Learning, Culture and Social Interaction 3 (2014) 65–68

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Learning, Culture and Social Interaction

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Editorial

Learning in context: Linguistic, social and cultural explanationsof inequality

In the course of the last twenty years, several large scale achievement studies have repeatedly and consistently shown thateducational attainment depends to a high degree on social reproduction. Thus, remedial activities focusing solely onimproving schools and teaching in order to enhance students' individual competences are not sufficiently suitable to tackleinequalities in this domain. In order to develop more effective interventions in the future, research needs explanatoryapproaches that aim at revealing the various mechanisms by which educational injustice is reproduced inside and outside ofschools.

The current special issue presents an interdisciplinary view of the topic, illuminating the linguistic, social and culturalprocesses in the construction of educational inequality. Three aspects are highlighted in particular:

(1) the role of language and communication in the mechanisms to be explained;(2) the notion of (different) formal and,more importantly, informal learning contexts as essential conditions for the acquisition of

knowledge and skills; and(3) the interplay of school and out-of-school settings.

The contributors to this special issue come from different disciplines, such as psychology, educational science and, last but not least,linguistics, and apply diverse theoretical frameworks and empirical approaches. But they all share the assumption that linguistic anddiscourse competences (such as argumentative skills), albeit informally acquired, are key competences for achievement in school: theyare at the heart of chances for and obstacles to institutional and societal participation on the one hand, and the acquisition of subjectknowledge and cognitive development on the other. What ties the two together is successful involvement in instructive and learningdiscourse. Consequently, the contributions of this issue investigate the dynamics of inequality by focusing on the role of discourse- andliteracy-related skills which are passed on in milieu-specific socialization processes.

In a broad sense, the term ‘context’ as used in the title of this special issue refers to different social milieus that have beenproven relevant for social reproduction by the large scale studies mentioned above. In its stricter sense of learning context,what this collection explores is the types of adult–child interaction patterns in their variance that are relevant for theacquisition of the competences mentioned above. In view of the aim of describing the mechanisms underlying thereproduction of educational inequality, the study of these patterns offers answers to important questions. Since habitualizedinteractive patterns in instructional as well as informal discourse are known to support or obstruct linguistic learning, thereis an obvious necessity to investigate relevant settings of children's interactive experience, i.e. family and peer as well asclassroom interaction. In this way, the broad sociological notion of context is connected to the micro-processual contextualconditions, thus explaining how the statistically proven covariation comes about in terms of the mechanisms that areactually at work in mundane activities.

This is the reason for the inclusion of studies that focus on families as an acquisitional context, which link macro and microaspects of inequality. They do this by identifying the varying social, economic and cultural resources available to mono- andbilingual families in different social milieus, focusing for example on parental involvement in homework and the underlyingparental styles. On the other hand, there are also analyses that reconstruct the acquisitional mechanisms as such, and explainin what way communicative practices and cultural orientations influence learning processes. By relating insights fromreconstructive as well as quantitative analyses, the volume shows the interplay between acquisition and its context fromdifferent angles.

A further interest of this issue is the empirical investigation of more or less supportive socialization processes not just in families,but also in institutions. A specific topic is the compatibility of the orientations and outcomes of informal familial socialization practiceswith hidden institutional norms and expectations. For instance, it is shown how – due to different socialization practices andcultures – children's skills are compatible with school standards and expectations to quite different degrees.

2210-6561/$ – see front matter © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2014.01.003

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The papers contribute to a multi-faceted explanatory approach to the persistent construction of inequality in the followingways:

Quasthoff & Wild set the scene by discussing the benefits of large-scale international studies and their limitations in explanatorypower. Against this background, they establish the significance of linguistic competence for educational success and describe afunction-based concept of language that provides the theoretical basis of this special issue. This concept emphasizes language useand actual processes of interaction; it also underlies a theory of language and discourse acquisition that considers interaction itselfas an acquisitional resource and focuses on more or less supportive interactive structures. Finally, Quasthoff & Wild point out inwhat ways the other contributions take up neglected aspects in the research on educational inequality and argue forinterdisciplinary approaches and methodological triangulation necessary to provide applicable solutions.The first three papers investigate families as socialization contexts. They are all based on sophisticated data sets and addresssocio-economic and milieu-specific differences from different perspectives.Domenech & Krah examine “what familial resources matter” with respect to children's argumentative performance. In a casestudy of two boys whose performance was unexpectedly high or low considering their socioeconomic status, the authors linkthe assessment of two persuasive texts to the micro-analytic reconstruction of familial interactive patterns. Their resultssupport the argument that the family's socioeconomic background in itself does not necessarily account for the kind ofcommunicative practices realized at home.Chng, Wild, Hollmann & Otterpohl present a quantitative study of the role of two opposed parenting practices, autonomy-supportand control, on children's evaluative reasoning. They further address the question whether familial communication patternsfunction asmediators between parenting dimensions and reasoning skills. The study is based on questionnairemeasures given toca 1300 fifth-graders and their parents, as well as on tests assessing the children's informal reasoning. Results show that theparents' choice and use of strategies, such as either autonomy-support or control, and the families' communication climate have asignificant impact on the shaping of children's evaluative reasoning skills in everyday situations.Focusing on home-based parental involvement, Yotyodying &Wild aim at identifying factors that explain differences in the qualityof parental instruction in two different cultural contexts, Germany and Thailand. Self-determination theory provides theframework for assessing parental instructive practices on four dimensions (autonomy support, responsiveness, structure, andcontrol). This cross-cultural study is based on two cross-sectional surveys using parent and pupil questionnaires in different schooltypes in the two countries. Findings demonstrate that in both cultural contexts, parental role conceptions explain the relationbetween their goal orientations and the quality of their instruction; they further suggest that parents fromdifferent cultures adoptdifferent kinds of parental instruction due to variations in their attitudes, interpersonal conditions, and family contexts.Conversations among children or adolescents have only recently become a focus of research in developmental research, whichhas demonstrated that they present a highly relevant and influential informal “learning context”. Therefore, the two studies byStude and Morek explore in what way peer interaction constitutes a context for language and discourse acquisition inpreschool or secondary school children respectively. It is asked in what way peer interaction is at all able to provide anacquisitional context and whether peer groups from varying social milieus systematically differ in interaction and thus allowfor different learning opportunities. Both studies apply conversation analysis and use naturally occurring peer interactions fortheir empirical basis.Focusing on early acquisitional processes, Stude explores the role of young children's peer interaction for the acquisition ofmetalinguistic abilities. Preschoolers were found to comment on three different aspects of talk (pragmatic, semantic, andformal). The findings indicate that peer talk provides a rich acquisitional context and offers the opportunity to try out means ofmetalanguage that in adult–child interaction are often reserved for the adult. In addition, Stude discusses how children maybenefit from linguistic models provided in adult–child interaction in other types of activities and shows how they creativelyincorporate these into their peer activities.In an examination of spontaneous interactions of twelve German cliques of preadolescents, Morek focuses on the mundanegenre of explanations. Explanations present an especially interesting phenomenon since they involve the interactiveconstitution and resolution of epistemic asymmetries. How do preadolescents deal with such asymmetries? Whereas peersfrom privileged milieus are shown to ‘tailor’ their explanations to fit the context-specific local necessities of peer talk, theircounterparts from more deprived homes adopt communicative practices which prevent the occurrence of explanatory talk.Thus, the interactive patterns found in peer groups provide differential learning opportunities for explanatory talk and seem toplay a hitherto neglected role in the reproduction of inequalities.A crucial question is how children and adolescents navigate the different contexts of family, peer group and school. The papersin the last section, therefore, take up the hypothesis of cultural distances between contexts in terms of children's practices andtheir closeness to or distance from the institutional discourse of classroom interaction. Some of these contributions reconstructteachers' observable expectations and their ways of responding and interactively processing different pupils' contributions inclass. Others discuss the effectiveness of teachers' fostering activities in class or show in what ways written language in schoolsdisadvantages children from certain sociolinguistic backgrounds.

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Inspired by conversation analysis Heller uses the example of two children to reconstruct their discursive practices in differentcontexts, namely family dinner talk and classroom interaction. Starting from the teachers' spontaneous comments on thechildren's performances in class, which reveal noticeable differences, the author conceptualizes the perceived differences asmanifestations of an interactively established match or divergence between the children's discursive practices and institutionalexpectations. By looking at the children's family repertoires of communicative genres as well as their practices of argumentation,the study succeeds in showing that themismatch between the children's verbal activities in class and their teachers' expectationsgoes back to communicative experiences at home. Tracing the histories of the two children's interactionswith their teachers over aspan of four months, Heller demonstrates a solidification of different interactional patterns and corresponding expectations withregard to communicative demands and competence, thus shedding light on the microstructural mechanisms of exclusion inclassroom interaction.Ping investigates how preschool teachers arrange dialogic book reading activities as contexts for second language acquisition,in particular the acquisition of word meaning and grammatical knowledge. Whereas previous research in this field tended tofocus on isolated actions of teachers, Ping bases her analysis on longer stretches of discourse involving children's activities.Data consist of five videotaped German-speaking preschool teachers in small group reading situations with 3–6 year oldimmigrant children. Ping shows that although teachers employ various instructional techniques in their discussion of word orgrammatical problems, the cognitive demands that teachers establish are rather low, a result which is in accordance withprevious findings.Walzebug addresses the questionwhethermathematical test items used in large scale studies contain hidden linguistic challengesand in fact covertly also test reading skills. The study combines twomethods, a Differential Item Functioning analysis which servesto identify test items that are more difficult to handle for students of low socioeconomic status. The items identified are then usedin “think-aloud” interviews with students of low SES. Her findings reveal that some mathematical items are indeed biased. Theanalysis explicates the specific linguistic challenges and also demonstrates that the understanding of complex linguistic structuresand ambiguous wordings can hinder the activation of mathematical knowledge in some cases.Cooper, finally, addresses the question of how immigrant youths manage to navigate the different contexts or “multipleworlds” of families, schools and peers. She shows how disadvantaged adolescents succeed in building college identities anddiscusses which aspects of these navigation processes are explained by theories of social capital, alienation and challenge.Reporting on two longitudinal studies with U.S.–Mexican immigrant youths, she traces parallels and contrasts across nationsas well as research-practice-policy linkages. Special attention is paid to the question of how cultural brokers can be resourcesfor opening academic pipelines. The results indicate that the family remains the major single resource for the students, butother cultural brokers also become important over time. Starting from the observation that interventions are often directed atisolated transition points, Cooper outlines how programs can be aligned to cover the entire process of academic learning.In the closing discussion, Grundmann & Steinhoff deal with the papers from a socialization perspective which emphasizes thesignificance of language and discourse competence for human agency. Using the metaphor of a gearwheel they illustrate thedynamic interplay between conversational practices, individual skills and habits in diverse social contexts. The gearwheel isalso used to demonstrate that and how different contexts are dynamically interrelated. The crucial question is, then, whethercommunicative practices allow for the smooth application of skills and habits across contexts.

Taken together, these novel studies contribute to the current scientific discourses on primary and secondary disparities instudents' educational success. They show in which way families, peers and classrooms create different interactive and linguisticcontexts for the acquisition of linguistic and other skills as key competences in acquiring knowledge and prerequisites forlearning. The investigation of how these socialization contexts either work together or impede each other enhances ourunderstanding of the mechanisms of unequal educational chances.

Acknowledgments

Most of the articles of this special issue have been contributed by doctoral students and associated postdocs of the internationaland interdisciplinary NRW Research School Education and Capabilities. Elke Wild and Uta Quasthoff are Principal Investigators withthe Research School, and Catherine Cooper as well as Matthias Grundmann have been speakers at the School's internationalconferences.

In its goal of investigating the conditioning factors of educational disadvantages within and outside of schools, the ResearchSchool focusses on the acquisition of social and linguistic abilities as important competences both for learning and theparticipation in society, and explores processes and mechanisms of participation and exclusion. We thank the state of NorthRhine–Westphalia as well as the Universities of Dortmund and Bielefeld for funding the School and thus enabling the researchpresented here. We are also grateful for valuable help that was given to authors and guest editors in the course of numerousdiscussions of our projects by other members of the Research School.

The authors and guest editors also thank Michael Pätzold for valuable linguistic assistance in English proofreading the articles.Furthermore, we are grateful for detailed and helpful suggestions given by the anonymous reviewers of this issue.

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Last but not least, we would like to express our gratitude to all those who allowed us to observe and record, question or testthem; the empirical results presented here would not have been possible without their help.

Uta QuasthoffVivien Heller⁎

University of Technology, Dortmund, Research School Education & Capabilities, Germany⁎Corresponding author at: Department of Cultural Studies, Dortmund University of Technology,

Joseph-von-Fraunhofer-Str. 20, 44337 Dortmund. Tel.: +231 9700512.E-mail addresses: uta.quasthoff@uni-dortmund.de (U. Quasthoff), v.heller@educap.de (V. Heller).