iii.
. 31g tw‘nfi.’
Jaw 3%.}.
‘ y a}...
. a 3.1.: .1
. . . ‘ .. ”mu .3... Man
.. t. .JWHJJUIH
. . V . . , ‘3. .Hml 52‘
. . I fit .25 A 3 v.
. . ‘ . .. 3.3.3.... . :1
V ‘ ‘ , #nurhnsaixo-hv. a r
. . , ‘ . . £5.53. :3: .gdh
. . ‘ , . . , . $33,...
. , ‘ . . ~
5:11.; bum.) 4.. . , . . . , t d...
. E. . 2 11.1.... .2 . .
-mfirfi hr :55? . .
.. a, ‘ .
.1. av. . ,
3 r‘ n. .
.12. a . .
. 55.1

. . hm) .. h
9’. . A u I
.3; .ufiifl 35:? P 3.. 1h
in. :5 1.1.3. ‘ a a .u f ._
.2 . 3 .
12:. 122:. . .9".
1.391)...

. s
‘ 5
.\IA1
. ‘ oftud
I?! l
, 1:» x
9:
z ‘
.3... .2
9:...

«.1... “Hunt:

rt!
9 .3

my?»

.. 2
I. . LA .
3: 5:6: 1
3
:u. . z...
a ‘ a:

II LE: lg
n? sh:
.Isufiuat 149V. A
. ‘ . ‘ 215 95.55:. .
,. ‘ . ‘ nfi.’
fl...
. . 5.5};
. . r. u!» an
Hunt... 5.. In... .
i113: ..
ref...“
1.2....

with?

t . . .12.

.31... altar-i..-

riil 333‘}: . ..
Pads"? 31‘... I I“: .410}: .
0.41.. 5mm} n0...

 

4.: 3.5.. :2...

aziuwnvlguu31x

52., Isfyizo. .3
7.1L???

2:.
.,.,,sfirh0fi...
air?
Hi}. r
3...:
is.

 

I , i
. m\).ldl.é
H! :36. .

514.!-
.:... . 2.25.23... .. SW... .1,
«ifzmu » .‘é..!.‘1x.v
.11.}: ,. . ‘éag, xx. , .n
_ .3 fimfiufl .Efifififiwmmzzi _ ‘
Vise). .3 n. «.3; a.
. ‘ L. . . . . 5 3.3: . .
‘ ., $4.3? .3
.a .
...§S..\.‘... . .
3.34.2.1 ‘

‘I'
'I

“I'll

 

wash; 4

£07 .LIBRARY
Mnchigan State
University

This is to certify that the
dissertation entitled

LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION IN THE ABSENCE OF
LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY?

A CASE STUDY OF HOW STUDENTS OF A LARGE PUBLIC
AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN THE MIDWEST CONSTRUCT
SOCIOCULTURAL AND LANGUAGE KNOWLEDGE INSIDE

AND OUTSIDE OF THEIR RUSSIAN LANGUAGE
CLASSROOM

presented by
NATALIA YEVGENYEVNA COLLINGS

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for the

Counseling, Educational
Psychology. and Special
PhD. degree in Education

 

 

Major Professor’s Signéture
Date

MSU Is an Aflinnatiw Adan/Equal Opportunity Institution

 

 

PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record.
TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due.
MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested.

 

DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2/05 p:/ClRC/DateDue.indd-p.1

 

LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION IN THE ABSENCE OF LANGUAGE AND
SOCIETY?

A CASE STUDY OF HOW STUDENTS OF A LARGE PUBLIC AMERICAN
UNIVERSITY IN THE MIDWEST CONSTRUCT SOCIOCULTURAL AND
LANGUAGE KNOWLEDGE INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF THEIR RUSSIAN
LANGUAGE CLASSROOM
By

Natalia Yevgenyevna Collings

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology, and Special Education

2006

ABSTRACT
LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION IN THE ABSENCE OF LANGUAGE AND
SOCIETY?

A CASE STUDY OF HOW STUDENTS OF A LARGE PUBLIC AMERICAN

UNIVERSITY IN THE MIDWEST CONSTRUCT SOCIOCULTURAL AND

LANGUAGE KNOWLEDGE INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF THEIR RUSSIAN

LANGUAGE CLASSROOM
By
Natalia Yevgenyevna Collings
This study represents an ethnographic account of what it means to learn the

Russian language in a sociocultural sense outside of Russia, in fact, in a classroom in a
large public American university in the Midwest. Analyzed data included fieldnotes of
classroom observations and interviews with four focal students and their teacher. The
findings are presented in the light of the theoretical framework based on the works of
Mikhail Bakhtin and Lev Vygotsky. The social work performed by the students and
related to learning Russian was considered as a cultural practice in Vygotskian
understanding, i.e., as organization of one’s thinking that results in the social activities of
taking a foreign language class and looking for other opportunities to use the language of
choice. The nature of this practice was described based on Bakhtinian understanding of
dialogue and monologue in culture. Students’ practice of learning a foreign language
proved to be dialogic, i.e., constantly evolving in a dialogue with multiple individually
interpreted societal discourses related to classroom culture, the concept of an educated
person, relationships between Russia and America, etc. Students’ and teacher’s
interactions within the classroom and with the researcher during the interviews were

described as constrained by social speech genres, monologic in nature, i.e., following

rather rigid and closed forms of Initiation, Response, and Evaluation (IRE) and creating a

cultural narrative in a conversation. Based on these findings, the study provides both
theoretical and pedagogical implications. It joins the literature discourse related to the
notions of culture, practice, and socialization along the lines of a postmodern perspective
building on Bakhtinian and Vygotskian ideas. For individual teachers who deal with the
concept of culture in their classrooms everyday, it provides an insight into understanding
culture as a multidimensional phenomenon co—constructed in a dialogue, but a dialogue
often constrained by the monologic genres of classroom interaction, and helps them think

of new ways of creatively weaving cultural knowledge into their unique pedagogies.

Copyright by
NATALIA YEVGENYEVNA COLLINGS
2006

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my dissertation director Anne Haas Dyson, my academic
advisor Yong Zhao, and my dissertation committee members Lynn Fendler and David
Dwyer for all of their support and guidance in writing this dissertation. I would also like
to thank my fellow doctoral students and friends for helping me by listening and
providing feedback inside and outside of the classroom. My endless appreciation also
goes to all the participants in this study for letting me observe their work in the classroom

and volunteering time for interviews.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1. Introduction .............................................. 1
1.1 Problem statement and purpose of the study ............................ 1
1.2 Literature review .................................................... 3
1.3 Outline of the chapters to come ....................................... 19
CHAPTER 2. Theoretical framework ................................. 21
1.1 Sociocultural theory ............................................. 21
1.2 Bakhtinian discourse, dialog and monolog ........................... 25
1.3 Foreign language learning as a social practice ........................... 31
1.4 Culture ......................................................... 32
1.5 Identity ......................................................... 34
CHAPTER 3. Method ............................................. 37
3.1 Phenomenon and case ............................................. 37
3.2 Research questions ............................................. 38
3.3 Data collection ................................................... 40
3.4 Data Analysis ................................................... 44
CHAPTER 4. Casing the joint ....................................... 47
4.1 Description of the site ............................................. 47
4.2 Relating language socialization to the classroom events and activities ......... 50
4.3 Theorizing language base ....................................... 55
CHAPTER 5: Genres of classroom communication ........................... 60
5.1 Genres of classroom communication ................................. 60
5.2 Role-play as a genre of classroom communication , ..................... 80
5.3 Informal ways of constructing cultural knowledge in the classroom ......... 84

vi

CHAPTER 6: Outside of the classroom ................................. 90

6.1 Michael ......................................................... 93
6.2 Jacob ......................................................... 95
6.3 Sophia ......................................................... 99
CHAPTER 7: Learning a language, constructing a Self .................... 104
7.1 Michael ........................................................ 104
7.2 Jacob ........................................................ 1 1 1
7.3 Sophia ........................................................ 122
CHAPTER 8: Dialogue and monologue in cultures .......................... 131
CHAPTER 9: Conclusions and implications ................................ 144
REFERENCES .................................................. 148

vii

CHAPTER ONE:

INTRODUCTION

Problem Statement and Purpose of the Study

Being a student, a teacher, and now a researcher of foreign language, I have never
stopped wondering how people can learn a language in a classroom, a thousand miles
away from the country where it is spoken. My thinking from early on was influenced by
Vygotskian views of the internalization of mental functions through language in social
contexts (Vygotsky, 1978). These views made good sense in the context of first language
acquisition by children, as shown, for example, in the framework of language
socialization studies (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). In a foreign language classroom
sociocultural worlds are not immediately available; however, they are brought in to a
different extent by the teacher, instructional materials, and the students themselves. How
do students figure these sociocultural worlds into their language learning?

I see at least two reasons that provide a rationale for gaining insight into this
question. The first one is to better. understand the relationship between culture and
language in a foreign language classroom at the level of the teacher, the students, and the
whole field. Despite a variety of methods and perspectives, I do not think that many
teachers, students, and even researchers might sound confident describing how
sociocultural knowledge figures into the foreign language learning and how it may be
conceptualized in order to make the process most successful.

The second reason is to better understand the goals of including “culture” in

foreign language education. More and more emphasis is being put today on multicultural

orientations in education. Promoting a multicultural orientation in students draws from
the landscape of poststructuralist, postmodernist, and critical understanding of culture and
related constructs. A foreign language classroom is positioned as one of the primary
arenas of multicultural education in the context of changing cultural conceptualizations:

The time has come, in my view, to revisit language teaching as a domain of

applied linguistic inquiry, but a domain that reclaims its full cultural and historical

meaning. Language teaching not only as methodology, or even as a bounded

instructional classroom activity, but as an institutional, societal profession, as a

public and political act of cultural production and reproduction, as a discourse of

power, linked to cultural ideologies and worldviews, and enhanced by new
technologies that are currently totally transforming our habitual notions of text,

discourse, communication, authenticity and the like (Kramsch, 1999, Section 4:

Looking into the Future, ‘1 l).

Studying learning a foreign language in a sociocultural sense outside of its
country seems to be helpful in terms of gaining insight into the relationship between
language and culture, especially on the background of existing problems of inconsistent
applications of sociocultural and other learning theories to foreign language pedagogy,
increasing pressure for Americans to know other languages and cultures, and the
unchanging format of classroom learning. A local understanding of this phenomenon
also seems promising to me in terms of informing a broad societal discourse of American
mono- or multi- cultural and linguistic orientation.

Thus, the first purpose for this dissertation study was to provide an in-depth

ethnographic account of how Russian language and culture were learned in the context of

a classroom located in a large Midwest University and help, or at least spur,
understanding of how language and culture are connected in the classrooms. In order to
do this, I employ a theoretical lens that builds on the works of two famous Russian
writers, Lev Vygotsky and Mikhail Bakhtin. Many of the authors from the sociocultural
camp that I discuss in the literature review that follows used Bakhtinian and Vygotskian
theories to various extents. These theories have been gaining popularity in many fields of
inquiry, such as educational research, anthropology, literature, linguistics, etc. They have
been interpreted and applied in many different ways. However, my interpretation of
these theories is rather different, as you will see from the discussion in the “Method”
chapter. Thus, the second purpose of this study is to offer a theoretical lens that builds on

Bakhtin and Vygotsky for thinking about teaching and learning across cultures.

Literature Review

Purposes for the Following Review

There are three reasons for this literature review that I would like to explain here.
The first reason is the researcher’s reflexivity. Reflecting on my subjectivity as a
researcher, I want to recognize that the views on language learning that I discuss in this
section to a various extent and consistency inform my vision. It is my hope that the
reader will not take my findings for granted, but will interpret them through the lens of
the reviewed literature. As I found in the process of reviewing literature on the
theoretical underpinnings of foreign language learning and teaching, the classifications of

theories, perspectives, and views are rather controversial. As a result, I am organizing

my knowledge on this subject here in the way that best makes sense to me, and also in the
way that will help me relate my later findings to the content of this section.

The second reason is that I believe that participants of this study, teachers and
students, have their own personal theories of how a language is learned. Foreign
language teachers received training that may have drawn on theories presented in this
section; teachers also draw on their own experiences as students. Students make sense of
foreign language in response to many things (the goal of this study is to unpack them as
much as possible), and among these things, in response to societal discourses on how
language is learned. Foreign language teachers, among many other interlocutors,
represent these types of discourses. My interest is to see how the views, theories, and
perspectives reviewed in this section are enacted in classroom discourses and
consequently in students’ understanding of learning a foreign language.

The third reason is that the goal of this study is not to stand alone, but to join the
conversations that currently exist in research. This section of my work presents my
understanding and interpretation of these conversations. It is intended to help the reader

figure out what place I am trying to find for myself among the literature discourses.

Fundamental Views on Leaming and Their Applications in Foreign Language Teaching
Foreign language teaching, as many other disciplines, has been influenced in its
history by three fundamental views on knowledge and learning: empiricist (or
behaviorist), rationalist (or cognitivist), and pragmatist-sociohistoric (or sociocultural)
(Greeno, Collins, & Resnick, 1996). Empiricists view learning as a change in behavior

that is observable; rationalists define learning as a change in mental associations, that is

not directly observable, but is predictable since the mechanism is innate and similar in all
living beings; and pragmatists and the followers of sociohistoric school see learning as a
change in activity due to individual’s interaction with the environment.

Empiricist views were mainly utilized in behaviorist theories, introduced in the
United States by John Watson and B. F. Skinner. According to behaviorist theories
language should be treated simply as one of human behaviors (verbal behavior), part of
general human intelligence, that is learned and functions through stimulus-response
mechanisms. In the field of foreign language teaching this view favors drill-oriented
audio-lingual exercises. Empiricist views have also lately been introduced in
connectionist theories that to my knowledge are still considered to be too new to be
widely applied to practice in foreign language teaching.

Rationalist views influenced foreign language methodology in at least two major
ways. The first influence is represented by the theory of Universal Grammars, or UG,
and was developed by Noam Chomsky and his followers. Chomsky positions linguistics
as a branch of cognitive psychology and suggests that every human being has an innate
“language acquisition device” (LAD) that is a mechanism through which a child learns
the first language. The second or foreign language proficiency, according to Chomsky’s
theory, is achieved through conscious study of generative grammar rules, which are in
their deep nature universal across languages (Chomsky, 2000). Such understanding of
language learning process in the field of foreign language education yielded the so called
cognitive-code method (Hadley, 2001), which is important to my study due to its

premises, such as:

1. Language learning, as any other cognitive activity, benefits from being
meaningful, i.e., connecting new knowledge to prior knowledge. Prior knowledge for
second language learners is conceptualized as their knowledge of first language structure
and developing knowledge of the underlying structure of the second language.

2. Learners must understand and analyze grammar rules to build their
competence as a foundation for performance.

3. The goal is to develop the same types of abilities that native speakers have.

The second influence of rationalism on foreign language methodology can be
found in acquisition models of language learning, stating that foreign language can be
naturally acquired, rather than learned, under certain conditions that are similar to the
conditions of a child learning the first language. Krashen’s “natural approach” (Krashen
& Terrell, 1983) is probably the most famous among the ones favoring acquisitionist
view of learning. It describes language learning being most natural not as a result of
consciously studying grammar rules, but as a result of understanding comprehensive
input and then filling in the gaps by grammar rules (Krashen, 2004). Thus, the main
difference between Chomsky’s and Krashen’s theory is whether grammar rules should be
learned in foreign language consciously using knowledge about how the first language
works, or unconsciously derived from input that is comprehensive, i.e., appropriate for
student’s level of proficiency.

Both cognitive and acquisitionist views in foreign language methodology are
usually described as sharing three characteristics. First of all, they imply a hierarchal
order of knowledge acquisition: when a lower level of knowledge is practiced, we are

ready to move to the next level (Hadley, 2001). One of the most prominent traces of

rationalist influence in foreign language acquisition is the proficiency-oriented method,
proposing several levels of learner proficiency in the same tasks. Secondly, when
cognitivists and acquisitionists do account for cultural aspects of language learning, they
treat text and context as separable entities (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1995). And lastly, they
treat speakers as individuals, not as members of specific groups, thus confirming to an
abstract ideal of a native speaker (Gumperz & Hymes, 1986).

The focus on grammatical structure was contested by the communicative
approach to language learning that borrowed the notion of communicative competence
from developments in sociolinguistics (Hadley, 2001). The notion of communicative
competence (Gumperz & Hymes, 1986) built on Chomsky’s grammatical competence,
making it broader by accounting for the social, or functional basis of languages. The
communicative approach also supplemented the Input, or Comprehension Hypothesis
proposed by Krashen with an Output Hypothesis, favoring communication with language
from beginning stages. It proclaimed that language is learned best through negotiation of
meaning in task-based interaction with others.

The communicative approach is not a single method; rather, it is an orientation
that can be applied to almost any method, including cognitive and acquisitionist.
Because of its social makeup and closeness to sociolinguistics, in my view, the
communicative approach is most closely connected to sociocultural views on learning.
There are also more recent applications of sociocultural views to foreign language
learning (Beltz, 2002; Kramsch, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2002; Norton & Toohey, 2004). I

discuss these in the following section.

My description of the influences of fundamental learning perspectives on foreign
language learning methods is by no means full or unarguable. As I mentioned earlier, the
purpose of providing it here is to inform readers about my researcher’s lens. This lens
will be directed not at teaching “methods”, understood as “static set of procedures”, but at
“pedagogy”, understood as a “dynamic interplay among teachers, learners, and
instructional materials”, which is found to characterize the general turn in twenty-first
century educational practice (Richards, 2002).

There are no distinct borders between views and perspectives on foreign language
learning. In most of the cases, there are continuums and blends. When reading books
and articles, I try to identify threads of conversations that can be placed along these
continuums. People who share similar views on knowledge and learning usually build on
each other, trying to advance the theory based on evaluating its applications in old
contexts and applying it to new ones. Criticism and argument, based on my observations,
often comes into the conversations when people have clashing views on the nature of
knowledge and learning, for example, cognitivist versus sociocultural; or disagree on the
method of inquiry, traditionally, positivist versus interpretive. Criticism also takes place
when people see theories as being misinterpreted in applications to particular practices.
This type of dynamics will help me describe the conversation that I am joining by doing
my study. Identified by the focus of my interest, this conversation evolves around
sociocultural theory and its applications in the field of foreign and second language

learning and teaching.

Conversations about Applications of Sociocultural Theory in Foreign Language
Learning and Teaching

There are several conversations in the literature, as I understand them. The two
conversational threads that I was able to trace most saliently are woven by 1)
sociocultural theorists pitted against “others”: mentalists, cognitivists, and acquisitionists;
and 2) researchers that can be placed along the continuum of sociocultural theory,
involving old and new conceptualizations that belong to different views of different
branches. My goal here is to describe how I understand these conversations and how I
am positioning myself among them.

Thread one: sociocultural views against others. The social turn in second and
foreign language learning and teaching originated as an opposition, or, in milder cases,
alternative to rationalist and empiricist views and, in my opinion, is well expressed in the
following quote: “From focusing on the abstract grammar system and treating learners as
a bundle of psychological reflexes, we have begun to treat learners as complex social
beings” (Canagarajah, 2004, p. 117).

Different conversations that fit under my category of “sociocultural views against
others” range from building oppositions to seeking integrations. As I already mentioned,
much disagreement comes from opposed views of the nature of knowledge in general,
language as a phenomenon, and “what it means to be scientific.” For example,
mentalists, led by Chomsky, usually do not regard sociocultural theory as scientific,
because it focuses on parole (speech), and not langue (grammar). They see only grammar
as being important to understanding language as phenomenon. Moreover, cognitivists

rely on positivist beliefs that the world is knowable through study of abstract universal

systems of rules, whereas sociocultural interpretive tradition tends to assume the
existence of multiple realities that can only be interpreted in local contexts.

A good example of a conversation that evolved along these lines is a recent
exchange between Marysia Johnson Gerson and Jan Hulstijn in The Canadian Modern
Language Review. In her Philosophy of Second Language Acquisition Johnson Gerson
proposed a “dialogical approach to second language acquisition” that builds on theories
of Mikhail Bakhtin and Lev Vygotsky as an alternative to “cognitivist and linguistic
views.” Following the path of sociocultural theory, she advocated for viewing the
development of second language ability as “the process of becoming an active participant
in the target language culture, and stated that “the participation metaphor should replace,
not compliment, the existing acquisition metaphor” (Johnson Gerson, 2004). Hulstijn
published a review of Johnson Gerson’s book, the meaning of which is nicely conveyed
in the following quote: “the author [Johnson Gerson] chooses a confrontational approach,
demanding the replacement of what she calls linguistic and cognitive theories of SLA.
But one cannot legitimately reject other theories without proposing a testable alternative
theory. Good ideas alone do not suffice to form a scientific theory; one must respect the
scientific game and its rules” (Hulstijn, 2004). Johnson Gerson replied to this criticism by
explaining that her real intent was not “to dismiss existing theories, but to show cognitive
and experimental biases in SLA theory and practice,” and also to contribute to developing
“a more comprehensive framework that attempts to unite the two major scientific
traditions - cognitive and sociocultural”. She recognizes that the task is very complex

because the views are diametrically opposed, but is worth undertaking, because SLA

10

 

should be able to benefit from different traditions of thought and research (Johnson
Gerson, 2004).

Another exchange was carried out between James Lantolf and Kevin Gregg, as far
as I could track it, from 1993 through 2002. It posts similar issues: Lantolf is trying to
introduce a social and postmodern orientation to second language learning, while Gregg
is being skeptical about the validity of such approaches. The bitterness of their
arguments can be illustrated by the titles of their articles alone: “Taking explanation
seriously; or, let a couple of flowers bloom” (Gregg, 1993), “SLA theory building:
‘Letting all the flowers bloom!” (Lantolf, 1996), “A theory for every occasion:
postmodernism and SLA” (Gregg, 2000), “Commentary from the flower garden:
responding to Gregg, 2000” (Lantolf, 2002), and “A garden ripe for weeding: a reply to
Lantolf” (Gregg, 2002).

Thread two: within sociocultural tradition. The sociocultural tradition
emphasizes social aspects of human knowledge and activity, and a close relationship
between culture and language. Within the sociocultural tradition it is now common to
distinguish between older and newer notions of culture. The older notion of culture
views beliefs and other psychological constructs are static, existing in the culture and
affecting cultural practice; that is defined as a noun. This older notion is usually
attributed to Hymes (1962)]. The newer notions of culture claim that meaning and
cultural practices, psychological constructs and societal categories (such as race, class

and gender) do not exist, but are being constantly constructed in the hybridity of

 

' Separating sociocultural views into categories of “older” and “newer” follows the line of sociolinguistic
influence on qualitative research in education. On a broader theoretical scale, these notions can be
presented as “static” (or “unitary”) and “dynamic,” and attributed to Edward Tylor (1871) and Karl Marx
(in his manuscripts written in the middle of the 19-th century) as their originators.

11

everyday life. These notions originated in the works of varied sociocultural theorists,
including Rosaldo, and are shared by many authors associated with sociocultural
perspectives on knowledge and learning (e.g., new literacy and cultural studies, critical
and feminist theory, the discourse theories of Foucault, and the dialogic framework of
Bakhtin).

Analyzing most recent literature, I was able to identify several threads of what I
generalize as sociocultural influence in foreign language learning and teaching. The ones
that I was able to trace most saliently are 1) a critique of viewing culture and identity as
unitary, stable, predictable, and leamable through text and in stages, 2) a critique of
idealizing native speaker’s skills as a model and end goal, and 3) critique of current views
on diversity and multicultural education. These three critiques are interrelated and build
on each other. Separation of them here is artificial and serves the purpose of a more
coherent organization of my narrative. As a result of these critiques, new directions are
being proposed. In this section, I am presenting my understanding of these critiques, the
new directions, and how these new directions feed into my research.

Critique of viewing culture and identigg as static and unitafl. In response to
emphasis on importance of cultural knowledge in foreign language learning and teaching
as presented by a communicative approach, textbooks and teachers attempted to codify
contexts and teach them as grammar rules; for example, students learned ten ways of
excusing themselves instead of ten ways of conjugating verbs. Textbooks provided
entries of “cultural knowledge” (Kramsch & McConnell-Ginet, 1992). This way of
“handling” cultural knowledge was originated by the “older” notion of culture described

earlier. Codifying cultural knowledge was not achieving the goal of social

12

meaningfulness of classroom interactions, and there was a lot of disappointment in the
nineties. Meanwhile, the concept of culture was undergoing big changes under the
influence of cultural and new literacy studies, feminist and critical theories,
conceptualizations of discourse in the works of Michael Foucault, and dialogic
approaches developed by Mikhail Bakhtin and his circle. The “new” notion of culture
conceptualizes it not as stable and unitary, but as dynamic and fluid. The concept of
culture under the “new” notion is substituted by the concept of discourses. Cultural
differences are not seen as country-specific in this context. They are seen as discourses
within and across cultures. For example, what could be analyzed under “older” notion of
culture as differences in gender relationships in the United States and Russia, under the
“new” notion would be researched as gender discourses within and across American and
Russian societies as they relate to the categories of class, nationality or race, and power.
These societal categories, in turn, do not exist, but are constantly co—constructed by
individuals in everyday life.

Identity has always been a concept closely related to culture. A very
comprehensive overview of identity concepts is presented in Identity and Agency in
Cultural Worlds by Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain (2001). The unitary, or
“western” view of identity “takes as its prototype a coherent, unified, and ordinary
subject” (Holland et al., 2001, p. 7). In this extreme, the concept of identity treats culture
and language as one of the knowledge systems contributing to the education of a holistic
individual. In opposition to this “western” view, cultural studies are “concerned with
“cultural identities” that form in relation to the major structural features of society:

ethnicity, gender, race, nationality, and sexual orientation” (Holland et. al., 2001, p. 7).

13

Today, just like the concept of culture, identity is being reconsidered as dynamic and
fluid, as “a huge variety of discourses, practices, concepts, means, and modalities of the
self” (Holland et al., 2001, p. 20).

Critiques of unitary concepts of culture and identity in the field of foreign
language learning and teaching led to rethinking the roles of the learner, the teacher, and
the text. As Claire Kramsch put it, “learners themselves are to weave texts and contexts
to make meanings and to give power to words: they can no longer passively recognize a
transcendental realm of pre-made units of meaning associated with pre-built texts”
(Kramsch & McConnell-Ginet, 1992, pp. 5-6). Claire Kramsch is one of the authors that
introduce to the foreign language field the idea of the inseparability of text and context in
production of cultural meaning. In describing this idea Kramsch tracks its origin to
Mikhail Bakhtin and his circle: “Bakhtin reminds students of language how much every
word they utter contains the words of others, how much they unconsciously reproduce the
speech [. . .]. For Bakhtin, context is text” (Kramsch & McConnell-Ginet, 1992, p. 12).

Foreign language researchers today more and more often and consistently
recognize that concept of culture in foreign language learning is closely connected to
issues of identity. Suresh Canagarajah (2004) writes: “What motivates the learning of the
language is the construction of the identities we desire and the communities we want to
join in order to engage in communication and social life” (p. 117). Bonny Norton and
Kelleen Toohey (2004) in their introduction to Critical Pedagogies and Language
Learning set the themes by claiming that “language is not simply a means of expression,

rather, it is a practice that constructs, and is constructed by the ways language learners

14

understand themselves, their social surroundings, their histories, and their possibilities for
future” (p. 1).

Traditional communicative approaches recommended learning a language “under
a foreign identity”; for example, in role plays the learner had to choose an identity of
someone from a foreign culture, as different from his own as possible, in order to “free”
oneself from the constraints imposed by existing identity and engage into play.
Immersion programs consider banning L1 in foreign language classroom as one of the
most effective techniques. Today, some researchers attempt to demonstrate that focusing
on L2 alone is neither necessary, nor desirable. Julie Beltz (2002), for example, argues
that language learner’s identity is hybrid in nature, and that L1 may provide an insight
into how “multicompetent language users inhabit and relate to a pluralistic, multilingual
world” (p. 216).

Criti ue o ideali in native s eaker. Building up her ideas about text as context,
Kramsch also argues against the ideal of a native speaker. In her multiple critiques of the
communicative approach she states that it “made language-learning settings a hostage of
a questionable ideal of mainstream native speaker socialization” (Kramsch & McConnell-
Ginet, 1992, p.11). In her argument, Kramsch refers to Fillmore’s “incarnation theory”
(Fillmore, 1979, p.13). “Incarnation theory” basically states that if a minor god would
wish to pass as a member of human community, it would need to know the sociocultural
contexts of the community inside and out in order to constrain itself enough not to give
away its divine origin. The point that Kramsch emphasizes is that it is impossible to
completely constrain one’s origin and no language course can provide the learners with

the complete knowledge of the sociocultural contexts of the foreign country. Moreover,

15

native-likeness is not always desirable. Kramsch explains that the goal is not to learn
sociocultural contexts inside out, but to understand that they are central to knowing the
language (not grammar rules). The teacher’s goal then is not to set the ideal of a native
speaker, but to try and make learners more culturally sensitive.

Once again relying on Bakhtinian dialogic framework and the idea of language as
a mediator between conventionality and creativity, Kramsch offers that dialogue, and not
individual performance, is a measure of communicative competence: “If we take the
locus of the non-native speaker as a point of departure, rather than fixed linguistic rules
of the text or the socially conventionalized patters of the context, we can reinstate the
power of the individual speaker to shape his environment in dialogue with other
speakers” (Kramsch & McConnell-Ginet, 1992, p. 13).

Julie Beltz explains the phenomenon of idealizing native speaker in foreign
language instruction by the influence of modern rational thought: “Since the learner is
measured against the objective and unitary grammatical competence of an L2 native
speaker, he or she is necessarily an inherently deficient communicator” (Beltz, 2002, p.
212). Beltz argues that the deficient communicator is a myth produced by viewing code
switching, or the use of the first language in the foreign language classroom, as a cause of
underdeveloped grammatical and communicative competence. She cites several research
studies that show that the use of L1 in the classroom can be interpreted as a conscious
discourse strategy of multilingual speakers, that they use to aid comprehension,
collaborate during group work, and explain grammar. Beltz paints a picture of the learner

as a “multicompetent language user who carefully and consciously uses multiple

l6

linguistic codes not necessarily for reasons of deficiency and failure, but rather to play,
represent, experiment, create, juxtapose, learn and grow” (2002, p. 217).

The importance of the re—conceptualization of “native speaker” in foreign
language learning and teaching has also been emphasized as a result of the recognition
that the concept of native standard language (NSL) is problematic itself. Via a
sociolinguistic lens NSL is problematic because it fails to account for the variation
present in all languages and among “native speakers” of those languages. For example,
French language in Quebec and in Paris are quite different, but they are both French
language. This issue becomes the theme of the volume recently edited by Carl Blyth
(2003). The author of the first article in this volume, Robert Train, suggests that because
of problematic nature of N SL, language teachers should abandon the role of a “model,”
and instead become “cultural informants” who promote “critical language awareness” to
their students (Sadler, 2003).

And yet another way to look at “nativeness” is offered in the research literature
dedicated to the study of bilingualism. As summarized by Guadalupe Valdaes, this
research concludes: “bilinguals unavoidably vary in their productive and receptive
abilities in both languages” (Valdaes, 1993, p.9-10). In other words, since it is
impossible to be equally proficient in two or more languages, we can consider an
individual bilingual if s/he uses two languages, regardless of proficiency and
circumstances. For my research, this would mean that the second year students of
Russian could be viewed as bilingual individuals, and their knowledge of Russian
language as a functional ability to participate (in various shapes and forms) in the Russian

speaking community.

17

We of views on diversifl apd mjulticultural education. Another conversation
that I was able to track in the literature and see as important to both the development and
positioning of my study is a conversation about the views on diversity and multicultural
education in American society and how these views are reflected in the practices of
foreign language learning and teaching. This conversation can be most closely attributed
to critical pedagogy, which sees the role of education not only as a reflection of social
order but also as an instrument of social change. As Allan Luke (2004) put it, critical
pedagogy argues that despite the efforts of promoting diversity and multiculturalism,
“teaching remains about, within, and for the nation, tacitly about the protection and
production of its Culture (and, by implication, its preferred ethnicities and races,
languages and codes) and committed to the production of its sovereign subjects” (p. 24).

Ryuko Kubota (2004) in her “Critical multiculturalism and second language
education” provides an insight into this problem by identifying three perspectives on
multicultural education: conservative, liberal, and critical. Conservative perspective
defends Euro-centric modes of thinking proclaiming European model as a norm and
defining everyone else in the world against it. Liberal perspective reflects the famous
American “melting pot” mentality. It is built on superficial views on diversity of which
everyone is expected to approve, emphasizing common humanity and natural equality
across race, class and gender. It argues that there is only one race — human race, which
produces color (or difference) blindness. Critical perspective conceptualizes culture as
dialectical and full of inherent tensions rather then as an orderly, coherent, and

predictable system. It emphasizes that social transformation is needed to reach the social

18

justice and equality. It advocates multicultural education for all students, not just for

minority students, who may need to raise their self-esteem.

My Voice

I see my position in the conversations I described as being mostly defined by the
focus and nature of my research, and not by my personal beliefs on how a foreign
language is learned. A research statement in Lantolf and Pavlenko (2001) describes my
goals as well:

We do not want to dispute the legitimacy of the scientific method and its

extensions into social sciences However, we believe that there is also much to

be gained by considering the relevance of an alternative approach to research - an

approach sometimes referred to as the hermeneutic tradition (p. 141).

The qualitative nature of my study and its research focus on individuals in the
context of social activity (foreign language learning) puts me into the sociocultural camp.
Realization of the complexity of the foreign language learning phenomenon drives me to
look for complex and dynamic constructs of learning, culture and identity. In short, I find
my voice developing within the “new directions” of sociocultural theory, because they
give me tools and a philosophy to learn as much as possible about foreign language

learning from the learner’s perspective.

Outline of the Chapters to Come

This dissertation study consists of nine chapters. After providing the problem and

purpose statements followed by situating this study within the wide range of literature in

19

the first chapter, in the second chapter I take a more focused approach to positioning my
work among the current perspectives by elaborating on my theoretical framework, which
included such tools as sociocultural theory, Bakhtinian dialogic views, and constructs of
social practice, culture, and identity. Chapter three is dedicated to the description of the
qualitative method that shaped my formulation and presentation of the phenomenon, the
case that framed it, the research questions, and the procedures of data collection and
analysis. Chapter four sets the scene for the following four findings chapters. It is
intended to give the reader a sense of the classroom where the study was conducted and
also the understanding of how my research questions and theoretical focus have evolved
during my presence in the Russian 202 classroom. In the process of data collection and
analysis I arrived at two big themes that seemed to work as preliminary assertions and
later organized my whole study. First of all, students often talked about norms and rules
of communication in classroom activities, which turned my attention to classroom culture
and social actions that students canied out in its context. Chapter five presents my
findings related to this theme. Secondly, students seemed to take contextual and cultural
work related to studying Russian outside of the classroom. This finding allowed me to
conceive of students’ foreign language learning as a unique practice of dialogic
participation in social contexts that are much broader than the classroom. Chapter six
elaborates on social contexts that my participants described as related to their foreign
language use, whereas chapter seven describes some possibilities of the identity work that
my participants engaged in. Chapter eight is an “overflow” chapter, which makes an
emphasis on dialogic nature of human interactions often following the monologic genres

established by the societal tradition, and intends to engage the reader in a Bakhtinian

20

discussion of monologic and dialogic aspects of constructing cultural knowledge.
Chapter nine concludes my dissertation with a summary of the findings, implications, and

ideas for future research.

21

CHAPTER TWO:

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The main theoretical tools that I used in this dissertation study were (a)
sociocultural theory, (b) Bakhtinian views on discourse, dialogue, and monologue, (c)
social practice as applied to language learning, ((1) culture, and (e) identity. As my
literature review showed, these tools have a history of controversial interpretations in the
field of educational research. The purpose of this chapter is to further clarify my

conceptualization of these terms in the context of this study.

Sociocultural Theory

As I pointed out in my literature review, sociocultural theory has a history that
allows for its multiple interpretations. I also noted that 1 position myself within the new
developments of sociocultural theory, viewing societal categories such as practice,
culture, and identity as rather fluid categories that are being constantly co-constructed in
the hybridity of everyday life. However, there are two potentially confusing points that I
would like to clarify here: socialization as a social phenomenon and my connection of
sociocultural theory to its principle theorist, Lev Vygotsky.

As I have noted earlier and will again show in the context of my findings,
language socialization as a theoretical concept was originally developed in the context of
an “older” sociocultural tradition embedded in sociolinguistics of Hymes and Heath.
According to these researchers, learning a language is a part of becoming a member of

society, coming to share its rather static set of meanings, values, beliefs, and norms. One

22

of the theoretical goals of my study is to problematize such an understanding of
socialization and to try to imagine it as a more fluid, dynamic and multidimensional
phenomena. However, in my study language socialization often became a theory of how
a language is learned that my participants developed in the interviews. As such a theory,
socialization was rather consistent with its “older” sociolinguistic representation. The
students I talked to expressed the opinions that the language can truly be learned only
inside of its country by coming to understand the true meanings of the natives. They also
stated that their goal was perfection in Russian. I approached these findings from two
directions: (a) I tried to show that students’ static socialization theories were not stable
beliefs, but rather a dialogic reflection on available social discourses, and (b) I tried to
show how their language learning was a much more complex practice than taking on the
static set of meanings that they attributed to Russian. Since I do see this flow of
sociocultural understanding of language socialization in my study as rather confusing, I
tried to reflect it in the following chain of explanations:

l. I initially encountered the concept of language socialization in “older”
sociocultural traditions developed within American sociolinguistics of the
seventies.

2. In the process on my study I came to understand language socialization as a
complex, dynamic and multidimensional construct and theoretically moved
myself into the camp of “newer” developments within sociocultural theory.

3. I once again encountered a static concept of language socialization in the theories

of how a language is learned developed by my participants in the interviews.

23

4. I looked at the “older” theories that my participants developed in the interviews
through the lens of “newer” sociocultural developments, and was able to imagine
my participants’ language learning experiences as a complex practice of
individual interpretation of the societal discourses.

Even though 1 position myself within the “newer” developments of sociocultural
theory, I consider my study sociocultural mainly because I built it on my understanding
of the ideas of its founder, Lev Vygotsky. As I understand it from reading Vygotsky,
cognition is mediated through language, and language is a system of meanings that are
embedded in sociocultural contexts. I believe that a sociocultural context is both a very
local and complex theoretical concept for Vygtosky. Sociocultural contexts do not
simply exist, they are co-constructed by their participants. One’s interaction within them
is individually unique and can take many forms. Vygotsky’s theory helps me understand
(a) in response to which sociocultural contexts my participants make sense of their
language learning experiences, (b) how they co-construct these contexts, and (c) their
interaction within these sociocultural contexts as fluid and constantly evolving. In order
to understand the nature of these phenomena even deeper, I turn to another Russian
writer, a literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin.

My familiarity with how Vygotsky’s thought has been applied to the field of second
language acquisition comes from James Lantolf’ s conceptualization of activity theory.
James Lantolf, working with a number of colleagues, has been very active in theoretical
aspects of this conceptualization and also in conducting and editing studies that fit under
the umbrella of activity theory in language learning. These studies set the task “to

explore the implications of Vygotsky’s theory in its contemporary formulation, the

24

activity theory, for understanding the nature of the relationship between real individuals
and languages other than their first” (Lantolf, 2001, p. 143). It is important to the authors
of these studies to understand language learners as people, unique and individual, and the
activity of language learning as “developing, or failing to develop, new ways of
mediating ourselves and our relationships to other and ourselves” (rather than simply
acquisition of forms) (Lantolf, 2001, p. 145).

I anticipate that my reader may find my thinking rather consistent with that of
Lantolf and his colleagues. However, I believe that limiting my theoretical framework to
Lantolf” s conceptualization of activity theory or making myself its follower in general is
not beneficial for my study. Activity theory often operates with “older” socialization
terms, such as community of practice. peripheral and legitimate participation, zone of
proximal development, inner speech, etc. My main hesitation is that activity theory
views community as a rather stable entity and human interaction within it as dialectical:
“a dialectic struggle between the leamer and the community out of which emerges the
learner’s position and identity” (Lantolf, 2001, 149). From my knowledge of philosophy,
I understand “dialectical” relationship as the one that brings opposites to constituting a
whole, tensions to agreement. My goals in this study is (a) to describe communities of
practice (primarily, classroom) as simply the contexts for understanding the meanings of
students’ actions within them, and not as something that shape or define these meanings,
and (b) to show students relationship with the communities of practice (now understood
in a lot broader sense than the classroom) as dialogic, and not dialectical. In order to
achieve these goals, I believe that I will have to add some theoretical tools to the activity

theory arsenal (Bakhtinian discourse, dialogue, and monologue) and carefully describe

25

my understanding of others (practice, culture, and identity). Whether or not such
perspective is helpful and how it can be used, I leave completely for consideration of my
reader, who I think of as a free author of my text acting in his own uniquely woven

universe of discourses.

Bakhtinian Discourse, Monologue and Dialogue

Discourse is an important theoretical construct in my study. The term discourse
has multiple meanings. Mostly generally defined, discourse is a collection of statements
that circulate in particular societies (Mills, 2004). Mills approaches discourse from the
perspectives of various authors, including Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin emphasizes the
dialogical nature of discourse: discourses do not exist in the isolation, but always in
relation, contrast or opposition to other discourses. At this point separating myself from
Mills, 1 would like to elaborate on complexity of Bakhtinian understanding of dialogue
and monologue in discourses. Whereas he deeply investigates the nature of human
interactions as dialogic, he also points out that the prevailing traditions of western
discourses are built on monologue. In a monologic tradition the relationship between two
people are described as subject-object. The subject usually conveys the truth to the
object. Monologue thus becomes a synonym of agreement on a final meaning, the truth.
Bakhtin notes that the more established a particular society is, the more monologic are
the interactions in it. Thus it is important to distinguish between monologue as a cultural
tradition of human interaction and dialogue as its nature. The relationship between two
people in a dialogue is subject-subject; the meanings are never finalized and determined.

Bakhtin writes that the dialogic nature of human interaction best shines through the

26

monologic tradition during big changes in established societies and during the formation
of the new ones, as for example, during Russia’s turn to capitalism at the end of the
nineteenth century. This analysis comes out in Bakhtin’s works on Dostoyevsky, a
Russian author who wrote most of his novels about that time (Bakhtin, 1984)2. In
relation to my study, I will be identifying societal discourses that my participants interact
with using the idea of a monologic tradition, whereas I will be trying to analyze the
interactions themselves as dialogic, i.e., complex, dynamic, and constantly evolving.

Dialogue, as a theoretical concept, has a very rich history. Nicholas Burbules
(2000) provided a summary of six distinct conceptualization of dialogue in education and
based on them identified three broad ways that different models of dialogue attempted to
address diversity: pluralism (or “melting pot” ideal), multiculturalism (or ideal of
celebrating differences), and cosmopolitanism (or model of unreconciled coexistence of
diverse cultures). According to Burbules, all conceptualizations of dialogue view it as a
tool for reaching consensus, except for cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism, on the other
extreme, rejects the value of engagement altogether (Burbules, 2000). The debates about
usefulness of various forms of the dialogue became one of the central issues in
contemporary education.

With this dissertation, I will probably join in these debates through my readers.
This is why it important for me to state here that I do not support or disregard any of the
views described above. As it relates to dialogue, the goal of my work was to understand
the nature of human interaction in one local site and not to provide any models for

teaching practice. I believe that models, theories and practice prescriptions based on

 

2 The 1984 text is a translation of Problemi Poetiki Dostoyevskogo, Moscow. 1963. The original
publication was Problemi Tvorchestva Dostoyevskogo, Leningrad, 1929.

27

philosophical ideas can be limiting and unfaithful to these ideas, because their realization
is inevitably local, and local is inevitably unique. I believe that this is what happened in
many cases to activity theory which was built with the ideas of Lev Vygotsky: an idea
calling for human thought and creativity was masked by readily available prescriptions,
and the very nature of schooling and teaching changed very little.

I was hoping that the reader would think with me about the nature of human
interaction. In my study and from my understanding of Bakhtinian thought, it comes out
that consensus, so valued in other dialogic models, is the opposite of a truly dialogic
mind. Dialogue does not know consensus: if a consensus is reached, what is there left to
talk about? Constant disagreement does not become an ideal here; the key is that talk,
conversations, or discourses (whatever we call them) always happen in many planes
individually identified by humans in an infinitely stratified society.

Bakhtin distinguishes between external and internal dialogue (he also calls it
macro and micro dialogue, or staged and real dialogue - translation is mine). I will first
focus on external dialogue, and then try to connect it to my understanding of internal
dialogue and how both figure out in my study. External dialogue consists of words that
people say out loud among each other in various social contexts. These social contexts
serve as a key to understanding the social actions that people’s words only mediate. I
believe that it is crucial to understand words as mediators of social actions embedded in
meaningful contexts. I will attempt to explain what I mean by this statement by
providing an excerpt from Dostoyevsky’s novel Idiot that Bakhtin heavily relied on in ‘

building his dialogic theory:

28

"I would like you," she [Aglaya] said, "not to come here tomorrow until evening,

when the guests are all assembled. You know there are to be guests, don't you?"

"Yes, I am invited," he [Myshkin] replied.

"I do not wish to quarrel with them about this; in some things they won't be
reasonable. . .. How mean it all is, and how foolish! We were always middle-
class, thoroughly middle-class, people. Why should we attempt to climb into the
giddy heights of the fashionable world? . .

"Listen to me, Aglaya," said the prince [Myshkin], "I do believe you are nervous
lest I shall make a fool of myself tomorrow at your party? "

"Nervous about you? " Aglaya blushed. "Why should I be nervous about you?
What would it matter to me if you were to make ever such a fool of yourself?
How can you say such a thing? What do you mean by ’making a fool of yourself?
What a vulgar expression! I suppose you intend to talk in that sort of way
tomorrow evening? Look up a few more such expressions in your dictionary; do,
you'll make a grand effect! I'm sorry that you seem to be able to come into a room
as gracefully as you do; where did you learn the art? Do you think you can drink a
cup of tea decently, when you know everybody is looking at you, on purpose to

see how you do it?"

"Do you know what, I had better not come at all tomorrow! I'll plead sick-list and

stay away," said the prince, with decision.

29

“Oh, my goodness! Just listen to that! 'Better not come,’ when the party is on
purpose for him! Good Lord! What a delightful thing it is to have to do with such
a - such a stupid person as you are!"

"Well, I'll come, I'll come," interrupted the prince, hastily, "and I'll give you my
word of honor that I will sit the whole evening and not say a wor ."

"I believe that's the best thing you can do. You said you'd 'plead sick—list' just
now; where in the world do you get hold of such expressions? Why do you talk to
me like this? Are you trying to irritate me, or what?"

"Forgive me, it's a schoolboy expression. I won't do it again. I know quite well, I
see it, that you are anxious on my account (now, don't be angry), and it makes me
very happy to see it. You wouldn't believe how frightened I am of misbehaving
somehow, and how glad I am of your instructions. But all this panic is simply
nonsense, you know, Aglaya! I give you my word it is; I am so pleased that you
are such a child, such a dear good child. How charming you can be if you like,

Aglaya."

"And you won't reproach me for all these rude words of mine -some day -
afterwards?" she asked, of a sudden.

(Dostoyevsky, Idiot, part 4, chapter 4; or chapter 44 in electronic version
available at http://www.onlin_e-literature.com/dostoevgty/idiot/MI)

In this dialogue Myshkin is seemingly being humiliated by Aglaya, who hates the

idea of showing the prince to the high society as her possible future husband. Aglaya is

30

more than rude and very much distressed in her talk, Myshkin, on the other hand, seems
to enjoy every moment of the conversation, which he concludes with translating Aglaya’s
words into her social action: she loves him and is dearly wonied about him and their
future. This ability to see social actions beyond words, or, to paraphrase it, to see words
in their inseparability with social actions that they convey, is a hallmark characteristic of
a number of Dostoyevsky’s key personages. The ideological content of these personages
was central to the concept of a dialogical narrative, so skillfully described by Mikhail
Bakhtin in “Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics.”

Let me now turn to the idea of internal dialogue. According to Bakhtin, people’s
thinking is always a process of interacting with multiple social sources. The meanings
formulated in this process are never final; they are constantly evolving and unpredictably
unique. People formulate meanings in external dialogues in response to particular social
contexts formed by participants and conditions, following their interpretation of the rules
of the present cultural tradition of interaction. In the process of these external
formulations internal meanings change, but not only in response to these external factors.
They change in response to many social sources that each person individually and
uniquely constructs around him/herself.

Such understanding of internal dialogue, combined with Vygotskian idea of
practice, helps me to conceive of cultural contexts related to foreign language learning as
constructed through an individual practice that students engage in on a much broader
scale than the classroom. External dialogue helps me understand teacher-students
interaction in the classroom as socially limited by participants’ roles that they attribute to

this local context.

31

Foreign Language Learning as a Social Practice

My initial understanding of practice comes from reading Lev Vygotsky. As I
understand it from his works, practice is organization of cognition, and consequently a
social activity. Conceived as a practice in this sense, foreign language learning in a
college course is organization of one’s thinking in a way that results in the social
activities of taking a foreign language class and looking for other opportunities to use the
language of choice.

It is important for me to view practice as a social act that is performed in response
to the “other” and is conceived by the actor as an interaction, and not as isolated action. I
derived this understanding of practice from the works of George Herbert Mead, Lev
Vygotsky, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Viewing practice as an interaction, as response to
something and someone will help me to understand in what societal discourses and
events students participate in (to which of them they respond) in their practice of learning
a foreign language.

In traditional socialization studies practice as a term has a different meaning. The
difference lays in the fact that practice is attributed first of all to a community, a culture,
and not to an individual learner. In this sense practices are cultural and defined as
“meaningful actions that occur routinely in everyday life, are widely shared by members
of the group, and carry with them normative expectations about how things should be
done” (Goodnow, Miller, & Kessel, 1995, p. l). The problem that I have applying this
definition to the context of my study is in the fact that participation in the community that

I observe, namely the classroom, does not provide me with answers to what foreign

32

language learning means to the students. Even though the actions that occur there
routinely seem meaningful and shared by the members, in each interview that I have
conducted so far, the nature of the practice of learning Russian was individually
interpreted by the students as embedded in deeper social contexts — discourses that vary
in every case. On another level, I do believe that foreign language students indirectly
participate in the practices of the community of the target language that they study. This
participation comes from their understanding of foreign culture obtained inside and
outside of the classroom. However, just as in the case of classroom practices, the
practices of the foreign culture and participation in them seem to be individually
interpreted in broader social contexts.

These findings lead me to shift the focus of my interpretive lens from the
practices of a classroom as a culture to the individual practice of the students. I believe
that foreign language for my participants “is not simply a means of expression, rather, it
is a practice that constructs, and is constructed by the ways language learners understand
themselves, their social surroundings, their histories, and their possibilities for future”

(Norton & Toohey, 2004, p. 1).

Culture

The sociocultural tradition emphasizes social aspects of human knowledge and
activity, and close relationship between culture and language. Within sociocultural
tradition it is now common to distinguish, as I already mentioned, between “older” and
“newer” notions of culture. The older notion of culture views beliefs and other

psychological constructs are static, existing in the culture and affecting cultural practice,

33

defined as a noun. This older notion is usually attributed to such authors as Hymes and
Heath. The newer notions of culture claim that meaning and cultural practices,
psychological constructs and societal categories (such as race, class and gender) do not
exist, but are being constantly constructed in the hybridity of everyday life.

In my research, I prepared to see culture as a societal category that does not exist,
but is constantly constructed in the hybridity of everyday life. However, just as in the
case with language socialization, my participants tended to talk about culture as a rather
static phenomenon, a set of beliefs and norms. A Bakhtinian view of discourse that I
described above helped me understand such representations of culture as reflecting on a
monological tradition of human interaction. Thus, “cultural context” in my work will
usually signify the participants’ interpretation of such in their attempt to describe a
coherent “package” in our conversations. Combining a monological tradition with
understanding human thinking as dialogic in nature, I came to understand culture as a
narrative that is being constantly produced, a voice in a dialogue, searching for coherence
in multiple discourses. I arrived at understanding culture as a textual fluid narrative,
deeply imbedded in an ideological environment.

With this view of culture I imagine myself joining a long history of denying a
genetic view of culture as some traits that are biologically inherited and define the mental
capabilities of ethnic and racial groups. Navigating through cultural determinism and
structuralism, I find myself focusing on social contexts, but with the individual in the
center. Moving beyond Hymes and Heath, I overcome the value, stability, and
romanticism of the tradition. Tradition, or established cultural practice, focuses on social

rather than biological aspects of human lives, but understands them as a “neat package”

34

and thus contributes to predetermining, reproducing, and labeling individuals as members
of social groups. I join the dialogue of “ideational” theories of culture (Gonzalez, Moll,
Amanti, 2005, p. 33) and build my understanding of culture as a symbolic interactive
system drawing from anthropological tradition of Geertz. It is also Geertz, to whom I can
track my focus on textual nature of culture as a narrative, further transformed to a voice
in a dialogue, drawing from Bakhtin.

Textual and ideological nature of my concept of culture helps me shift the focus
on symbolic systems available to certain individuals, language, of course, being the most
important one. Within these systems, there are different systems of value for knowledge
and ability. Fluidity of culture helps me picture individuals and their interpretation of
symbolic systems as an open, changing process, where human thought is socially
bounded, but free. People search for coherence, in individual ways navigating through
available discourses. I believe that understanding culture as a search for coherence in a
dialogue, an inquiry (Gonzalez et al., p. 39) is an idea that can help keep an open mind

about the “other,” and help people think about their cultural attributions and teachings.

Identity

Identity is a controversial theoretical construct that I need to clarify for my study.
As I indicate in my literature review, there are several views of identity. Staying
consistent with the representations of language socialization and culture that came out in
my interviews, I could also see that traditional understandings of a cultural identity as a

social role widely applied to my case. My participants talked about themselves (labeled

9’ 6‘ 9’ 66

themselves) as “students, teacher,” “Americans,” “Russians, white,” etc. They

35

sometimes explained their own behavior and behavior of others by the social roles that
they assumed in various situations. For example, not confronting a teacher’s View could
be explained by being a “student,” being late could be explained by being a “Russian.”
In my understanding, social roles are ways of participating in (identifying with) societal
discourses. I believe that the uniqueness of this identification with societal discourses
can help me peek into the constantly evolving construct of Self. For example, I could
identify a societal discourse of how a foreign language is learned in the classroom. This
discourse was present in the classroom (site that is observable to me) in a way that
prescribed certain student and teacher roles. Instead of assuming that roles (cultural
identities) explained the nature of participation in this discourse, I approached this
participation as many possibilities, for example, of compliance, struggle, and opposition.
Then I tried to analyze such ways of participation as related to other societal discourses
that the students seemed to be engaged in according to our conversations outside of the
classroom.

In sum, I analyzed identity as a construct evident in my interviews with
participants operating within monologic traditions of human interaction. As already
mentioned, such a construct usually depends on traditional social roles understood by
means of etic labels conveyed through language (e. g., student, teacher, American, parent,
child). I define Self as the emic content of etc labels. In other words, Self is a unique
interpretation (constantly evolving in social contexts) of what it means to be someone, for
example, a student, an American, an English language speaker, and a Russian language

speaker at the same time.

36

As I hoped to show in this chapter, my conceptualizations of the sociocultural
theory, the Bakhtinian views, the social practice, culture, and identity provided me with
the theoretical tools that allowed me to approach my phenomenon as fluid, dynamic, and
constantly evolving. The next chapter will describe the methodological tools that helped

me fulfill this approach in a research study.

37

CHAPTER THREE:

METHOD

Phenomenon and Case

The phenomenon that I studied can be introduced as learning a foreign language
in a sociocultural sense outside of a country associated with that language. I believe that
a second year Russian language university classroom is an extremely interesting
backdrop for my phenomenon. The United States and Russia have a long history of a
politically and economically complex relationship. Russia is now a developing
democratic culture that attracts a lot of attention on the world arena. Russian literature
and history, as well as stereotypical representations of reality, are quite popular. All
these factors constitute a significant symbolic capital that somehow should figure into the
relationship between language and culture that I am interested in.

The choice of the particular classroom as a case that would flesh out my
phenomenon of interest was influenced by factors of familiarity and accessibility. I am a
native speaker of Russian and know English, but no other languages. I taught Russian
language at my university prior to admission to the doctoral program in education. I
know the university teachers of Russian and I am familiar with the program. In their
fourth semester of learning Russian, the students are still working toward a widely
accepted two-year foreign language requirement and can be assumed to have developed a
certain degree of familiarity with both Russian language and culture, as well as the

process of studying them.

38

Research Questions

The main research question of this study is: “What does it mean to learn Russian
in a sociocultural sense outside of Russia, in fact, in a classroom in a large public
university in the Midwest?”

Various dimensions of this question were becoming clear to me as a researcher in
the process of data collection and analysis. Following the recommendation for
qualitative researchers (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003; Dyson & Genishi, 2005) I entered my
site in January of 2004 with the intent to “hang loose” (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003, p.49). I
was observing classroom events and activities, alert to patterns concerning how students
connect language learning to Russian culture, and how both can be described. At that
time, I was inspired by language socialization studies (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1995),
developments in sociolinguistic theory associated with such names as Hymes, Heath,
Mehan, and Cazden, and constructivist views tracking back to the works of Vygotsky.
All these sources, explaining language learning as a process of socialization into certain
cultures and speech communities, made me curious about applying this concept to a
classroom, where society, or authentic speech communities, are not immediately present.

I identified potential socialization agents in the classroom, defining them as
sources of familiarizing oneself with Russian culture. My list of socialization agents
included the textbook with its references to cultural realia3 in Russia (for example, a short
passage about how to buy tickets in a Russian Movie theatre), the teacher, who was a
Russian national and often provided descriptions of Russian life in the context of

classroom activities, additional classroom materials (for example, a children’s book or a

 

3 Realia - objects or activities used to relate classroom teaching to the real life especially of peoples studied
(source: Merriam-Webster online).

39

literary text), a Russian drama movie that students watched and discussed from time to
time, and the classroom itself where students spoke Russian and English to each other
and the teacher. However, I was quickly realizing, as I hope to show with my findings,
that students did not perceive what I conceptualized as socialization agents as a
representation of a community that they were joining. The relationship between language
and culture seemed to be rather complex.

Two large patterns that came out in the process of data analysis were a student-led
focus on grammar in almost all classroom activities and a variety of opinions when it
came to talk about Russia. This made me wonder about the location and nature of what I
was trying to conceive of as culture. At this time in my readings I turned to pieces
incorporating postmodernist understanding of culture as a complex, negotiated, and
dynamic. In the further process of observing lessons and interviewing six students and
the teacher, I came to understand that Russian culture couldn’t be conceived of as an
objective unitary reality that the students are supposed to be socialized into. Rather, it
can be described as a complex and dynamic discursive construct.

Thus, my sub-questions were built around methodological constructs of culture
and practice that I initially had planned to use as an etic theoretical frame. How can
Russian culture be described in an emic sense in the context of my classroom? What is
the nature of the learning practice students engage in both inside and outside of the
classroom? The goal of my study is to unpack the local meanings of these constructs
while also describing my journey of understanding how learning a foreign language is

connected to culture.

40

Data Collection

Timeframe. By the end of 2005 I had spent three semesters in the Russian
language classroom. I would like to think about these three semesters as three stages of
my research: a pilot study, formal data collection period, and maintaining connection
during data analysis and write-up.

What I now consider to be my pilot study was a project for a class on qualitative
methods of research. In the spring of 2004 I observed a second year Russian language
classroom that consisted of 19 students, 10 male and 9 female. The class met four times
a week, but I observed only two times a week. In addition to classroom observations I
conducted interviews with the teacher, Rimma, and two students, Foma and Grigory,
whom I selected as key informants.

The spring semester of 2005 was the period of formal data collection. This time I
again observed a second year classroom, taught by the same teacher, Rimma. (I wanted
to continue observing students who participated in my pilot study at their third year, but
there was an irresolvable schedule conflict.) This classroom consisted of 27 students, 14
male and 13 female. I observed four times a week, i.e., I observed every session during a
full semester. My key informants became Michael, Jacob, and Sophia. Yuri, who was in
this classroom, offered me an interview, which I conducted in summer during a study
abroad trip to Russia.

In the fall of 2005 I visited a combined third and fourth year classroom that
consisted of the students from my first and second semesters of observations, but only
those who moved beyond a two year foreign language requirement, had longer

requirements, or made Russian their major. This classroom again consisted of 27

41

students, 14 male and 13 female. Foma, Grigory, Michael and Yuri were in this
classroom. Sophia and Jacob couldn’t continue because third year Russian didn’t count
towards any of their requirements and they could not afford to take it as an additional
load. Sophia stopped by the classroom occasionally to meet up with her friends and
eagerly talked to me. Jacob was taking a semester off, but kept in touch with me through
e-mail. This classroom had a different teacher, James. There were three class sessions
per week, but I visited it only from time to time. The purpose of doing so was to
maintain contact with my key informants and get an idea of what happens past the second
year of learning Russian in a classroom.

Key informants. Altogether, I had six key informants for my study: Foma,
Grigory, Sophia, Jacob, Michael, and Yuri. I have selected these students based on
criteria of internal sampling (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003, p. 61). All these students sat close
enough to my researcher’s comer so that I could observe them during class and hear
everything they said. All of them exhibited talk and behavior that triggered my interest in
terms of insights into my research agenda. And finally, all of these students were willing
to talk to me and participate in my study.

All of my key informants (as well as all other students in the class) were white
Caucasians. Five of them were male, with Sophia being the only female participant. My
key informants were not a group of friends; rather, they could be described as classmates.
As classmates, they provided interesting accounts of each other and other class members’
behavior and talk that I observed during class sessions. None of them had any Russian
heritage; none of them had been to Russia before they started studying Russian language.

Four of them went to Russia as participants of a Study Abroad program that I

42

coordinated. Even though visiting Russia was not my selection criteria, the information
obtained in Russia gave me an idea of how these students extended their experiences
inside and outside of the classroom in America to traveling to Russia.

The following table is intended to clarify when I observed which students and

when the interviews happened:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Key informants Semester observed Trips to Russia Interviews

Foma Spring 2004 Summer 2005 Spring 2004
Fall 2005 Summer 2005

Grigory Spring 2004 Summer 2004 Spring 2004
Fall 2005

Sophia Spring 2005 Never Spring 2005

Jacob Spring 2005 Never Spring 2005

Michael Spring 2005 Summer 2004 Spring 2005
Fall 2005

Yuri Spring 2005 Summer 2005 Summer 2005
Fall 2005

 

 

 

 

It’s important to mention here that due to the process of data reduction only four
of my key participants are consistently present in this study: Foma, Jacob, Michael, and
Sophia. These were the people that I spent most time with and with whom I was able to
establish the best contact.

Observations and fieldnotes. During all class sessions that I observed, I took
detailed notes that were later written up as fieldnotes (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003; Dyson &
Genishi, 2005; Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995). The fieldnotes focused on behavior and
talk that I observed in the classroom coming from my key informants and the teacher, or
directed to my key informants and the teacher. It was my intent to briefly describe the
different activities that took place in the classroom, for example, grammar explanations

and exercises, practicing dialogues, teacher’s mini-lectures about Russian culture, etc. I

43

 

tried to describe events that were related to Russian culture more thoroughly. For each
observation I tried to provide a short description of the physical setting of the classroom,
including seating patterns and positions of the desks. When it seemed relevant, I jotted
down the portraits of participants, including their dress, hair, and postures. In addition, I
paid attention to informal interactions before, during, and after class. In the process of
writing up fieldnotes I tried to be very explicit about my own reactions to what happened,
addressing the issues of researcher’s reflexivity.

Besides classroom observations, my fieldnote entries also included conversations
that happened with my participants outside of classroom, for example, when I ran into
them by chance in the cafeteria and other places.

Interviews. I have conducted interviews (that I often refer to as conversations)
with all of my key informants and also with their teacher. For the teacher I developed a
set of questions that focused on her rational for including classroom activities and also on
her interpretations of students’ reactions to them. When interviewing the students, I
followed the approach of a guided conversation (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003; Rubin &
Rubin, 2005). That is, I encouraged my key informants to talk about their experience of
learning Russian inside and outside of the classroom, initially allowing them to define the
content of the interview as well as the direction of my study. As the themes of my
findings became more salient in the process of an on-going data analysis, I started to
probe more deeply for the relevant topics that my subjects brought up. With the
exception of the first three interviews conducted during the pilot study, all interviews
were audio taped and transcribed. For the first three interviews I took detailed notes that

were typed up immediately after the interview took place.

Data Analysis

As mentioned, data analysis was an on-going process that helped shape the
direction of my study, final research questions and preliminary assertions. My method of
analyzing data was informed by models provided in Bogdan and Biklen (2003), Dyson
and Genishi (2005), and Emerson et al. (1995), and included three levels: (a)
identification of routine classroom events, (b) thematic organization of the identified
classroom events and students’ response to them through open coding and writing initial
memos, and (c) focused coding of fieldnotes and interview transcripts, writing integrative
memos.

At the first level of analysis, I distinguished among several categories of
classroom events that repeatedly and systematically took place in the classroom:

1. “Grammar / Vocabulary / Pronunciation related explanations by the teacher.”
Most of the formal planned explanations centered on grammar, most of the vocabulary
and pronunciation explanations were corrective in nature, i.e., they were spurred by what
students were trying to say in Russian. The teacher often used Russian realia to explain
grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation, for example, a) she encouraged students to
guess new meaning based on what they already knew about Russian language and
“Russian way of speaking,” b) she always tried to show connections between words and
their etymology in explaining vocabulary, c) she incorporated examples of how particular
grammar structures were used in authentic situations.

2. “Doing textbook exercises as a class.” This often happened after grammar

explanations or as feedback given after students received their homework back.

45

3. “Work in pairs.” Following the teacher’s task, students worked in pairs, most
often to practice dialogues from the textbook, discuss a topic assigned by the teacher, or
work on a translation together.

4. “Speaking Russian.” The teacher sometimes suggested a discussion topic and
requested students to speak in Russian. Often “speaking Russian” happened in the
beginning of the class in a form of a speech warm-up; sometimes it was facilitated by
other class materials and happened anytime during the class.

5. “Using authentic materials.” Most often this refers to watching a Russian
movie that was broken up into the episodes supplemented with exercises and vocabulary
lists. Sometimes the teacher also brought in authentic Russian texts and read them to the
students.

6. “Cultural discussions.” Usually teacher-led discussions of Russian cultural
realia spurred by “using authentic materials.” These discussions were mainly in English,
sometimes in both Russian and English.

7. “Meaning negotiations.” Negotiation of word meanings between the teacher
and the students. Because the teacher is a native speaker of Russian, she sometimes
asked her students what certain things meant in English.

8. “Classroom management.” Homework assignment and feedback, syllabus-
related discussions, announcements, cleaning blackboard, etc.

9. “Informal interactions.” Informal interactions between students before, during,
and after class.

After performing this analysis I turned to the interviews in order to see how my

key informants talked about the classroom events and what kind of meaning they

46

assigned to them. As a result of open coding of the classroom fieldnotes and the
transcripts of interviews I developed two major preliminary assertions: a) students
assigned grammar-related meanings to most of the classroom activities, even to those that
I characterized as culture-related; and b) sociocultural learning seemed to be a taking
place on a plane that was much broader than the classroom.

At the stage of focused coding and writing integrative memos I attempted to
conceptualize learning Russian as an individual practice of producing cultural meaning,
where classroom was assigned the function of supplying the “language base.” I focused
on variations in students’ talk related to cultural meanings, which led me to developing
the following themes, which organize my findings chapters:

1. “Language base” that is received in the classroom.

2. Language socialization as something that students look for outside of the
classroom.

3. Understanding of Russian culture as an individually constructed narrative.

4. “An American speaker of Russian” (producing cultural meaning of knowing a
foreign language).

5. Appropriating societal discourses to produce meaning of learning Russian,

Russia as a country, and oneself as an American speaker of Russian.

While this chapter introduced the process of how my research questions and
themes evolved in the process of ongoing data analysis, the next chapter will elaborate on
this process by bringing in more classroom and theoretical context, thus setting the scene

for the chapters to come.

47

CHAPTER FOUR:

CASING THE JOINT

This chapter starts with a description of one typical day that I spent in my
classroom collecting data and interacting with the participants. It then transitions into the
explanation of how I was able to relate my theoretical understanding of language
socialization to the case, bringing in the first accounts of my participants and theorizing

them as participation in societal discourses that I was able to identify.

Description of the site

It’s Monday and after I wake up and spend a few hours in front of the computer,
it’s time to go to the Russian class where I conduct my observations for this study. This
is the usual routine of my of my Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, unless
there is a meeting in the morning — then I make it to campus early. The building where
the Russian class is held is only a five-minute walk from the college of education, where
I have a desk in a grad bay. When 1 enter the building, I run into a student from the
classroom that I observe. He says hello in Russian, and I swallow my American “hi,”
changing it to Russian “zdravstvuite.” He sounds coarse, and I ask him, in Russian, if
this weather gave him a cold. He agrees, now in English, elaborating a little bit on the
subject. By the end of this unsophisticated conversation we reach the third floor and he
opens the staircase door for me. The classroom door is open, most of the students are
chatting in their seats, Rimma is handing out homework. When Rimma sees me, she

greets me in Russian with a smile. I great her also, making it to my corner, saying hello

48

in Russian to “my comer” students. Jacob, one of my participants, turns and smiles at
me, waving his hand. Michael, another participant, comes over to talk about our next
meeting (where I help him with Russian and he helps me with my dissertation).

Rirnrna, sitting down at the desk in front of the blackboard, asks the students if
they are done exchanging social news and starts the lesson. She comments on the
homework that she just handed out and leads into reviewing the verb conjugation that
caused most of the mistakes. The back door (the classroom has two doors) opens and my
third participant, Sophia comes in, apologetically smiling. The classroom is just big
enough to fit 27 people; students sit an uneven double semicircle, and the back row is
almost touching the wall. All this makes in very hard for Sophia to make it to her usual
seat in the middle of the back row, but people move and let her in. Rimma asks Sophia
why she is late. Sophia provides and explanation and Rimma comments on how there is
always an explanation for being late. At this time Andrey walks in the front door and
confidently heads to his seat in the middle of the front row. Rimma inquires about his
reasons to interrupt her class.

The class evolves into the grammar explanation on the blackboard, reading
dialogs from the textbook and a discussion that Rimma tries to build on the theme of the
dialogues — buying movie tickets. Rimma asks the students how often they go to the
movie theatres and what movies they’ve seen recently. From time to time she involves
me in the conversation to get another “Russian perspective” either on some aspects of
Russian culture or possibilities of sentence construction. I am also sometimes used as a

resource by a heritage speaker who usually sits right in front of me. It happens if

49

someone asks her a question (quietly, during Rimma’s explanations or group work) and
she is not sure about the answer.

The 50-minute class period flies by, as I am trying to write down as much as
possible in my notebook. Apart from what people say, it’s important to me to catch if
students whisper to each other, what the intonations of their voices are, how they sit
today. Usually I have the same people in the same areas, but not seats. Neighbors often
change, and I cannot find any consistency or identify relationships among students
judging by whom they sit by. Today I will probably have time to type up these notes on
the computer right after the class is over and I make it back to my desk. I teach an
undergraduate educational psychology class on Mondays and Wednesdays, but that’s not
until 3pm. Sometimes I meet with Michael or Jacob right after class, and then I have to
dedicate quite a bit of time for both typing up the class notes and transcribing my
conversations with them. But today shouldn’t be busy.

The class ends, but I am still writing as the students pack up and walk out of the
class. I am trying to catch the last minute conversations. When everyone leaves, I walk
out with Rimma and we talk about the class discussion that she was trying to engage the
students in, sliding into the topic of who visited her during the office hours yesterday. I
ask a few questions that are of interest to me. These after-class conversations are very
valuable to me, and Rimma, with her full to insanity schedule, uses this time to provide
me with the information I need, because we both know how hard it is to schedule hour-
long interviews. This is probably what I will start my notes with — our conversation, as
much as I can retain from it. I can later check with her on the important points that

influenced my thinking in this work.

50

Relating Language Socialization to the Classroom Events and Activities

As I pointed out in the theoretical framework, my understanding of language
socialization was initially derived from language socialization studies. In these studies,
young children acquire language through participating in social activities, meaningful in
the context of particular cultures (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). Words thus become not
only the means of communication, but, most importantly, the mediators of
meaningfulness of the social activities that children participate in.

Language socialization studies, as well as my thinking from early on, were
powerfully influenced by Vygotskian views of internalization of mental functions
through language in social contexts (Vygotsky, 1962, 1978). As I pointed out in my
literature review, many foreign and second language researchers have recently called for
our attention to social contexts of classroom and other settings. Because I was interested
in language socialization, I first focused my attention on identifying social contexts
related to Russian language and culture in classroom events and activities. Later it
became obvious to me that (a) in the classroom, contexts of classroom culture were most
important in providing meaning to activities through which students acquired foreign
language, and (b) outside of the classroom, cultural contexts and activities within which
students learned Russian were uniquely constructed by students in response to many
social sources. Classroom cultural contexts and unique student practices of constructing
cultural and linguistic knowledge became the focus of my study. But to make this

narrative consistent, let me describe how my thinking evolved.

51

While attending a full schedule of Russian 202 it was easy for me to identify
routine classroom events and activities. I think that many people who took or taught
language classes will recognize them. They included language warm-ups (talking about
the weather, a new movie, last night’s football game, etc. for about 5 minutes in the
beginning of the class), grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation explanations and drills,
doing textbook exercises as a class, working in pairs to practice a textbook or teacher
assigned dialogue, watching a Russian movie accompanied by vocabulary tasks, class
discussions, and taking tests. It also soon became obvious to me that it would be very
hard to find a better teacher if I was to look for Russian language and cultural contexts in
the classroom. Rimma, a native Russian speaker, provided rich contextual explanations
for grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. For example, when students encountered
the word morning exercise" in a textbook dialogue, she wasn’t satisfied with the
dictionary translation. She claimed that she thought that morning exercise was “a very
Russian thing,” and asked the student if they could relate it to any “American things.”
Rirnma also used every opportunity to bring in Russian movies and texts into the
classroom, from serious newspaper articles to children’s stories.

One “language socialization” practice that received a very distinct, cultural “face”
as appropriated by Rimma was giving American students Russian names. Traditionally,
this practice serves three purposes: (a) it gives students a chance to get familiar with
Russian names, (b) Russian names change according to grammatical categories which
provides students with additional practice, and (c) some teachers and researchers believe

that foreign names allow foreign language students to adopt a new cultural identity, at the

 

4 Italicized text means that the utterance was originally in Russian and was translated into English by the
author.

52

same time freeing them from the identity of a student who is afraid to make a mistake. I
believe that Rimma also wanted to bring in Russian cultural contexts into the classroom
with Russian names. Rimma allowed students to choose their own Russian names first.
If they didn’t, she named them herself. For example, one of my participants, Sophia, who
did not choose her own name, was named by Rimma after a famous Dostoyevsky’s
character. Rimma used this opportunity to talk about Russian characters created by
Dostoyevsky. Rimma often used various dirninutives of Russian names that were chosen
by students or assigned to them, also, I believe, in order to “Russianize” classroom
communication.

When I started my observations, I thought that using Russian names in such ways
was a very creative and effective teaching strategy. To my native ear classroom
communication sounded very “Russian,” which I attributed to the implemented ways of
naming. Can you imagine my surprise when I found out that many students in the
classroom not only didn’t understand why they were named in a certain way, but often
didn’t even realize that Rirnma was addressing them when she used, and especially
varied, diminutives. “I heard her [Rimma] call me that [a diminutive of Jacob’s Russian
name], it seems like she calls me different variations of that... That’s why I often don’t
know that she is calling on me... She’s looking my way, but she says some different
name,” Jacob told me in the interview. Sophia claimed that she did not like her Russian
name because in her mind it associated not with a literature personage, but a real person
that she used to know and not like. Foma was probably the only one who stated that he
absolutely loved his Russian name and that his goal of learning Russian was to become

“Foma.” He knew the biblical history of his name and always tried to find out more.

53

This type of relationship with the name was something that Rimma was clearly looking
for, but as I said, Foma was the only one who established it, among all students to whom
I talked.

In sum, I was fascinated by how much cultural and language context Rimma was
trying to bring into the classroom. I was also fascinated with the seemingly weak
response of the students to these efforts. Rimma’s enthusiastic questions and cultural
inquiries were often met with silence, uneasiness, and lack of enthusiasm.

In the interviews, my participants often talked about receiving a “language base”
in the classroom, and rarely mentioned any contextual or cultural knowledge. Most
often, they talked about contextual learning as embedded in communication with Russian
speakers, existing or projected into the future. Most students seemed to see immersion as
the only way to truly learn the language, but did not seem to believe that it was possible
to socialize into the language outside of the country where it’s spoken. An excerpt from
my conversation with Foma demonstrates this finding:

Foma: I am glad that I waited three years [before coming to Russia]. After three

years of studying it’s much easier to come here, you know, much, much easier

than the first or second year. I know I speak only a little bit better, but I

understand a lot, lot better. At first, and before I came here, I would listen to each

word and then put it together, but now... I am getting more and more into the
language, and it’s so much fun, so much fun!

Natalia: Yeah, I talked to many people, I think I talked to you about this too...

You can’t really learn the language being outside the country, right?

Foma: Exactly, exactly!

54

Natalia: So what was... You know, you said that the three year before really

helped. What were those three years?

Foma: The three years, you know, learning the basic rules. Knowing the

rules helps you understand a little bit more, but now, I know the rules and I know

even better the context that they are going to be used in... yeah, that’s it! I know
now, like being here now, like the context makes a lot more sense, a lot more
sense! And that’s cool.

Natalia: You know, they try to bring the context into the classroom, and they give

you all these texts, and literature, and songs... Do they help at all?

Foma: Yeah, they do a little, but it’s no comparison to being here, absolutely no

comparison to being here.

Foma described three years of learning Russian in a classroom as a process of
acquiring “basic rules.” He knew from the beginning that he was learning these rules in
order to use them later in Russia. He was “waiting” to grow context on them. From what
he knew about classroom and language learning, one “couldn’t really learn a language
outside of the country.” I later concluded that this was why he wasn’t looking for this
real, contextual learning in the classroom. In another conversation, with Jacob, I received
even more support to this finding:

Natalia: So what’s your theory of learning the language?

Jacob: I don’t know, I think you just kind of get a feel for it. I mean you can’t

get a feel just studying, but it takes both. For me. I have to study a lot of

grammar, but you don’t really feel it until... the only way you can feel it is being

in that culture extensively. At least probably a year or something like that. Inside

55

the culture, at least around people who are speaking it... all the time with you...

because they say it the way that they say it.

Natalia: I remember when we talked before you said that you couldn’t learn

Russian in Poland when there were Russians around you, because you didn’t have

the basis...

Jacob: I didn’t have the basis, now I have the basis and I don’t have the people

(smiles).

Natalia: So you need the basis before you...

Jacob: [joining in] Before you can do it.

Jacob continued to tell me that he didn’t learn a lot about culture in the classroom,
rather, he went in there in order to be “forced” to learn grammar, because “if you don’t
take a class, you never find time to do it.” When I mentioned a few examples of
Rimma’s attempts to bring in cultural information to her lessons, he indifferently
answered that he “already knew all that,” and even if not, it did not interest him. Foma
and Jacob, like many other students that I talked to, seemed to limit their work in the
classroom to receiving a language base, leaving cultural learning to real and imaginary

COHICXIS .

Theorizing Language Base
As it comes out of my observations, foreign language was taught and learned in
my focal classroom as a system of linguistic abstractions, or grammatical rules. The

cultural form of language education based on grammar rules has roots in Saussure’s

56

linguistics, which divorced “language from its ideological irnpletion” (Morris, 20025, p.
34). Knowing grammar rules seemed to be sufficient for studying “dead” languages,
such as Latin. As Voloshinov explains, “any abstraction, if it is to be legitimate, must be
justified by some specific theoretical and practical goal,” and “at the basis of the modes
of linguistic thought that led to the postulation of language as a system of normatively
identical forms lies a practical and theoretical focus of attention on the study of defunct,
alien languages preserved in written monuments” (Mon‘is, 2002, p. 34). The goal of
foreign language education today is rather different, it is acknowledged as active
communication with the world’s diverse population and learning about each other
cultures. However, somehow, language education still seems to be based on Saussure’s
distinction between grammatical form and meaning.

I am not trying to say here that the methods of teaching a foreign language did not
respond to a revolutionized need for foreign languages as means of live communication.
They did, but it seems to me that one core issue remained the same: language is not
perceived in the classroom as inseparably connected to social actions, and I believe that
this leads to confusion with what a truly meaningful, authentic context is. For example,
communicative approaches to foreign language learning offer to engage students in
authentic dialogues instead of ordering them to repeat grammatical forms over and over
again. However, asking students to compose a dialogue between a movie theater clerk
and a customer cannot be assumed to represent an authentic social action of buying
movie tickets. The social action performed by students as associated with this task in the

context of the classroom is quite different.

 

5 The Bakhtinian Reader published in 1994 by Morris contains excerpts from various Bakhtinian works
with Morris’s commentaries. I chose to cite this text throughout my dissertation because I read most of
Bakhtinian works in Russian and in original publications.

57

The social actions mediated through routine activities in the classroom (most of
which are considered authentic) can be described as language practice. Practicing
language forms seems to fit into the genre of teacher—student interactions following the
model of Initiation, Response, Evaluation, or IRE (Mehan, 1982; Cazden, 2001). When a
student is trying to describe in Russian how she spent her winter break, she does not do it
to be understood, she does it in order to practice abstract language forms to the point of
their recognition by others. This is what's evaluated — the level of recognition, not
understanding. Reading Bakhtin and Voloshinov, I came to see this situation as a conflict
with real-life communication, because “the task of understanding does not basically
amount to recognizing the form used, but rather to understanding it in particular, concrete
context, to understanding its meaning in a particular utterance, i.e., it amounts to
understanding its novelty and not to recognizing its identity” (Morris, 2002, p.33).

1 would like to warn the reader ahead of time that this study is not designed to
provide any prescriptions for foreign language instruction. I am not trying to criticize the
foreign language methodology implemented in the curriculum of the classroom under
study. But I do want to show you, my reader, how I was able to understand the social
work performed in the classroom as deeply rooted in a cultural tradition of classroom
teaching and learning which I believe has formed under a strong rationalist and
structuralist influence, such as the one attributed to Saussure in linguistics. Indeed, as
Voloshinov himself notes, this tradition can be tracked much further than to the Age of
Enlightenment, all the way to ancient Romans and Hindus. It seems important to think
about how this tradition evolved from “comparison of language to the system of

mathematical signs” that is concerned not with “the relationship of the sign to the actual

58

reality it reflects nor to the individual who is its originator, but the relationship of sign to
sign within a closed system already accepted and authorized” (Morris, 2002, p. 29).
Language understood as a synchronic closed system of signs had the practical goal to
“awaken the dead” (Morris, 2002, p. 34). However, as Voloshinov explains, there is no
such thing as dead in language, because “any utterance - the finished, written utterance
not excepted — makes response to something and is calculated to be responded to in turn.
The [written] monument, as any other monologic utterance, is set forward being
perceived in the context of current scientific life or current literary affairs, i.e., it is
perceived in the generative process of that particular ideological domain of which it is an
integral part” (Morris, 2002, p. 35). That is to say that utterances understood in
rationalist tradition as monologic (i.e., as grammatical structures with a closed,
predefined meanings) are indeed dialogic (i.e., only meaningful in particular present
context that is uniquely interpreted by each participant) in nature. Similar to linguistics,
European structuralism interpreted other meaning systems as closed, synchronic and
universal. The dialogic nature of human thinking remained outside of it.

I believe that following the European structuralist monologic tradition of thinking
in general, and especially in linguistics, my participants constructed the knowledge that
they were supposed to receive in the classroom as a closed system of grammar rules, a
“language base” that they can then apply outside of the classroom. Classroom culture of
communication, regardless of how much it was being challenged by goals of learning
foreign languages for real-life communication, remained rather supportive of such rigid
understanding of knowledge with it’s dominating pattern of IRE and evaluation of

recognition being a substitute of understanding the message in a conversation.

59

I wrote this chapter to show the reader how I arrived at the assertion that
organized the findings presented in this study. My main research question formulated as
“what does it mean to learn Russian in a sociocultural sense outside of Russia, in fact, in
a classroom in a large public university in the Midwest?” was answered through these
assertions as “it means to receive a ‘language base’ that will be later utilized in ‘true’
cultural contexts, such as visiting Russia, interacting with Russian people, using Russian
language for work, etc.” The next chapter will contribute to answering one of my sub-
questions: “how can culture be described in an emic sense in the context of the
classroom,” by showing that even though students focused on acquiring the language
structure in the classroom, culture (American, Russian, and classroom) was a key

component in how their learning was constructed.

60

CHAPTER FIVE:

GENRES OF CLASSROOM COMMUNICATION

Following the tradition of cultural studies and recent anthropology studies, I see
culture as “a continual process of creating meaning in social and material contexts,
replacing a conceptualization of culture as static, unchanging body of knowledge
‘transmitted’ among generations” (Levinson, Foley &Holland, 1996, p. 13). Culture in
my study becomes a complex narrative construct that can be understood as a dialogic
relationship among many cultures, such as Russian, American, and classroom culture,
which the students engage in. With this vision of culture it is essential for me to analyze
cultural forms (a term borrowed from cultural studies), i.e., social and material contexts,
of the classroom that produce cultural knowledge and are, in turn, produced by the
participants (the teacher and the students) of the classroom. These cultural forms of the
classroom shaped the possibilities for language socialization in my foreign language

classroom, or can be used to explain the lack of thereof.

Genres of Classroom Communication

One of the important theoretical tasks of this chapter is to conceptualize the
cultural forms of classroom communication. Here, again, I turned to ideas of the
Bakhtinian circle. If one conceives of words as cultural and ideological signs that are
social, than each period and social group has to have its own repertoire of speech forms
for ideological communication in human behavior (Morris, 2002, p. 54). These speech

forms are also called genres:

61

Language is realized in the form of individual concrete utterances (oral and

written) by participants in the various areas of human activity. These utterances

reflect the specific conditions and goals of each such area not only through their
content (thematic) and linguistic style, that is, the selection of the lexical,
phraseological, and grammatical resources of the language, but above all, through
their compositional structure. All three of these aspects — thematic content, style,
and compositional structure - are inseparably linked to the whole of the utterances
and are equally determined by the specific nature of the particular sphere of
communication. Each separate utterance is individual, of course, but each sphere
in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these

utterances. These we may call speech genres (Morris, 2002, p. 81).

Influenced by these insights, I could clearly see that my focal classroom, as a
social unit had distinct repertoire of genres, which were, above all, “conditioned by the
social organization of the participants involved and also by immediate conditions of their
interactions” (Morris, 2002, p. 55). The social organization of the participants in my
classroom placed them into the positions of (a) the teacher with the corresponding actions
of teaching the “material” and checking understanding by asking questions, and (b) the
students, who were supposed to learn the “material” and satisfy the teacher by answering
her questions. Immediate conditions of teacher-students interactions were interpreted by
students as learning the linguistic, and not cultural material, in other words, the students
were receiving “a language base” instead of socializing into the Russian language.

The social organization of the classroom has been often characterized as an

important contextual factor in the literature. In the 2001 addition of the Handbook of

62

Research on Teaching, Burbules and Bruce reviewed such conceptualizations of
classroom organization that took several forms in the literature: Teacher/Student (T/S)
model, Initiation-Response-Evaluation communication pattern (IRE) (Mehan, 1979;
Cazden, 2001), and a transmission and recitation model of communication (Nystrand, et
al., 1997, xiv). According to their summary, all three conceptualizations represent a
“predominant pedagogical communicative relation” that has four distinguished features:

1. It assumes that the perforrnative roles of teacher and student are given, distinct,
and relatively stable: a teacher teaches and a student learns.

2. Activities in the classroom include expressing information, directing behavior,
and evaluating performance, and are prerogatives of the teacher.

3. Teaching is centrally a matter of communicating content knowledge.

4. Education is an activity of instrumental practices directed intentionally toward
specific ends, and therefore can be evaluated along a scale of effectiveness in meeting
those ends (Burbules & Bruce, 2001, The T/S model, ‘1 1-5).

Burbules and Bruce note that this pattern is predominant in educational practices
and institutions and so “ingrained” in memories of both the teachers and the students, that
it is very hard to overcome it. In the rest of this chapter I will try to show how Rirnma
and her students, acting within classroom communication genres (which I found to be
rather close to characteristics of the communicative pattern described above) were co-
constructing cultural knowledge of Russia, America, and each other.

Rimma, as I noticed earlier, was a teacher who really cared about her students’
cultural understandings of Russia. However, the genres of classroom communication

(vocabulary and grammar explanations, class discussion, etc.) into which she tried

63

weaving precious cultural knowledge were quite different from the authentic genres of
acquiring cultural knowledge, such as, for example, observing Russian people and
engaging in informal conversations with them. In the process of knowledge co-
construction it appeared that the thematic content of Rimma’s utterances was not as
important as their genre which students interpreted as vocabulary or grammar
explanations in a lesson. As a result, the students limited their social work in the
classroom to learning vocabulary and grammar, in most cases ignoring the cultural
contexts that Rimma was trying to provide.

1 would like to provide an example of how a genre of authentic communication, in
this case, an informal conversation, can become a genre of classroom communication,
thus completely changing the social and language themes, goals and rules. During one of
my observations Rimma gave students five minutes to practice a dialogue from the
textbook. The dialogue was about Brodsky, a famous Russian poet. When the five
minutes were over, Rimma addressed the class:

Rimma: Are you ready? Ready? Ready? 0K. Who wants to try?

Silence.

Rimma: I will start with a Russian and non-Russian. (Meaning a “heritage

speaker" and a “regular" American student.) She points at Nadia and Alexandra.

Nadia and Alexandra each read one line out of the textbook.

Nadia: What else should we do?

Rimma: Well, I want a conversation between two people about Brodsky. For

example, “I’ve just read about Brodsky,” “What do you know about Brodsky?”

(She pronounces these questions with enthusiasm and gestures.) Make it... I

don’t know... Normal! And you guys all learn!

Nadia and Alexandra exchange two more lines. They try to copy Rimma’s

enthusiasm, but the rest of the class laughs and they pause. Rimma suggests a

few more lines that they can exchange, but they don’t say anything and Rimma

calls on the next pair of students. One of these students is Kira, probably the best

“heritage speaker” in the classroom.

Kira: He wrote about God. ..

Rimma: Not only, not only. He didn’t work anywhere.

Kira: Ah! And he didn ’t work anywhere.

Rimma: But you had to work [in the Soviet Union]! You couldn’t just ...... He

was an interesting person, good thinker. You know what he once said? Poetry is

acceleration of the mind. He wasn’t against anything, he minded his own
business, but he wasn’t mainstream, he wasn’t marching the march, so they
thought that there was something dangerous...

During this mini-lecture Rimma repeatedly attempted to get students involved and
make it a conversation, but received only weak responses, or none at all. Sometimes
students repeated the words and phrases after her, sometimes provided one-syllable
answers. If we apply the IRE model of discourse analysis (Cazden, 2001) to the

conversation above, we will receive the following table:

 

Initiation Response Evaluation

 

Rimma: Are you ready?
Ready? Ready? 0K.
Who wants to try?

 

 

 

 

Silence.

 

65

 

 

Rimma: I will start with a
Russian and non-Russian.
(Meaning a “heritage
speaker” and a “regular”
American student.) She
points at Nadia and
Alexandra.

Rimma calls on the next
pair of students. One of
these students is Kira,
probably the best “heritage
speaker” in the classroom.

Rimma: But you had to
work [in the Soviet
Union]! You couldn’t

 

Nadia and Alexandra each
read one line out of the
textbook.

Nadia: What else should
we do?

Nadia and Alexandra
exchange two more lines.
They try to copy Rimma’s
enthusiasm, but the rest of
the class laughs and they
pause.

Kira: He wrote about
God. ..

Kira: Ah! And he didn’t
work anywhere.

 

Rimma: Well, I want a
conversation between two
people about Brodsky.
For example, “I’ve just
read about Brodsky,”
“What do you know about
Brodsky?” (She
pronounces these
questions with enthusiasm
and gestures.) Make it...
I don’t know... Normal!
And you guys all learn!

Rimma suggests a few
more lines that they can
exchange, but they don’t

say anything.

Rimma: Not only, not
only. He didn’t work
anywhere.

 

66

 

 

just ...... He was an
interesting person, good
thinker. You know what
he once said? Poetry is
acceleration of the mind.
He wasn’t against
anything, he minded his
own business, but he
wasn’t mainstream, he
wasn’t marching the
march, so they thought that
there was something
dangerous...

 

 

 

 

There are two interesting features in this conversation that I would like to focus
on in this analysis. First of all, I think it is possible to separate teacher’s initiations into
personal (when she addressed a particular student or students) and impersonal (when she
addressed the whole class). You could see that Rimma only received a response if her
initiation was personal, directed to a particular student, and sounded as an instruction. If
initiation sounded as a suggestion, students did not respond.

Secondly, teacher’s evaluations in this conversation did not focus on whether the
students pronounced the words and constructed the sentences correctly. In the previous
chapter I talked about the Bakhtinian idea of the difference between monologic and
dialogic traditions of “evaluation” function in communication as “recognizing identity”
versus “understanding novelty” (Morris, 2002, p.33). In the conversation above Rimma
did not seem to care as much about “recognizing identity” in students responses, but
instead, tried to initiate a dialogue where students’ responses would express their

opinions, i.e., she wanted to “understand the novelty” of students’ responses.

67

 

Thus, in my opinion, the teacher was really trying to initiate an authentic
conversation, a cultural discussion between herself and the students. However, Rimma’s
demand and desire to engage her students in a “normal” conversation did not go along
with the social work that the students were ready to perform within the limits of a
classroom genre of practicing a dialogue, i.e., new grammar and vocabulary. N adia’s
question “what else should we do?” proved that Nadia did not know what she, as a
student responding to a teacher, was supposed to do except for repeating the lines in the
textbook. Kira’s first turn was an attempt to use information outside of the textbook
dialogue (in response to the teacher’s initiation), but it was brief and isolated, and her
second response was a translation of the teacher’s initiation. Most students’ responses
during Rimma’s closing mini-lecture also focused on translating or repeating Rimma’s
phrases. All this evidence made me think that the students interpreted the genre and
subsequently the theme of the activity as the language practice, whereas Rirnma was
trying to transition it to the cultural discussion about life of a nonconforrnist person in the
Soviet Union.

Even though I find the idea of classroom genres very important, students’
responses in the classroom that I observed were certainly not enough for describing their
individual complex social work related to various topics covered in the classroom. The
students’ unique practice of constructing cultural meanings that crossed the classroom
and went far beyond it will become the focus of the next chapter. Here, I would like to
‘ show my reader how one of the students, silent in the previous fieldnote excerpt, talked
about the topic of Brodsky in our conversation and how Rimma’s knowledge of her

interest influenced the classroom activity. Before I recorded the above event, after one of

68

the classes earlier in that week, Rimma mentioned to me that Sophia was very interested
in Brodsky and even came to her office hours to talk about him. She streamed this
observation into the conclusion that students are, indeed, interested in Russian culture
talked about in the classroom and how thus it is important to bring more and more culture
in the classroom. In my conversation with Sophia this topic came out in a different
context:

Sophia: I told Rimma that one of my favorite things to do was to read the

transcript of the Brodsky. That was my most favorite thing to do in the whole two

years of Russian. There was that transcript of the trial on a poet, and it was
abridged, but we had a list of questions and we had to find out everything that was
important, and that was so exciting to me, because it was the first time when I felt
like that my studying was paying off. I felt like wow, may be I could look at
historical documents and study them. Even though it was really... they took meat
of the document and left the real basic stuff, but... it was a most encouraging
thing I’ve done. Because I felt like I have accomplished something as opposed to
something like... to make a worksheet.

In my understanding, Sophia liked studying Brodsky not because she was
interested in who he was in Russia, but mainly because the unit contained something
resembling historical documents, which she wanted to be able to read with her knowledge
of Russian. She interpreted this activity as authentic in regard to her professional
interests, whereas Rimma interpreted her interest as being curious about Russian culture
and used it as a rational for including more cultural discussions in the classroom,

discussions, during which Sophia usually was silent or spoke English if allowed.

69

Assuming that it was important for her students, Rimma used every opportunity to
provide them with more vocabulary and discuss the cultural meanings of the words that
they encountered. Watching the movie was an especially rich soil for such interventions.
Rimma often distinguished between two types of her vocabulary explanations: “it’s
practical for you to know” and “you won’t use it too much, it’s just for the recognition.”
For example, knowing the full array of vocabulary for “vacation” was introduced as a
very practical knowledge, whereas adding the particle “to” to the end of the word was
presented as a more local, historical thing that students should simply know about.
Vocabulary in both groups usually was outside of the unit requirements and not expected
to appear on the quiz. As a result, students rarely recognized it when they encountered it
again. In the following excerpt from the interview, Michael explains how his social
actions in the classroom are limited by genre of vocabulary learning that is required:

Michael: I understand [Rimma’s rational for contextual learning]... But when

she explains the new vocabulary, I have no idea. Because I’ve never used it

before, and she uses a ton of context. She says something is English and then she
asks a lot of questions in Russian. Or, the same question in Russian, over and
over. Then she’ll give us one vocabulary word. I don’t know if that’s very
helpful. Because vocabulary is out of context. I mean, it’s in context for the
movie, but it’s just jotting it down, people aren’t going to study that. Well,
like today, she told us that this thing is very practical to use, but these students
will never use it, because they never have to practically use Russian, you know...

There were a lot things that Michael was trying to say here, but I don’t think I

could pay him enough for giving me this phrase: “vocabulary is out of context.” The way

70

I interpreted it, vocabulary explanation as a classroom activity, or genre, was out of
cultural, conversational context in the context of a foreign language class. Students jotted
it down, just like they were supposed to when vocabulary was taught. But because this
vocabulary was not going to be on the test, or in exercises, they were not going to study
it. Thus, all authenticity of presentation attempting to imitate spontaneous nature of real
life language communication did not seem to be helpful.
However, in the same conversation, Michael also mentioned that Rimma’s
questions in Russian did help:
Michael: I like when she [Rimma] asks the questions in Russian, it helps a lot.
Even if you don’t understand the words, or a word, you start getting the
contextual knowledge... and that’s the only way I survived when I was in
Volgograd, because half the words they were saying - I had no idea, but if I
caught one or two words, and I understood the context, I began to understand, and
that’s how I learned a lot of words actually, just hearing them, and saying them
back immediately. Hearing them starts making sense in context, like when my
host sister, her friend took me out and showed me one of the old houses that was
turned into a museum, and he was talking about how his family lived in there
before, and I know the word family, but I didn’t know a lot of things... That’s
actually the best way to do it.
It sounds contradictory with the first statement, but whose thinking is not
contradictory? Contradictions are indications of both internal and external dialogue.
First of all, I was the one who led Michael into this, suggesting that Rimma tries to

approach real-life situations with her vocabulary work. This is what Michael is

71

responding to, seeking coherence among my “authorized and educated opinion,” his own
strong views on language learning, and his “informal” feelings about benefiting from his
classroom instruction. It seems to me that he wants to say, yes, it should work, but for
some reason, it doesn’t. One solution that he suggests is systematic presentation of
classroom material, which I think can be understood as translating “real-life” genres of
communication into the classrooms genres of explanation and practice:

Michael: So if you make it an environment where... Like we had one class [in

Volgograd] when it was just conversational Russian and we were graded on that,

and it would really push people. Because they would have to learn how to speak.

But we don’t have that. And I guess that’s not really a focus of ours... In my

personal opinion, we should have one class on grammar, and one class on

conversational, two separate classes, an hour a piece, that’s how I think
competence could be built. And they would have to parallel each other, like you
learn the constructions, and then you learn how to speak them...

It turns out that in the context of classroom culture, foreign language
communication only happened if people were “pushed,” in other words, if they were
graded. The grade became the aspect of evaluation in the genre of classroom
communication. Conversational work was not immediately graded in Rimma’s
classroom, moreover, she mostly used it as an outlet for engaging Russian cultural
knowledge. As Michael pointed out, this caused many of his classmates not to try as
hard. Grading was missing as a regulator in the genre of classroom practice.

Let’s come back to Michael’s comment stating that vocabulary presented in the

context of the movie became out of context as a part of the classroom activity. Watching

72

the movie “Adam’s Rib” in class overall seemed to be a very controversial activity. The
rationale behind doing it was to learn new vocabulary and practice the old one in the
cultural contexts. However, the students seemed to construct the meaning of this activity
following the cultural forms of watching movies familiar to them in American, student,
and non-academic cultures. Making sense of new cultural phenomena through familiar
cultural forms will become one of the main topics of chapter eight in this dissertation.
Here, I would like to show how it affected the students’ interpretation of the social
meaning of the activity of watching a movie in the classroom. Sophia provided a very
insightful explanation in this regard:
Sophia: I think also because of the way we watched it for such a long period
of time it became not cool, watching the movie in the class, that was my
impression, because we were doing it for so long, that just like [imitating] “I am
so sick of watching Adam’s Rib,” ha—ha. People do that kind of stuff, they’ll tell
something different that they actually feel, or believe, so I think people actually
enjoyed it more than they let on, but... it just wasn’t cool... “I don’t want to
watch it any more because we were watching it...” you know, watch it for 20
minutes, and then, you know, watch it again for 20 minutes... that was just a
feeling I got. And a lot of people just went out and rented it... So I think...
everybody was just like “let’s just watch the damn movie so that I know what
happens,” and, ha-ha. .. And I think that a lot of people were not watching the
movie to see the cultural value, as much as just, “I want to know what happens.”
I've already seen the movie because James [another Russian teacher]... he

would actually give us 1 credit for attendance if we went and saw a Russian

73

movie, the Russian film series, so went to a couple of them to just... just get some

absences erased, ha—ha. .. I saw Adam’s Rib...

As Sophia noticed, the social action which the students were performing when the
movie was shown could be described as “watching it to see what happens,” just like they
would have done watching any movie for pleasure. In my interpretation of Sophia’s
words, showing the movie in 20 minute increments did not provide a suitable genre for
contextual vocabulary learning, instead, it simply frustrated the students. A simple way
out that consisted of renting the movie and watching it outside of the class did not seem
to help students refocus on language and culture learning, it just made the class showings
boring. Sophia suggested a different, very simple change that would influence the
construction of the activity meaning to her:

Sophia: I really think that the best way would be twenty minutes and then talk

about it a little, and then watch it again without the subtitles, when it’s still fresh

in your short-term memory and you are going to be able to take a lot more out of
it. in those twenty minute increments I can get the basics of the plot and not
have to worry about it, to focus on the language the second time, and that would
be helpful.

According to these words, all Rimma needed to do was switch off the subtitles the
second time the increment was shown. For Sophia subtitles became the defining factor in
figuring out what it meant to watch a movie: if you watch with subtitles, than you watch

for pleasure, if you watch without the subtitles, then you watch for the educational value.

74

I also believe that sometimes students were simply confused about what they were
doing — having a discussion or practicing new vocabulary and grammar, as I think can be
seen in the following excerpt:

After watching the first episode from the movie “Adam’s Rib,” Rimma asks her

students: What did you learn about the family?

The students respond with silence.

Rimma: Grandma lays down, grandma dances, grandma sings... (Claps her

hands trying to get the class going.) You can use your good new vocabulary here.

Andrey: Grandma is always in... What’s Russian for bed?

Rimma: But Andrey, you have these words here, in the handout: lays in bed...

Did you do that? (Asking everyone if they practiced the handout as their

homework.)

Rimma continues asking other questions. She usually starts the question building

on the vocabulary from the handout, but easily slips into new vocabulary, using

every chance to talk about Red Square, assortment of Russian words for

“boyfriend,” character’s relationships and actions that are “Russian,” etc.

Andrey seemed to be confused about the goal of this activity. He started out
trying to participate in a class discussion by constructing sentences out of the words that
he already knew. Rimma corrected him and drew the class’s attention to practicing new
phrases from the handout. However, soon she herself broke out of this frame streaming
the activity into what Andrey initially interpreted it to be: a class discussion involving
creativity and “contextual” learning of new vocabulary. Here, once again, Rimma’s

rational was brilliant from the point of contextual learning: she encouraged sensitivity to

75

language contexts and students’ creative independence of them. And once again, this did
not seem to work well with the students who all performed their individual complex
social work and tried to figure out the rules of performance in the classroom.

Sensitivity to cultural contexts that Rimma was trying to encourage by constantly
shifting genres of classroom communication proved to be a very hard task to achieve in
the context of genres of classroom communication. The following excerpt from my
fieldnotes is another clear example of this phenomenon:

In the beginning of the class Rimma wrote three Russian sayings on the

blackboard and asked the students to guess their meaning. With the help of

mostly heritage speakers she discussed the meanings and usage of these sayings.

She finished this classroom event by giving students a task to write an essay using

one of the proverbs. After this, she announced a vocabulary quiz. Students were

expressing anticipation of bad grades while turning in the quiz.

Rimma, when all the papers were collected: Did you figure out that two out of

five words from your quiz were staring at you from the blackboard? (These two

words were a part of the sayings that she wrote on the blackboard in the beginning
of the class.)

Several students responded negatively, shaking their heads.

Rimma: Ican’t believe it, it’s a phenomenon. (To me) Natasha, this is something

for you to write about.

Several voices: We didn’t get it...

Rimma: You didn't make the connection?! I just talked for fifteen minutes about

it! Raise your hand if you figured it out!

76

No one raised a hand.

Alina: But it’s on the blackboard, and we were having a quiz!

Rimma: So you were being honest, but you made a connection?

Alina nods.

Sasha: We were concentrating on the quiz...

A few students whisper among themselves.

Rimma: I just want to say - be cautious!

Even Rimma thought that this case was worth writing about. The proverbs that
she wrote on the blackboard had a purpose of expanding the usage of the unit vocabulary.
However, Rimma did not introduce them as such, instead streaming the opening event
into a homework assignment of writing an essay. She was hoping that the students would
use these proverbs as a cue for the test. The test itself did not matter to her as much as
students’ flexibility in using Russian. However, students interpreted the two activities as
totally different, and did not pay any attention to the blackboard, acting within the genre
of writing a test. Rimma first was shocked interpreting this event as students not making
any connection to her cultural activity involving Russian sayings. She then negotiated
with the students the meaning of what really happened and tried to encourage them to be
more flexible and sensitive to the change of classroom genres: “I just want to say - be
cautious!”

Another characteristic of classroom communication genres that distinguished
them from corresponding authentic genres of real-life communication was the fact that
the teacher and the students were usually not equal partners in a conversation. As you

may remember, a lot of students did not like the Russian names that were assigned to

77

them. When I asked Sophia why she wouldn’t tell Rimma about her association with the
name, Sophia answered that she understood and respected Rimma’s rationale, so “it was
OK.” When I asked Jacob why he keeps letting Rimma call him names that he didn’t
understand, he said: “What am I going to do? Stop it, ha—ha? I don’t mind what she
does.” One time Rimma offered Andrey to make a bet with her about reflexive verbs
being a lot less confusing topic in a week or so. Audrey’s response was: “I am in no
position to do that” (make bets with the teacher). As you can probably see, the students
did not feel like negotiating, let alone arguing with the teacher’s decisions. Classroom
communication followed the teacher’s rules and decisions, and very often, Rimma did not
even realize it. In the context of classroom activities, equality between the teacher and
the students had to change depending on what was happening, for example, a quiz or a
discussion. When students asked questions, they were supposed to be more equal
partners with the teacher, compared to when they answered her questions. However, the
shift of these classroom genres sometimes was not well sensed by all participants,
causing confusion, as can be seen in the following excerpt from my conversation with
Michael:

Michael: Rimma [when she tells the students that s/he is wrong] is not serious

about it all the time, she kind of likes to joke about it, it’s a way for her to get

control, like, to say, I am right and you are wrong, and it stops conversation, so

that she can talk about more things, or change the subject.

Natalia: I’ve been thinking about it a lot, but, it seems to me, that in many

instances when she says ‘you’re wrong,’ the person really is wrong...

78

Michael: I know, too... Like when she was talking to someone today and the

person kept saying bezhu (a mistake similar to runned instead of ran), and she is

like, no, you’re wrong, I am right. That’s OK, that doesn’t bother me, because I

understand that she is really trying to communicate something... But sometimes

she’ll do that when a student is asking her a question, not giving her an answer,
and she doesn’t understand that they are asking her a question or that they are
confused, and she says, no, you’re wrong, I am right.

There is another important factor that Michael struggled with here, his classmates.
From our conversations it is clear that Michael thought that most of his fellow students
only took Russian because it was a two-year requirement for their major, an thus their
attitude and goals for learning Russian were quite different from his. This was evident,
for example, in the following phrase: “these students will never use it, because they never
have to practically use Russian...” I will focus on distinction between “me” and “they”
in the classroom in more detail in one of the chapters to come. Here, it is important to
analyze this factor as something very crucial in the sociocultural context of the teacher’s
actions.

Rimma pointed out many times in our conversations that she had to tailor her
instruction for a diverse audience. She knew a lot about her students, including
information about why they took Russian, as well as what their majors, professional
goals, heritage, and even daily schedules were. She talked about students who were very
talented but extremely busy, talented and had enough time to dedicate to Russian, not so
talented but put a lot of effort into their learning, and not very talented or interested

overall. Apart from being aware of these differences in her classroom, Rimma as a

79

Russian national struggled with combining her “Russian” cultural understanding of how a
foreign language was learned with the “American” equivalent of this phenomenon. She
talked about not being able to be strict and critical with her students due to the pressure of
keeping the enrollment numbers high. She talked about her understanding that people
who really wanted to learn Russian would go to a college that had a better reputation for
teaching it compared to our university. She also thought with me about how American
students and system of education in general were different from what we got used to in
Russia. In my understanding of our conversations, we often came to thinking about how
in America students “had rights,” which diminished teacher’s freedom, and such system
often benefited to students being spoiled and less motivated. As I understood it, because
Rimma conceptualized the majority of her student population along these lines, she tried
to make tasks easier, less of them grade oriented, and her own attitude “softer.” This
contributed to taking structure out of her lessons making some students that I talked to
frustrated as they were trying to figure out their student roles in the classroom, as, for
example, Jacob, who experienced the “Eastern European” teaching style in Poland:
Jacob: And this woman [a Polish teacher] used to say to me, “you don’t know
anything.” She would call my name and say, “you can’t do anything” [repeats in
Polish], when are you going to learn this? And the whole class was there, and she
did it to everyone in the class.
Natalia: So do you think it’s unheard of here?
Jacob: Yeah, they would never do it here. Because students would complain,
because they are whiners, you know? Over there, who are you going to complain

to, as a student, who are you? Nothing. What are you going to do, you are going

80

to tell the professor’s boss on him? What are they going to do with the professor?

Nothing. It’s crazy, I mean, over here, you just have these babies, you know,

they’ve been living at home, they’ve had everything they need, you know, “the

teacher said this and that to me,” crying...

As I hoped to show in this chapter, there were a lot of fluid contextual factors that
contributed to co-constructing the meaning of classroom social work between the teacher
and the students. So far, I have focused on genres of classroom communication that I
was able to identify as routine and most influential. In the next two sections of this
chapter, I will try to open a window to another two possible genres: role-play and
informal observation. I was only able to get a glimpse of them during my study;
however, I believe that this glimpse is important to mention here, because I find that
thinking about these genres can very insightful for both the teachers and the students in

terms of imagining and co-constructing meanings in the classroom.

Role-play as a Genre of Classroom Communication
Let’s go back to a vignette describing the task where the students had to come up
with the dialogues about a Russian poet Brodsky. Remember how Rimma asked her
students to make the dialogues “normal”?
Rimma: Well, I want a conversation between two people about Brodsky. For
example, “I’ve just read about Brodsky,” “What do you know about Brodsky?”
(She pronounces these questions with enthusiasm and gestures.) Make it... I

don’t know... Normal! And you guys all learn!

81

If you were in the classroom and could hear Rimma’s intonation and see Rimma’s
gestures, which were quite theatrical, you would agree with me that by saying “normal”
Rimma did not really hope that everyone in class would momentarily get genuinely
interested in Brodsky and start exchanging opinions about him. She was trying to model
a role-play, where students would not have, but play out, a “normal” conversation. As
you may remember, that did not go very well. Rimma pointed out that despite many of
her effort it was very hard to get students to play in the classroom. She explained her
efforts as the following:

Rimma: I simply took time and explained to them, that they have to be more

responsible and active. That I understand that the level that we are working at is

not the level at which they discuss world problems in English... That I

understand that it is hard to be active and interested when you have a vocabulary

of a five year old... And I told them — fake your interest and enthusiasm, get in
this role, be playful about it. I told them that I myself am not really very
interested in what time they get up and what they have for breakfast, but I fake
this interest, and it helps me make a conversation. Foma did get it; he is now
better at just getting into this role. There is a child inside of every person, and
when you learn a language it is important to get that child out...

This interview was done at the end of the semester, and Rimma names only one
student “who got it,” Foma. Foma was a “Russian name,” but it meant a little more to its
owner than a usual “Russian name” assigned in the classroom. I found Foma to be an
extraordinary person in many aspects, and especially in his passion to learn Russian. He

described all his Russian experiences as “fun.” He said that he “simply fell in love with

82

Russian language.” It seemed like Foma found a new way to express himself in Russian
language: “with Russian, I feel like I can be really happy, really angry.” And more than
that, he found a whole new Self: “I love being Foma. It’s a different me who knows how
to speak Russian. I want to become Foma.”

Foma indeed was approaching “normal,” trying to mimic Russian intonations and
gestures, when Rimma was trying to engage the class in the role-play. However, his role
of a Russian speaker did not seem to be limited to the classroom. Foma told me that he
had a lot of Russian friends with whom he could be “Russian,” he looked for every
opportunity to engage with Russian and Russians, for example, he tour-guided Russians
who visited the university. Thus, Foma’s engagement in the classroom role-play could
not be easily explained by his understanding of the role-play as a new genre of classroom
communication that Rimma was trying to introduce. He identified with a Russian Foma
on the individual level, engaging in a practice of language learning that was a lot broader
than the classroom. Identities of other students, whose relationship with Russian was not
as fulfilling, seemed to constrain their participation in the role-play. For example, as I
noticed before, Sophia and Jacob did not associate themselves with their “Russian
names.” They were not an indication of a different identity; they were the rules that they
followed in the classroom. In fact, Sophia said that knowing only a “Russian name” of
someone in the classroom meant no personal relationship:

Sophia: One thing that really bothered my a little... I talked by e-mail to James

[another Russian teacher] when my backpack was stolen, and I instinctively

signed [my real name], and he would write back: “Hi, Sophia,” and it almost was

like... I really wish he would call me [by my real name], in the e-mail at least,

83

especially... I could connect to Sophia in Cyrillic and be OK with that, but Sophia

written in English...

Natalia: So you got used to it?

Sophia: I just learned to respond to it, but I never... the people I know personally,

I never remember their Russian name. There are some people in the class, like

Andrey, he’ll always be Andrey to me, and Konstantin will always be

Konstantin. . .(both Andrey and Konstantin are “Russian names”)

Because Foma was the only one who “got the role-play” last year, I sensed that
this semester Rimma was trying to add to her classroom genres a different type of
playfulness. Especially in the beginning of the semester, I heard a lot of laughter in the
classroom. Students laughed at Rimma’s comments on how “easy” Russian grammar
was, on how “they were going to love grammatical aspect,” they laughed at Audrey’s
singing during the class game for practicing the construction “I want you to do
something,” and they laughed with Rimma and with each other during class discussions.
Rimma often took a role of a Russian who learns about American language and culture.
She never hesitated to ask her students to explain certain things in English to her; she
expressed rather extreme (but transparently not serious) judgments about what she
perceived American or young generation ways. One day, for example, the topic was
music and Rimma asked students what kind of music they liked and if they played any
instruments:

Alina: I like Russian music and trance. (Everyone, including Rimma, laughs.)

Rimma: What is trans, you dance yourself into trans? (Laughter becomes

hysterical.)

84

Alina: I’ll play you sometime.

Rimma: No, I don’t want to be anywhere near it. (Laughter increases even
more.)

Alina did not seem offended or even embarrassed by this laughter. She laughed
just as hard when it was Andrey’s turn to announce to the class that he can play a “fagot.”
Fagot means a musical instrument in Russian, and of course, the students associated
another meaning with it. This was a type of the game they engaged in, a playful, silly,
and most importantly, informal negotiation of cultural differences. This game made the
roles of the students and the teacher less formal and more flexible, without having to add
a whole new “Russian” identity in a role-play. For some, for example, Andrey, it
allowed to accept identities such as “class clown.” I can imagine that a “class clown”
identity helped Andrey to abstract from how he usually had to figure himself in his
complex life. This thought came to me when I once saw Andrey driving his old car,
which apparently saw many accidents, with a cigarette in his mouth, seemingly deep in

thought about something. This image was strikingly different from the image of a

student Andrey that I got used to see in the classroom.

Informal Genres of Constructing Cultural Knowledge in the Classroom

Even though I found traditional genres of teacher-student interaction to be very
important for understanding how students constructed their cultural knowledge of Russia,
America and each other, there were certainly more details to consider. Apart from my
researcher’s intuition, I was led in this inquiry, again, by ideas of Bakhtinian circle,

which conceptualized speech genres as internal and external, more and less visible:

85

speech performances engulf and wash over all persistent forms and kinds of

ideological creativity: unofficial discussions, exchanges of opinions at the theatre

or a concert or at various types of social gatherings, purely chance exchanges of
words, one’s manner of verbal reaction to happenings in one’s life and daily
existence, one’s inner-word manner of identifying oneself and identifying one’s
position in the society, and so on. [these are] forms of the “utterance,” of little

speech genres of internal and external kinds... (Morris, 2002, p. 54.)

During my observations, 1 always tried to catch students’ conversations before
and after class, as well as unofficial exchanges in whisper during the class. During my
conversations with Rimma I strived for understanding her interaction with the students
outside of the classroom. During my interviews with participants, I looked for details
describing how else they were making sense of Russia in class and how they connected it
to their practice outside of the classroom. The winner in the last category was certainly
Sophia, who shed a lot of light on my research by allowing me access into the more
intimate layers of her Russian classroom.

“I watch things, I watch people. . said Sophia when I asked her about a sense of
community in the classroom. She was able to tell me who was friends with whom, how
relationships changed over time, and overall give me a fresh perspective on classroom
events from the side of personal relationships that constructed them, in her understanding,
of course. But what really fascinated me was how much sense she was able to make of
Russia and Russians through her observations of the teacher, heritage speakers, myself,

other students in the classroom, events in the movie, and textbook materials:

86

Natalia: And there is another thing in the research, that even if you take Russian
for two years and don’t get fluent... fluency is not the goal, but you gain cultural
sensitivity. . .

Sophia: Cultural sensitivity, well... first of all, I was never exposed really... very
many times in my life to people who grew up in Russia... and... I think that just
that of and in itself would make somebody more culturally sensitive...

Natalia: Do you mean heritage speakers in class?

Sophia: Well, yeah, and, well, just Rimma and even you, you know... just I
wouldn’t be around you guys if I wasn’t learning Russian. So I think it makes
sense like that... I think that Rimma she does a very good job with that just
because of her personality. What I like about Rimma is that she stresses that
without standing there and lecturing about it for an hour... there are little bits and
pieces of it that come out every day and every once in a while, and... this is the
kind of stuff that interests me.

When I first heard this, I got all excited and tried to steer our conversation into

what I conceptualized as “cultural knowledge” that Rimma was trying to incorporate into

every aspect of her teaching, just like I discussed before. However, Sophia did not go

there very far with me. Instead, she opened me a whole world of observing how Rimma

speaks, addresses students, grades papers, etc. She compared these aspects with other

teachers that she had, James, who was “very good at giving the students an American

perspective on Russia,” and Kornilov, who was “old school Russian.” For example, she

told me that if she went to Russia without having a Russian class she would think that

Russians always yell at each other and perhaps at her. Now she knows that this is simply

87

a manner of speech that is more emotional than what Americans are used to. She also
learned that Russians were more direct in their communication, not because they tried to
be mean, but because this was a norm. She learned that it was impolite to eat candy in
the classroom if your teacher was Russian by hearing a story about Andrey eating a
candy in the middle of the class in front of Rimma, and Rimma scolding him for that.
From observing heritage speakers, Sophia got an idea that Russian women dressed sexier
than their American friends, and that perhaps, overall, Russia was more sexist than
America. Sophia mentioned a lot of episodes from the movie “Adam’s Rib,” which
never became a focus of the classroom discussions. For example, she thought she saw
Nastya, one of the main characters, drinking while being pregnant, which made her
contemplate an idea that perhaps there was more of a drinking problem in Russia,
especially because she was able to connect her observation to a story that she heard from
her friend who worked in an adoption agency about warranting American parents against
adopting children from Russia because they might had come from families of alcoholics.
Sophia also thought of a connection between N astya stealing food from the grocery store
where she worked with a story that came from her friend about a Russian girl here, in
America, talking about stealing candy bars from a grocery store and how easy it was.
There is an important contextual circumstance that I want to draw the reader’s
attention to here. All of the above stories came out in response to my questions about
Sophia’s interpretations of Russian culture. I understand that Sophia was constructing a
narrative, because I asked for a narrative. This does not mean that she herself had these
stable stereotypical ideas of Russia. In fact, she often showed with her language that the

nature of her cultural understandings was dialogic in a true Bakhtinian sense. The

88

language that indicated this to me consisted of (a) words expressing possibility, not
certainty, such as “perhaps,” “may be,” “I thought,” (b) asking for confirmations from
me, such as “is this true?”, “am I being horrible?”, (c) statements such as “I know that not
all Russians are like this,” “I know that this sounds stereotypical.” I found it fascinating
observing Sophia engaging in a dialogue with her prior experiences, classroom
observations, and myself in a complex endeavor of making sense of Russian culture
within informal intersecting genres of observation and constructing a narrative in

response to a question.

The idea that the meaning of the message can be best understood in the context of
how, by whom, to whom and under what circumstances it was produced is certainly not
new. Language enacted in the classroom received a special term in the history of
educational and sociolinguistic research: classroom discourse. Cazden and Mehan (2001)
distinguished between sequential and selectional dimensions of classroom discourse
structure, positioning themselves in a row with such researchers as British linguists
Sinclair and Coulthard, who focused on form-function language relationships, Frederick
Erickson, who wrote about structure and improvisation in language, and Gordon Wells,
who proposes to rename IRE to IRF, substituting evaluation with feedback (Cazden,
2001, p. 37-47). There is also more recent literacy research associated with rhetoric and
dialogical framework advocating for seeing classroom and everyday communication as
following certain speech genres (Dyson, 1997; Nystrand & Duffy, 2003). I definitely see
myself joining the voices of these researchers with the outlook on the foreign language

learning as happening within limitations of genres of classroom communication. I tried

89

to join these researchers in a dialogue; that is why I did not select and follow one system
of classroom discourse analysis already established in the literature. I tried to show how I
developed my understanding of genres of dialogic communication and figured it in the

context of my study.

90

CHAPTER SIX:

OUTSIDE OF THE CLASSROOM

The goal of this chapter is to reveal the nature of the cultural practice of learning
Russian, as experienced by the three key student participants, in each, this practice was
complexly intertwined with societal discourses. As I tried to show in the previous two
chapters, although Rimma tried very hard to communicate Russian cultural traditions to
her students, they did not seem to respond to her teachings by “learning” cultural
material. The main reason was that cultural and language socialization did not fit into the
genres of classroom communication, and was quite different from the social work of
acquiring “a language base” and socializing into the classroom culture. Another way to
look at this is that socialization does not result from learning about traditions. Anne
Dyson (1993) brilliantly worded the relationship between traditions and socialization in
her book about young children:

These notions of different cultural traditions — the sociocultural folk, the popular,

and the written literary —- are a helpful heuristic, a way of approaching and

thinking about the complexity of the children's social and language lives. But
societal categories for these fluid fuzzy concepts are just that — fluid and fuzzy,

intertwined in complex, dialogic relationships (p. 14).

I found this insight to be very helpful for my analysis of the young adults’
learning. My participants created cultural narratives in our conversations in response to
my questions about Russian culture. These narratives sounded as interpretations of

various cultural traditions. However, the way these narratives were constructed showed

91

the fuzziness, fluidity, and complexity of the societal categories that my participants
engaged in to create them. One time, for example, the students in Rimma’s classroom
were reading a textbook dialogue referencing the names of several famous Russian poets:

Rimma: Slava, do you know anything about Anna Akhmatova?

Slava: No.

Rimma: Kira, what about you?

Kira: No.

Rimma: You need to fill out this gap in their education. Russians can’t live

without poetry because “it’s accelerator of the mind.”

“Poetry is the accelerator of the mind” is a famous quote from the Russian poet
Brodsky, about whom Rimma talked earlier in the day. Another activity that Rimma did
earlier that day was announcing a poetry day, for which each of the students had to learn
a Russian poem of their choice. Similar to the examples in the previous chapters,
Rirnma’s commentary about the importance of poetry in the lives of Russians remained
without a response. No one asked why poetry was so important for Russian culture and
what would be the best way to “fill in the gap in the education.” None of my focal
students, judging from our conversations, picked up a book of the Russian poetry in the
library. None of them even continued this conversation with me. At another time, a
similar conversation evolved around sports in the classroom, and ended with very similar
results. Why? This is a complicated question. I don’t think the answer is that the
students did not care about Russian culture. It seemed to me that the nature of the
practice of constructing cultural knowledge related to learning Russian was more

complex, taking unique and individual form in case of each student. This cultural

92

knowledge involved Russian and Russia, but was not limited to them. In a sophisticated
dialogue situated within many societal discourses students, as free authors, knitted their
own intercultural understandings, picking the threads and combining them into unique
patterns. This view made Rimma’s comments on the role of poetry or sports in Russia
important. However, who would pick these threads, and what threads they would be
combined with, was hardly predictable. The students were not putting on Russian hats
and acting Russian.

Practice becomes the key theoretical construct in this chapter. My initial
understanding of practice comes from reading Lev Vygotsky (1962, 1978). As I
understand it from his works, practice is organization of cognition, and consequently,
social activities. Conceived as a practice in this sense, foreign language learning in a
college course is the organization of one’s linguistic actions and understandings through
participation in the social activities of taking a foreign language class and looking for
other opportunities to use the language of choice. Taking a language class was
conceptualized by my participants as receiving a “language base,” — a base for social
engagement with the Russian language outside of the classroom. Here I will focus on
how such engagement can be understood in the case of my three key participants,
Michael, Jacob, and Sophia.

Sometimes, I use the word practice in a different meaning, constructed by the
students in the interviews — conversations that followed the monologic genre of
constructing narratives. This meaning is more consistent with Goodnow, Miller, &

Kessel’s (1995) conceptualization of practice as an attribute of a community that

93

individuals share (see p. 32 of this dissertation). In order to avoid confusion, I will try as

much as possible to differentiate between these two meanings in the following text.

Michael

Michael became interested in Russian when he went to Ukraine on a study abroad
trip for criminal justice students. Being a student of anthropology, in Ukraine he became
very interested in the national group of Tatars, by informally interacting with the
representatives of this group. When Michael returned to the United States, he started to
read about Tatars on the Internet and was able to see how many news and historical
accounts about Tatars were inseparable from their relations with Russians. Racism,
nationalism, and language politics that already were keen interests of Michael about the
US appeared to him from a new angle and in a new context. Michael got inspired to
write about the history of these people by collecting their accounts in the informal
conversations. In order to engage in the informal conversations, he needed the language.

Michael’s interest in Ukraine and Russia was facilitated not only by his
professional and civil interests, but also by the friendships that he brought back from
Ukraine. He kept in touch both by phone and e-mail with a number of friends. He
wanted to communicate with them in their language. He wanted to be able to discuss
movies, going out, the university and private life, and many other common interests in
their lives not only in English, but also in the language that was native to his new friends.

When Michael came back to his university, he realized that in order to find time
for a new language in his busy life he needed to enroll into a class. Taking a class was a

popular foreign language learning practice (practice is used here in its second meaning, as

94

 

 

an attribute of community) that Michael identified in available societal discourses and
uniquely wove in his own individual practice of learning Russian (here practice is used in
its first meaning, consistent with my theoretical framework) in the context of organizing
his interests and life experiences (or, cognition and social activities, in Vygotsky’s
words). No surprise, Michael did not find any offerings of the Ukrainian language.
However, according to his observations, everyone in Ukraine, including Tatars, spoke
Russian. A lot of people there may not have wanted to speak it due to the complicated
language politics, but they knew it. Russian also appeared suitable to Michael because it
was giving him the means to reach out to the people who lived on quite a significant
amount of land. He perceived their situation as critical, he wanted to get involved, and he
desired to make a contribution to educating people about each other, especially taking
into the account a complex relationship between the former republics of the Soviet Union
from within and from outside, most importantly, with the United States, historically and
presently.

Organization of social activities described above can be interpreted as Michael’s
motivation to learn Russian. I believe that it is crucial to approach such “history of
interest” conceptually broader than motivation, as the societal discourses that students
like Michael participate in and draw from. For example, it would not be hard to identify
a societal discourse of relationship between the United States and the former Soviet
Union. But Michael’s participation in this discourse, from interpretation of the main
issues to identifying his social position in it, is infinitely unique and constantly evolving,
intersecting with the material from his classes, which included not only the Russian

language, but also anthropological research, Russian and international history, literature,

95

philosophy, etc. On another level, Michael’s dialogue with the socially available
discourses was uniquely imbedded in his childhood history of growing up as a son of a
deaf father, of a child who heard his mother’s stories of the terrifying nuclear weapons in
Russia, and of a grandson of the man who was a member of a communist party in New
York before World War II. This dialogue has been changing and evolving, it took place
inside and outside of the classroom, with his closest and not so close friends, while he

was looking for and reading books on the topics that interested him.

Jacob
Jacob seemed to set a border between the classroom and his own life. This
boarder helped me grasp and tighten the concept of the individual nature of a learning
practice in this study:
Natalia: I am trying to make sense of what I see in the classroom, and I am
reading a lot of literature and a lot of literature says to bring more culture into the
classroom, this and that, and that you should make students more culturally
sensitive... and then I look at someone like you, and you have so many things
going on outside of the classroom, you have Russian friends that motivate you to
study, you are looking at other sources, listen to Russian music, so I am
wondering, you know...
Jacob: Every once in while I do learn something in the class, but really... I study
on my own, I do my own work, and all my classes are always the same, I mean I
do everything on my own and being in a class is more or less a formality, you

know... I have to be there, and I have to take tests, why not. I am looking for

96

an excuse to study because... if I have to study for a test, then at least I'll do

something. Because I am too busy doing schoolwork, and there is always a

pressing demand of what you have to have done, because it... takes precedence

over... over anything else you are doing.

In this interview, Jacob called being in class “a formality,” as related to the actual
learning that he performed “on his own.” At the same time, being in the class sounded
like a necessity, because schoolwork, as a social context of life, mainly defined his
activities: if he did not take a class on a subject that interested him, he was not going to
have time to learn it. Thus schooling became a frame for Jacob’s activities, the frame,
which was supposed to allow him to organize his life and fit in with the rest of the
society. However, this frame remained formal, whereas his personal learning went far
outside of it and took unique individual forms.

Jacob started learning Russian after spending three years in Poland, where he
became fluent in the Polish language. In Poland, Jacob had many Russian fi'iends who
spoke Russian around him often. Jacob frequently mentioned a Russian guy named Gleb,
whom he considered to be his best friend. Jacob spoke Polish to Gleb, although Gleb’s
Polish was worse than J acob’s. Jacob said that he often talked to Gleb and a few other
Russian friends on the phone and they all wanted him to come back to Poland, or visit
Russia. Speaking Russian to his existing Russian friends and to other Russians that he
might meet seemed to be an important organizing center of J acob’s practice of learning
Russian. But even if it was possible to single this goal out as an organizing center, it was
impossible to ignore the web of other social sources, which Jacob drew from in his

complex practice of learning Russian.

97

Practice is a social phenomenon, and Jacob’s ways of learning Russian very well
reflected this fact. He took a class in order to receive “the base,” and his reasoning
concerning why this was necessary was in a dialogue with societal discourses related to
pedagogical research and practice (here practice is used in its second meaning, as an
attribute of the community) related to how a foreign language was learned. Jacob
considered immersion (a method when one is immersed into the language environment)
as the best way to learn a foreign language, however, he did not have any opportunities
for practicing immersion; this is why he had to start with receiving a language base. He
further organized his activities as opportunities to practice Russian. These activities
included watching Russian TV, memorizing extra vocabulary, and using supplementary
grammar books. Jacob also wanted to spend a summer in the Russian immersion
program. What was interesting, he seemed to prefer it to a study abroad program, where,
as he heard, Americans stuck together and surrounded themselves with English speakers,
so that there were few opportunities to speak Russian to Russians who didn’t speak
English. The social practice of learning a foreign language in a classroom was
individually appropriated by Jacob in a dialogue with what he constructed as efficient
social practices.

Learning Russian in Jacob’s case seemed also somehow connected to his
traveling to Europe, watching the History channel, taking anthropology and philosophy
classes, and his childhood experiences, as they all came out in our conversations. In the
research literature a factor considered to be influential for someone’s decision to learn a
foreign language is heritage. Jacob considered himself to be of Polish heritage, since his

grandmother (his father’s mother) came from Poland. However, Jacob was not sure if it

98

was his heritage that made him interested in Poland and Eastern Europe. Jacob’s father
spoke some Polish, but Jacob said that he learned very little Polish from him. He said
that he never felt any pressure or encouragement from his family to learn about Polish or
Russian culture, or to somehow identify with them. His dad just “told him a lot about it.”
However, as Jacob added, his dad told him a lot about everything, for example, about
Samson and Delilah, about German occupation during the World War II, and about the
relationship between Russia and Poland. Jacob remembered that when he was a kid, his
dad would simply read to him, and then they would talk about all kinds of things. Jacob
eagerly shared a lot of these stories with me, simply enjoying talking about them. All my
attempts to identify any particular threads, which would make sense as connecting his
childhood experiences to his interest in Russian, seemed to fail. When I readily
suggested that his dad was the one who influenced his decision to go to Poland, Jacob
replied that he didn’t mind, but wasn’t particularly happy about it since he wanted Jacob
to finish his program of study in the US. When listening to Jacob’s stories of German
excellence in many areas, I probed for the Russian-German relationship, but Jacob took
the conversation into the technical aspects of war methods, which both sides had used.
When I mentioned the name of Karl Marx whose ideas inspired the Russian revolution,
Jacob did not pick up on it.

The discourses that came out in my conversations with Jacob were individually
and uniquely interpreted and woven together by him. Just as in the case of Michael, it
was impossible for me to bundle them up into the rigid concepts of socialization agents.
The fact that these discourses were directed to me, whom Jacob identified as the language

learning researcher, only strengthened my opinion of fluidity, unpredictability, and

99

uniqueness of participation in the social discourses as building a learning practice. Jacob
knew that I was looking for particulars; he also knew that I was interested in connections
to the classroom, but even then he could not “organize” his experiences into coherent

categories.

Sophia

When talking to Michael and Jacob I did not have to go far in order to get a deep
insight into the nature of a practice of learning Russian outside of the classroom through
the discourses that came out in our interviews. Both of them had much to share
concerning their Russian experiences, so all I had to do was build on the information that
they provided. I was hoping for a similar outcome in the conversation with Sophia,
however, when we had talked for about an hour in an unstructured way and I still was not
able to identify how she was building on those unique out-of-classroom discourses, I
decided to ask a question: “What do you think you will do with you Russian after this
class is over?” Sophia took this question in stride: “I don’t know, that’s kind of sad, I
guess, I have never thought about this before you asked!” For a moment I felt bad,
thinking that I had interfered with something more personal than what this study
authorized me for, however, Sophia sounded lost only for a minute. The rest of our
conversation focused on how Russia and Russian had been woven in her life since the
childhood. One of the fascinating aspects for me was a feeling that Sophia was
constructing her narrative purely in response to my questions, for the first time explicitly
making sense of events in her life as constituting her unique practice of studying the

Russian language outside of the classroom.

100

The reader may remember my discussion of how Sophia picked up a thread of
classroom topic covering Russian poet Brodsky and wove it into her own unique practice
of studying Russian, which went far beyond the classroom. Whereas Rimma and I hoped
for cultural learning about “traditions,” Sophia interpreted reading about Brodsky as
working with the real historical documents, which was important and meaningful to her
because of majoring in history: Being a history major constituted the frame of Sophia’s
practice of learning Russian in our conversation. Sophia explained that ideally she
wanted to become a specialist in the Russian history with the ability to read real Russian
documents. She further connected this aspiration with the absence of real-time Russian
interests, including communicating with Russians or following Russian news:

Sophia: Now that I think about that... and I think I’ve been so interested in

imperial Russia that I haven’t really studied modern Russia, or Soviet history at

all... I think in a way I was fascinated with old stuff... Like, my interest in going

to Russia would not be as much for the people and the culture now as for just

seeing, experiencing the history... I’ve never thought about it, I don’t know...

Even though the frame of Sophia’s practice of studying Russian was of a
professional nature and embedded in history, she was able to weave more and more
experiences into it as our conversation evolved. Childhood experiences figured into her
narrative in a similar way to Jacob’s. She talked about her mother’s stories about
childhood during the cold war:

Sophia: I remember my mom showing me the globe when I was a kid and

showing me Soviet Union, and this is what’s happening there, and telling me a

little bit about it and I remember that fascinating me, and... because she was

101

brought up in the fifties during the cold war, when, um. .. you know, we just

didn’t get along so well, and she was just like, now, it’s a little different, but

people still can’t speak their mind, and so... that fascinated me from early, early
age...

Just like Jacob, Sophia did not confirm my suggestion of parents’ influence in the
choice of a foreign language:

Sophia: When I first signed up for Russian, my mom was like: “you signed up for

what?” She was just like, why don’t you just take French? And I was like,

“because I don’t want to take French, I want to take Russian,” and she was like

“it’s going to be very hard”...

Stories told by the parents during childhood seemed to figure into Sophia and
Jacob’s language learning practice not as an external motivational factor (parent’s will or
support) but as a more personal and subtle construct of “fascination.” Sophia further
built on it by discussing her memories of the high school teacher who received a
nickname “comrade Christopher” for his keen interests in Russia, which he always
brought into the classroom, her unforgettable impressions of seeing the news about the
change of power in Russia in 1991, her readings of Dostoyevsky when she was sick with
anemia for a long time, her obsession with figure skating, where Russians were
unquestionable leaders, and many other aspects of her life, which she did not think of
explicitly connecting to learning Russian before our conversation.

In response to my questions Sophia was also able to think of her current
connections with Russian culture, such as stories about Russians in America, which she

heard from her friends, reading articles about the Russian cartoon character Cheburashka,

102

who was introduced to her by James, the professor of Russian during her first year of the
language, stories about adopting children from Russia that she heard from her friend
working in the adoption agency, and simply observing Russians (heritage speakers, the
teacher and myself) in her classroom. I elaborated on many of these examples in the
previous chapter.

After talking for about three hours, Sophia, who initially was lost after my
question about her Russian connections outside of the classroom, was able to present me
with a quite coherent practice of studying Russian, which went far beyond the classroom.
It was precious for me to see the complex dialogic relationship not only within this
practice, but also in its connection to other aspects of Sophia’s life. Sophia often
mentioned that she was “jealous” of other people’s opportunities to learn foreign
languages and travel because she was in a different position compared to many of them:
“If I wasn’t like a super-mom trying to get through school with a three-year-old. .
Bringing up a child, graduating from school, and getting a real job were the social goals
that prioritized her life, influencing all of the learning practices connected to the
academic subjects. I believe that Sophia’s case provides an extra dimension to the insight
into the complexity of the dialogue that the students engage in when figuring the meaning

of college learning in their lives.

None of my participants (by chance, not that I intentionally have chosen them that
way) talked about interest in Russian as directly facilitated by their environment or
background (e. g., heritage, support of the parents and peers, etc.). This fact

problematizes many current models of human environment, which build on its

103

 

.-

-

.;:
9;;
I
-.
. .-
.1:
1",
_"-
.r;
in“;
.3
:3!-
2‘!
I!
i.
.3“!
.-§
Q,
“I;
..=.
7;
‘r‘
:55
1:
‘5":
.9;
".
::
5‘
-.‘%1:
'x
~35
.3“
'3‘:
'2;
3":
”a
:‘
,3.
Q?
L‘
.3'2‘
* :E
r
:4:
'v
"3
“-‘
-v
,‘v.
-
‘—
,.
-T
If

understanding as an ecological phenomenon with the components of the macro- and
micro-systems (one of the original proponents of this theory is Brofenbrenner [197 9]).
Micro-system (family, school and peers) is usually recognized as the most powerful
component or culture, where defining beliefs and values are constructed.

My findings are supportive of the dialogic, polyphonic view where the person is a
free interpreter of the sources, which are defined by the intellectual, not the physical
proximity. The intellectual proximity, in turn, is defined by the individuality of
interpretation. The discourses which my participants engaged in were, in their nature, not
official, not formal, and not local, but individual, dispersed and unpredictable. They had
no past, as past only became important as an authored present (Bakhtin, 1984).

Looking at language learning from the perspective of an individual practice
provides much insight for the teacher. Of course, no teacher will have a chance to
become as familiar with her students’ histories as myself being a researcher in this study.
However, I believe this is not necessary. What is necessary in my opinion is to
understand that students’ learning of the academic material is social and cultural; it goes
far beyond the classroom and constantly and uniquely evolves in a dialogue. The next
chapter will continue the theme of the nature of a cultural practice, which the students
constructed drawing from discourses that they engaged in inside and outside of the
classroom, by describing some possibilities of identity work that my participants carried

out as the students of Russian 202.

104

CHAPTER SEVEN:

LEARNING A LANGUAGE, CONSTRUCTING A SELF

My main research question for this study is: “What does it mean to learn Russian
in a sociocultural sense outside of Russia, in fact, in a classroom in a large public
university in the Midwest?” The goal of this chapter is to contribute to answering this
question in terms of what it means to learn Russian for someone’s identity, or in my
conceptual interpretation, understanding of Self. Following my theoretical framework I
will consider the understanding of Self as a phenomenon, which happens in the context of
the learners’ dialogic participation in a social and cultural practice, uniquely and fluidly
constructed in each individual case through participation in the societal discourses.
Through the analysis of my conversations with Michael, Jacob and Sophia, 1 was able to
identify some fascinating dialogues, which they engaged in trying to figure their
knowledge of Russian into their understandings of Selves as college students, American

citizens, and future professionals.

Michael

College education in general is an important identity construct for young people
who come from local communities. As Levinson, Foley and Holland (1996) point out,
“no matter how the knowledgeable person is locally defined, regardless of the skills and
sensibilities, which count as indicators of “wisdom” and intelligence in the home and
immediate locale, schools interject an educational mission of extra-local proportions,”

thus providing “a contradictory resource for students who might benefit from their

105

teachings and credentials” (Levinson, Foley & Holland, 1996, p. 1). Even though this
statement refers to schools in general, I believe it is particularly true in the case of higher

education. In college young adults enter a complex dialogue of what Levinson, Foley

’9 66 ’9

and Holland call “particular visions of the society, national priority, “university’s
cultural politics,” and values of their home communities, both at the level of the family
and peers.

In one of my conversations with Michael he told me about his home community
where most of the communication happened in a vernacular English, usually referred to
as African-American language. He told me that he used to use a lot of vernacular
English, especially when he played basketball. He said that he now talked very different
than before, because he was now used to college, and added - it’s funny. He said that it
was funny because when he spoke to people from back home he had to change his
language, because even though they understood his English, it sounded weird to them:

Michael: That’s what college does to you... sometimes. I don’t like that I don’t

speak the way I used to, because it kind of separates you from people. It makes

me seem like I am educated and that makes me feel out of place. They think that

I am better than them. I lost most of my friends when I started learning Russian,

or economics — most of my friends don’t care about that, they are interested in

video games. How boring... hah, but that’s my generation.

In these words, I was able to identify a complex dialogue that Michael
participated in. On one hand, he felt a loss of being able to identify with his friends from

home. This identity loss came out of his gain in “educated” language and interests. This

loss-gain relationship indeed seemed to be very contradictory: “while feeling bad,”

106

Michael also uplifted himself from his “generation,” calling their interests “boring.” He
also mentioned that it was not so much college in general, but his specific “college”
interests in particular, which benefited to the loss of old friends. Being interested in
learning Russian, or foreign languages in general, was not a mainstream social activity
which could be easily shared. From my other conversations with Michael, I know that by
economics he meant mainly global issues, also out of the mainstream, such as the
environment, cultural politics, etc. Michael seemed to be engaged with the particular
visions of society, identifying himself as someone who is against the mainstream vision
of a monocultural locally limited American citizen.

The complexity of Michael’s identity work related to learning Russian seemed to
grow even more when we turned in our conversations to some of the political and
economical issues. Imagining himself as a future bilingual citizen and professional,
Michael was determined not to use governmental support. He pitted himself against the
societal vision of a foreign language speaker who could be used as a resource in the
military, political or business affairs, benefiting American globalization. This is where
he also separated himself from “others” in the classroom, a phenomenon that I will
elaborate on in the next few paragraphs. However, Michael’s relationship with the
mainstream “national priorities” seemed to be still somewhat dialogic, i.e., not radically
defined and forever finalized. For example, Michael once brought a dictionary for my
inspection. The dictionary, as he was told, was used by the CIA. Wanting to achieve the
best possible excellence in Russian, Michael found himself referring to the best possible

resources, which he identified as the resources used by the most powerful groups.

107

“Othering” oneself from people in the classroom seemed to come out as an
important construct of my participants’ understandings of Selves. In my Russian
classroom, it came from many different sources, and one of the most noticeable ones was
the perception of each other’s goals and interests. Disagreeing with mainstream
American international policies, Michael saw most of his classmates as future
businessmen, politicians and military workers who would serve those interests. Even
teaching English in Russia did not seem attractive to Michael, because, in his opinion,
most Russians, especially those who could afford to take classes from native speakers,
were learning English for business purposes. His desire to know Russian was different.
He wanted to help people in the former Soviet Union. He wanted to write about them in
order to educate American people and to help the nations communicate with each other.

Most of the time “othering” was not striking in the routine classroom interactions,
however, I was able to identify it from time to time. A lot of it was fed by the textbook
materials and resulting discussions centered on the existing stereotypes of Russians and
Americans. For example, one of the textbook chapters was dedicated to the leisure types
of activities and started out with the descriptions of how Russians and Americans spent
their free time. Rimma brought this discussion into the classroom, initially asking
students how much free time they had:

Rimma: Do you have a lot of free time?

Vlad: No.

Rimma: I thought Americans loved having fun! Andrey, do you have a lot of free

time?

Andrey: No, I study often.

108

Rimma: A lot (correcting often). Do you watch baseball?

Andrey: Yes, Yankee!

Rimma: Then don’t tell me you don’t have free time. Americans are famous for
having fun all over the world. Or, at least you can see my biases. Or, may be I

envy you.

Rimma: Is it true that all Americans love sport? Let’s do the voting. All
Americans love sport. (About half of the hands rise.) You don’t think that all
Americans like sport. (About third of the hands rise.)

Andrey: Come on, all of America is obsessed with football!

Michael and Igor shake their heads: Not all!

Judging from my observations, Rimma was not serious or really determined in her
opinion about Americans. Her voice, intonations, and facial expressions made me
believe that she was trying to stream this discussion into the genre of a casual exchange
of opinions. In my interviews with her she showed a deep understanding of how diverse
her students and the American population in general were. However, we can see how
some of the “othering” work happened within this discussion. Even though I believe that
both Michael and Igor understood the genre established by Rimma as informal and
humorous, they voiced their opinions against Andrey’s call for the group identity.

Another important building block of Michael’s identity was his awareness of the
“cultural politics” of the American schools as they related to language learning. He
regretted that he never had an opportunity to learn Russian as a child, commenting on the

fact that foreign language classes for children were far from the top of the American

109

educational priorities. Positioning himself against those priorities, Michael stated that if
he has children, they would for sure learn a foreign language from the very beginning, in
his case, it would be Russian, of course. He told me with disappointment in his voice that
it was not only the fact that foreign language classes were rarely available and not
popular, but learning them was difficult, because it was not aided, and did not correspond
at all to the English language instruction. For example, he did not know what parts of
speech, such as adjectives, were until he was nineteen. All those factors came to
constitute in my conversations with Michael the national language policies, which
confined most of the American citizens to a limited, profession-oriented knowledge of
the foreign languages and cultures. This was not Michael’s goal, but this was how
Michael saw the goals of many of his classmates.

In addition to all limitations described above, foreign language learning goals of
others were also defined by a two-year requirement that many majors now have.
Michael, as well as Jacob (as we will see later) was confident that most of his classmates
would be gone after the second year of Russian. He was sure that “these people” were
not genuinely interested in Russian culture or the language, and all they need was to
satisfy the university requirement. This was how Michael explained the weak
interactions and slow pace of his class. If students were genuinely interested, then things
would be different. As an example of a motivated group, Michael talked about his class
in Volgograd, where most of the people went because of their personal interest in the
Russian language and culture: “in Volgograd, there were motivated people, so it was easy

to learn among them...”

110

Michael also understood that the teacher responded to the audience, which was
mainly interested in satisfying a foreign language requirement, which did not have to be
Russian. From my conversations with the other people in the department, I could see that
this type of audience was constructed as atypical audience for less common foreign
languages in our university. Students who were really interested in Russian went to
schools that were famous for their Russian programs, and that was not here. As a result,
Russian recruitment here was not very high, and the language had a reputation of being
difficult. This is why one of the main teacher’s goals was not to scare anyone away.
Understanding this type of reciprocity, Michael still wished for more discipline and
pushing, like he found in Volgograd, where the audience was perceived by him as
“motivated”:

Michael: What she [Rimma] needs to do, I think, is ask people. If they know that

they don’t have to answer, they don’t care, because you need to force them. [. . .]

she should stick to doing that, because she will go to English... When I was in

Volgograd, they [meaning mainly the Russian teacher] would ask me a question

in Russian, and I would say, “I don’t know.” And then they would repeat it

slowly, and may be after two or three times, she [Russian teacher] would move to
someone else, and then someone else would answer, and then I would understand
their simple answer, because we were more or less at the same level. There were

a lot of the second year students, and I was the first year student. And some of the

second and third year students, they would understand the words and they would

respond, and I’d be like, oh, that’s why! That’s what she’s saying! And it helps,

because everyone’s at a different level and knows different things.

lll

The identity work described above contributed to Michael’s positioning of
himself in the classroom and as a Russian learner outside of the classroom. A quiet and
diligent student with no steady friends in the classroom, not exhibiting any extraordinary
behaviors, Michael positioned himself without unnecessary conflict among the “others”
in the classroom, limiting his activity to the academic work of receiving “a language
base.” An active worldly thinker, Michael viewed his Russian language learning as a
social work of positioning himself as an anti-mainstream American citizen and an
international actor. As I hope you were able to see, these two identities were externally
quite different, however, internally, they were deeply interrelated in a complex dialogue

of constructing Self.

Jacob

Jacob was not sure what his career plans were, but he hoped that they would
involve Russian. He talked about many possibilities, from international business to
military. One aspect that stood out in his thinking was the desire to find a serious
occupation. He did not choose Russian, Spanish and mathematics because these subjects
were connected into a well-thought-out career plan. He chose them because they
interested and challenged him. However, I sensed that he wanted more determination
and “self-actualization” in his life full of “crazy ideas:” “I never felt in my life that I have

self-actualized myself... you know? I want to do something... I am not satisfied...

99 66 99 66

somehow”... “Self-actualization, seriousness, craziness,” and “challenge” all

somehow combined in Jacob’s dialogue of envisioning his Self. Learning Russian was

112

woven in this dialogue as something definitely challenging, potentially serious, but for
now, simply a hobby.

Jacob claimed that he learned languages because he loved to talk to people.
When I tried to suggest that many people in the world spoke English, he rejected such an
opinion: “No, in Poland they don’t speak English, in Russia I know they don’t. Some
people do, you do, but in general, nobody who was in my class... there was one girl...
and there were one or two who knew a little bit”... Jacob then continued to clarify that
even if people spoke English, “there are words that don’t even have English equivalents.
The way they think about something, you can’t really understand...”

Because in my conversation with Michael Russian language learning figured as
an important building block of his understanding of Self as a citizen, I started probing for
similar connections while talking to Jacob. Indeed, I was able to identify very similar
discourses in our conversation. Jacob talked about Poles and Russians having different
perceptions of him and of each other due to the nationality alone:

Jacob: It really makes me sad, what the state of affair in the world is... people

don’t understand, that when you have a government like I have a government

right now, that I don’t approve of... people don’t see that it’s the government,
they don’t separate the government from the people, you know. It’s like, the

Polish people, they don’t think that Stalin... they don’t think about everything

that Stalin did to Russians, they don’t see that Stalin did that to them, they see that

Russia, Russians did it to them.

Then Jacob continued talking about a stereotypical image of Americans that he

could easily identify in Europe:

113

Jacob: Stereotypical idea of an American for Europeans, for Russians, what is it,
it is that we are stupid, that we are, for the most part, I mean, that we are ignorant
of other cultures... because one of the problems 1 think is the American TV, and
the second is that a lot of people that are traveling around, they are like rich little
eighteen-year-old, nineteen-year-old kids that grew up and don’t know anything
about life, that always have been very wealthy and catered to their whole life, and
they are spoiled, and because of this they have no manners and they think that if
they go over there, they don’t speak any other languages, and they don’t want to
hang out with the people, and they don’t always behave very well, and they are
not just aware of anything in the world.

Even though Jacob had a big problem with the existing stereotype, he seemed to
have little problem with identifying himself as an American:

Natalia: See, you are clearly against it, but you still say “we.”

Jacob: Ha? Because, you know, they are representing me. I feel like I can’t be

disconnected from it. We are Americans, I am an American, just like the people

in my class. We, us in our class... I don’t know, I am part of them, whether I like
it or not. I don’t like it, but I can’t do anything about it.

Jacob seemed to see no escape from sharing group identities, except for nostalgia
for the times when Kennedy had power and one could be proud to be an American. I felt
that Jacob saw the category of nationality as a rather stable one. National identity for him
was something you were born with, regardless of how much you agreed with its image.
When he talked about his friends from Poland, he separated them into Polish and Russian

groups, even though a lot of the people that he talked about seemed to have quite a bit of

114

diversity in their heritage and political inclinations. Jacob seemed to associate national
views with the historical attitudes which were “in your blood,” the history which was
passed from generation to generation. He did not seem to think that him knowing foreign
languages and spending time with people who speak it could change the matters in their
essence: “you go some place and you feel like... like people don’t like you... regardless
of understanding who you are as a person... it really does not change much in the end.”
He did not seem to think that national prejudices could be broken with a civil action:
“what can you do, you are helpless.” When I tried suggesting that Jacob’s desire to speak
to people in their own language and not being satisfied with English alone spoke of his
high citizen qualities, Jacob said that those were too broad terms for framing his interest
in Russian, Polish and Spanish:

Natalia: You know, what I am trying to get out of this study, I think that even you

studying the language is a very significant action in trying to find a solution [to

people stereotyping each other based on history and government alone]...

because you already know Polish, and you are trying to learn Russian, and

Spanish... would you agree?

Jacob: Yeah... No, I am just doing it for myself, I mean... I don’t know, I’ve

never thought about it in such broad terms, I don’t think I am doing anything

heroic, I am just trying to talk to people, man, I just enjoy talking to people, I like

being out, different places with different people.

Jacob did not respond to my probing regarding learning a foreign language as a
way of achieving a multicultural, anti-monolingual identity. It is interesting that Jacob’s

microdialog seemed to involve issues of American monolingualism and monoculturalism,

115

which were similar to the ones that Michael talked about. But in the case of Jacob these
issues were differently incorporated into his understanding of Self. Jacob persistently
described his knowledge of the languages as simply the means of talking to people who
interested him, and he consistently identified this interest as purely personal. He resisted
my attempts to raise it to a citizen level, describing himself as an individualist, “a cat
[that] go[es] on his own trail.” Instead of following with my thread of having a
multicultural identity and its importance for an American citizen, which I was all fired up
about after the conversations with Michael, Jacob continued talking about how
communicating with people in different languages was fun and interesting. He did say
that he was interested only in certain countries, such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan,
Armenia, but did not provide any political reasons for it:

Natalia: So why, why all these places are interesting to you?

Jacob: I don’t know...

Natalia: They are interesting to me because I grew up in the Soviet Union and

very much attribute myself with it, but I am very interested why the former

republics are so interesting to you? To an American?

Jacob: I don’t know... I just met these people [in Poland]... I don’t know, I just

get these ideas about some places where I’ve never been before. For example,

you know what’s a really fascinating place to me? Armenia.

Natalia: Why?

Jacob: Because... There are a few things about it, um. .. first of all, everybody I

have ever met from Armenia is absolutely fascinating, everybody. And second...

have you ever heard of a System of a Down? A group?

116

Jacob continued to tell me that System of a Down was one of his favorite music
groups and followed up with their history and the meaning of their lyrics. But he was
not, as Michael, associating former republics of Soviet Union with political need and
importance. He just liked the people, but he did not like all the people. For example, he
told me about his attempt to learn German. He studied it very hard for a year and then
spent three months in Germany, all to find out that Germans were “not his kind of
people.” In our other conversations, he spoke very highly of Germans, and especially
about their various technical achievements, but still expressed little interest in
communicating with them directly. On the other hand, Serbs in his opinion were
“fascinating” people, and it was their language that Jacob wanted to learn next.

Jacob seemed to be fascinated with things that were superior, from leading
educational institutions to cutting edge inventions and animals with the most advanced
intellect. Knowing certain foreign language in perfection seemed to be in line with those
aspirations. He once again rejected my suggested thread of “multicultural identity” when
I proposed that one cannot be equally fluent in two languages:

Natalia: So what does it mean for you to get it [a foreign language] down?

Jacob: When I can speak it how I can speak English.

Natalia: There is this idea that you are never completely equal in two languages.

Jacob: It isn’t true. I’ve known people who have done it. Absolutely. Like this

girl. She was only seventeen, she’s never been to an English-speaking country. It

was absolutely unbelievable, she was perfect! And I know another girl, from

Krakov — she was the same. Absolutely, absolutely perfect! She spoke English

better than me really, because she knew more vocabulary, more than in general

117

people know. Only English scholars, she was perfect. And she wasn’t hyper

perfect, she was just... it wasn’t Queen’s English, you know.

Natalia: I know exactly what you mean. I recognize it. But I didn’t mean equal

in that sense.

Jacob: You mean you always think in your own language?

Natalia: For example, I am not completely equal in two languages. I am writing

my dissertation in English, so I know more academic terms in English, I learned

them in English, I do not have enough time to think about translation. . . So my

English may be stronger in academic area, and Russian is stronger in the areas

that are not explored here, so this is the idea...

Jacob: Yeah. Well, I don’t know. The ultimate goal is perfection. The idea is to

be able to speak. . . I can’t express myself in any way in Russian at this moment.

It seemed to me from my conversations with Jacob that knowing foreign
languages, just as in case of Michael, was an important construct of his understanding of
self which incorporated societal discourses similar to the ones that I identified while
talking to Michael. However, while Michael seemed to talk about himself as a Russian
speaker more in terms of a worldly citizen, Jacob limited his knowledge of Russian and
other languages as serving his strictly personal interests and aspirations of perfection. At
a citizen level, he seemed to desire to shape himself into a profession, which would be
“serious” and might incorporate his foreign language knowledge, but not for the goals of
communicating with people and ruining cultural borders. He envisioned the technical,

military, or business projects where his knowledge of languages could be simply utilized.

118

As the reader may remember, solely professional orientation as a goal of learning
Russian was a quality that Michael identified in many of his classroom. For Michael, it
was important to “other” himself from people with such goal. Michael knew Jacob better
than many other of his classmates, they often talked in class, and sometimes even outside
of the class. Michael thought that Jacob was a serious language learner, which is why
Jacob’s career goals did not serve as a separating ground (or, if they did, it happened on a
different level). Jacob, in his turn, also “othered” himself in a classroom, and I think it is
interesting to see how his understanding of Self and others was at the same time similar
and different when compared to Michael’s.

“I just don’t know those people. Some of them are so... they are just so different.
That class just itself is different. I mean, the people are different... than in most other
classes,” Jacob told me in one of our conversations. Just like Michael, he talked about
his frustration with people who were not serious about learning a language, who took it
for a two-year requirement. Jacob articulated this issue very passionately, and we came
back to it several times:

Jacob: I was telling one of the students... there were a couple of people and we

were outside one day... and they were talking about all the problems that they

were having with one verb, and I said, why don’t you just look at it, figure it out,
and just say it, very slowly, over a few times, until you can say with some

fluency. May be it would take you 20 minutes, may be it would take longer, I

don’t know, but wouldn’t take all day, and wouldn’t have this problem any more.

And he says: well, I am graduating in five weeks, so I am not going do anything

more than I have to here. And it was like, isn’t that exactly the problem? All this

119

time he is not putting any effort into it because it’s important enough to do for
him, it’s like, why are you here? I feel like I haven’t really learned, hardly
anything. I do when I am forced to do, you know? And I am not forced to do
anything in here. In class I don’t have to do anything, because people are
fumbling around on these verbs that they had at the beginning of last year and
they still don’t know. It’s irritating to me. It’s irritating because it is not
necessary. If they just couldn’t do it, but there is no reason for this. I don’t
understand the whole process. It’s just frustrating. I don’t even know how
someone can go to a university like this. What do they do? What will they do
when they get out into the world? I mean, what kind of a professional person they
are going to be? If they go into everything with the same attitude, that this is just
a requirement, 1 am trying to get a paper... they become a substandard employee
at some place, and look at them, and they see where they come from, and they
came from [our school]. But I can’t wait to get to at least the next level,
because it seems like it’s at least going to be people who are not taking it for just a
requirement. 1 know that the university requirement is only two years for
Bachelor’s of Arts, which means through 202. So after this, it seems like next
year it’s going to be more challenging now, because people only are going to take
it if they want to take it.
Whereas Michael seemed to associate the two-year requirement with career goals
and saw these goals as limiting to how hard people worked in class, Jacob did not mind
other people learning Russian as a part of their future profession. His big concem

seemed to be that these people would not become good professionals with the attitude

120

that they had toward learning. Jacob thought that there were may be five people at the
most in his classroom who were serious about learning Russian. It is interesting that
among these people he named Michael and two heritage learners. As a matter of fact, he
called Michael “serious,” whereas heritage speakers were named “good.”

Jacob often did not know the names of people in his class when I was trying to
bring up examples. He said that somehow he simply did not have to know other people’s
names in many of his classes in America, whereas in Poland he somehow right away
knew everyone’s name and had some kind of relationship with everyone. This social
practice of getting or not getting to know classmates, that was co-constructed in our
conversation, blended with a practice of taking a foreign language in order to satisfy a
university requirement and allowed Jacob’s individual appropriation of the societal
practice of “othering,” or stereotyping people. I interpreted it this way because the
category of the “two-year requirement people” seemed to be constructed by Jacob
through overgeneralization (which is key to stereotyping) of his experiences in the
classroom with people “fumbling around” and outside of the classroom when his
classmate refused to do extra work close to the graduation. Othering seemed to be more
related to how Jacob positioned himself, rather than to how he really built or did not build
relationships with others. Othering was impersonal; it came into conversations when
Jacob talked about his own learning experiences, not when we talked about certain
individuals.

In my conversation with Michael we concluded that the slow and overly nurturing
environment of his Russian class was connected to the fact that enrollment was low and

that our university was not the school where most of the people would go if they really

121

wanted to learn Russian. In my conversation with Jacob, he often compared his Russian
class to his Spanish class, where the demands were a lot higher and where he felt that he
was actually learning the language. He often mentioned that his Spanish professor did
not give anyone a break, and if someone could not keep up, they dropped out. To me,
this seemed to be consistent with the assertion that how Russian was taught and learned
in the classroom was to a large extent influenced by social factors of popularity of the
Russian language and the reputation of our university as a place to learn it. Spanish
enrollments were always high and the teachers did not have to fight for their students.
However, Jacob explained it from a different angle. He talked about “a bad system that
we have around here,” a system where teachers are evaluated by students at the end of the
semester and the evaluations are crucial to their careers. Jacob liked his experiences in
Poland, where teachers had no problem pushing students very hard and reprimanding
them for not studying hard enough.

I felt that Jacob, in the process of shaping who he was, was separating himself
from a number of American practices, such as the two-year requirement for a foreign
language, not knowing other people’s names, and student evaluations. I also felt that this
separation and the resulting understanding of Self was deeply imbedded in a dialogue
with a variety of social sources, from his intercultural experiences in Europe to social
practice of “othering.” It was fascinating for me to see how much dialogue was involved
in Jacob’s understanding of Self as related to the rest of his classmates and learning
Russian. On one hand, he was frustrated with people who were taking Russian for a
requirement, who for that reason were not going to become good professionals, who were

not ashamed to graduate with a bad preparation from his university. On the other band,

122

Jacob was rather unsure what his professional plans were and whether or not he
considered his university a good school. He often mentioned that he was taking Russian
just for himself, and he often talked about his attempts to get into better schools. Jacob
did not follow up with the third year Russian, probably taking on one of his ideas, that he
inconsistently called crazy or challenging and serious. As I hope I was able to show,
Jacob’s understanding of Self was very much socially embedded, but at the same time

very much individually woven in a constantly evolving process.

Sophia

Just as in the case of my inquiry into the learning practice that embedded the
study of Russian, Sophia did not offer me as much material for conceptualization of
identity work as Michael and Jacob did. I read through the interview transcriptions
several times before I could identify themes that would relate to the student and citizen
identities. Just like Michael and Jacob, Sophia seemed to be critical of the stereotypical
images of Americans, which she identified mainly as spoiled by having too good of a life.
In one situation we were talking about a Russian professor Komilov who taught Sophia
during her first year. She described him as “the cutest sweetest old man who scared her
more than anybody else in the world.” Sophia explained her and other students’ fear of
Komilov by not being used to personal criticism that the teacher used in abundance as an
effective teaching technique: “I think that a lot of American students are really just
expected to be cuddled through the learning process in a lot of ways, and... they don’t,
like, get any true criticism of themselves, or there is an expectation that they do

something better than they do it the first time.” In another situation, partly in response to

123

my reactions, Sophia constructed the image of Americans who unlike Russians took

things for granted because they did not have to work hard for them:
Sophia: You know, it’s funny, someone I know would always comment on my
interest in Russia, and he would be like, you know, mother Russia is in a lot of
trouble now, and so he would always pick on me, but his biggest joke about
Russia was the toilet paper lines, ha-ha. ..
Natalia: When was that?
Sophia: That was... I would probably say it was around 1987 to 89, that’s when
you would see those pictures in the news, and the lines standing for toilet paper,
that was kind of what you heard a lot, you stand in line for toilet paper, it was a
big joke, ha-ha. It’s horrible.
Natalia: You know what, we did, that was the most horrible thing, probably. But
no one thought it was the end of the world. I remember being in school, and there
was a girl and during the breaks she would check in three lines, and come back.
Sophia: (Nods very supportively when I try to emphasize that it wasn’t the end of
the world.) Yeah, and if you go to Meijer’s and they don’t have something in
stock, like your favorite brand of cereal, people freak out, and I think there is
something to be said to having to stand in line to get something you need, or want,
that would make you appreciate it more, I think. When you have to work for it.
Because a lot of people, especially students here, have never had to work for
anything. So it was just a joke.
In the data that I obtained 1 could not find any explicit evidence of how Sophia

identified herself with these images. However, I could definitely see that this

124

identification was rather complex and dialogic. She described herself as a hard-working
single mom striving to get an education and provide for her son at the same time. She
definitely sounded critical when producing the narratives that I cited above. But at the
same time, I did not see any harsh borders that would separate Sophia from the rest of the
Americans or her classmates.

As the reader could see, both Michael and Jacob separated themselves from the
impersonal others in the classroom, generalizing them as people who’s interest and
engagement in Russian was very different from their own. Sophia’s construction of her
Russian class population was drastically different:

Sophia: This group of people in Russian class... I thought, oh my, if I add their

le together, they are probably the smartest group of people I’ve been in, ha-ha. ..

But I really am impressed with the whole group; I am just amazed that anybody

can learn the language at all... I really am, totally amazed. Because I feel like if I

need 12 hours to get ready to take test... it says something, because I never had to

study much in my whole life. If they are able to do it when they study for two
hours and still do better than me, it’s like, wow! It’s the first situation where I felt
like... it was humbling, because I’ve always really felt like I can do anything and
succeed in it without putting in a lot of work, and this was when I felt that... I can
do it, but it’s not going to be my intellect, but my work, that gets me there. If
nothing else, it taught me to be able to work hard... and do something that’s not
easy, and that’s, ha—ha, that’s a tough lesson to learn...

Sophia sounded proud to identify herself with the highly intellectual students of

Russian, it seemed to be an important construct of her understanding of Self. She talked

125

very positively about most people in the classroom, unless she identified them as cliques
that were too good to speak to her. Sophia told me many stories of running into people
from her class in the parking lots, food court, and other places, and having long
conversations based on only one thing in common: studying Russian. For example, this
is how she described her relationship with Ellen:

Sophia: I wouldn’t say I am friends with her, I ran into her over the summer on

campus, and I asked her if she wanted to get together to study, and we ended up

having a long conversation, but... our worlds are two different places that do not
intersect, you know, ha-ha. .. but I like her, she is sweet, we have zero in common
beyond Russian, ha-ha. ..

In her Russian class Sophia was also able to find a couple of true friends who, as I
understood it from our conversations, were very important to her as they made her a
better person:

Sophia: The only two people who I think I am friends with in this class are
Larissa and Sasha... with the rest of them we are more like... you know, when the
class ends the friendship is going to end... Like Nadia. Nadia and I have another
class together, so we’ve spent more time together than I have basically have with
anybody else in this class, but... we like each other, but we kind of... keep our
distance, ha-ha. I am not sure exactly why... it’s just not a friendship material,
you know... Larissa and I are going to have a garden together. It’s called a
community garden project, and you can... they’ll give you a garden plot and
they’ll give you the seeds and tools, it’s so cool! Cause my yard is full of trees,

there is no gardening to do there, and um. .. She’s actually a vegan. She doesn’t

126

eat meat, eggs, or dairy. She’s going to starve to death, ha—ha. She’s lost 15
pounds since I met her... And I can relate, because I don’t eat meat myself, but it
really bothers me with her... if you ever noticed, I bring her protein bars to class,
because I am scared that she’s going to die, ha-ha. I want to learn how to garden
and I invited her to do it with me because she needs to eat food, ha—ha.

Sophia often talked about Larissa and Sasha as her best friends. When I was
visiting the Russian classroom during the first semester of the third year (that Sophia was
not able to take due to monetary issues), I saw her stop by to meet up with Larissa and
Sasha. This friendship lasted beyond taking a class together. Sophia spoke very highly
about Sasha and Larissa’s intellect and knowledge, which sounded as a comparison to her
descriptions of other, old friends, who did not have any educated interests and were not
going to take her anywhere she wants to be. This separation from old friends and
interests seemed similar to the identity work that Michael engaged in othering himself
from his generation, however, as I hope I was able to show, Sophia judgments about
people sounded a lot more personal and particular.

Thus, Sophia’s dialogue of figuring her Self into the group of the Russian students
was dramatically different from both Michael’s and Jacob’s. I believe that this data
shows well that understanding a Self in relation to others and academic knowledge is
unique and dialogic, and that both the categories of the others and the academic subject
and the practices of identifying with them are being constantly constructed in a dialogue.
Sophia’s practice of identifying with the academic subject of Russian and her
conceptualization of the two-year requirements again provided me with a whole new

perspective on learning Russian in a large university.

127

As the reader may remember, Sophia described Russian as the most challenging
subject that she encountered in her life. I could see how both Michael and Jacob could
have easily classified her as one of the students who was slowing down the class (even
though they did not do it and I may be wrong). They attributed weak participation of
students like Sophia to their lack of effort. Sophia proved otherwise. She explained how
much work she had to do in order to get a good grade in Russian, and how difficult it was
for her to speak it regardless of all the effort. Whereas Michael and Jacob both described
a two-year requirement of the foreign language as the reason for having a lot of
unmotivated students in class, Sophia saw it as an obstacle to learning Russian enough to
be able to use it for her future profession:

Natalia: That [two-year requirement] does not make any sense, because just like

Rimma was saying, take two years, third year you can really do something, and...

Sophia: Exactly, exactly! And it feels like... [understand the point of having a

requirement, but if you study history, you need to be able to read historical

documents, and... But if they are not going to make you take it long enough, you
can’t read them... it is kind of pointless. Because I don’t have any elective
credits left, so I talked to James [the other Russian teacher] and asked him if there
would be any way I could alter the requirements of that class to make it a history

class by doing a research paper or something like that. Because the class is I

guess one-third historical documents, and I am a history major, so that would

really be a useful skill, and... I talked to my advisor, and she was really pretty...
not impressed with the idea, and, yeah, she was... not very understanding, her

attitude was: “it sounds like a cool class, so you should just take it anyways.”

128

And I am like, well, I’d really like to take it, I am just trying to brainstorm and see
if there is anyway that I can possibly do it and get credit for it, and what she said
was, I think: “you need to bite the bullet, pay the money and take the class.” And

I was like... pay the money... my kid’s daycare costs as much as my tuition, ha-

ha, so, shut up, lady, ha-ha. ..

As we can see from this excerpt, learning a foreign language was very meaningful
for Sophia, it was much more than simply satisfying a university requirement. Because
the requirement was only for two years and Sophia was not able to afford taking Russian
on the top of all the credits that she had to complete, she did not enroll in the third year of
Russian. Separating from the Russian language was rather emotional for her; once 1 even
saw her crying in class when Rimma was describing the third year with the purpose of
convincing students to enroll in it. I felt that Sophia started a hard journey of
conceptualizing the knowledge that was never learned well enough to transfer into the
real life as “an accomplishment of itself,” which you are proud of, but cannot use for the
purpose that you were studying it:

Sophia: I’ve spent way too much time crying over Russian, ha-ha. .. (Sophia gets

serious after a burst of laugh.) But... may be I don’t know... I might just take it

[next, third year]... I really want to. Just because I feel like... I really worked

hard at it, you know, and... It would... I am kind of sad to see that... Because I

feel like... I can’t speak Russian, and... taking two years is an accomplishment by

itself, but... there is not really any room ...... Even if I do stop, I am really
proud that I’ve made it though, because it’s not real easy, ha-ha, it really have not

been. . .

129

The idea of conceptualizing a certain area of knowledge as a personal
accomplishment rather than an existing skill was something I have thought about for
quite a while. In one of our conversations Sophia said: “I have two years of French, but I
can’t really speak it fluently.” It is interesting that very often pe0ple say: “I have” in the
present tense. It seems to me that having two years of French, art, or swimming can
become an important part of their Selves, but does not exist as a skill in present tense.
Sophia’s notion of taking French reminded me of many other stories, two of which I
would like to discuss here.

My husband and I once visited the friends of ours, Earl and Dina. Everything
looked picture-perfect in their house with two boys, ages 2 and 11, who were running
around the house like crazy. While watching the energetic play of the boys, I was telling
Dina about my experiences with the study abroad programs, and about my students trying
to learn Russian. Dina joined into a conversation by saying proudly: “I used to be fluent
in French, but of course now I lost it all.” With these words she looked explanatorily at
her two sons who at the time were trying to fit together under a small coffee table. Dina
further proved that she could barely say a sentence in French, but her former knowledge
of it seemed to be a significant construct of her identity. Knowledge of French did not
exist any more, but her Self, as a French speaker, very well existed. It was something she
was proud of, something that helped her to identify with me, “an educated foreign
language person.”

An important point in analyzing identity issues in my work is looking at assigning
a value to knowing a foreign language, and thus perceiving oneself as a more valuable

educated person, or, what is culturally constructed and valued in the immediate situation

130

as an educated person. I doubt that Dina’s statement about her knowledge of French
would be highly regarded in a conversation with other mothers of young children, who,
as culturally constructed, assign more value to child-caring skills and routines.

Certain skills or experiences, valued as identity constructs, can be very abstract
when compared to real life accomplishments. I first thought about it when a student of
mine was interviewing me about my music education and the role of music in my life. I
said that I do not have any skills left to show, but I am definitely glad that I received this
education. I said that I didn’t attend classical music concerts nor dealt with music in
everyday life any differently due to this education, but I would definitely push my
children to learn how to play a musical instrument. After the interview, I thought: “What
kind of value does musical education have to me?” The only thing I can do is say that I
have it. I can talk about music education, what the classes were like, etc. I can relate to
other people talking about it. And I do feel more accomplished because of it. “A former
musician” is an important part of how I identify myself, especially in the immediate
situation of talking to musically inclined people.

Following this line of thought I conceptualized Sophia’s knowledge of Russian as
an important identity construct, a big part of how she figured her Self in a complex
dialogue situated within multiple societal discourses of what it means to be an educated
person, an accomplished professional, and an American citizen, a single mother, a good
daughter, and a friend. The discourses were fluid and depended on an immediate
situation in which Sophia co-constructed them with the people she was responding to, in
my research study, it was in response to me as a native speaker, a foreign language

teacher, and a Ph. D student in education.

131

CHAPTER EIGHT:

DIALOGUE AND MONOLOGUE IN CULTURES

Whereas the preceding three chapters presented my main findings answering the
research questions, there was another finding, or, to be more exact, a theoretical
consideration. Because this finding was very important to me as an author, I would like
to emphasize it by dedicating a separate short chapter to it. The reader may even
consider this chapter an “overflow” of the previous ones. In the process of conducting
this study I was able to observe and hopefully communicate in my writing the complex
relationship between the dialogic nature of human interaction and the monologic forms
that it often adopts. I understand the nature of human interaction as dialogic and its
forms as monologic following Bakhtin’s conceptualization of the human thoughts, or
ideas:

The idea begins to live, that is, to take shape, to develop, to find and renew
its verbal expression, to give birth to new ideas, only when it enters into genuine
dialogic relationships with other ideas, with the ideas of others. Human thought
becomes genuine thought, that is, an idea, only under conditions of living contact
with another and alien thought, a thought embodied in someone else’s voice, that
is, in someone else’s consciousness expressed in discourse. At that point of
contact between voice-consciousness the idea is born and lives.

The idea is not a subjective individual-psychological formation, with
“permanent resident rights” in a person’s head; no, the idea is inter—individual and

inter-subjective — the realm of its existence is not individual consciousness but

132

dialogic communion between consciousnesses. The idea is a live event, played
out at the point of dialogic meeting between two or several consciousnesses. In
this sense the idea is similar to the word, with which it is dialogically united. Like
the word, the idea wants to be heard, understood, and “answered” by other voices
from other positions. Like the word, the idea is by nature dialogic, and
monologue is merely the conventional compositional form of its expression, a
form that emerged out of the monologism of modern times... (Bakhtin, 1984, p.
88)
Inspired by the works of Bakhtin, I tried to understand my participants’ thoughts
about learning Russian as ideas that come to live in a dialogue with societal discourses. I
wanted to describe not the true coherent meanings of those ideas, but only the moments
of their construction in contact with the other (most typically myself, the teacher, or other
students); and the dialogic nature of their construction. Seeing the forms of human
interactions as traditionally monologic helped me understand the complexity of my
participants’ ideas. The two main monologic forms that I grasped in my dissertation
were the interaction sequence of most classroom communication (i.e., IRE sequences)
and the construction of cultural narratives in classroom conversations and my interviews
with key participants dealing with the topic of culture. In Bakhtinian tradition both of
these forms can be described as genres of human communication (Morris, 2002, p. 81).
My goal was to show the reader that the monologic (closed and rigid) rules of the genres
of classroom communication and producing cultural narratives did not define or disclose
the true meanings of learning Russian. These genres could be understood as the contexts

of the social actions that the students were carrying out, such as practicing language or

133

having a conversation about Russian culture. The true meanings of learning Russian
were constantly being constructed by my participants through dialogic participation in
multiple individually interpreted societal discourses.

One key feature of the monologic tradition that I was able to identify was making
sense of the foreign culture through familiar cultural forms. This is the finding that [
would like to emphasize in this chapter. Let me illustrate this idea with a small personal
vignette. Last summer I went to the zoo with a small family party. We were standing by
the monkey’s cage when I overheard the following conversation:

Little girl: Mama, look at the monkeys! These two are a husband and wife, they

are kissing, and that one for some reason just sits in the comer.

Mother: It must be mad or something... But these two are so cute! Look at how

they pat each other on their heads!

Little girl laughs.

Doesn’t this sound familiar? How often do we try to explain animals’ behavior
by associating it with familiar human cultural forms? Is patting on each other heads
considered to be “cute” in the monkey culture? Were the monkeys really kissing? Does
this behavior have anything to do with being a couple? What does being a couple mean
in the monkeys’ world? Was that other monkey really “mad”? I was going through all
these questions and realizing that my answer to all of them was “I have no idea.” But the
conversation between the mother and the daughter seemed to be so natural. Their
judgments were not much different from the judgments that I could make myself

watching “Animal planet” with my husband.

134

Very often when people deal with foreign cultures, they seem to make sense of
them through available familiar cultural forms. As you can see from my vignette, we can
be socialized into these types of judgments, representing a monologic cultural form of
interaction, beginning in childhood. This cultural form of making sense of foreign
cultures is monologic in its form because, when engaging into it, people do not inquire
about unfamiliar phenomena. Instead, they explain these phenomena through
associations from their own world.

Returning to my data, I now want to show the reader how students in my
classroom tried to make sense of Russian culture relying on familiar to them cultural
forms in the context of cultural discussions. I have very few cultural discussions in my
fieldnotes. Most of the data shows that students were mostly interested in learning
grammar and pronunciation aspects of Russian language and drove the teacher’s agenda
into this direction. Cultural discussions like the one described below provided me with a
lot of insight into the issue of how Russian culture could be co-constructed by the teacher
and the students within the context of an American classroom.

I believe that the teacher’s goal for cultural discussions was to develop a better
understanding of the ways Russians did things. In the interview, I asked for her opinion
on whether the students understood Russian culture. “It’s hard to say, but I think that
they understand... 1 think that they understand, but I don’t know to what extent it seems
weird to them,” replied Rimma. From this answer and my other encounters with the
teacher, I interpreted her understanding of culture as mostly the norms of behavior.

Continuing her answer, she provided me with an example of how it took her several

[35

explanations to make sure that the students understood why the Russian way of greeting
each other was different from its American equivalents:
Rimma: When the first shock is over and when you start to explain things... but
one time is not enough, you need to always talk about... some kind of... obvious
things... For example, I always tell them, and they know, that Russians never ask

’9 66

a question “how are you?” and reply “great, no problem.” Not because we are
not friendly, but because it’s a different culture, because when someone asks [how
are you doing they want to know what really is good and bad in your life]... But
you always have to remind them about that, this [the greeting] connects to
something else [in culture], everything’s so interrelated...

It seemed like Rimma believed that students could obtain cultural knowledge
through her explanations, especially if they were systematic and frequent — just as in case
of any other knowledge. At the same time students’ understandings of cultural
knowledge came out a rather complex phenomenon in her discourse. She noticed that
even if students understood “Russian culture” it still could seem weird to them. Rimma’s
definition of “weir ” seemed to have different dimensions: “In the beginning they were
giggling, but then, I think, they understood it.” Thus, “giggling in the beginning” was
one type of weird; understanding in the end, but perhaps not agreeing -- was another.

Most of the cultural discussions in Rimma’s classroom centered on watching the
movie “Adam’s Rib.” As I explained earlier, regardless of Rimma’s efforts, her students

did not seem to think about interpreting the movie as a realia of Russian culture, as we

can observe in the following episode:

136

Rimma starts the movie. It the last part of Adam’s Rib. Students seem to be
engaged in the movie. I hear a lot of laughter. While the students are watching
the movie, Rimma, as always, is writing selected words from the movie on
blackboard. After the movie ends, Rimma asks the students what they think about
the ending.

Alina: I think it ’s an optimistic ending. It’s a miracle.

Frol: l was surprised.

Igor: It means women will survive by themselves.

Lyuda: It’s a nice frame to the movie.

Rimma: Life goes on, river...

Dima: I didn’t like it, it didn’t fit with the rest of the movie. It was good until
then.

Rimma says a few words about the director of the movie. She says that she
agrees that the ending does not fit with the rest of the movie, but her question is
why did they make an ending like this?

Jacob: The bell thing fell...

Rimma: But why?

Jacob: No, Imeant...

Rimma, interrupting: Yes, but why?

Vlad: I didn’t think it was optimistic at all. They, especially Nastya, did not look
happy.

Rimma: Right, Nastya says: It can’t go on forever. F orevemess, eternity...

(points at the board where she wrote that phrase).

137

Jacob: Maybe they thought that they were deceived [by grandma] this whole time
taking care of her [inferring that grandma was pretending to be sick the whole
time].

Lyuda: Maybe they were shocked that the bell hit her so hard.

Sveta [heritage speaker]: I don’t think that their shock means that they are not
happy-

Ellen: I think that she [grandma] ruled their lives, they were hoping that it would
end, and then she resurrects. “I am back!” [imitating grandma, sarcastically]. I
don’t think they are happy at all.

Sasha: Don’t they have nursing homes in Russia?

Rimma: It’s not in the culture at all to give old people away.

The discussion about nice and not so nice nursing homes continues for about two
minutes. Then Rimma asks other people what they think about the movie.
Audrey and Konstantin answer “I don’t know.”

Rimma: These are not allowed: “I can’t,” “I don’t know.”

Konstantin: Was it necessarily a miracle? May be she wasn’t that bad [meaning
that grandma wasn’t in a condition bad enough for her getting up to be considered
a miracle].

Alina: Maybe she got a reason to get up when she lost the bell.

Ellen and Sasha, almost together: She was surprised when her hand moved, she
was paralyzed! [insisting that grandma really was that bad and the fact that she

got up was truly a miracle].

138

Inna: In American movies everything becomes clear at the end, here we don’t get
any answers...

Rimma: Right, what do you think is going to happen to the characters? (At this
point Rimma clarifies that students can use whatever language they are
comfortable, even thought the students were mostly using English already.)

Igor: Mishka is going down quickly. He is not a good decision maker.

Rimma says that this could be a part of a Russian character in general and
reminds the class about Dostoyevsky’s novel “Brothers Karamazovi.” She talks
about people who make the scenes. The discussion does not pick up from there
and Rimma asks about Evgeny, another character in the movie.

Sasha: I liked him.

Andrey: 1 terms of maturity, I think he is the only one over 20 in this movie. The
whole thing reminded me of a fourth grade cafeteria.

Sophia, interrupting Andrey: He doesn’t have an emotional part in it!

Rimma: What else do you think?

Sophia: I think he is creepy!

Rimma: I think he is “what you see is what you get” kind of guy. What is another
way to say it?

Igor: He wears his heart on his sleeve.

Sophia: This is a cultural difference. If someone showed up like this at my door
with flowers, that’d be a red flag to keep him away, but obviously, this is accepted

in Russia.

139

Rimma wraps the discussion by suggesting that everyone can keep thinking about

cultural differences, the significance of the ending, and the goals of the director.

When Rimma attempted to bring in Russian symbolism with the metaphor of the
river and explanation of the “Russian character” with the novel Brothers Karamazovi by
Dostoyevsky, the students did not pick up her thread of the conversation. The teacher’s
initiations in this classroom discussion were followed by an awkward silence or
responses not related to what she was trying to accomplish. One student talked about the
movie as a piece of art (with a nice frame), a few stated how much they did or didn’t like
it, and some assigned a symbolic meaning to it (e.g., women will survive by themselves).
Students did not built on each other, relying on familiar cultural forms, or genres, of
watching a movie. Within the genre of classroom communication, understanding
Russian cultural realia through the movie was not their goal. Their goal was to answer
the teacher’s questions. In her turn, Rimma did not built on her students’ comments,
because they didn’t go along with her agenda of providing Russian contexts of
understanding the movie.

Not building on each other, the students and the teacher seemed to act within the
contexts of at least three different genres: explaining Russian cultural realia presented in
the movie, American cultural forms of watching and interpreting movies in general, and
interactional sequence of classroom communication. Rimma was trying to engage her
students into a conversation with the goal of trying to understand Russian cultural forms
that they encountered in the movie. Students offered interpretations that built on their
practices of watching the movies in general, which included, but were not limited to,

expectations of the plot, discussion of the characters, and expressing like-dislike types of

140

opinions. There was no dialogue in this discussion: the teacher and the students did not
build on each other, they did not inquire about each other’s knowledge, they each
followed their own agenda. What was important, there was a very specific context for
this discussion — a classroom activity. This context contributed, and perhaps even
defined, the rules and the nature of this exchange. The teacher was trying to engage
student in a discussion about cultures. But culture in the classroom, as a social
phenomenon co-constructed by the teacher and the students, acting within familiar genres
of classroom communication, became a subject, a material that needs to be taught,
learned, and evaluated. The genre of classroom communication, where the teacher asked
questions and students provided answers that were evaluated, seemed to be in conflict
with the goal of having a cultural discussion where people play with meanings and build
on each other opinions in a dialogue.

Whereas the compositional form (or genre) of classroom communication came
out as monologic, when I turned to the interviews, my participants demonstrated unique
dialogic constructions of the ideas about Russian culture. Sophia was contemplating in
our conversation what it meant that Mishka was not weird, but just Russian. Jacob
connected what happened in the classroom to his knowledge about the cultural practice of
“not giving old people away” in Russia — knowledge acquired through his experience of
living in Poland and having Russian friends. Neither Sophia’s contemplations, nor
Jacob’s knowledge were engaged into a dialogue in the classroom. In the context of the
monologic classroom discussion the students did not hear each other voices, instead, they
interpreted each other messages in the context of their beliefs about classmates. Sofia

interpreted Jacob’s words as “dumb boy things,” and grouped him with Andrey, even

141

though Jacob seemed to have no particular relationship with Andrey. Jacob interpreted
Sasha’s inquiry about nursing homes in Russia as evidence of “ugliness” in American
culture. Jacob did not remember who said those words in particular, so he assigned an
impersonal “they” to their author:
Jacob: I didn’t like everybody’s interpretation of the movie; I thought they were
all stupid. I thought everybody basically misunderstood everything. I think it
brought out a lot of ugliness in our whole culture. I mean their whole idea of
taking an old woman and taking her to some home... They thought that they
were upset and angry because the woman was standing and she was going to live
longer, and they were going to have a baby and kind of get rid of her, or
something like that. You could see how shocked they were... I think that they
thought that she was codependent, and they thought, why wouldn’t she get rid of
this woman, why wouldn’t she put it in a home, how can she be doing this, and I
think... that whole idea to me is just really, really disgusting. They didn’t say it,
but they started asking, “Isn’t there anything in Russia, like a nursing home?”
(Irnitating intonation that is very quiet, abstractly questioning, but at the same
time loaded.) And when she [Rimma] started to explain that they don’t do it
there, they started searching for it even further, “Isn’t there anything?” You
know, they were looking for it in some way, I mean, you can see that in their
minds, while watching the movie, they are searching for a way... I don’t know...
Natalia: I feel that what you are saying is that they are trying to translate it into

their reality, instead of trying to understand how things are in Russian reality...

142

Jacob: Exactly, exactly, that’s what they are doing. That’s exactly what they are
doing. Exactly. They translate into their way, and they don’t see it any other
way. None of them. With the exception of maybe Michael.

Jacob’s example showed how due to the absence of dialogic openness in the
classroom communication the students produced each other as culturally insensitive
Americans. They interpreted each other words as closed, finished, and monologic ideas —
ideas signifying whom the other was. As I mentioned in the beginning, monologic
tendencies of Western world come out of a long tradition of viewing society, culture, and
language as closed systems. Being a well-established citizen with firm beliefs and values
is a significant value in our culture. Last fall, when introducing sociocultural theory and
Vygotsky’s ideas in my educational psychology class, I asked my undergraduate students
whether they perceived themselves as individuals with a relatively stable set of beliefs
and values. Almost everyone said “yes.” I challenged their thinking just a little bit, but
got scared as we were going deeper into the issue. What alternative could I offer them?
Because, drawing from discourses of the system, this is exactly where they took me: to
looking for a coherent alternative. Neither Vygotsky, nor Bakhtin suggested an
alternative to imagining our society and us as coherent entities with stable sets of virtues.
Coherence does not survive in a dialogue. The great minds invited us to always think
about it.

Thus, the monologic forms of human discourses dealing with making sense of
other cultures come out of a dialogue with the societal traditions. It was the monologic
traditions of the society that the students responded to. They responded to it by

borrowing words and genres from it. But the relationship with the system remained

143

dialogic, which meant fluid, flexible, and individually authored. This is where the hope
comes from. As long as a closed system of an alternative is not what we are looking for.
In the course of this study I understood that a teacher could be a lot more effective
if s/he thinks about the students as social actors borrowing from established monologic
cultural forms of interaction, but the process of borrowing and the relationships with the
material taught in a class as dialogic. Classroom interaction, as any social interaction, is
constrained by its established genres and assumed social positions, in this case, identities
of the teacher and the students. The teacher is only one social source that the students
respond to, and, especially at the college level, often not the most powerful one. In
constructing their knowledge, no matter what it is, students participate in many societal

discourses, which they individually interpret and uniquely weave together.

144

CHAPTER NINE:

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

Summary of Findings

1 used a rhetorical question as the title of my dissertation: “Language socialization
in the absence of language and society?” and structured the dissertation around answering
a more specific research question: “What does it mean to learn Russian in a sociocultural
sense outside of Russia, in fact, in a classroom in a large public university in the
Midwest?” At the end of my journey I can answer these questions in the following way.
Learning Russian and about Russian culture in an American college classroom was
constrained by monologic cultural forms of genres of classroom communication and
conceptualizing ideas into coherent narratives. Acting within these genres, my
participants conceptualized learning Russian in the classroom as receiving a language
base, culture as an unnecessary sub-subject taught by the teacher, and classroom activities
as practicing linguistic knowledge instead of understanding cultural contexts. By
employing a theoretical lens based on Bakhtinian and Vygotskian theories I was able to
see beyond these monologic conceptualizations and discover the complexity of the
students’ learning practice as unique and individual in each case, unbelievably rich, but
very hard to grasp and coherently relate to actual events in the classroom, as it was
constantly evolving in a self-constructed dialogue with social sources defined by
intellectual, not physical proximity. [ was also able to gain insight into how learning
Russian was powerfully connected to the students’ understanding of Self as foreign

language learners and American citizens.

145

Theoretical and Pedagogical Implications
I see my theoretical intention being very close to the one Anne Dyson expressed
in her book about elementary school children who incorporated their media experience
into the development of their literacy practices:
Through analytical narratives of the literacy actions and reactions of Sammy,
Tina, and their peers, I situate child writing within the social and ideological
complexity of children’s lives and contemporary times. I hope to contribute to
and extend sociocultural visions, which portray learning to write as learning to
use medium to participate in cultural life in socially appropriate ways (e. g., Heath,
1983; M011 and Whitemore, 1993; Rogoff 1990). 1 illustrate that children’s ways
of writing are shaped, not only by their interaction in adult-governed worlds, but
also by their social goals and ideological positioning in peer- governed ones.
Moreover, social identification and social conflicts, not only social interactions,
make salient new kinds of writing choices, newly imagined ways of depicting
human relationships (Dyson, 1997, p. 6).
In my study I attempted to situate learning a foreign language within the social
and ideological complexity of the classroom of a large university in the Midwest (“not a
place to seriously study less common foreign languages”), student’s lives and
contemporary times. I worked towards this goal by co-constructing analytical narratives
of the social actions and reactions of Rimma, Michael, Jacob, Sophia, and Foma inside
and outside of their Russian language classroom. I hoped to contribute to and extend

sociocultural visions, which portray the goals of the foreign language learning as making

[46

it more cultural by providing authentic contexts (Kramsch, 2002; Beltz, 2002; Lantolf,
2002; Krashen, 2004). I tried to illustrate that students’ practices of learning a foreign
language are not shaped by their interactions in the classroom, rather, social genres of
classroom interaction can help teachers understand the nature of the social actions that
the students are carrying out in the classroom, and how these actions are connected to
their foreign language learning practices — practices that are much broader than the
classroom and involve a complex dialogue among students’ social goals, ideological
positioning, and social identification within the constantly evolving individual
interpretation of the societal discourses.

On a broader scale, I see the theoretical value of my work in joining the literature
discourse problematizing the notions of culture, cultural practice, and socialization.
Culture came out in my study as being constantly constructed through dialogic
participation in a cultural practice that is uniquely and fluidly interpreted by each
individual. This dialogic participation is what I understand as socialization. Thus,
language learning in a foreign language classroom can indeed be understood as
socialization, however, the term socialization than needs to be understood in a sense very
different to the one of “becoming a member of a particular society” (Goodnow, Miller, &
Kessel, 1995; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). Socialization becomes a phenomenon of
unique and individual interpretation of what students identify as a classroom learning
practice in the context of organizing their life experiences outside of the classroom.

Interwoven with these theoretical implications are the pedagogical ones. I believe
that an in-depth ethnographic account such as this study can provide insights for the

teachers who deal with the idea of culture in their classrooms everyday. Understanding

147

culture as a multidimensional phenomenon co-constructed in a dialogue, but a dialogue
that often follows the monologic genres of classroom interaction, may help teachers to
think of new ways of creatively weaving cultural knowledge into the construction of their
unique pedagogies. Understanding student practice of learning classroom material as a
dialogic endeavor crossing the borders of the classroom in unpredictable directions may
help the teachers to reevaluate the role of the classroom and their own part in students’
learning. Thinking about the importance of learning a foreign language for the dialogue
of understanding Self may help the teachers better understand their students on both
social and academic levels, as it helped me to discover Michael, Jacob and Sophia’s
intricate ways of intertwining learning Russian with the social work of figuring their
identities of students and citizens. Let me illustrate this idea with one more example
from my own practice.

As a Ph.D. student of education I taught a course in educational psychology for 2
years. At the end of my second year I felt a great sense of progress in my pedagogy as I
was trying to communicate complexity of modern interpretations and application of
learning theories, being a strong advocate of the ones emphasizing social and cultural
aspects of teaching and learning. This was when one of my students came over to talk
about the final project and claimed that she still liked behaviorism. My first reaction was
a shock: last century behaviorism after all the discussions about Vygotskyl? But I didn’t
show this reaction to my student. I thought about several things: the context of our
conversation (preparation for a class project that demanded to utilize all theories,
including behaviorism); the social sources that my student might have been drawing from

(perhaps, a reflection of the fact that behaviorism is still very much present in teaching

148

practice and it is pointless to deny it); and the fact that this statement is not her stable
characteristic, but a constantly evolving idea. As a reward, I was able to see the
complexity of this idea as our conversation continued and as the final project came out.
What I hope I was able to achieve as a teacher was understand the context of a student-
teacher conversation as a monologic form that only for a moment packaged a very
complex process of my student’s understanding of learning theories into a neat, coherent,
and shocking for me statement: “I still kind of like behaviorism.” As one of my
professors asked to clarify my thought: “When you talk about monologic, you talk about

only the visible part of an iceberg, right?”

Limitations and Strengths

There are certain limitations to qualitative methodology. First of all, it makes my
findings deeply embedded in the social context of the classroom where I studied them, as
well as in the various social contexts outside of the classroom that my participants talked
about. Secondly, it employs an interpretive mode of inquiry, which means that the data
presented here is the result of my own researcher’s interpretation of how my participants
were interpreting their learning. I tried to reflect on this fact by describing words and
actions of my participants as my understandings of their responses to certain social
contexts, such as classroom activities and talking to a researcher (me), rather than
portraying them as stable characteristics. These limitations do not allow for direct
generalization of the findings from one case to others; however, I believe that interpretive

research is extremely powerful in terms of exercising pedagogical imagination and

149

providing a model for thinking about the importance of small, local, fluid and dynamic

details of the classroom life.

Implications for Future Research

Taking into the account the limitations and strengths described above, I can
suggest the following implications for future applications of my study. First of all, I hope
that this work will become a powerful template for thinking theoretically about culture in
the classroom and outside of it, about what we understand by knowledge, about the role
of the teacher, and about the complex identities of our students. Secondly, I hope that it
can serve as a methodological template and join a strong tradition of ethnographic studies
in education, turning the teachers’ and researchers’ attention to complexity of local
specifics. I could see both templates to be applied in various settings, both where culture
is conceptualized as a major influential factor (e.g., immigrant communities), and where
culture often remains unnoticed but plays an important role (for example, I found that I
utilized a lot of the thinking from this study in teaching an educational psychology class
in a seemingly homogeneous setting that consisted of 99% of Caucasian students in a
large university in American Midwest).

Personally, I believe that this dissertation study was an important step in
establishing myself as a future educator and researcher. It helped me to engage in an in-
depth dialogue with the theoretical perspectives on culture and society, and I see this
dialogue continuing through my professional life. I intend to continue doing
ethnographic research providing engaging insights into the concepts of culture,

socialization, practice, dialogue, monologue, identity, etc. Taking advantage of my

150

international background I would like to continue studying the cultural experiences
related to education of the American and Russian students inside and outside of their
countries, thus helping them to deeply engage into these experiences in the contexts of

study abroad programs and professional intercultural projects.

151

REFERENCES

Bakhtin, M. M., & Emerson, C. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky 's poetics. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.

Beltz, J. A. (2002). Identity, deficiency, and first language use in foreign language
education. In C. Blyth (Ed.), The Sociolinguistics of F oreign-Language
Classrooms: Contributions of the Native, the Near-native, and the Non-native
Speaker American Association of University Supervisors, Coordinators, and
Directors of Foreign Language Programs (AA UCS) Issues in Language Program
Direction: A Series of Annual Volumes. Boston: Heinle.

Blyth, C. (2003). The Sociolinguistics of F oreign-Language Classrooms: Contributions
of the Native, the Near-native, and the Non-native Speaker American Association
of University Supervisors, Coordinators, and Directors of Foreign language
Programs (AA UCS) Issues in Language Program Direction: A Series of Annual
Volumes. Boston: Heinle.

Bogdan, R. C., & Biklen, S. K. (2003). Qualitative research for education. An
introduction to theories and methods (4-th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Breen, M. P. (2001). Learner contributions to language leaming: new directions in
research. Harlow, England ; New York: Longman.

Brofenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development. Cambridge, MA: Harward
University Press.

Burbules, N. (2000). The limits of dialogue as a critical pedagogy. In Peter Trifonas
(Ed.), Revolutionary Pedagogies: Routledge. Retrieved from the World Wide
Web: http://faculg.ed.uiuc.edu/burbules/papers/limits.html

Burbules, N ., & Bruce, B. (2001). Theory and research on teaching as dialogue. In V.
Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (4th ed.). Washington, DC:
American Educational Research Association.

Canagarajah, S. (2004). Subjective identities, pedagogical safe houses, and critical
learning. In B. Norton & K. Toohey (Eds.), Critical Pedagogies and Language
Learning: Cambridge university press.

Cazden, C. B. (2001). Classroom discourse: the language of teaching and learning (2nd
ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

152

Cazden, C. B., John, V. P., & Hymes, D. H. (1985). Functions of language in the
classroom. Prospect Heights, 111.: Waveland Press.

Chomsky, N. (2000). New horizons in the study of language and mind. Cambridge; New
York: Cambridge University Press.

Dyson, A. H. (1997). Writing superheroes: contemporary childhood, popular culture,
and classroom literacy. New York: Teachers College Press.

Dyson, A. H., & Genishi, C. (2005). On the case. New York: Teachers College Press.

Dyson, A. H. (1993). Social worlds of children learning to write in an urban primary
school. New York: Teachers College Press.

Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. 1., & Shaw, L. L. (1995). Writing ethnographic fieldnotes.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fillmore, C. ( 1979). A grammatarian looks to sociolinguistics. In J. B. Pride (Ed.),
Sociolinguistic aspects of language learning and teaching (pp. 2-16). Oxford:
Oxford UP.

Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: selected essays. New York: Basic
Books.

Gonzaalez, N. (2001). I am my language: discourses of women & children in the
borderlands. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Gonzaalez, N., Moll, L. C., & Amanti, C. (2005). Funds of knowledge: theorizing
practices in households, communities, and classrooms. Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum
Associates.

Goodnow, J. J ., Miller, P. J ., & Kessel, F. S. (1995). Cultural practices as contexts for
development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Greeno, J ., Collins, A., & Resnick, L. (1996). Cognition and learning. In D. C. Berliner &
R. C. Calfee (Eds.), Handbook of educational psychology (pp. 15-46). New York:
Macmillan.

Gregg, K. R. (1993). Taking explanation seriously; or, let a couple of flowers bloom.
Applied Linguistics, 14, 276-294.

Gregg, K. R. (2000). A theory for every occasion: postmodernism and SLA. Second
Language Research, 16, 383-399.

Gregg, K. R. (2002). A garden ride for weeding: a reply to Lantolf. Second Language
Research, 18(1), 79-81.

153

Gumperz, J. J. (1982). Language and social identity. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New
York: Cambridge University Press.

Gumperz, J. J ., & Hymes, D. H. (1986). Directions in sociolinguistic: the ethnography of
communication. Oxford, UK; New York, NY, USA: B. Blackwell.

Hadley, A. O. (2001). Teaching language in context (3rd ed.). Boston: Heinle & Heinle.

Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: language, life, and work in communities and
classrooms. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Holland, D., Lachicotte, W., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (2001). Identity and agency in
cultural worlds: Harvard University Press.

Hulstijn, J. (2004). Meta-theoretical reflections on the incorporation of sociocultural and
dialogical factors into a theory of second language acquisition: A review of A
philosophy of second language acquisition by Marysia Johnson. The Canadian
modern language review, 61(2), 275-279.

Hymes, D. (1962). The ethnography of speaking. In W. Sturtevant (Ed.), Anthropology
and human behavior (pp. 13-53). Washington: Anthropological society of
Washington.

Hymes, D. (197 2). Introduction to Cazden, Hymes, & John, Functions of Language in the
classroom (pp. xi-ivii). New York: Teachers college press.

Hymes, D. H. (1974). Foundations in sociolinguistics: an ethnographic approach.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Johnson Gerson, M. (2004). A Response to Hulstijn. The Canadian modern language
review, 61 (2), 281-282.

Johnson, M. (2004). A philosophy of second language acquisition. New Haven: Yale
University Press.

Kramsch, C. J. (1989). New directions in the teaching of language and culture.
Washington, DC: National Foreign Language Center at the Johns Hopkins
University.

Kramsch, C. J. (1993). Context and culture in language teaching. Oxford ; New York:
Oxford University Press.

Kramsch, C. J. (1995). Redefining the boundaries of language study. Boston, Mass.:
Heinle & Heinle.

154

Kramsch, C. J. (1998). Language and culture. Oxford, OX ; New York: Oxford
University Press.

Kramsch, C. J. (1999). Expansion of the Field. AAAL newsletter. Retrieved from the
World Wide Web: http://aaal.languiuc.edu/letter/20.2/expansion.html

Kramsch, C. J. (2002). Language acquisition and language socialization: ecological
perspectives. London; New York: Continuum.

Kramsch, C. J., & McConnell-Ginet, S. (1992). Text and context: cross-disciplinary
perspectives on language study. Lexington, Mass: D.C. Heath.

Krashen, S. (2002). Defending Whole Language: The Limits of Phonics Instruction and
the Efficacy of Whole Language Instruction. Reading Improvement, 1(39), 32-42.

Krashen, S. (2004, November, 13). Applying the Comprehension Hypothesis: Some
Suggestions. Paper presented at the 13th International Symposium and Book Fair
on Language Teaching (English Teachers Association of the Republic of China),
Taipei, Taiwan.

Krashen, S., & Terrell, T. D. (1983). The natural approach: language acquisition in the
classroom. Oxford, England.

Kubota, R. (2004). Critical multiculturalism and second language education. In B. Norton
& K. Toohey (Eds.), Critical pedagogies and language learning (pp. 30-53).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lantolf, J. P. (1996). SLA theory building: “Letting all the flowers bloom!” Language
Learning, 46, 713-749.

Lantolf, J. P. (2000). Sociocultural theory and second language learning. Oxford [Eng];
New York: Oxford University Press.

Lantolf, J. P. (2002). Commentary from the flower garden: responding to Gregg, 2000.
Second Language Research, 18(1), 72-78.

Lantolf, J. P., & Appel, G. (1994). Vygotskian approaches to second language research.
Norwood, N .J .: Ablex Pub. Corp.

Lantolf, J. P., & Labarca, A. (1987). Research in second language leaming: focus on the
classroom: proceedings of the 6th Delaware Symposium on Language Studies,
October 1984, the University of Delaware. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Pub. Corp.

Lantolf, J. P., & Pavlenko, A. (2001). (S)econd (L)anguage (A)ctivity theory:

understanding second language learners as people. In M. P. Breen (Ed.), Learner
contributions to language learning: Pearson education limited.

155

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated leaming: legitimate peripheral participation.
Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Levinson, B. A., Foley, D. E., & Holland, D. C. (Eds.). (1996). The cultural production
of the educated person: critical ethnographies of schooling and local practice.
New York: State University of New York.

Luke, A. (2004). Two takes on critical. In B. Norton & K. Toohey (Eds.), Critical
pedagogies and language learning (pp. 21-30). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Mehan, H. (1979). Learning lessons: social organization in the classroom. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Mehan, H. (1982). The structure of classroom events and their consequences for student
performance. In P. Gilmore & A. A. Glatthom (Eds.), Children in and out of
boundaries (pp. 59-87). Washington, DC: Center for applied linguistics.

Mills, S. (2004). Discourse. London; New York: Routledge.

Mitchell, R., & Myles, F. (2004). Second language learning theories (2nd ed.). London
New York: Arnold; Distributed in the United States by Oxford University Press.

M011, 1., & Whitmore, K. (1993). Vygotsky in classroom practice: Moving from
individual transmission to social transaction. In E. Forman, N. Minick, & C. Stone
(Eds.), Contexts for leaming: Sociocultural dynamics in children ’s development.
New York: Oxford University Press.

Morris, P. (Ed.). (1994). The Bakhtin reader. Selected writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev,
Voloshinov. London: Arnold.

Norton, B., & Toohey, K. (2004). Critical pedagogies and language learning.
Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.

N ystrand, M., & Duffy, J. (2003). Towards a rhetoric of everyday life: new directions in
research on writing, text, and discourse. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin
Press.

Ochs, E. (1993). Constructing social identity: A language socialization perspective.
Research on language and social interaction, (26), 287-306.

Ochs, E., Schegloff, E. A., & Thompson, S. A. (1996). Interaction and grammar.
Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press.

156

 

Ochs, E., & Schieffelin, B. B. (1995). Language acquisition and socialization: three
developmental stories and their implications. In B. G. Blount (Ed.), Language,
culture, and society (pp. 470-512). Long Grove, Illinois: Waverland press, inc.

Richards, J. C. (Ed.). (2002). Methodology in language teaching: an anthology of current
practice: Cambridge University Press.

Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking: cognitive development in social context.
New York: Oxford University Press.

Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. Oxford; New York:
Oxford University Press.

Rosaldo, R. (1993). Culture & truth: the remaking of social analysis. Beacon Press.

Rubin, H. J ., & Rubin, I. (2005). Qualitative interviewing: the art of hearing data (2nd
ed.). Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.

Sadler, R. (2003). Review of "The sociolinguistics of foreign language classrooms:
contributions of the native, near-native, and non-native speaker". The Reading
Matrix, 4(3).

Savignon, S. J. (1997). Communicative competence: theory and classroom practice: texts
and contexts in second language learning (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Savignon, S. J. (2002). Interpreting communicative language teaching: contexts and
concerns in teacher education. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Schieffelin, B. B., & Ochs, E. (1986). Language socialization across cultures. Cambridge
[Cambridgeshire]; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Tylor, E. B. (1873). Primitive culture: researches into the development of mythology,
philosophy, religion, art, and custom (2d ed.). London: John Murray.

Valdaes, G. (1993). Bilingualism and language policy: uncommon knowledge and
common concerns. Stanford, CA: Stanford Center for Chicano Research.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: the development of higher psychological
processes (M. Cole, Trans). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Watson-Gegeo, K. (1988). Ethnography in ESL: defining the essentials. TESOL
Quaterly, (22), 575-592.

157

GENERAL REFERENCES

Auer, P. (1998). Code-switching in conversation: language, interaction and identity.
London; New York: Routledge.

Auer, P., & Di Luzio, A. (1992). The contextualization of language. Amsterdam;
Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub. Co.

Ball, A. F., & Freedman, S. W. (2004). Bakhtinian perspectives on language, literacy,
and leaming. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Cook, G. (2003). Applied linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cook, V. J. (1997). Inside language. London; New York: Arnold.

Cook, V. J. (2001). Second language learning and language teaching (3rd ed.). London,
New York: Arnold; Co-published in the United States of America by Oxford

University Press.

Cope, B., Kalantzis, M., & New London Group. (2000). Multiliteracies: literacy learning
and the design of social fittures. London; New York: Routledge.

Davis, K. A. (1999). Foreign language teaching & language minority education.
Honolulu, HI: Second Language Teaching & Curriculum Center Distributed by
University of Hawai'i Press.

Derrida, J. (1998). Monolingualism of the other, or, The prosthesis of origin. Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Dyson, A. H. (2003). “Welcome to the Jam”: popular culture, school literacy, and the
making of childhoods. Harvard Educational Review, 73(3).

Edwards, J. R. (1994). Multilingualism. London; New York: Routlege.
Hanks, W. F. (1996). Language & communicative practices. Boulder: Westview Press.

Hanks, W. F. (2000). Intertexts: writings on language, utterance, and context. Lanham,
Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.

Hymes, D. H. (1980). Language in education: ethnolinguistic essays. Washington, DC:
Center for Applied Linguistics.

158

 

Hymes, D. H. (1996). Ethnography, linguistics, narrative inequality: toward an
understanding of voice. London; Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis.

Hymes, D. H. (2003). Now I know only so far: essays in ethnopoetics. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.

Kramsch, C. J., ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics, Center for Applied
Linguistics, & National Institute of Education (US). (1981). Discourse analysis
and second language teaching. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Ogulnick, K. (2000). Language crossings: negotiating the self in a multi-cultural world.
New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University.

Ortner, S. B. (1999). The fate of “culture”: Geertz and beyond. Berkeley: University of
California Press.

Pride, J. B. (1979). Sociolinguistic aspects of language learning and teaching. Oxford ;
New York: Oxford University Press.

Richardson, V., & American Educational Research Association. (2001). Handbook of
research on teaching (4th ed.). Washington, DC: American Educational
Research Association.

Schieffelin, B. B., Woolard, K. A., & Kroskrity, P. V. (1998). Language ideologies:
practice and theory. New York: Oxford University Press.

Seremetakis, C. N. (1994). The Senses still: perception and memory as material culture
in modernity. Boulder: Westview Press.

Weis, L., & Fine, M. (2000). Speed bumps: a student-friendly guide to qualitative
research. New York: Teachers College Press.

159

 

ER

uIllillljjl‘ljlljjlll11131le