Language Acquisition

International Journal of Language Studies
Volume 11, Number 1, January 2017, pp. 1-22

ISSN: 2157-4898; EISSN: 2157-4901
© 2017 IJLS; Printed in the USA by Lulu Press Inc.

Language acquisition socialization: Sociocognitive and complexity
theory perspectives

Assia BAGHDADI, M’sila University, Algeria

Although it dates back to the early 1980s, language socialization
research is still regarded as one of the relatively recent realms of
scholarship in applied linguistics. It is based on the premise of bringing
together an analysis of social, cultural, and cognitive dimensions of
situated language learning. Employing this perspective, the current
research has a three-fold purpose: (a) to maintain language acquisition
aspects that are represented by social, cognitive, and social-cognitive
underpinnings, (b) to shed light upon the theoretical backgrounds of
both sociocognitive theory and complexity theory, which have been
purposefully selected to be discussed due to their bearings on language
socialization, and their sharing of the view that the cognitive and the
social are intricately interwoven and mutually constitutive, and (c) to
depict the commonalities and differences of the two theories in order to
point out the extent of convergence and divergence that they have with
language socialization as well as the extent they reach in shaping a
meaningful language acquisition research agenda.

Key words: Complexity Theory; Sociocognitive Theory; Language Acquisition
(LA); Language Socialization

1. Introduction

Human language is exclusively a human property. It is indeed a social
behavior that coexists with any human being wherever they may be, mainly
because human beings are created to be social and because they need to
communicate with other society members through exchanging knowledge,
beliefs, opinions, feelings, etc. In one of his famous statements about language
and the social aspects of human nature, Sapir (1921) argued that language “is
a great force of socialization, probably the greatest that exists” (cited in
Mandelbaum, 1958, p. 15).

The term language socialization represents a broad framework having as a
primary goal the understanding of the development of linguistic, cultural, and
communicative competence through children’s verbal interaction with more
proficient individuals (Duff & Talmy, 2011). It is also defined by Duff and

2 A. Baghdadi

Kobayashi (2010) as a process by which newcomers in a community or
culture acquire communicative competence, membership, and legitimacy in
that community through social interaction and (often) overt assistance, and
by contributing in the group activities.

As far as a novice’s membership in one particular speech community is
concerned, Moore (2008) explained this issue by claiming that a novice is
socialized through the use of language, and is socialized to use it through
engaging in communicative encounters and in routine interactions with more
knowledgeable members in order to become an active and a competent
member in that community. In this sense, language socialization is not
restricted to only language use and developmental processes, but it also
covers the issue of the effect of those processes upon learners being accepted
in the target community and their own statuses in it (Ochs & Schieffelin,
1986). In other words; the intended purpose of language socialization
researchers exceeds the acquisition of linguistic conventions and pragmatics
to reach the adoption of identities, stances, ideologies, and other behaviors
that enable a novice to behave and be treated appropriately in the new
community (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1986).

The genesis of language socialization as a paradigm was in the early 1980s by
Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin, the linguistic anthropologists who
conducted extensive fieldwork in non-Western societies. Between 1975 and
1977, Schieffelin conducted a longitudinal study of childern’s language
acquisition among the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea; between 1978 and
1979, Ochs conducted a longitudinal study of Samoan children’s language
acquisition (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984). Both researchers tended to bridge the
gap between two totally separate and distinctive fields of inquiry: (1)
developmental psycholinguistic research on first language acquisition, and
(2) anthropological research on child socialization.

Language acquisition research focused on the individual either as acquirer or
provider of language. In contrast, anthropological research depicted different
communities putting the sociocultural context at the center of analysis
(Moore, 2008). Schieffelin and Ochs (1986) based themselves on the premise
that, for a better understanding of the two fields, they should be viewed and
studied as two interacting and interdependent disciplines of scholarship
whereas Moore explained, from Ochs and Schieffelin’s vision, that an
interaction between a child and a caregiver should be studied as a cultural
phenomenon embedded in the wider systems of cultural meaning and social
order of the society in which the child is being socialized (Moore, 2008).

From its beginning language socialization research was concerned with
theoretical and applied issues and it evolved to be the concern of many
researchers who, according to their own visions and tendencies, expanded its

3 International Journal of Language Studies, 11(1), 1-22

scope to second language acquisition and contributed to its emergence in the
early 1980s as a new area of scholarship in applied linguistics (Duff & Talmy,
2011). They even helped language socialization paradigm to integrate
theoretical perspectives and methods from a variety of disciplines such as (1)
linguistic anthropology, (e.g., Duranti, Ochs, & Schieffelin, in press; Hymes,
1972; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986a), (2) sociology (e.g., Bernstein, 1972;
Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1979, 1984), (3) cultural psychology (e.g., Lave &
Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1995, 2003), (4) systemic functional linguistics (e.g.,
Halliday, 1980, 2003), (5) semiotics (e.g., Hanks, 1992); (6) cultural-historical
psychology/sociocultural theory and activity theory (e.g., Engestrom, 1999;
Leontiev, 1981; Vygotsky, 1978), and more recently, (6) discursive
psychology including positioning theory (e.g., Bamberg, 2000; Korobov &
Bamberg, 2004).

Within language socialization, we distinguish two types: (a) first language
(L1) socialization, and (b) second language (L2) socialization. In contrast to
first language (L1) socialization, second language (L2) socialization deals with
issues related to children or adults with already constructed repertoires
including linguistic, discursive and cultural practices as they interact with
veterans from a new community. Moreover, it should be noted that second
language (L2) socialization is bidirectional where the more proficient
interlocutors are also socialized by novices into their identities, and they may
learn from the newcomers their specific communicative needs and may also
learn from these learners’ perspectives and prior experiences (Duff & Talmy,
2011).

In the socialization paradigm the concept of communicative competence is
central. This concept was firstly proposed by Hymes (1972), who defined it as
the learner’s ability to appropriately use grammatically correct language in
real context. Communication in Hymes’ viewpoint (1972, cited in Salmani
Nodoushan, 2013) entails two steps where the speaker is supposed (1) to
construct an evaluative vision about the speech context, and then (2) to
decide upon the appropriate communicative options that enable him to
encode what he intends to convey as a message (cf., Allen & Salmani
Nodoushan, 2015; Capone & Salmani Nodoushan, 2014; Salmani Nodoushan,
1995; 2006a,b; 2007a,b; 2008a,b; 2012; 2014; 2015; 2016a,b,c; 2017; 2016;
Salmani Nodoushan & Allami, 2011). Researchers interested in language
socialization focus on the development of this competence as a process in
which a novice is socialized into the linguistic and the socio cultural activities
of the target speech community (Moore, 2008 ).

Also fundamental to this paradigm is the notion of ‘practice’ which is
represented in language socialization by speaking and listening. This practice
enables the novice to participate in community activities with increasing

4 A. Baghdadi

competence and commitment into community practices (Bourdieu, 1977).

In language socialization, research studies are typically ethnographic.
Generally speaking, ethnographic research tends to understand the cultural
patterns and values of groups in their local contexts (Duff & Talmy, 2011). As
this type of research is based on persistent engagement in and on extensive
observation of contexts, it helps researchers to have access to a broad
description of the cultures, communities and other dynamic social settings
(Bronson & Watson-Gegeo, 2008; Duff, 1995; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1996).

Garrett (2008) identified the core methodological features of language
socialization research by summing them up under the following:

1) Longitudinal research design: As language socialization studies develop,
it is necessary to cover the different transformations that occur over a
period of time and engender development.

2) Field-based collection and analysis of a substantial corpus of audio or
video recorded naturalistic discourse: This enables the researcher to
repeatedly examine communicative behaviors and to identify patterns
in novice interactions in close detail.

3) Holistic and theoretically-informed ethnographic perspective: From this
perspective, researchers refer to prior research on the target social
community from a variety of disciplines to give a locus to their study in
the broader social, cultural, and historical context.

As such, a language socialization researcher is not restricted to study the
detailed ethnographic accounts of the development of individuals in specific
social communities, but he/she goes further to comprehend how these
developmental processes relate to social, cultural, and historical processes
(Moore, 2008).

As language acquisition socialization research is mostly concerned with
bringing together an analysis of social, cultural, and cognitive dimensions of
situated language learning, it seems highly compatible with two newly
emerging theories: (1) the Sociocognitive Theory (cf., Atkinson, 2002) and the
(2) the Complexity Theory (cf., Larsen-Freeman, 1997); both of these theories
consider the cognitive and the social to be intricately interwoven and
mutually constitutive. Along the same lines, the present paper attempts firstly
to elucidate language acquisition aspects, and secondly to contribute to a
greater understanding of both theories through shedding light on their
insights and conducting a comparative analysis on them to find answers to
the following questions:

1) What are the commonalities and differences of Sociocognitive and
Complexity theories?

5 International Journal of Language Studies, 11(1), 1-22

2) What do they have in common with language socialization approach,
and how do they differ from it?

3) To what extent do they contribute to shape a language acquisition
research agenda?

2. Language acquisition: Cognitive, social, and social-cognitive aspects

From its early days, second language acquisition focused on the cognitive
dimensions of language acquisition. After that, the scope of this focus was
broadened to include socially-oriented dimension of the acquisition process.
Thus, second language acquisition researchers were divided into two camps:
(a) Those who called for the cognitive aspect maintaining that SLA is basically
cognitive, and (b) those who rejected that stance and emphasized the primacy
of the social account of SLA. Recently, however, a new trend emerged to
accommodate both the cognitive and the social aspects.

The first trend represented by cognitivists was influential over the past thirty
years or so (cf., Doughty & Williams, 1998; Gass, 1997). Cognitive approaches
have tended to focus on the patterns that can be observed in the output
produced by the learner without referring to the learner’s nature or the
context in which he is learning (Doughty & Long, 2003). Hence, experimental
approaches prioritized the treatment of decontextualized language samples
where the crucial focus of interest has been on either the cognitive
representation or processing of linguistic information (Robinson & Ellis,
2008); nevertheless, the cognitive accounts appear to have a social
orientation. From this perspective, the cognitivists argue that language
acquisition has its genesis in processes of turn-taking in language use, and
that interaction is understood as a mechanism for generating input thereby
activating the various cognitive mechanisms involved in information
processing (Batstone, 2010). Moreover, the concept of negotiation either of
meaning (Long, 1996) or of form (Lyster & Ranta, 1997) is also central to
cognitive accounts. Due to these accounts and arguments, cognitive
approaches have been criticized for decontextualizing language—which
cannot be separated from the context in which it is produced (Block, 2003).

The second trend is represented by theorists who are thought to be socially
oriented researchers (e.g., Wagner, 2004), and who argue that although the
mind is undoubtedly involved in the process of language learning, factors
such as (a) the contextualized nature of language, (b) the role of social factors,
and (c) the importance of social participation should not be marginalized.
Wagner, for instance, argued that:

The theory of learning as participation simply avoids statements about
the participants’ inner states. The participants are socialized into

6 A. Baghdadi

practices, but the description has no means to show what kind of inner
states are related to the process of becoming a member in a social
group.

(Wagner, 2004, p. 614)

Based on Wagner’s (2004) stance, the mental aspect of language was not
denied, but it was rather left to other methodologies. The focus should be on
participation itself rather than on the learning that might occur within the
interactive context. Dornyei and Ushioda (2009) added that, from a social
perspective, the learner’s identity has its roots in the social relations he
experienced within one specific community.

However, from the perspective of the sociocultural theory, the social is seen
as interacting with dimensions of mental processes where the innate is
transformed through socially constructed processes. That is, biological
constructs such as attention and memory are seen to be crucially impacted
through encounters with other activities and concepts (cf., Lantolf, 2006).
This vision led to the emergence of a third trend.

The third trend based itself on the view that neither language use nor
language learning can be adequately defined or understood without
recognizing that they have both a social and a cognitive dimension which
interact (Batstone, 2010). Watson-Gegeo and Nielsen (2003, p. 156) argue
that:

The cognitive/social dichotomy widely taken for granted in SLA theory
obscures the relationship between the knowledge about language that
learners construct and the social, cultural, and political contexts in
which acquisition takes place. Cognition originates in social interaction.
Constructing new knowledge is therefore both a cognitive and a social
process. SLA theory’s [sic] need for just this sort of integrative
perspective is one of the arguments for taking a language socialization
approach in L2 research.

Indeed, the social and the cognitive were the concern of many researchers.
However, they might have been distinguished according to their relative view
on the relative primacy of the social versus the cognitive. From this
perspective, Duff and Kobayashi (2010) claim that none is superior and
suggest the language socialization approach as a good example combining the
two tendencies and offering an interesting way of contextualizing and
theorizing activity-based language learning, tasks, participants, and
communities or cultures. The following section explicates successively the
rationale of the sociocognitive and the complexity theories as two good
examples supporting the duality of second language acquisition that is

7 International Journal of Language Studies, 11(1), 1-22

represented by the social and the cognitive dimensions. Also it elicits the
methodological principles on which they are based; it highlights the
commonalities and the differences that exist among them, and points out the
points of convergence and divergence that they have with language
socialization.

3. The Sociocognitive theory

Sociocognition is a concept introduced by Atkinson (2002) to accentuate the
interplay between the physical and the social worlds to which individuals are
attuned, and even the patterns they produce and use internally. Batstone
(2010, p. 5) argues that “Sociocognition is based on the view that neither
language use nor language learning can be adequately defined or understood
without recognizing that they have both a social and a cognitive dimension
which interact.”

Sociocognition as a theory is viewed by Bandura (1985) as an explanation of
how humans think, and why they are motivated to follow particular actions in
society. As far as learning is concerned, it is defined from a sociocognitive
perspective as an internal mental process that may or may not be reflected in
immediate behavioral change (Bandura, 1986). Learners, as practitioners, are
viewed as dialectically connected to the social contexts in a synergetic
relation (Meskill & Rangelova, 2000). To sustain the rationale of the
sociocognitive paradigm, Atkinson (2002, p. 537) calls for a greater
integration of the social and cognitive in L2 research, with a greater focus on
the process of the learner’s inclusion and participation within situated
linguistic activities:

a sociocognitive approach to SLA would take the social dimension of
language and its acquisition seriously . . . . Second, language and its
acquisition would be fully integrated into other activities, people, and
things in a sociocognitive approach to SLA. They would be seen as
integral parts of larger sociocognitive wholes, or, in Gee’s (1992) term,
Discourses . . . . Third, language and its acquisition, from a
sociocognitive perspective, would be seen in terms of ‘action’ and
‘participation’—as providing an extremely powerful semiotic means of
performing and participating in activity-in-the-world (Rogoff, 1990,
1998; Lave and Wenger, 1991). Finally, a sociocognitive perspective
should not, strictly speaking, exclude. As an approach to language, it is
fundamentally cognitive and fundamentally social . . . it argues for the
profound interdependency and integration of both.

Sociocognitively speaking, second language learners can learn a language in a
better way if their cognitive capabilities are employed along with their social

8 A. Baghdadi

interactions. This view was, in fact, underpinned by the sociocultural theory
presented by Vygotsky (1978) who stated that human beings’ cognition is
defined in relation to the social interaction of the individual within his own
culture where his thoughts, actions, and experiences are all socially and
culturally mediated. Moreover, he claimed that individuals will be able to
learn and develop when they are capable to differentiate individual
consciousness from others and from the environment (Vygotsky, 1978). With
the aim of making his theory more explicit, Atkinson (2010b) presents three
principles on which sociocognitive approach to second language acquisition is
based: (1) The Inseparability principle, (2) the Learning-Is-Adaptive
principle, and (3) the Alignment principle.

The Inseparability principle: According to Batstone (2010; cited in
Atkinson (2010b, p. 27), the inseparability principle is the one in which:
“. . . the social and the cognitive are indivisible and can only be properly
understood by keeping their essential unity intact.” More explicitly,
Atkinson (2010b, p. 27) explicates that “Mind, body, and ecosocial
world are inseparable contributors to SLA processes, so to understand
such processes these elements must be considered together.”

The Learning-is-adaptive principle: In this principle, Atkinson (2010b,
p. 27) claims that “learning is largely a process of better adapting to our
ecosocial environment.” Although he admits that the mainstream
learning theories, including SLA studies, assume that learning occurs
for its own sake being conceptualized as progressive separation of
knowledge from the environment, Atkinson states the opposite arguing
that since cognition is ecosocial entailing the adaptive action; as the
embodied cognition enables humans to adapt to their environments,
and as learning is cognitive process, thus learning is adaptive (Atkinson,
2010b).

The Alignment Principle: It is the third principle, and turns around the
construction of the social meaning. It is conceptualized by Atkinson
(2010b) as a major mechanism of SLA, where the participants, due to
the participation in the ongoing construction of meaning in
sociocognitive space, learn how to mean in an L2. He extends this
conceptualization by defining alignment as “. . . the means by which
social actors participate in the ongoing construction of social meaning
and action in public/sociocognitive space. In mutually attending,
negotiating, sharing information and emotions, solving interactional/
communicative problems, building participation frameworks,
interacting with their extended cognitive surroundings, etc., social
actors dynamically adapt to their environments, creating shared
meaning in mind-body-world” (Atkinson, 2010b, p. 29).

9 International Journal of Language Studies, 11(1), 1-22

In the sociocognitive paradigm, according to Atkinson (2011), SLA research
study is just beginning, and any account of its research methods must be
emergent and prospective. He maintained an exploratory set of
methodological principles on which sociocognitively oriented SLA research
might be based claiming that his ultimate purpose is merely to provide
guidance in designing studies that can deepen our understanding of how
mind, body, and the world work together in SLA.

One of the core claims of sociocognition is the extension of mind into the
world through social tools and systems, where Atkinson (2010a, 2010b)
justifies the interest of socio-cognitive methodologies in looking for cognition
in worldly artifacts and practices and mainly in how they integrate mind,
body, and the world. Starting from the premise that much, if not all, L2
learning takes place via interaction, Atkinson believes that sociocognitive
research methodologies would therefore examine language learning in
interaction, and put the emphasis on studying real-world L2 use.

Although SLA is a process, mainstream SLA research focused typically on the
linguistic products of SLA based upon knowledge of language as object
(Doughty, 2003). From a sociocognitive viewpoint, Atkinson (2010a,b) argues
that SLA is a continuous, complex, nonlinear process that takes place at the
level of interaction. Atkinson favors the variety of the individuals’ experiences
since it enriches the researcher’s understanding of human beings; without
denying the existence of the common developmental trajectories, he appeals
to the rejection of uniform, mechanical, teleological development as a
necessary guiding assumption of SLA research.

4. The Complexity theory

The Complexity theory is defined by Larsen-Freeman (1997) as a theory that
seeks to explain complex, dynamic, open, adaptive, self-organizing, nonlinear
systems. It focuses on the close interplay between the emergence of structure
on the one hand, and process or change on the other. It has its roots in the
physical sciences, but it has been applied to many social sciences such as
economics, epidemiology, and organizational development. This is because
complexity theory affords a transdisciplinary perspective (Halliday, 1990).
Rather than seeing the world through a deterministic, reductionist,
Newtonian lens, complexity theorists adopt a more holistic perspective
(Larsen-Freeman, 1997).

Larsen-Freeman (2011, p. 49) perceived deep parallelism with language
acquisition which she explains in her words as:

. . . in contrast to my own (generative) training in linguistics, I came to
understand language as a complex adaptive system, which emerges

10 A. Baghdadi

bottom-up from interactions of multiple agents in speech communities
rather than a static system composed of top-down grammatical rules or
principles. The system is adaptive because it changes to fit new
circumstances, which are also themselves continually changing.

In Complexity theory, Larsen-Freeman (2002, 2007) looked for a way to
integrate the social and the cognitive rather than segregating them. The issue
of interconnectedness is crucial to complex systems, and of great importance,
when dealing with language which is viewed by Larsen-Freeman (2008) as
arguably complex systems. Hence, it provides a ground to unite different
language phenomena such as language development, its evolution, its
learning, its teaching, and its use. From this perspective, Larsen-Freeman
claims that “Complexity theory characterizes this relationship by suggesting
that cognitive and social forces operate simultaneously, albeit on different
levels and at different timescales” (2010, p. 51) where the linguistic system
can be “. . . defined as a dynamic adaptedness to a specific context” (Tucker &
Hirsch-Pasek, 1993, p. 362). Language learners modify and change their
language resources, as they try to adapt their language resources to new
contexts leading to the emergence of a reciprocal causality between the
language system and its use to become mutually constitutive. Additionally, a
common dynamic process operating at different time frames is manifested by
language use and language learning. In other words language learning occurs
when people use it (Larsen-Freeman, 2010).

When it comes to second language learning, the contrast between instructed
and uninstructed context is invoked by Larsen-Freeman (2003), who believes
that few generalizations may be held across different learning contexts. From
a Complexity theory point of view, language learners must be provided with
abundant opportunities of language practice. Moreover, Larsen-Freeman
(2010) proposes that we should ‘teach grammaring’ rather than ‘grammar’.
Within the ‘grammaring’ approach, the dynamism of language learning and
use should be extended to the construction of meaning through adopting a
psychologically authentic approach. Moreover, she introduced a set of
theoretical principles on which her theory is based. The three main principles
are explained below.

The first principle considers language as a dynamic set of patterns
emerging from use, where those patterns transform into stable entities
within a complex system. In this sense, Beckner et al., (2009, p. 11)
argues that “Sequences of elements come to be automatized as
neuromotor routines,” with grammar considered as a by-product of
communication not as the source of understanding and communication
(Hopper, 1998). They are patterns which Tomasello (2003) calls
‘constructions’—i.e., form–meaning–use composites, having graded

11 International Journal of Language Studies, 11(1), 1-22

borders not discrete ones, ranging from single morphemes to idioms to
partially filled lexical patterns to complex clauses (Larsen-Freeman,
2011).

The second principle focuses on the adaptation of language-using
patterns to their context of use. As Larsen-Freeman (2011, p. 53) stated,
“As with other complex systems, language-using patterns are
heterochronous: Language events on some local timescale may
simultaneously be part of language change on longer timescales,” and
“the system changes every time a form is used.”

The third principle deals with language development which proceeds
through soft-assembly and co-adaptation in social context. From a
complexity theory perspective, such a context contributes significantly
to language development by affording possibilities for co-adaptation
between interlocutors (Larsen-Freeman, 2010). According to Larsen-
Freeman, co-adaptation is an iterative process; indeed, language
development itself can be described as an iterative process with
learners visiting the same or similar territory repeatedly. With each
visit, learners soft-assemble their language resources. The term soft-
assembly was coined by Thelen and Smith (1994), who thought that an
assembly is said to be ‘soft’ because the elements being assembled, and
even the ways they are assembled, can change at any point during the
task or from one task to another.

In complexity theory, research was a challenge that compelled …