第二语言习得的社会转向:以身份认同研究为例

The Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition: Taking Identity Research as an Example

第二语言习得的社会转向是指从二十世纪末开始,西方学界一些研究者开始聚焦二语习得的社会层面,借鉴一些社会科学的理论、方法和视角来研究二语习得的一种研究趋势。本文首先介绍这种社会转向的发端——二十世纪末一场关于二语习得"社会性"和"认知性"的大讨论,进而阐述二语习得社会学派在理论基础和研究方法上的新主张以及一些研究趋势。因为从身份认同角度来研究二语习得在二语习得的"社会"分支中获得大量研究关注,本文特别选取二语习得与身份认同研究这一领域进行介绍,对主要的身份认同理论流派进行梳理和评述,并选取一些有代表性的关于汉语二语习得和身份认同的国内外实证研究进行介绍,以之为例来具体阐释社会转向下二语习得研究的一些特点。

The social turn in second language acquisition(SLA)started from the end of the twentieth century and refers to the research trend that focuses on the social aspect of SLA and that borrowed heavily from social science disciplines in its theoretical foundation,research methodology and perspectives.This article starts from introducing the notable“social and cognitive debate”(which marked the start of this social turn)in SLA,and proceeds to summarise some of the key theoretical and methodological claims of researchers who have taken the social perspective to SLA.Then the article will narrow down to introduce identity research in SLA,for the massive research attention this area has been attracting.Main theoretical approaches to the study of identity and language acquisition are presented,with their contributions and limitations discussed.Then some empirical studies on identity issues in the acquisition of Chinese as a second language,conducted both within and outside China,are presented and used as examples to illustrate some of the features of research conducted with the social perspective.