SOCIOCOGNITIVE PERSPECTIVES ON SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, TEACHING, AND USE

A sociocognitive perspective on discourse and second language acquisition/teaching is ecological and ecosocial-that is, it concerns the fundamental relationality of people, places, and things as negotiated and expressed in social interaction. It conceptualizes learning as a form of adaptive alignment with one’s environment; thus, language learning exponentially increases our ability to participate in coordinated ecosocial action, and therefore our survival and quality of life. It conceptualizes teaching as the curating of learning-as-adaptive-alignment. If learning and teaching are ultimately concerned with human survival and well-being, they are ultimately driven by human needs and desires-valuing, affect, emotion, identity, and so on-as negotiated and expressed in sociocognitive interaction. This chapter presents the history, theory, research methodology, two sample studies, implications for research and pedagogy, and future directions regarding a sociocognitive approach to second language learning and teaching. In keeping with the discourse-analytic focus of this volume, it highlights the use of multimodal interaction analysis to investigate second language acquisition and teaching from a sociocognitive perspective.