ABSTRACT
In the last few decades, the work of Mikhail Bakhtin has gained wide dissemination in many parts of the world and has received an enormous amount of critical attention. In particular, his philosophy of language has spread to numerous Fields of sociological inquiry, including current research into language and literacy education. The impact of his ideas on the research and pedagogy of second and foreign language, however, has been more gradual. One reason for this is that the field of second language acquisition is still predominantly informed by structural linguistics and cognitive psychology, focusing on the study of self-consistent systems of language and the workings of individual minds. Even though these studies contribute to the construction of second language acquisition as a discipline in its own right, a dominant positivistic approach underlying them obscures what it means to teach and learn a second language in the contemporary world: a world characterized not only by great sociocultural and linguistic heterogeneity but also by cultural domination, assimilation, and xenophobia. In this respect, Bakhtin’s commitment to the profoundly social nature of language and consciousness, to the dialogical dynamism of cultural-semiotic life, to the recognition of the plurality of voices, and to the coexistence of differences offers fertile ground for researchers and practitioners who seek to make sense of second language and literacy learning in multicultural societies and classrooms. In this chapter, then, I endeavor to explore the relevance of Bakhtinian ideas for a socially critical approach to English-as-a-second-language (ESL) education,
especially in current conditions when conservative and liberal notions of cultural diversity and difference claim to provide final vocabularies for adjudicating tensions in multicultural societies.
