Introduction

One of Earl Stevick's enduring contributions to the field of language education is the insight that ‘success depends less on materials, techniques, and linguistic analyses, and more on what goes on inside and between people in the classroom’ (Stevick 1980: 44).1 An important part of what does or does not go on has to do with relevance, in other words, the connection between something on the external dimension of human experience with something on the internal dimension of the student's appreciation of self (Stevick 1980: 119). Relevance breaks down if what happens does not make sense in terms of the learner's past, present or future realities (p. 118). The affairs of the classroom are thus firmly connected to the world beyond.

Conceptualizing the language learner in this way suggests not only a focus on the person, but a focus on that person as a ‘person-in-the-world’ (Lave and Wenger 1991: 5). It also encompasses matters of agency and identity (Miller 2010). In what follows, I explore this with reference to interaction in an adult immigrant language classroom along with connections to realities beyond it.

Agency

Second language acquisition researchers working within a sociocultural paradigm view the interrelated notions of agency, self and identity as being of importance in the learning of additional languages (van Lier 2010: ix). From a sociocultural perspective, agency is viewed as a person's capacity to act within the possibilities afforded by the social structures in which he or she is situated (van Lier 2008; Miller 2010). More specifically, as a context-related capacity: