Language -Learning: The Importance of Access to Community

Abstract

This article is based on data derived from a four-year ethnographic study that followed two cohorts of ESL learners enrolled in mainstream Canadian primary classrooms from kindergarten through grade 2. It draws on sociocultural theory, based on the work of the Russian scholars Vygotsky and Bakhtin and developed in North America by Lave and Wenger (1991), Rogoff (1994), and others. In the article, we examine classroom practices that appear to offer our participants access to the linguistic resources of their community and those in which our participants appear to have limited access to these resources. Choral and small group activities are contrasted with Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) sequences to show contrasting possibilities for access. We argue that speech situations in classrooms that are ludic or playful, that, in Bakhtin's (1981) terms, offer ever new ways to mean, are those in which children have the possibility of appropriating the words of others and of finding voices and utterances for themselves.