kurian, 2003;
Weedon, 1997), and ethnic studies from colonial
and postcolonial societies, including currently
colonized indigenous and ethnic minority peo-
ples within dominant societies, are consonant
with the new findings in the human sciences.
And in turn, the voices of these scholars and
their claims for indigenous and other standpoint
epistemologies (Collins, 2000; Gegeo, 1994;
Gegeo & Watson-Gegeo, 2001, 2003; Wautischer,
1998) are supported by the new research. The
emergence of formerly silenced voices is part of
the contemporary process of globalization in
which peoples on the periphery within and out-
The Modern Language Journal, 88, iii, (2004)
0026-7902/04/331350 $1.50/0
2004 The Modern Language Journal
side dominant or center societies, rather than
being passively affected by globalization, are ac-
tively reacting to and participating in it. They are
speaking on their own behalf to the centers of
knowledge construction and power, in order to
promote their interests and the ongoing decolo-
nization process. This remarkable and creative
combination of sociopolitical events and tra-
jectories in mainstream and non-mainstream
research has already seriously eroded the univer-
salist assumptions that have until now deter-
mined mainstream theory and method and that
are anchored in Anglo-Euro-American cultural
ontology and epistemology.
The paradigm shift has begun to be felt in SLA
scholarly social spaces through new cognitive sci-
ence-based theories of language (see Doughty &
Long, 2003; also Atkinson, 2002; Martinez,
2001), including emergentism theory (N. C.
Ellis, 1998; MacWhinney, 1999), and criticalist
sociocultural studies of second language learn-
ing and teaching (e.g., Canagarajah, 1999; Tol-
lefson, 1995). The conventional paradigm for
SLA research has come under increasing criti-
cism since the late 1970s for (a) its exclusive reli-
ance on Cartesian, positivistic assumptions about
reality, (b) its experimental modes of inquiry
that cannot incorporate cultural and socio-
political context into its models, (c) its basis in
structuralist or other problematic linguistic theo-
ries, and (d) its inability to produce implications
for pedagogy that actually work for second lan-
guage teaching, especially in the periphery (i.e.,
third- and fourth-world situations; Block, 1996;
Crookes, 1997; Firth & Wagner, 1997; Jacobs &
Schumann, 1992; Kramsch, 1995; Lantolf, 1996;
Liddicoat, 1997; Pallotti, 1996; Pennycook, 1994;
Rampton, 1997a, 1997b).
However, recent developments have opened
the way for a new synthesis involving a reconsid-
eration of mind, language, epistemology, and
learning, based on the recognition that cog-
nition originates in social interaction and is
shaped by cultural and sociopolitical processes.
That is, cultural and sociopolitical processes are
central, rather than incidental, to cognitive de-
velopment.
My purpose here is twofold. First, I overview in
brief, outline fashion some of the diverse lines of
research and thinking that converge on a set of
general principles for cognitive development
and social practice, which are still to be under-
stood in full through further research. In being
indicative rather than exhaustive, I highlight
some of the subtleties in issues of social influ-
ences and experience in shaping mind and lan-
guage skills that are undertheorized in SLA, and
I identify lines of work that have not yet entered
SLA social spaces. Second, I argue for a language
socialization paradigm for SLA. Such a paradigm
would be embracive of and consistent with the
new research.
NEW UNDERSTANDINGS ABOUT
MIND AND LANGUAGE FROM THE
COGNITIVE SCIENCES
What do we now know about cognitive pro-
cesses and the human brain? The shift fromcogni-
tion to mind in much of the research discourse on
cognitive development reflects current under-
standings about the brain and thinking. First,
neuroscience research (Churchland, 1986, 2002;
Dacey, 2001; Edelman, 1992; Fauconnier &
Turner, 2002; Goldblum, 2001; Quartz & Sej-
nowski, 2002) has demonstrated that the body-
mind dualism of Western philosophical and
mainstream scientific thought, in which cogni-
tion rides in a detached fashion above the body
and is in some sense distinct from itan idea still
implicit in much educational and SLA research
and teachingis fundamentally mistaken. What
we humans understand about the world we un-
derstand because we have the kinds of bodies and
potential for neural development that we have
(Regier, 1995, 1996; Varela et al., 2000). Even
our scientific instruments are an extension of our
bodily capacities, and built on the assumptions
we make about the nature of reality (ontology)
and our way(s) of creating knowledge about real-
ity (epistemology), and based on our bodys ways
of detecting and relating to the world. All cogni-
tive processes are thus embodied.
Second, most cognitive scientists estimate that
more than 95% of all thought is unconscious
what Lakoff and Johnson (1999) called the
cognitive unconsciousand it is this uncon-
scious thought, lying outside our awareness, that
shapes and structures all conscious thought (p.
13; see also Baumgartner & Payr, 1995; Jacoby,
1991; Naatanen, 1992; Schneider, Pimm-Smith,
& Worden, 1994; Solso & Massaro, 1995). In-
cluded in the cognitive unconscious is all im-
plicit knowledge that we have learned through
socialization beginning in the prenatal months.
Third, mind is a better term than cognition be-
cause the latter tends to focus on only parts of the
mind, typically what Vygotsky (1981) called the
higher mental functions of voluntary memory,
logical reasoning, language, metacognitive skills,
and some forms of categorization. Most of our
theoretical models of cognitive skills acquisition
332 The Modern Language Journal 88 (2004)
assume that these higher-order cognitive skills
are independent of other mental processes. How-
ever, through research on patients who have lost
emotional capacity via brain damage, cognitive
scientists have shown that without emotional ca-
pacity, people cannot make rational judgments,
including moral decisions. Emotions are essen-
tial to logical reasoning (Damasio, 1994). As
developmentalist Kurt Fischer and his colleagues
argued (Fischer, Wang, Kennedy, & Chang,
1998), emotions have well-defined roles in hu-
man activity and are not opposed to cognition,
as is assumed in Western culture; to the contrary,
[emotion] links closely with cognition to shape
action, thought, and long-term development
(pp. 2223). Three neuroscientific models have
been proposed and are being investigated to ac-
count for emotions and their role in human activ-
ity (network, Halgren & Marinkovic, 1995; poly-
vagal, Porges, 1995; and hemispheric asymmetry,
Davidson, 1992, Fox 1991; see Byrnes, 2001, for a
summary).
Fourth, our earlier conception of cognition
has been further expanded to incorporate many
other components of a human mental life, in-
cluding symbolic capacity, self, will, belief, and
desire (e.g., Ingvar, 1999; E. K. Miller, 2000;
Schwartz & Begley, 2002; Shweder, 1996; Silber-
sweig & Stern, 1998).
Fifth, not only is language metaphorical, but
because of the kind of neural networks we build
in our brains, thought itself is metaphorical and
made possible through categorization that is typ-
ically conceptualized as prototypes (Rosch &
Lloyd, 1978; Smith & Medin, 1981; Taylor,
1989). Some categories and prototypes are in-
herent in the kind of body and mind we human
beings have, and therefore may be said to be uni-
versal. A great many categories and prototypes,
however, in fact probably the majority, are socio-
culturally constructed and therefore vary cross-
culturally.
Sixth, until now we have conceptualized the
brain metaphorically as a container of intelli-
gence, knowledge, and cognitive skills, and the
individual as a container for the brain and as pos-
sessing (or failing to possess) societally desired
cognitive skills. Our metaphor has thus very
much determined the way we look at human
thinking and behavior, and certainly the way we
measure and assess the cognitive abilities of stu-
dents in schools and language classes. Some of
the most interesting research in human develop-
ment over the past several years has up-ended
this conception of cognition. Research demon-
strates that both the content and process of
thinking . . . are distributed as much among indi-
viduals as they are packed within them (M. Cole
& Engestrm, 1993, p. 1). The discovery of
distributed cognitionsthat people think in con-
junction with others, that cognition is socially
constructed through collaboration (Resnick, Le-
vine, & Teasley, 1991; Salomon, 1993)links to
the work that is going on in cognitive anthropol-
ogy and by standpoint epistemologists on the na-
ture of knowledge construction (see below).
Even Vygotskian theory (1978, 1981; Rogoff,
1990) is subject to the critique of not being social
enough, and as yet continuing to treat the mind
as a container for the transfer of knowledge
(Atkinson, 2002; Brandt, 2000; Watson-Gegeo,
1990).
What have we discovered about language from
cognitive science research? First, research has
discovered no structure in the brain that corre-
sponds to a Language Acquisition Device as ar-
gued by Chomsky and others. Language is not
completely a human genetic innovation because
its central aspects arise via evolutionary processes
from neural systems that are present in so-called
lower animals (Bates, Thal, & Marchman,
1991). There can be no pure syntax separate
from meaning, emotion, action, and other dy-
namic aspects of the mind and communication.
Linguistic concepts, like all other cognitive pro-
cesses, arise fromthe embodied nature of human
existence and through experience (Langacker,
1990, 1991). Language develops through the
same general processes as other cognitive skills,
and grammar is a matter of highly structured
neural connections (Churchland & Sejnowski,
1992; Elman, Bates, Johnson, Karmiloff-Smith,
Parisi, &Plunkett, 1996; Plunket &Elman, 1997).
Second, innateness is usually equated with
language universals. However, if we are to be
consistent with cognitive science, emergentism,
connectionism, and cognitive linguistics, what
we take to be universal typically involves univer-
sals of common human experience starting after
birth. In other words, it is not just a matter of
what we are born with, but the fact that we hu-
man beings occupy a set of environments with
and within which our body-mind has co-evolved
and that present us with common experiences.
These experiences include, as Lakoff and John-
son (1999) phrased it, the conceptual poles of
grammatic constructions, universals of spatial re-
lations, and universals of metaphor (p. 508; see
also Fauconnier, 1997; Koenig, 1998). The rest is
culturally variable (see Chafe & Nichols, 1986); it
is shaped by gender, ethnicity, social class, and
sociohistorical, sociopolitical processes (Chaik-
Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo 333
lin & Lave, 1996; Segall et al., 1999; Stephens,
1995) in very powerful ways that affect percep-
tions, assumptions, language(s), and other un-
derstandings of the world.
While some theorists continue to defend or re-
invent Chomskys theories, or both (e.g., Chom-
sky, 1995; Fodor, 1998; Pinker, 1994; White,
2003), biologists and neuroscientists have shown
that a built-in Universal Grammar (UG) or lan-
guage acquisition structure is unnecessary for ex-
plaining language universals. Chomskyian the-
ory failed a major test when McWhorter (1997)
devastatingly critiqued Bickertons (1988, 1990)
Chomsky-based bioprogram model of creole
language formation, showing that, for instance,
the grammatical structures that Bickerton
claimed Surinam Creole speakers had suppos-
edly created from UG turned out to be trans-
ferred from the African substrate. Evolutionary
biologist/primatologist Terence Deacon (1997)
convincingly demonstrated that languages have
had to adapt to childrens spontaneous as-
sumptions about communication, learning, so-
cial interaction, and even symbolic reference
(p. 109)placing the social in the center of the
linguistic:
The theory that there are innate rules for grammar
commits the fallacy of collapsing the irreducible so-
cial evolutionary process [of language evolution and
change] into a static formal structure. . . . The link
from psychological universals to linguistic universals
is exceedingly indirect at best. . . . The brain has
co-evolved with respect to language, but languages
have done most of the adapting. (pp. 121122)
Chomskyian theory is but one account of lan-
guage in linguistic theory, yet Pinkers (1994)
and Krashens (1985) works have been read by a
wider public, and language teachers at all levels
often assume a Chomskyian perspective (per-
haps unconsciously) on language that affects
teaching moments with students, even if they are
attempting to teach according to best practice
that incorporates language use and sociocultural
issues (as modeled or argued in, e.g., Berns,
1990; Kramsch, 1995; Kern, 2000; McGroarty,
1998; or Larsen-Freeman, 2000).
Third, language structure, language use, and
language acquisition are inseparable because ex-
perience shapes all our neural networks. These
processes are therefore also shaped by socio-
historical, sociocultural, and sociopolitical pro-
cesses, because language change, use, and learn-
ing occur insocial, cultural, andpolitical contexts
that constrain and shape linguistic forms in vari-
ous ways, and mark their significance. The politi-
cal nature of language learning and use is increas-
ingly a focus of researchincomplex first language
and second language situations, from a variety of
critical perspectives (Caldas-Coulthard & Coult-
hard, 1996; Canagarajah, 1999; Chouliaraki &
Fairclough, 1999; Huebner & Davis, 1999;
Kroskrity, 2000; Peirce, 1995a, 1995b; Penny-
cook, 1994; Phillipson, 1992; Tollefson, 1995;
Watson-Gegeo & Gegeo, 1994, 1995).
The latter issues are at the heart of ontology,
epistemology, and learning. To move into issues
of ontology and epistemology, we first need to
examine what we currently understand about
how knowledge is organized by and in the em-
bodied mind.
ONTOLOGY, CULTURAL MODELS,
AND EPISTEMOLOGY: COGNITIVE
ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE VOICES
OF THE OTHER
Ontology refers to what there is, and episte-
mology to how we know. Work in cognitive an-
thropology over the past two decades has revis-
ited the once discredited issue of linguistic
relativity, and through empirical research, has
demonstrated that differences in languages do
have a significant impact on differences in think-
ing (Gumperz & Levinson, 1996). Levinson
(1996), Lee (1996), and Silverstein (2000), in
particular, have launched brilliant reconsider-
ations of Whorfs (1956) principle of linguistic
relativity and the data at its basis, correcting the
gross misrepresentations of the past. Lees devas-
tating critique of Pinkers (1994) carelessness in
confusing data completely undermines his dis-
missal of Whorfs ideas, for instance.
The new work on linguistic relativity is closely
related to empirical research on cultural models
for thinking and behaving by cognitive anthro-
pologists using schema and prototype theory
(DAndrade & Strauss, 1992; Holland, Lachi-
cotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998; Holland & Quinn,
1987; Shore, 1991). In turn, the work on cultural
models is parallel to research by psycholinguist
K. Nelson (1996) and her colleagues on chil-
drens language development, which also draws
on schema and script theory. Nelson (1996) ar-
gued that Human minds are equipped to con-
struct complicated mental models that rep-
resent . . . the complexities of the social and
cultural world (p. 12). She proposed the term
Mental Event Representation (MER) for the basic
flexible structures of childrens cognitive devel-
opment, in the form of schemas and scripts that
334 The Modern Language Journal 88 (2004)
become a mental context for future behavior in
similar situations.
Cognitive anthropologists argue that cultur-
ally shared knowledge is organized into cultural
models, defined as prototypical event sequences
in simplified worlds (Quinn & Holland, 1987, p.
24; Holland et al., 1998, expanded this idea into
figured worlds). Cultural models frame and in-
terpret experience and guide a variety of cogni-
tive tasks, including setting goals, planning, di-
recting action, making sense of action, and
verbalization (Quinn & Holland, 1987). They
operate below the surface level of behavior and
the linguistic level of morphology and syntax, to
shape perception, information processing, and
the assignment of values (Gegeo & Watson-
Gegeo, 1999). Analytically, cultural models are
compatible with a neural network model of the
embodied mind.
Typically inpsycholinguistic research, the com-
plex interrelationships among forms of cultural
knowledge across domains are not addressed. In
contrast, an important insight from cognitive an-
thropology is the relationship between cultural
models and the systematic or thematic nature of
cultural knowledge. Quinn and Holland (1987)
argued that this thematicity is the result of a
small number of very general purpose cultural
models that are repeatedly incorporated into
other cultural models (pp. 1011) in hierarchi-
cal and other arrangements. General-purpose
models or premises operating across several cul-
tural domains give a culture its distinctiveness
and reduce the total amount of cultural knowl-
edge to be mastered by the learner.
Knowledge encoded in cultural models is
brought to bear on specific tasks in the form of
metaphorical proposition-schemas and image-
schemas (Lakoff, 1984; Quinn & Holland, 1987).
A proposition-schema specifies concepts and the
relations which hold among them (Quinn &
Holland, 1987, p. 25), such as (among Ameri-
cans), ARGUMENT IS WAR (Lakoff & Johnson,
1980), versus, for instance, in Kwaraae, Solomon
Islands, ARGUMENTATION IS STRAIGHTEN-
ING OUT (Watson-Gegeo, 1995), or, to take an-
other example from Kwaraae, FAMILIES
SHARE FOOD WITHOUT EXPECTATION OF
RETURN. An image-schema is more gestalt-like
and usually metaphorical, such as the American
image-schema MARRIAGE IS A JOURNEY
(Quinn, 1987, 1997), or the Kwaraae image-
schema EXTENDED FAMILY MEMBERS ARE
ALL ONE HEARTH (or one basket/house-
hold/garden/cluster of baking stones). This lat-
ter image-schema means that extended family
members are all one family, and thus the
proposition-schema FAMILIES SHARE FOOD
WITHOUT EXPECTATION OF RETURN ap-
plies to all of them.
Cultural modelswhich are usually tacitly
understood, and often unconsciouslie at the
heart of cultural identity, ontology, and indige-
nous and local epistemology. Until very recently,
ontology and epistemology were treated as what
Western philosophy and science had invented,
while everybody else had only a world-view and
commonsense strategies for discovering knowl-
edge needed to survive in the local environment.
Today, scholars from third-world societies and
from indigenous societies living under colonial
conditions in first- and second-world societies are
challenging the privileging of Western ontology
and scientific epistemology. This challenging has
come in the wake of the critique of mainstream
epistemology by third wave feminist scholars
against the Anglo-Euro-American patriarchal po-
sitioning of mainstream epistemology.
Epistemology refers to both the theory of
knowledge and theorizing knowledge (Gold-
man, 1986, 1999). Epistemology is concerned
with who can be a knower, what can be known,
what constitutes knowledge, sources of evidence
for constructing knowledge, what constitutes
truth, how truth is to be verified, how evidence
becomes truth, how valid inferences are to be
drawn, the role of belief in evidence, and related
issues (Gegeo & Watson-Gegeo, 2001; see also
Williams & Muchena, 1991). Social epistemolo-
gists (e.g., Fuller, 1988) and feminist epistemolo-
gists (e.g., Code, 1991; Grosz, 1990; Haraway,
1988; L. H. Nelson, 1993) recognize with sociolo-
gists of knowledge (Bloor, 1991; Dant, 1991;
Stehr, 1994) that epistemological agents are
communities rather than individuals. In other
words, knowledge is constructed by communi-
tiesepistemological communitiesrather than
collections of independently knowing individu-
als (Gegeo & Watson-Gegeo, 2001, p. 58), and
such communities are epistemologically prior to
individuals who know (L. H. Nelson, 1993, p.
124). Feminist epistemologists, parallel to neuro-
scientists, recognize the embodiment of knowl-
edge. Grosz (1993) cogently argued that the cur-
rent crisis of reason in Western culture and
philosophy is a consequence of the historical
privileging of the purely conceptual or mental
over the corporeal, and the inability of Western
knowledges to conceive their own processes of
(material) production, processes that simulta-
neously rely on and disavow the role of the body
(p. 187). Both of these points are consistent with
Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo 335
the new findings of cognitive science and devel-
opmentalist research just reviewed. However,
feminists add the additional and crucial insight
that human bodies are not all the same. In partic-
ular, Western positivistic research typically as-
sumes a male body and usually a White middle-
class heterosexual male experience of and in the
world.
Moreover, the feminist and third-world chal-
lenge to Western rationality and normal science
takes all these arguments a step further to chal-
lenge the taken-for-granted objectivity on which
much of Western science depends for its claim
that the knowledge it produces is necessarily uni-
versal and always superior to all other forms of
knowledge. Particularly relevant to the present
discussion is standpoint epistemology as developed
by feminists, which recognizes that Knowledge
claims are always socially situated (Harding,
1993, p. 54). That is, all knowledge is subjective,
positioned (i.e., from a standpoint, not objective
in a final sense), historically variable, and spe-
cific, even when what is constructed turns out to
have universal implications. With the realization
that all knowledge is situated comes the recogni-
tion of the importance of who gets to be the
knowledge producers versus those who are only
allowed or able to be knowledge consumers, and
why there is so much power in the hands of those
who control knowledge. Knowledge is political
as well as cultural, and for this reason, research-
ers must ask, who gets to represent whom?
Typically, it has been White Anglo-Euro-Ameri-
can researchers who study and represent mainly
non-European Others who are not allowed
voice to represent themselves as they wish to be
or are positioned. As Yeatman (1994) put it,
Who must be silenced in order that these repre-
sentations prevail? (p. 31).
However, the prevailing relations are in a very
early stage of changing, through the new re-
search by third-world scholars writing about
their own cultures ontologies, epistemologies,
and cultural models. Indigenous epistemology re-
fers to an indigenous cultural groups ways of
thinking and of creating, reformulating, and the-
orizing about knowledge via traditional dis-
courses and media of communication, anchor-
ing the truth of the discourse in culture (Gegeo
& Watson-Gegeo, 2001, p. 58; see also Gegeo,
1994; Gegeo & Watson-Gegeo, 2002). Local episte-
mology refers to processes of creating knowledge
that are situated in local conditions and relation-
ships and may be partially or wholly shared
across cultural groups. As concepts, indigenous
and local epistemology focus on the process
through which knowledge is constructed and val-
idated by a cultural group and on the role of that
process in shaping thinking and behavior. Un-
derlying these concepts is the assumption that
all epistemological systems [are] socially con-
structed and (in)formed through sociopolitical,
economic, and historical context and processes
(Gegeo & Watson-Gegeo, 2001, p. 58). Together,
ontology, epistemology, and cultural models
constitute deep culture (Watson-Gegeo & Gegeo,
2004).
Culture is not uniform and unchanging; it is
variable, an ongoing conversation embodying
conflict and change, shaped by the dialectic of
structure and agency (Giddens, 1979), inher-
ently ideological, and prone to manipulation
and distortion by powerful interests (Foucault,
1980; Gramsci, 1978; Habermas, 1979). Bhaba
(1994) argued that cultures and cultural forms
are in a continuous process of hybridity, creating
a third space (p. 38) for new cultural posi-
tionings to develop or be constructed, (re)creat-
ing current versions of cultures, and so on. That
means, as Chaudhry (1995) pointed out, that hy-
brid individuals exhibit hybrid identities as well
as hybrid world-views deriving from different sys-
tems of meaning (p. 49). Nevetheless, people
usually have an internal sense of their cultural
positioning(s). As Hall (1991) argued, cultural
identity and knowledges involve two senses of
the self: of one shared culture, a sort of collec-
tive one true self, hiding inside the many other,
more superficial or artificially imposed selves,
which people with a shared history and ancestry
hold in common; and of identity and knowl-
edges produced by the ruptures and discontinu-
ities that result in critical points of deep and
significant difference (p. 223). Although hybrid-
ity is associated now with diaspora(s), colonial-
ism, postcolonial history, and globalization, the
complexity it evokes (Canclini, 1995) is perhaps
more easily grasped in multicultural/multilin-
gual nations than in the United States (where
mainstream interests try to suppress or downplay
multilingualism and multiculturalism). Even
with the reality that culture(s) is/are always mov-
ing and changing, people undertake their own
critical reflection on culture, history, knowledge,
politics, economics, and the sociopolitical con-
texts in which they are living their lives. They act
on these reflections, and in all known societies,
there exist formal contexts for direct teaching of
cultural knowledge and values.
Latour (1986) pointed out that to gain West-
ern recognition as useful and meaningful, tra-
ditional and local knowledges typically must be
336 The Modern Language Journal 88 (2004)
translated into Western scientific discourse
that is, the parts that seem relevant to a West-
ern science are extracted from the whole and re-
organized into discourse that looks scientific to
Westerners, transforming acceptable elements
into universal knowledge (see also Vos, 2000).
This treatment of the knowledge systems of cul-
tural Others is an indication of the role of power
and sociopolitical processes in knowledge con-
struction and use, including language learning
and discourse forms. As anthropologist Raffles
(2002) argued:
Explanatory power results less from intrinsic truth-
fulness than from the successful collaboration of po-
litical, cultural, and biophysical actors. . . . In this ac-
count, scientific knowledge is as much a local
knowledge [as any other] . . . all knowledges are also
intimate . . . [and] intimacies are necessarily rela-
tional. [Intimate knowledge] draws attention to the
embeddedness of social practice in relations of
power. (pp. 327328)
The recognition that all knowledge is posi-
tioned and situated in sociohistorical, socio-
political contexts brings us to the questions,
What do the new understandings about body-
mind imply for context? And how do people
learn?
CONTEMPORARY UNDERSTANDINGS OF
HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, SITUATED
LEARNING, AND CONTEXT
The new research has made older cognitivist
theoretical assumptions about development and
learning obsolete. One of the best accounts of
how our understandings have changed is found
in the National Academy of Sciences book, pub-
lished in 2000, From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The
Science of Early Childhood Development (Shonkoff &
Phillips, 2000). First, by asserting that human
development is shaped by a dynamic and contin-
uous interaction between biology and culture,
the national panel stated that the nature versus
nurture debate is thus scientifically obsolete
(p. 3). As Spitzer (1999) pointed out:
We have demonstrated that the connections be-
tween the neurons in a human brain cannot possibly
be genetically determined, because the entire hu-
man genome is by far too small to contain the neces-
sary information. Instead, humans learn through
interactions with the environment that change the
connections in our biological brains. (p. 38)
Second, genetics and environment not only af-
fect but are affected by a childs agency in devel-
opment. The transmission model of develop-
ment and socialization is therefore also scientifi-
cally obsolete. Not only adults, but also children
are active participants in their own develop-
ment and help to shape their environment
(Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000, p. 24).
Third, the idea that development is entirely
and necessarily universal with regard to the spe-
cifics of stage and trajectory is now obsolete.
The effects of culture on child development are
pervasive, the panel declared. Culture influ-
ences every aspect of human development and
is fundamental to what happens (Shonkoff &
Phillips, 2000, p. 25; see also P. J. Miller & Good-
now, 1995). The determination that culture is
formative entails recognizing the influence of
the family and family organization. Today there
is a turn towards seeing the family rather than
the individual child as the unit of analysis. Some
of the leading human development departments
in U.S. universities are changing their names to
reflect this new emphasis. For instance, the de-
partment at the University of WisconsinMadi-
son recently changed its name from Human
Development to Human Development and
Family Studies, and faculty have begun collabo-
rative research projects, using qualitative and
ethnographic methods.
Fourth, critical period as a description or
boundary for certain kinds of development is
now a dispreferred term, having been replaced
in cutting-edge research by sensitive period
(Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000, p. 195). Research has
found that the developing brain is open to in-
fluential experiences across broad periods of de-
velopment (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000, p. 183;
see also Barlow, Petrinovich, & Main, 1982).
Drawing on activity theory, critical psychology,
ecological psychology, and cognitive anthropol-
ogy, Lave (1993) defined learning as changing
participation [and understanding] in the cultur-
ally designed settings of everyday life (pp. 56).
She pointed out that cognitivist theories of learn-
ing have heretofore claimed that actors rela-
tions with knowledge-in-activity are static, that
is, they do not change except when subject to
special periods of learning and development,
and that institutional arrangements for incul-
cating knowledge are the necessary, special cir-
cumstances for learning, separate from everyday
life (p. 12). The weight of evidence, however, is
moving towards sociocultural theories that em-
phasize learning as ubiquitous, as an aspect of
all activity (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 38). In any
situation, people will learn, even if what they
learn is to fail, an all-too-common consequence
of formal schooling.
Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo 337
Underlying the split between older cognitivist
theories and contemporary sociocultural theo-
ries of learning is an epistemological gulf. Older
cognitivist theories viewed knowledge as a collec-
tion of real entities, located in heads (the con-
tainer metaphor), and learning as a process of in-
ternalizing these entities (what Freire, 1970,
called the banking model of educationinwhich
deposits of prepackaged knowledge are made
into the heads of students). Today some scholars
in education and language teaching are attempt-
ing to apply aspects of neuroscience directly,
ahead of the research and without regard to the
complexities of cognitive scientific understand-
ings (see Knudson, n.d., and Wolfe, 2001). In
contrast, sociocultural theories, which are receiv-
ing support from the new research, regard know-
ing and learning as engagement in changing
processes of human activity (Lave, 1993, p. 12).
Even as cognitivist theories have not recog-
nized the heterogeneity of knowledge, they also
do not take into account situated activity and the
fact that conflict is a ubiquitous aspect of hu-
man existence (Lave, 1993, p. 15). As we have
seen, power issues cannot be detached from
knowledge, and thus all learning is political in
nature.
Then what is meant by situated cognition and sit-
uated learning? Both terms have wide usage today
in various pedagogical fields, where their mean-
ings are often diluted. Situated cognition refers to
the position that every cognitive act must be
viewed as a specific response to a specific set of
circumstances (Resnick, 1991, p. 4). This fram-
ing of cognition challenges experimental psy-
chology and psycholinguistic assumptions that
the research laboratory (or a test-taking situa-
tion) is a neutral environment in which valid
findings about peoples skills can be discovered,
measured, or both. Research has shown, for in-
stance, that childrens conversational inexperi-
ence, rather than their cognitive incompetence,
can produce inaccurate results about their abili-
ties in an experimental situation (Siegal, 1991).
Research has also shown that adults often attend
to figuring out the social meaning of the experi-
mental situation rather than the cognitive fea-
tures of the task given them (Perret-Clermont,
Perret, & Bell, 1991). In short, there is no decon-
textualized, neutral environment: Everything oc-
curs in and is shaped by context.
Situated learning refers to more than the idea
that learning takes place somewhere and through
doing, or that the meaning of activity depends on
social context. Situated learning is a general theo-
retical perspective on the relational character of
knowledge and learning, the negotiated char-
acter of meaning, andthe concerned(engaged,
dilemma-driven) nature of the learning activity
for people involved in it. Thus, there is no activ-
ity that is not situated, the whole person is in-
volved in learning, and agent, activity, and the
world mutually constitute each other, as Lave &
Wenger (1991, p. 33) argued. A situated learning
perspective rejects the notion that there can ever
be decontextualized knowledge or a decontex-
tualized activity. By definition, everything that
happens in the human world is in a context with
specifiable characteristics. Even so-called general
knowledge can be learned only in specific contexts.
And the usefulness of general knowledge is only
in its applicability to (re)negotiating or (re)con-
structing meaning in specific circumstances
(Lave & Wenger, 1991).
Context is also a much more complex concept
than is usually recognized in experimental SLA
research (for a review of the history of context as a
concept in linguistics, see Berns, 1990). From an
activity theory point of view, context is histori-
cally constituted between persons engaged in so-
cioculturally constructed activity and the world
with which they are engaged (Lave, 1993, p.
17). Ongoing social structures shape but do not
fully determine context, because context is also
negotiated, and all interactions involve contra-
dictions and political dimensions. Meaning is re-
lational, that is, among individuals and activity
systems or institutions. Context is open and is
partially renegotiated in every interaction, but it
is not completely so. It is the fluid, dynamic,
complex, heterogenous nature of context that is
usually reduced to a list of features or elements
in SLA research, a mistaken notion of how con-
text is constructed in interaction and across time
and space. Even in communicative language
teaching, much more attention is given to creat-
ing lessons that contain examples with specified
typical contexts in which the language/discourse
to be learned is realistic, than to the relational/
contextual, dialogic (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986) na-
ture of the learning/teaching interaction within
the complex context of the classroom. Teachers
teach, but they co-create context with others
(administrators, institutional culture, students,
etc.), and they respond to and are constrained by
context.
The social construction of cognition and learn-
ing challenges our basic notions of cognition,
even as second-generation cognitive science has
challenged these notions. Social structures are
often hidden and taken for granted, yet can in-
fluence our assumptions about cognition, assess-
338 The Modern Language Journal 88 (2004)
ment of cognitive skills, and pedagogy. Lave
(1988), for instance, pointed out that our soci-
etys organization around capitalist production
and exchange of commodities creates a meta-
phor in which work can be divided into sets of
separate activities and skills. As Resnick (1991)
argued:
What we take as knowledge in school and to a large
extent in cognitive research reflects [the] assump-
tion that competence can be decomposed into con-
stituent parts and decontextualized for purposes of
instruction and evaluation, without losing anything
essential. So our very definition of the cognitive . . .
is subtly colored by assumptions that derive from so-
cial and economic arrangements with long histori-
cal roots. . . . The social, then, invisibly pervades
even situations that appear to consist of individuals
engaged in private cognitive activity. (p. 7)
How can we move SLA theory onto a firm
grounding that takes into consideration the new
research we have just reviewed and found to be
converging across the social, human, and behav-
ioral sciences and that creates a more realistic
and useful basis for research and practice? A lan-
guage socialization paradigm for SLA would re-
solve many of these issues and have significant
application to language teaching.
TOWARD A LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION
PARADIGM FOR SLA
As a theoretical and methodological perspec-
tive, language socialization (LS) began as a re-
sponse to concerns with the narrowness of main-
stream first language acquisition and child
development research models of the 1960s and
1970s, and to the realization that language learn-
ing and enculturation are part of the same pro-
cess (Watson-Gegeo, 1992). Since the early
1980s, a series of rigorous, detailed studies of
childrens first (sometimes involving aspects of
second) language socialization have been under-
taken in a variety of societies. Initial studies were
carried out in the South Pacific (Papua New
Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Hawaii), Af-
rica, Asia, Europe, and the diverse cultures of the
United States (e.g., Boggs, 1985; Cook, 1999;
Cook-Gumperz, Corsaro, & Streeck, 1986; De-
muth, 1986; Heath, 1983; Kulick, 1992; Ochs,
1988; Philips, 1983; Schieffelin, 1990; Schieffelin
& Ochs, 1986; Tudge, 1990; Watson, 1975;
Watson-Gegeo & Gegeo, 1986a, 1986b).
Language socialization studies of second lan-
guage classroom learning, both oral and written
language, have also begun appearing (e.g., At-
kinson & Ramanathan, 1995; Duff, 1995; Eckert,
2000; Harklau, 1994; He, 1997; Hoyle & Adger,
1998; Kanagy, 1999; Li, 2000; Losey, 1995; Pal-
lotti, 1996; Poole, 1992; Schecter & Bayley, 1997;
Siegal, 1996; Watson-Gegeo, 1992, 2001; Wat-
son-Gegeo & Gegeo, 1994, 1995, 1999a; Willet,
1995; for a review of some of the better LS stud-
ies in SLA, see Watson-Gegeo & Nielsen, 2003).
The most exciting development in LS studies in
SLA is the arrival of Bayley and Schecters (2003)
excellent collection of research pieces, most
from a critical, sociopolitical perspective, on
second language socialization in more than 10
bilingual/multilingual sociocultural situations
around the world, in home, school, and commu-
nity contexts, across the life-span. This volume
sets a new, higher standard for LS research in
SLA and pushes the paradigm shift forward. Al-
though individual authors in the Bayley and
Schecter volume make important statements
about the shifts going on in LS theory and re-
search, an overarching theoretical statement
does not emerge from the book. What I try to do
here, therefore, is move us towards a LS para-
digm for SLA by briefly laying out some of the
key premises of LS theory. We need to recognize
that a new paradigm will be socially constructed
by an epistemological community, not individu-
ally announced, and that what we are seeking
to build is an open, not a closed, paradigm. In
other words, we are not seeking to construct a
new grid or new walls, we are instead opening up
spaces.
The basic premise of LS is that linguistic and
cultural knowledge are constructed through each
other, and that language-acquiring children
and adults are active and selective agents in both
processes (Watson-Gegeo & Nielsen, 2003, p.
165, drawing on Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). The
learning of language, cultural meanings, and so-
cial behavior is experienced by the learner as a
single, continuous (though neither linear nor
necessarily unparadoxical) process (Watson-
Gegeo & Gegeo, 1995). Learners construct a set
of (linguistic and behavioral) practices that en-
able them to communicate with and live among
others (Schieffelin, 1990, p. 15) in the highly
complex, fluid, and hybridized cultural settings
in which they may find themselves and need to
act. This premise coincides with our understand-
ings that language and language varieties adapt
to human circumstances and biology, that cul-
ture shapes development (including language
learning), and that language, culture, and mind
interactively shape each other through interac-
tive practices and discourses. Language socializa-
tion research offers us an opportunity, as well, to
Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo 339
extend Whorfs (1956) principle of linguistic
relativity by examining how, in the process of
learning first, second, and additional languages,
learners also learn multiple representations (on-
tologies and epistemologies) of the world.
A second premise of LS theory is that all ac-
tivities in which learners regularly interact with
others in the family, community, workplace, or
classroomare not only by definition socially orga-
nized and embedded in cultural meaning sys-
tems, but are inherently political. People learn
language(s) in social, cultural, and political con-
texts that constrain the linguistic forms they hear
and use and also mark the social significance of
linguistic and cultural forms in various ways.
These insights apply to second language learners
as well as to first language learners because learn-
ing is ubiquitous, there is no context-free lan-
guage learning, and all communicative contexts
involve social, cultural, and political dimensions
that affect which linguistic forms are available or
taught and how they are represented. As Bour-
dieu (1985) argued, there is no disinterested so-
cial practice. In fact, the study of language social-
ization processes allows us to recover how
language forms correspond with the values, be-
liefs, and practices of a particular group and how
novices can come to adopt them in interaction,
because through language, social structures and
roles are made visible and available (K. Cole &
Zuengler, 2003, p. 99). Discourse organization
then becomes central to understanding in class-
rooms, for example, the ways that language vari-
eties and forms are used to create expectations,
meanings, and judgments about learners, their
knowledge(s) and indigenous/local/standpoint
epistemologies, and so on, especially through
interactional routines that invite while limiting
agency (Sato & Watson-Gegeo, 1992; Ulichny &
Watson-Gegeo, 1989; Watson-Gegeo & Gegeo,
1999b).
A third premise of LS theory has to do with the
complexities of context essential to analysis. Over
the past decade, SLA research has demonstrated
that social identities, roles, discourse patterns,
and other aspects of context all affect the process
of language learning, including motivation
(Peirce, 1995a) and consciousness (Schmidt,
1990). Conventional SLA research has often
treated aspects of context in ways that are
reductionist and superficial. R. Ellis and Roberts
(1987) approach to context, for example, drew
on Hymes (1974) SPEAKING model, which
Hymes intended as sensitization for researchers
to the multidimensionality of context, but in fact,
R. Ellis and Roberts followed Brown and Frasers
(1979) reductionist approach in limiting context
to a few dimensions. Roberts and Simonot (1987)
wanted to deepen context beyond such narrow
uses, yet included only three levels in their analy-
sis, omitting many historical and sociocultural di-
mensions that cannot be dismissed beforehand.
These problems persist even in the criticalist
work of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL;
e.g., Halliday & Hasan, 1989; for excellent cri-
tiques of SFL, see Bronson, 2001; Hyon, 1996;
Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999; J. R. Martin,
1997; Sullivan, 1995).
The limitations placed by prior, and often con-
temporary, SLA research on what counts as con-
text typically derives from the positivistic, experi-
mental model of research that attempts to
control variables rather than account for the
complexities of peoples real lived situations,
and, in any case, reflects a felt need to reduce
complexity in order to arrive at firm, codable cat-
egories. Berns (1990), Resnick (1991), Kramsch
(1995), the authors in Bayley and Schecters
(2003) work, and especially Lave (1993) repre-
sent advances in encompassing the complexities
of context. In LS research, context refers to the
whole set of relationships in which a phenome-
non is situated (Watson-Gegeo, 1992, p. 51), in-
corporating macrolevels/macrodimensions of
institutional, social, political, and cultural as-
pects, and microlevels/microdimensions involv-
ing the immediate context of situation (Good-
win & Duranti, 1992; Malinowski, 1923). The
history of macro- and microdimensions, includ-
ing interactants individual experiences and the
history of relationships and interactions among
them, are important to the analysis. In this re-
spect, LS study aims to go beyond Geertzs
(1973) notion of thick descriptionwhich he
borrowed from the philosopher Gilbert Ryles (as
cited by Geertz, 1973, p. 7)to thick explanation.
Thick explanation takes into account all rele-
vant and theoretically salient micro- and macro-
contextual influences that stand in a systematic
relationship to the behavior or events (Wat-
son-Gegeo, 1992, p. 54) to be explained. Sys-
tematic relationship is the key for setting
boundaries (Diesing, 1971, pp. 137141), with
attention to data collection to the point of theo-
retical saturation (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). This
premise of LS theory is consistent with the new
understandings about the ubiquitous and funda-
mental role of context in human experience.
A fourth premise of LS theory, also supported
by research, is that children and adults learn cul-
ture largely through participating in linguisti-
cally marked events, the structure, integrity, and
340 The Modern Language Journal 88 (2004)
characteristics of which they come to understand
through primarily verbal cues to such meanings.
The construction and learning of syntax, seman-
tics, and discourse practices is especially funda-
mental to learners socialization in framing and
structuring their development of both linguistic
and cultural knowledge, including ontology and
epistemology. Second language classrooms ex-
hibit and teachwith varying degrees of explicit-
nessa set of cultural and epistemological as-
sumptions that often differ from those of the
second language learners native culture(s). Cer-
tainly such differences have been well docu-
mented for linguistic and cultural minorities in a
variety of national and international settings and
have often been shown to be problematic for
child and adult second language or second dia-
lect learners.
A fifth premise of LS theory incorporates the
insights on cultural models and Mental Event
Representations from cognitive anthropology
and K. Nelsons (1996) work in human develop-
ment. What this means is that cognition is built
from experience and is situated in sociohis-
torical, sociopolitical contexts, as argued by Lave
(1993). The construction of event representa-
tions and other cultural models is the building of
new neural networks or links between networks,
from the perspective of cognitive science. Be-
cause cognition is created in social interaction,
contemporary LS theory is concerned with par-
ticipation in communities of practice and learn-
ing, more specifically, the learning process
which Lave and Wenger (1991) called legitimate
peripheral participation. They emphasized the cru-
cial importance of learners access to participa-
tory roles in expert performances of all knowl-
edge skills, including language.
The term legitimate peripheral participation refers
to the incorporation of learners into the ac-
tivities of communities of practice, beginning as
a legitimated (recognized) participant on the
edges (periphery) of the activity, and moving
through a series of increasingly expert roles as
learners skills develop. Capacities and skills are
therefore built by active participation in a variety
of different roles associated with a given activity
over a period of time, from peripheral to full par-
ticipant. Lave and Wenger (1991) thus moved
beyond the Vygotskian notion of internaliza-
tion into a more fluid, realistic, and criticalist
perspective on learning. Their theory of social
practice is related to the work of Giddens (1979)
and Bourdieu (1977) and is congruent with what
cognitive anthropologist Hanks (1991) de-
scribed as the radical shift [in the human sci-
ences] from invariant structures to ones that are
less rigid and more deeply adaptive, with struc-
ture more the variable outcome of action than
its invariant precondition (p. 17).
Lave and Wengers (1991) formulation speaks
to the relational interdependency of agent and
world, activity, meaning, cognition, learning,
and knowing, and emphasizes the inherently so-
cially situated negotiation and renegotiation of
meaning in the world (pp. 5051). This per-
spective is important to focusing our attention
on how learners are brought into or excluded
from various activities that shape language learn-
ing. The importance of studying access, negotia-
tion, and the roles of second language learners
movement from beginner to advanced second
language speaker status is foregrounded. These
issues have critical importance for linguistic mi-
norities and immigrants, who often face social
and political hostility or exclusion and may react
to that exclusion with resistance. Moreover, if we
were to take Lave and Wengers legitimate pe-
ripheral participation model seriously, we would
need to rethink education from the ground up,
including all the assumptions we have about
classrooms as settings for learning.
METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES FOR SECOND
LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION
A language socialization paradigm is eclectic
with regard to research methods and design but
emphasizes ethnographic and other forms of
qualitative research as the key empirical meth-
ods. In the past few years, a number of discus-
sions of qualitative and ethnographic methods in
SLA and English as a second language research
have appeared (Davis, 1995; Edge & Richards,
1998; Lazaraton, 1995; Peirce, 1995b; Ramana-
than & Atkinson, 1999; Watson-Gegeo, 1990),
but only two so far (Watson-Gegeo, 1992;
Watson-Gegeo & Nielsen, 2003) flow from a LS
perspective. Quality LS research requires a com-
bination of ethnographic, sociolinguistic, and
discourse analytic methods at a minimum, and
often includes quantitative and sometimes ex-
perimental methods, as well. However, quantita-
tive and experimental work must be ecologically
valid (M. Cole, Hood, & McDermott, 1978) that
is, incorporate all relevant macro- and micro-
dimensions of context; and, going beyond the
psychologists notion of ecological validity, in-
corporate whole events and behavior rather than
short strips of time with coding into preset cate-
gories (Watson-Gegeo, 1992). LS research is
built on fine-grained longitudinal studies of lan-
Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo 341
guage and culture learning in community or
classroom settings, or both, systematically docu-
mented through audiotape, videotape, and care-
ful fieldnote records of interaction. Central to
the analysis are tape-recorded naturally occur-
ring interactions that are analyzed for linguistic
and sociolinguistic features (including paralin-
guistic, kinesic, and suprasegmental features),
participant structures, genres, presentation of
self, indexicality, discourse organization, and
other aspects of interaction. In-depth ethno-
graphic interviews of learners are conducted, fo-
cused around their goals, inferences, and other
understanding of interactions in which they or
others participated; emergent patterns in data;
and theoretical issues salient to the research
questions that evolve, grounded-theory style,
from accumulating data and continuous analysis.
(For further discussion of methods in LS re-
search, see Watson-Gegeo, 1992, and Watson-
Gegeo & Nielsen, 2003.)
CONCLUSION
A language socialization paradigm would
transform SLA research, which is already moving
towards becoming consistent with the new re-
search in the human, social, and neurosciences,
and make it more relevant to learners actual ex-
perience (e.g., Kern, 2000). A language socializa-
tion paradigm would also transform the way we
attempt to teach languages in classrooms. We
would have to reexamine our pedagogical strate-
gies, the assumptions we make about classroom
organization, lesson structure, and effective ma-
terials, including current assumptions about
sociocultural strategies. Our concern with multi-
culturalism would be radically changed, as well,
from the rather superficial and anemic treat-
ment of cultural variability to a serious and inten-
sive consideration of how our perceptions of the
world are shaped by the interaction between our
embodied experience in the world and the cul-
turally based ontology/ies and epistemology/ies
into and through which we are all socialized in
the course of learning our first language(s) and
culture(s) (however hybridized they may be);
and then (re)socialized or partially (re)social-
ized in the process of learning a second or third
language and culture.
Moreover, political issues in language, mind,
culture, interaction, ontology, epistemology, and
learning would be foregrounded rather than
noted and then treated as peripheral or ignored
altogether. With criticalist applied linguists and
SLA researchers in sociopolitical perspectives, we
would all have to ask ourselves and our students,
Why are we teaching/learning English (or an-
other language)? What does this teaching/learn-
ing imply in our highly diverse but rampantly po-
litically structured world? What are the political
implications of our teaching, learning, and re-
searching language learning and pedagogy?
Whomdoes this work empower and whomdoes it
disempower?
Finally, I want to address briefly an aspect of
human experience that is largely missing from
the new neuroscience research, and which may
make some readers uncomfortable. So let me be-
gin from the periphery. In all known human so-
cieties, the schism between transcendentality
and appearances is recognized, as Wautischer
(1998, p. 9) argued in the introduction to his ed-
ited volume, Tribal Epistemologies: Essays in the Phi-
losophy of Anthropology. In the West, we typically
divide spirituality from science; even those scien-
tists who themselves experience or are open to
the notion of spirituality tend to separate spiri-
tual matters from their daily professional work.
This is not an unimportant issue because, for
most indigenous and ethnic minority peoples,
spirituality and the sacred are at the core of their
indigenous and local knowledge systems. Many
third- and fourth-world peoples feel that when
their languages and cultures are recorded and
analyzed by Anglo-Euro-American researchers,
they are desanctified in both the spiritual and
the epistemological sense. When indigenous and
ethnic minority peoples talk about their indige-
nous ontologies and epistemologies, much of
what they say falls outside any perspective con-
sistent with our age of reason, as Wautischer
(1998, p. 4) commented. He went on to say that
mainstream researchers own experiences with
aspects of body-mind which we cannot explain
such as intuition or intentionare ubiquitous
. . . [and] show that our twentieth century sense
of science is incomplete: objectifying methodol-
ogies cannot account for qualitative experiences,
while introspective methodologies collapse un-
der the scrutiny of noetic [i.e., intellectual] in-
trusion (p. 4). Nevertheless, spiritual traditions
and formal religions are on the rise in first- and
second- world societies everywhere.
In Western science, with the exception of a few
pioneers primarily in physics, we have closed off
from reality-grounded science the recognition of
the strong human seeking for transcendental
and immanent meaning. The resulting dichot-
omy resembles the body-mind dualism that has
been so physically and emotionally destructive to
us since Descartes and which is now crumbling
342 The Modern Language Journal 88 (2004)
under the weight of evidence from a variety of
methodological perspectives. Part of the post-
modern realization is that knowledge is now go-
ing to move from the periphery of world power
to the center, instead of always from the center
to the periphery, as has been the case under co-
lonialism whether internal or external, and in
the divisions between the formally (especially
higher) educated and the less schooled. Post-
modernism is able to embrace the diversity of
human experience. As Johnson (1999) argued:
Constructivist versions of postmodernism seek to
reunite dichotomies between subjective and objec-
tive, fact and imagination, secular and sacred . . . im-
manent and transcendent. . . . The inclusion of a
spiritual perspective may permit acceptance of the
paradoxes inherent in these dichotomies. If our cul-
ture of separation arises partially from an overem-
phasis on the intellect and the ego, then the re-
balancing of spirit and rationality are necessary to
nurture life. (p. 157)
These issues are even more important in a time
when the ecological sciences are beginning to
make headway in changing the modernist para-
digm. Physicists in the new physics have been
developing a quantitative model of local and
nonlocal energetic/information healing (Tiller,
2003b), demonstrating mathematically and
through controlled experiments that spiritual ex-
periences are real. Tiller (2003a) argued:
Today, we once again have abundant experimental
evidence concerning natures expression that is be-
ing swept under the rug by the scientific establish-
ment because it doesnt fit into the current prevail-
ing paradigm. This concerns the issue of whether or
not human qualities of spirit, mind, emotion, con-
sciousness, intention, etc., can significantly influ-
ence the materials and processes of physical reality.
The current physics paradigmwould say no and in-
deed there is no place in the mathematical formalism
of the paradigm where any human qualities might
enter. However, the database that supports an un-
qualified yes response is very substantial. (p. 1)
The new physics posits both individual particles
and wave-like patterns of probabilities of inter-
connectedness, reversing the Cartesian notion
that the worldis comprisedof independent parts
(Johnson, 1999, p. 160). Physicist Capra (1983)
argued that quantumand relativity theories share
ontology with mystics throughout history.
The reconsideration of spirituality in light of
the entrance of marginalized Others into the on-
going conversation about learning, knowledge,
language, literacy, and sociopolitical processes, I
believe, will become a significant dimension of
the paradigm shift in the human and social sci-
ences that revolutionizes the way we view mind,
language, epistemology, and learning. It will af-
fect how we think about learning languages and
cultures and the values we hold in relation to lo-
cal/indigenous languages and knowledges, mov-
ing us away from instrumentalism towards a gen-
uine recognition and appreciation for differing
ways of being, learning, teaching, and under-
standing in language teaching. And it will ex-
pand how we think about mind, cognition, and
intelligence.
A paradigm shift of the dimensions I have at-
tempted to outline in this article is painful be-
cause such shifts shatter the old in the interest of
making room for new growth and new visions. By
definition, paradigm shifts question all that we
hold dear, all that we have assumed, the theories
close to our hearts, the methods we have be-
lieved in, the goals we have set for our careers. In
this case, normal science which we have taken to
be the hallmark of our very technologically ori-
ented (and distorted) society is from here on
challenged. It will be a new kind of science that
emerges, far more holistic and open than in the
past, integrating more of human experience and
understanding than in the past. It will incorpo-
rate voices and knowings from the periphery of
world power, from standpoints of indigeneity,
hybridity, ethnicity, color, gender, and sexual
orientation. As noted Nobel laureate (chemis-
try) Prigogine commented (as cited in Jantsch
1980; see Prigogine, 1980):
The world is far too rich to be expressed in a single
language. Music does not exhaust itself in a se-
quence of styles. Equally, the essential aspects of our
experience can never be condensed into a single de-
scription. We have to use many descriptions which
are irreducible to each other. . . . Scientific work
consists of selective exploration and not of discovery
of a given reality. It consists of the choice of ques-
tions which have to be posed. (p. 303)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This revised article was originally presented as an in-
vited plenary talk at the Pacific Second Language Re-
search Forum (PacSLRF), 5 October 2001, in Hono-
lulu, via distance technology. I am indebted to
Kandace Knudson, Matthew C. Bronson, and Sarah E.
Nielsen for our many significant conversations on the
issues and sources in cognitive science and SLA dis-
cussed here. I am also grateful to Michele Favreau-
Haight, Suzanne Romaine, Kathryn Davis, David
Welchman Gegeo, Julia Menard-Warwick, Sally Sieloff
Magnan, and three anonymous reviewers, for their
Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo 343
helpful comments on an earlier draft. I dedicate this
paper to Charlie (Charlene) J. Sato, in memory of our
conversations in 1991 when, while working on our
Discourse Processes in Hawaii Creole English proj-
ect, I first began proposing the ideas developed here,
catalyzed by our synergistic, free-ranging, and wonder-
fully electric discussions of mind, language, culture,
and epistemology.
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