“Why Didn’t I Hear About the GPA in Graduate School?”

By Greg Thomson

This is addressed to people who have an academic background in second language acquisition or applied linguistics, and who wonder why they have never heard of the Growing Participator Approach.

Hundreds of people who are enjoying the Growing Participation experience don’t need to know where the concept came from. Some, however, might want help answering academic challengers! A key fact about this approach is that it is aimed at bringing joy to ordinary—non-intellectual—folk, including kids who are growing participators with their parents. I would still encourage people who want to “learn the language” intellectually that if they keep it fun and engaging for the kids, it will be fun and engaging for the parents! 

In 2000, I was recruited by a consortium of NGOs in Central Asia to serve as a “language learning consultant”. I had recently completed a Ph.D. My dissertation was entitled, Second Language Acquisition and Comprehension Mechanisms: The Problem of Russian Inflectional Morphology. When I moved to Kazakhstan, my overseers there told me to “learn some Kazakh” in addition to my more general language learning consulting.  

In 2003 I was asked to train “language learning advisors”. Over thirty people came together from many countries. During the discussions of that workshop, the Growing-Participation concept emerged. At that time, the lived experience in Kazakh contexts of my wife, my fifteen-year-old son and me intersected with my academic reflections. A new “meta-story” of “growing participation” won out over my earlier meta-stories of “language and culture learning”.

My Academic Story

As to academic input, my graduate-student days (1990 to 2000!)  had included:

1. A preliminary undergraduate year (1990-1991) was spread over the University of North Dakota (UND), the University of Calgary (UC) and the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) at the Linguistic Society of America Linguistic Institute (LSA-LI). During that year, I did upper-level coursework in linguistics and philosophy, including a two-semester course at UC in second language acquisition (SLA) research, divided between quantitative and qualitative research emphases.

2. An MA in Linguistics at the University of New Mexico (UNM, 1991-1994). I was privileged to work for Joan Bybee for two years as her Usage-Based ideas were developing. I took two courses at that time with language-testing pioneer John Oller. The program required that I write comprehensive exams in phonology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and syntax-semantics-discourse.  Also, at UNM, I attended the LSA-LI of 1995, which provided the opportunity to take a course with leading SLA scholars, Susan Gass and Jacqueline Schacter. That course was in the Inter-language tradition.

3. A Ph.D. in psycholinguistics at the University of Alberta (UA, 1994-2000). My candidate exams dealt with morphological theory, psycholinguistic processing and SLA,  mental model theory, and automaticity in cognitive processing. [1] During that time I audited a UG-oriented course in SLA, and a seminar (with Tracey Derwing) that went through Rod Ellis’s 700-page tome, The Study of Second Language Acquisition,  which I had read before, but now read again and discussed.

From the start of my graduate studies, my goal was to become a bona fide language learning consultant, which I assumed would emphasize theoretical and applied linguistics. However, two graduate courses in particular changed my intellectual direction:

1. A psycholinguistics course taught by Mark Seidenberg and Maryellen MacDonald at UCSC at the LSA-LI in 1991.

2. An introduction to Vygotskian sociocultural theory by Vera John-Steiner in 1994 (as part of a child language course).

The course with Seidenberg and MacDonald immediately awakened my interests, such that I took as many psycholinguistics courses as I could after that. The course with John-Steiner had a delayed impact. At my PhD oral exams, I was asked what I most valued in my graduate studies, and I shocked one of my co-supervisors by skipping over the experimental emphasis of UA and instead, reached back to John-Steiner’s course that had awakened me to Vygotsky.

Two Narratives of Language Learning

By the time I was starting to “learn some Kazakh” I had two parallel mental narratives of language learning—1) psycholinguistic (or cognitive) and 2) sociocultural.

The typical linguistic approach to second language acquisition is also described as “cognitivist” (or “internalist”). However, linguists tend to posit an “internal grammar,” being a bounded, self-contained and relatively stable formal object hidden in the heads of “native speakers,” under construction in the heads of “learners”.

I instead held to a psycholinguistic idea of cognitive processes. Psycholinguists studied the processes of comprehension—from acoustic cues to discourse macrostructures—and speech production—from “thinking-for-speaking” to articulation and self-monitoring. The cognitive language system is dynamic, and using it changes it, even for native users. It is thus always in process. Heavy participation means experiences of millions of words of speech in context, which equals continual healthy growth.

Regarding the second narrative, socioculturalists hold that, rather than being something hidden in the brain of each individual separately,  language (again, a process, not an entity) can only be in individual brains after first being experienced publicly, in social interactions.

In 2003, for background in the psycholinguistic story, I recommended that language learning advisors read the book The Ascent of Babel, by Gerry Altmann. In a relatively brief space, Altmann surveyed a broad sweep of psycholinguistics for motivated readers with no previous background.

For the sociocultural narrative, I found no book analogous to The Ascent of Babel. Instead, we had a reading list [2]. Since 2003, we’ve not hesitated to incorporate other ideas into what we call “sociocultual,” especially ideas covered under the rubric of linguistic anthropology, such as discourse analysis, speech acts, politeness, etc.

 By the time of the first workshop for language learning advisors in late 2003, I felt that both the psycholingistic narrative of language learning and the sociocultural narrative could appear as coherent stand-alone stories. They belonged to two different discourses: The yellow, psycholinguistic (cognitive)  discourse and the blue sociocultural one (as depicted in the following diagram).

  I became uncomfortable combining these two discourses in a way that was simply additive, as in the figure above. These two discourses entered into a Bakhtinian inner dialogue. Now, get ready for a metaphor: two segments in one dimension (additive) versus two dimensions (multiplicative, synergistic), as seen below.  In the resulting quasi-Cartesian space every point x,y is would be simultaneously in both dimensions. That is, the experience of growing participation is everywhere cognitive and everywhere sociocultural. And there is a third dimension! The temporal dimension reflects the fact that the other two dimensions are always processual.

 At the language-learning advisor workshop in 2003, people wanted to know how I was doing what I was doing, and why I was doing it that way. Those conversations clarified and enriched a concept. During the course of “negotiating” the three-dimensional concept with workshop participants, I found I needed to change my ways of talking to fit my new mindset: not language learning, but growing participation in another human group, which includes understanding what they say and conversing in the context of life. Special “nurturers” (later, special “mentors”) meet them in their ZPD and assist them in their participation which is also the growth process.

 Those workshop participants took home our “First 100 Hours” plan. As it spread it brought joy to many who thought, “I can’t learn languages” or “language learning is one of the hardest things people ever do.” Soon people asked for similar guides for the other five phases.

 Over the past seventeen years, hundreds of growing participators formed a discourse community, in which (for many), the formerly cognitivist narrative of “language-learning” has become an embodied, lived experience--joint participation with host people in their practices, growing through phases of 1) Connecting, 2) Emerging, 3) Knowable, 4) Deep Personal Relationships, 5) Widening Understanding, 6) Ever participating/growing.

 And the Growing Participator discourse is itself a never-finished process.

[1] There is, of course, more. From 1967 to 1990, I delighted in linguistic reading. My reading ranged widely from the history of linguistics to a variety of contemporary theories and “hyphenated disciplines”. Early in this period my reading included anthropologists such as Kluckhohn, Benedict, Hall and Spradley. In the 1980s, it included a lot of reading related to SLA, as I was working as an amateur language learning consultant. Before starting to “learn some Kazakh” I had “learned some” Blackfoot, Urdu and Russian to “professional” levels. In the case of Russian the learning had been a family project with my wife and two youngest sons. 

[2] This was an early version of the reading list:

Agar, Michael. (1994). Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation. New York: Perennial.

Block, D. (2003). The Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.

Bruner, Jerome S. (1990) Acts of Meaning. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Edwards, D., & Potter, J. (1992). Discursive Psychology. London: Sage Publications.

Harre, Rom & Gillett, Grant. (1994). The Discursive Mind. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.

Lantolf, J. P. (Ed.). (2000b). Socio-cultural Theory and Second Language Acquisition Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lantolf, J. P., & Appel, G. (Ed.). (1994). Vygotskian Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Press.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning: Gender, ethnicity and educational change. Harlow, England: Pearson Education.

Kasper, Gabriele & Rose, Kenneth R. (2002). Pragmatic Development in a Second Language. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sfard, A. (1998). On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational Researcher, 27, 4-13.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thought and Language. (Alex Kozulin, Trans.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wertsch, James V. (1991). Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press