Firth and Wagner: On Discourse, Communication, and (Some) Fundamental Concepts in SLA Research.

In response to the Firth and Wagner reading of this week; the authors explain toward the beginning about a growing number of SLA studies, mainly being ethnographic that are focused on the social and contextual aspects of SLA. They go on to say that although most studies are beginning to question and explore notions of the learner, nonnative, and native speaker and interlanguage, most “tend to take the formal learning environment as their point of departure.” My question is, why to these studies tend to do this?
One of the three main changes that the authors state would address the imbalance that “hinders progression within the field” asks for a “significantly enhanced awareness of the contextual and interactional dimensions of language use. “ I usually find the word “contextual” to include a vast array of meanings. In this case, what contextual dimensions should be enhanced? (Verbal and social?)
Within the article the authors describe “learner” discourse as, language “above the sentence”. I am interested to know more about what exactly the authors mean by this phrase. Would “above the sentence” include things like voice inflections and accents? Does it include spoken ques as well?
By gathering information from this article in the interactive section, I’ve begun two lists of views and theories supported by Hymes and Chomsky. I remember learning about them in my linguistics class, but I just want to make sure I have the right idea. In other words, let me get this straight:
Hymes: communicative competence (social and contextual)
Chomsky: grammatical competence, formalistic, context free.
The “interlanguage” section of the article was of the most interest to me. Information regarding the interaction between native speakers and non-native speakers, to me, is not only interesting, but according to this article, also has a lot to do with the study of Second Language Acquisition (SLA).
It was fascinating to learn that, according to their studies, when natives and non natives are interacting for the first time (in these recorded conversations) they tend to restrict themselves to “here and now topics”. They also found that natives tend to adopt the role of “information gatherer.” Both speakers assign themselves to specific roles, but is this a defense mechanism used to avoid embarrassment? After reading this article I now notice that in my experience speaking English with a non-native speaker, to avoid confusion, I sometimes did the things that the author mentioned.
I noticed while reading the article that many questions arising from discourse communication have a connection to psychology. Questions about the behavior of people in SLA like why they act a certain way are the same questions asked in the subject of psychology. Certain psychological factors could contribute to the behavior of native speakers and to their communication with each other.