Watsongegeo 2004

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 unhelpful debates between the cognitivist and sociocultural camps that have generated
more acrimony than useful theory. Recent developments in second generation cognitive science, first language acquisition studies, cognitive anthropology, and human development research, however, have opened the way for a new synthesis. This synthesis involves a reconsideration 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.
WE ARE AT THE BEGINNING OF A PARADIGM

shift in the human and social sciences that is revolutionizing the way we view mind, language, epistemology, and learning, and that is fundamentally transforming second language acquisition
(SLA) and educational theory and research. This
paradigm shift is being stimulated by new research in the cognitive sciences (Churchland,
2002; Fauconnier & Turner, 2002; Levy,
Bairaktaris, Gullinaria, & Cairns, 1995; Rumelhart, 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; Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000; Wozniak & Fischer, 1993),
first language acquisition and socialization (Gibson, 1982; K. Nelson, 1996; Schieffelin & Ochs,
1986; Seidenberg, 1997; Slobin, 1985; WatsonGegeo, 2001), cognitive anthropology (Chaiklin
& Lave, 1996; Gumperz & Levinson, 1996; HolThe Modern Language Journal, 88, iii, (2004)
0026-7902/04/331350 $1.50/0
2004 The Modern Language Journal
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, including cultural and cross-cultural psychology
(M. Cole, 1996; L. M. W. Martin, Nelson, & Tobach, 1995; Segall, Dasen, Berry, & Poortinga,
1999; Sinha, 1997; Stigler, Sweder, & Herdt,
1990).
The shift is also prompted by the flow of research from the periphery to the center of political 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 peoples 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-
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side dominant or center societies, rather than
being passively affected by globalization, are actively 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 decolonization process. This remarkable and creative
combination of sociopolitical events and trajectories in mainstream and non-mainstream
research has already seriously eroded the universalist assumptions that have until now determined 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 science-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 learning and teaching (e.g., Canagarajah, 1999; Tollefson, 1995). The conventional paradigm for
SLA research has come under increasing criticism since the late 1970s for (a) its exclusive reliance on Cartesian, positivistic assumptions about
reality, (b) its experimental modes of inquiry
that cannot incorporate cultural and sociopolitical context into its models, (c) its basis in
structuralist or other problematic linguistic theories, and (d) its inability to produce implications
for pedagogy that actually work for second language 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 reconsideration of mind, language, epistemology, and
learning, based on the recognition that cognition 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 development.
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 understood in full through further research. In being
indicative rather than exhaustive, I highlight
some of the subtleties in issues of social influences and experience in shaping mind and lan-
The Modern Language Journal 88 (2004)

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 processes and the human brain? The shift from cognition to mind in much of the research discourse on
cognitive development reflects current understandings about the brain and thinking. First,
neuroscience research (Churchland, 1986, 2002;
Dacey, 2001; Edelman, 1992; Fauconnier &
Turner, 2002; Goldblum, 2001; Quartz & Sejnowski, 2002) has demonstrated that the bodymind dualism of Western philosophical and
mainstream scientific thought, in which cognition 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 understand 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 reality (epistemology), and based on our bodys ways
of detecting and relating to the world. All cognitive 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 unconscious 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). Included in the cognitive unconscious is all implicit knowledge that we have learned through
socialization beginning in the prenatal months.
Third, mind is a better term than cognition because 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
Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo

assume that these higher-order cognitive skills
are independent of other mental processes. However, through research on patients who have lost
emotional capacity via brain damage, cognitive
scientists have shown that without emotional capacity, people cannot make rational judgments,
including moral decisions. Emotions are essential to logical reasoning (Damasio, 1994). As
developmentalist Kurt Fischer and his colleagues
argued (Fischer, Wang, Kennedy, & Chang,
1998), emotions have well-defined roles in human 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 account for emotions and their role in human activity (network, Halgren & Marinkovic, 1995; polyvagal, 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, including symbolic capacity, self, will, belief, and
desire (e.g., Ingvar, 1999; E. K. Miller, 2000;
Schwartz & Begley, 2002; Shweder, 1996; Silbersweig & 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 typically conceptualized as prototypes (Rosch &
Lloyd, 1978; Smith & Medin, 1981; Taylor,
1989). Some categories and prototypes are inherent in the kind of body and mind we human
beings have, and therefore may be said to be universal. A great many categories and prototypes,
however, in fact probably the majority, are socioculturally constructed and therefore vary crossculturally.
Sixth, until now we have conceptualized the
brain metaphorically as a container of intelligence, knowledge, and cognitive skills, and the
individual as a container for the brain and as possessing (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 students in schools and language classes. Some of
the most interesting research in human development over the past several years has up-ended
this conception of cognition. Research demonstrates that both the content and process of
333
thinking . . . are distributed as much among individuals as they are packed within them (M. Cole
& Engestrm, 1993, p. 1). The discovery of
distributed cognitionsthat people think in conjunction with others, that cognition is socially
constructed through collaboration (Resnick, Levine, & Teasley, 1991; Salomon, 1993)links to
the work that is going on in cognitive anthropology and by standpoint epistemologists on the nature 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 corresponds to a Language Acquisition Device as argued 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 dynamic aspects of the mind and communication.
Linguistic concepts, like all other cognitive processes, arise from the 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 universals 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 human 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 Johnson (1999) phrased it, the conceptual poles of
grammatic constructions, universals of spatial relations, 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-
334
lin & Lave, 1996; Segall et al., 1999; Stephens,
1995) in very powerful ways that affect perceptions, assumptions, language(s), and other understandings of the world.
While some theorists continue to defend or reinvent Chomskys theories, or both (e.g., Chomsky, 1995; Fodor, 1998; Pinker, 1994; White,
2003), biologists and neuroscientists have shown
that a built-in Universal Grammar (UG) or language acquisition structure is unnecessary for explaining language universals. Chomskyian theory 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 supposedly created from UG turned out to be transferred from the African substrate. Evolutionary
biologist/primatologist Terence Deacon (1997)
convincingly demonstrated that languages have
had to adapt to childrens spontaneous assumptions about communication, learning, social 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 social 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 language 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 (perhaps 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 experience shapes all our neural networks. These
processes are therefore also shaped by sociohistorical, sociocultural, and sociopolitical processes, because language change, use, and learning occur in social, cultural, and political contexts
that constrain and shape linguistic forms in various ways, and mark their significance. The politi-

cal nature of language learning and use is increasingly a focus of research in complex first language
and second language situations, from a variety of
critical perspectives (Caldas-Coulthard & Coulthard, 1996; Canagarajah, 1999; Chouliaraki &
Fairclough, 1999; Huebner & Davis, 1999;
Kroskrity, 2000; Peirce, 1995a, 1995b; Pennycook, 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 embodied mind.
ONTOLOGY, CULTURAL MODELS,

AND EPISTEMOLOGY: COGNITIVE
ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE VOICES
OF THE OTHER
Ontology refers to what there is, and epistemology to how we know. Work in cognitive anthropology over the past two decades has revisited 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 thinking (Gumperz & Levinson, 1996). Levinson
(1996), Lee (1996), and Silverstein (2000), in
particular, have launched brilliant reconsiderations of Whorfs (1956) principle of linguistic
relativity and the data at its basis, correcting the
gross misrepresentations of the past. Lees devastating critique of Pinkers (1994) carelessness in
confusing data completely undermines his dismissal 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 anthropologists using schema and prototype theory
(DAndrade & Strauss, 1992; Holland, Lachicotte, 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 childrens language development, which also draws
on schema and script theory. Nelson (1996) argued that Human minds are equipped to construct complicated mental models that represent . . . 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 development, in the form of schemas and scripts that

become a mental context for future behavior in
similar situations.
Cognitive anthropologists argue that culturally 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 interpret experience and guide a variety of cognitive tasks, including setting goals, planning, directing 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 & WatsonGegeo, 1999). Analytically, cultural models are
compatible with a neural network model of the
embodied mind.
Typically in psycholinguistic research, the complex interrelationships among forms of cultural
knowledge across domains are not addressed. In
contrast, an important insight from cognitive anthropology 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 hierarchical and other arrangements. General-purpose
models or premises operating across several cultural domains give a culture its distinctiveness
and reduce the total amount of cultural knowledge 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 imageschemas (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 Americans), ARGUMENT IS WAR (Lakoff & Johnson,
1980), versus, for instance, in Kwaraae, Solomon
Islands, ARGUMENTATION IS STRAIGHTENING OUT (Watson-Gegeo, 1995), or, to take another 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 imageschema EXTENDED FAMILY MEMBERS ARE
ALL ONE HEARTH (or one basket/household/garden/cluster of baking stones). This latter image-schema means that extended family
335
members are all one family, and thus the
proposition-schema FAMILIES SHARE FOOD
WITHOUT EXPECTATION OF RETURN applies to all of them.
Cultural modelswhich are usually tacitly
understood, and often unconsciouslie at the
heart of cultural identity, ontology, and indigenous 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 knowledge 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 positioning of mainstream epistemology.
Epistemology refers to both the theory of
knowledge and theorizing knowledge (Goldman, 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 epistemologists (e.g., Fuller, 1988) and feminist epistemologists (e.g., Code, 1991; Grosz, 1990; Haraway,
1988; L. H. Nelson, 1993) recognize with sociologists of knowledge (Bloor, 1991; Dant, 1991;
Stehr, 1994) that epistemological agents are
communities rather than individuals. In other
words, knowledge is constructed by communitiesepistemological communitiesrather than
collections of independently knowing individuals (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 neuroscientists, recognize the embodiment of knowledge. Grosz (1993) cogently argued that the current 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 simultaneously rely on and disavow the role of the body
(p. 187). Both of these points are consistent with
336
the new findings of cognitive science and developmentalist research just reviewed. However,
feminists add the additional and crucial insight
that human bodies are not all the same. In particular, Western positivistic research typically assumes a male body and usually a White middleclass heterosexual male experience of and in the
world.
Moreover, the feminist and third-world challenge to Western rationality and normal science
takes all these arguments a step further to challenge the taken-for-granted objectivity on which
much of Western science depends for its claim
that the knowledge it produces is necessarily universal 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 specific, even when what is constructed turns out to
have universal implications. With the realization
that all knowledge is situated comes the recognition 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, researchers must ask, who gets to represent whom?
Typically, it has been White Anglo-Euro-American 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 representations prevail? (p. 31).
However, the prevailing relations are in a very
early stage of changing, through the new research by third-world scholars writing about
their own cultures ontologies, epistemologies,
and cultural models. Indigenous epistemology refers to an indigenous cultural groups ways of
thinking and of creating, reformulating, and theorizing about knowledge via traditional discourses and media of communication, anchoring the truth of the discourse in culture (Gegeo
& Watson-Gegeo, 2001, p. 58; see also Gegeo,
1994; Gegeo & Watson-Gegeo, 2002). Local epistemology refers to processes of creating knowledge
that are situated in local conditions and relationships 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 validated by a cultural group and on the role of that
process in shaping thinking and behavior. Underlying these concepts is the assumption that
all epistemological systems [are] socially constructed 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), inherently 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 positionings to develop or be constructed, (re)creating current versions of cultures, and so on. That
means, as Chaudhry (1995) pointed out, that hybrid individuals exhibit hybrid identities as well
as hybrid world-views deriving from different systems 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 collective 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 knowledges produced by the ruptures and discontinuities that result in critical points of deep and
significant difference (p. 223). Although hybridity is associated now with diaspora(s), colonialism, postcolonial history, and globalization, the
complexity it evokes (Canclini, 1995) is perhaps
more easily grasped in multicultural/multilingual 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 moving and changing, people undertake their own
critical reflection on culture, history, knowledge,
politics, economics, and the sociopolitical contexts 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 Western recognition as useful and meaningful, traditional and local knowledges typically must be

translated into Western scientific discourse
that is, the parts that seem relevant to a Western science are extracted from the whole and reorganized into discourse that looks scientific to
Westerners, transforming acceptable elements
into universal knowledge (see also Vos, 2000).
This treatment of the knowledge systems of cultural Others is an indication of the role of power
and sociopolitical processes in knowledge construction and use, including language learning
and discourse forms. As anthropologist Raffles
(2002) argued:
Explanatory power results less from intrinsic truthfulness than from the successful collaboration of political, cultural, and biophysical actors. . . . In this account, scientific knowledge is as much a local
knowledge [as any other] . . . all knowledges are also
intimate . . . [and] intimacies are necessarily relational. [Intimate knowledge] draws attention to the
embeddedness of social practice in relations of
power. (pp. 327328)
The recognition that all knowledge is positioned and situated in sociohistorical, sociopolitical contexts brings us to the questions,
What do the new understandings about bodymind 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, published 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 continuous 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 between the neurons in a human brain cannot possibly
be genetically determined, because the entire human genome is by far too small to contain the necessary 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 affect but are affected by a childs agency in development. The transmission model of develop-
337
ment and socialization is therefore also scientifically obsolete. Not only adults, but also children
are active participants in their own development 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 specifics of stage and trajectory is now obsolete.
The effects of culture on child development are
pervasive, the panel declared. Culture influences every aspect of human development and
is fundamental to what happens (Shonkoff &
Phillips, 2000, p. 25; see also P. J. Miller & Goodnow, 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 department at the University of WisconsinMadison recently changed its name from Human
Development to Human Development and
Family Studies, and faculty have begun collaborative 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 influential experiences across broad periods of development (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000, p. 183;
see also Barlow, Petrinovich, & Main, 1982).
Drawing on activity theory, critical psychology,
ecological psychology, and cognitive anthropology, Lave (1993) defined learning as changing
participation [and understanding] in the culturally designed settings of everyday life (pp. 56).
She pointed out that cognitivist theories of learning have heretofore claimed that actors relations 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 inculcating knowledge are the necessary, special circumstances for learning, separate from everyday
life (p. 12). The weight of evidence, however, is
moving towards sociocultural theories that emphasize 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.
338
Underlying the split between older cognitivist
theories and contemporary sociocultural theories of learning is an epistemological gulf. Older
cognitivist theories viewed knowledge as a collection of real entities, located in heads (the container metaphor), and learning as a process of internalizing these entities (what Freire, 1970,
called the banking model of education in which
deposits of prepackaged knowledge are made
into the heads of students). Today some scholars
in education and language teaching are attempting to apply aspects of neuroscience directly,
ahead of the research and without regard to the
complexities of cognitive scientific understandings (see Knudson, n.d., and Wolfe, 2001). In
contrast, sociocultural theories, which are receiving support from the new research, regard knowing and learning as engagement in changing
processes of human activity (Lave, 1993, p. 12).
Even as cognitivist theories have not recognized the heterogeneity of knowledge, they also
do not take into account situated activity and the
fact that conflict is a ubiquitous aspect of human 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 situated learning ? Both terms have wide usage today
in various pedagogical fields, where their meanings 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 framing of cognition challenges experimental psychology and psycholinguistic assumptions that
the research laboratory (or a test-taking situation) is a neutral environment in which valid
findings about peoples skills can be discovered,
measured, or both. Research has shown, for instance, that childrens conversational inexperience, rather than their cognitive incompetence,
can produce inaccurate results about their abilities in an experimental situation (Siegal, 1991).
Research has also shown that adults often attend
to figuring out the social meaning of the experimental situation rather than the cognitive features of the task given them (Perret-Clermont,
Perret, & Bell, 1991). In short, there is no decontextualized, neutral environment: Everything occurs 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 theoretical perspective on the relational character of

knowledge and learning, the negotiated character of meaning, and the concerned (engaged,
dilemma-driven) nature of the learning activity
for people involved in it. Thus, there is no activity that is not situated, the whole person is involved 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 decontextualized 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)constructing 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 historically constituted between persons engaged in socioculturally 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 contradictions and political dimensions. Meaning is relational, 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 context is constructed in interaction and across time
and space. Even in communicative language
teaching, much more attention is given to creating 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) nature 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 learning 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 influence our assumptions about cognition, assess-

ment of cognitive skills, and pedagogy. Lave
(1988), for instance, pointed out that our societys organization around capitalist production
and exchange of commodities creates a metaphor 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] assumption that competence can be decomposed into constituent 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 social and economic arrangements with long historical 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 behavioral sciences and that creates a more realistic
and useful basis for research and practice? A language socialization paradigm for SLA would resolve many of these issues and have significant
application to language teaching.
TOWARD A LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION
PARADIGM FOR SLA
As a theoretical and methodological perspective, language socialization (LS) began as a response to concerns with the narrowness of mainstream first language acquisition and child
development research models of the 1960s and
1970s, and to the realization that language learning and enculturation are part of the same process (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 undertaken in a variety of societies. Initial studies were
carried out in the South Pacific (Papua New
Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Hawaii), Africa, Asia, Europe, and the diverse cultures of the
United States (e.g., Boggs, 1985; Cook, 1999;
Cook-Gumperz, Corsaro, & Streeck, 1986; Demuth, 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 language classroom learning, both oral and written
language, have also begun appearing (e.g., Atkinson & Ramanathan, 1995; Duff, 1995; Eckert,
339
2000; Harklau, 1994; He, 1997; Hoyle & Adger,
1998; Kanagy, 1999; Li, 2000; Losey, 1995; Pallotti, 1996; Poole, 1992; Schecter & Bayley, 1997;
Siegal, 1996; Watson-Gegeo, 1992, 2001; Watson-Gegeo & Gegeo, 1994, 1995, 1999a; Willet,
1995; for a review of some of the better LS studies 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 community contexts, across the life-span. This volume
sets a new, higher standard for LS research in
SLA and pushes the paradigm shift forward. Although individual authors in the Bayley and
Schecter volume make important statements
about the shifts going on in LS theory and research, an overarching theoretical statement
does not emerge from the book. What I try to do
here, therefore, is move us towards a LS paradigm 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 individually 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 social behavior is experienced by the learner as a
single, continuous (though neither linear nor
necessarily unparadoxical) process (WatsonGegeo & Gegeo, 1995). Learners construct a set
of (linguistic and behavioral) practices that enable 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 understandings that language and language varieties adapt
to human circumstances and biology, that culture shapes development (including language
learning), and that language, culture, and mind
interactively shape each other through interactive practices and discourses. Language socialization research offers us an opportunity, as well, to
340
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 (ontologies and epistemologies) of the world.
A second premise of LS theory is that all activities in which learners regularly interact with
others in the family, community, workplace, or
classroom are not only by definition socially organized and embedded in cultural meaning systems, but are inherently political. People learn
language(s) in social, cultural, and political contexts 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 learning is ubiquitous, there is no context-free language 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 Bourdieu (1985) argued, there is no disinterested social practice. In fact, the study of language socialization processes allows us to recover how
language forms correspond with the values, beliefs, 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 classrooms, for example, the ways that language varieties 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 analysis, omitting many historical and sociocultural dimensions 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 critiques of SFL, see Bronson, 2001; Hyon, 1996;
Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999; J. R. Martin,
1997; Sullivan, 1995).
The limitations placed by prior, and often contemporary, SLA research on what counts as context typically derives from the positivistic, experimental 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 categories. Berns (1990), Resnick (1991), Kramsch
(1995), the authors in Bayley and Schecters
(2003) work, and especially Lave (1993) represent advances in encompassing the complexities
of context. In LS research, context refers to the
whole set of relationships in which a phenomenon is situated (Watson-Gegeo, 1992, p. 51), incorporating macrolevels/macrodimensions of
institutional, social, political, and cultural aspects, and microlevels/microdimensions involving the immediate context of situation (Goodwin & Duranti, 1992; Malinowski, 1923). The
history of macro- and microdimensions, including interactants individual experiences and the
history of relationships and interactions among
them, are important to the analysis. In this respect, 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 relevant and theoretically salient micro- and macrocontextual influences that stand in a systematic
relationship to the behavior or events (Watson-Gegeo, 1992, p. 54) to be explained. Systematic relationship is the key for setting
boundaries (Diesing, 1971, pp. 137141), with
attention to data collection to the point of theoretical saturation (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). This
premise of LS theory is consistent with the new
understandings about the ubiquitous and fundamental role of context in human experience.
A fourth premise of LS theory, also supported
by research, is that children and adults learn culture largely through participating in linguistically marked events, the structure, integrity, and

characteristics of which they come to understand
through primarily verbal cues to such meanings.
The construction and learning of syntax, semantics, and discourse practices is especially fundamental to learners socialization in framing and
structuring their development of both linguistic
and cultural knowledge, including ontology and
epistemology. Second language classrooms exhibit and teachwith varying degrees of explicitnessa set of cultural and epistemological assumptions that often differ from those of the
second language learners native culture(s). Certainly such differences have been well documented 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 dialect 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 development. What this means is that cognition is built
from experience and is situated in sociohistorical, sociopolitical contexts, as argued by Lave
(1993). The construction of event representations and other cultural models is the building of
new neural networks or links between networks,
from the perspective of cognitive science. Because cognition is created in social interaction,
contemporary LS theory is concerned with participation in communities of practice and learning, more specifically, the learning process
which Lave and Wenger (1991) called legitimate
peripheral participation. They emphasized the crucial importance of learners access to participatory roles in expert performances of all knowledge skills, including language.
The term legitimate peripheral participation refers
to the incorporation of learners into the activities 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 participant. Lave and Wenger (1991) thus moved
beyond the Vygotskian notion of internalization 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) described as the radical shift [in the human sci-
341
ences] from invariant structures to ones that are
less rigid and more deeply adaptive, with structure 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 socially situated negotiation and renegotiation of
meaning in the world (pp. 5051). This perspective is important to focusing our attention
on how learners are brought into or excluded
from various activities that shape language learning. The importance of studying access, negotiation, 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 minorities 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 peripheral 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 methods. In the past few years, a number of discussions 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; Ramanathan & 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 combination of ethnographic, sociolinguistic, and
discourse analytic methods at a minimum, and
often includes quantitative and sometimes experimental methods, as well. However, quantitative and experimental work must be ecologically
valid (M. Cole, Hood, & McDermott, 1978) that
is, incorporate all relevant macro- and microdimensions of context; and, going beyond the
psychologists notion of ecological validity, incorporate whole events and behavior rather than
short strips of time with coding into preset categories (Watson-Gegeo, 1992). LS research is
built on fine-grained longitudinal studies of lan-
342
guage and culture learning in community or
classroom settings, or both, systematically documented through audiotape, videotape, and careful fieldnote records of interaction. Central to
the analysis are tape-recorded naturally occurring interactions that are analyzed for linguistic
and sociolinguistic features (including paralinguistic, kinesic, and suprasegmental features),
participant structures, genres, presentation of
self, indexicality, discourse organization, and
other aspects of interaction. In-depth ethnographic interviews of learners are conducted, focused 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 research, see Watson-Gegeo, 1992, and WatsonGegeo & Nielsen, 2003.)
CONCLUSION
A language socialization paradigm would
transform SLA research, which is already moving
towards becoming consistent with the new research in the human, social, and neurosciences,
and make it more relevant to learners actual experience (e.g., Kern, 2000). A language socialization paradigm would also transform the way we
attempt to teach languages in classrooms. We
would have to reexamine our pedagogical strategies, the assumptions we make about classroom
organization, lesson structure, and effective materials, including current assumptions about
sociocultural strategies. Our concern with multiculturalism would be radically changed, as well,
from the rather superficial and anemic treatment of cultural variability to a serious and intensive consideration of how our perceptions of the
world are shaped by the interaction between our
embodied experience in the world and the culturally 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)socialized 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 another language)? What does this teaching/learning imply in our highly diverse but rampantly politically structured world? What are the political
implications of our teaching, learning, and researching language learning and pedagogy?
Whom does this work empower and whom does 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 begin from the periphery. In all known human societies, the schism between transcendentality
and appearances is recognized, as Wautischer
(1998, p. 9) argued in the introduction to his edited volume, Tribal Epistemologies: Essays in the Philosophy of Anthropology. In the West, we typically
divide spirituality from science; even those scientists who themselves experience or are open to
the notion of spirituality tend to separate spiritual 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 indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, much of
what they say falls outside any perspective consistent 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 methodologies cannot account for qualitative experiences,
while introspective methodologies collapse under the scrutiny of noetic [i.e., intellectual] intrusion (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 dichotomy resembles the body-mind dualism that has
been so physically and emotionally destructive to
us since Descartes and which is now crumbling
343

under the weight of evidence from a variety of
methodological perspectives. Part of the postmodern realization is that knowledge is now going 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 colonialism whether internal or external, and in
the divisions between the formally (especially
higher) educated and the less schooled. Postmodernism is able to embrace the diversity of
human experience. As Johnson (1999) argued:
Constructivist versions of postmodernism seek to
reunite dichotomies between subjective and objective, fact and imagination, secular and sacred . . . immanent and transcendent. . . . The inclusion of a
spiritual perspective may permit acceptance of the
paradoxes inherent in these dichotomies. If our culture of separation arises partially from an overemphasis on the intellect and the ego, then the rebalancing 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 paradigm. 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 experiences are real. Tiller (2003a) argued:
Today, we once again have abundant experimental
evidence concerning natures expression that is being swept under the rug by the scientific establishment because it doesnt fit into the current prevailing paradigm. This concerns the issue of whether or
not human qualities of spirit, mind, emotion, consciousness, intention, etc., can significantly influence the materials and processes of physical reality.
The current physics paradigm would say no and indeed there is no place in the mathematical formalism
of the paradigm where any human qualities might
enter. However, the database that supports an unqualified yes response is very substantial. (p. 1)
The new physics posits both individual particles

and wave-like patterns of probabilities of interconnectedness, reversing the Cartesian notion
that the world is comprised of independent parts
(Johnson, 1999, p. 160). Physicist Capra (1983)
argued that quantum and relativity theories share
ontology with mystics throughout history.
The reconsideration of spirituality in light of
the entrance of marginalized Others into the ongoing 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 sciences that revolutionizes the way we view mind,
language, epistemology, and learning. It will affect how we think about learning languages and
cultures and the values we hold in relation to local/indigenous languages and knowledges, moving us away from instrumentalism towards a genuine recognition and appreciation for differing
ways of being, learning, teaching, and understanding in language teaching. And it will expand how we think about mind, cognition, and
intelligence.
A paradigm shift of the dimensions I have attempted to outline in this article is painful because 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 believed 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 oriented (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 incorporate voices and knowings from the periphery of
world power, from standpoints of indigeneity,
hybridity, ethnicity, color, gender, and sexual
orientation. As noted Nobel laureate (chemistry) 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 sequence of styles. Equally, the essential aspects of our
experience can never be condensed into a single description. 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 questions which have to be posed. (p. 303)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This revised article was originally presented as an invited plenary talk at the Pacific Second Language Research Forum (PacSLRF), 5 October 2001, in Honolulu, 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 discussed here. I am also grateful to Michele FavreauHaight, Suzanne Romaine, Kathryn Davis, David
Welchman Gegeo, Julia Menard-Warwick, Sally Sieloff
Magnan, and three anonymous reviewers, for their
344
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 project, I first began proposing the ideas developed here,
catalyzed by our synergistic, free-ranging, and wonderfully electric discussions of mind, language, culture,
and epistemology.
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