This article presents four more‐or‐less independent reasons why TESOL educators should be cautious about adopting critical thinking pedagogies in their classrooms: (a) Critical thinking may be more on the order of a non‐overt social practice than a well‐defined and teachable pedagogical set of behaviors; (b) critical thinking can be and has been criticized for its exclusive and reductive character; (c) teaching thinking to nonnative speakers may be fraught with cultural problems; and, (d) once having been taught, thinking skills do not appear to transfer effectively beyond their narrow contexts of instruction. A more recently developed model of cognitive instruction, cognitive apprenticeship, is then briefly discussed as a possible alternative to more traditional thinking skills pedagogies. This thing we call “critical thinking” or “analysis” has strong cultural components. It is more than just a set of writing and thinking techniques—it is a voice, a stance, a relationship with texts and family members, friends, teachers, the media, even the history of one's country. This is why “critical analysis” is so hard for faculty members to talk about; because it is learned intuitively it is easy to recognize, like a face or a personality, but it is not so easily defined and is not at all simple to explain to someone who has been brought up differently. (Fox, 1994, p. 125)

This article develops the notion of a sociocognitive perspective on second language acquisition (SLA), proposed as an alternative to the cognitivism pervading the field. By sociocognitive, I mean a view of language and language acquisition as simultaneously occurring and interactively constructed both "in the head" and "in the world."First, I develop a view of language and its acquisition as social phenomena-as existing and taking place for the performance of action in the (socially-mediated) world. Second, I describe the cognitive nature of language and its acquisition, focusing especially on recent developments in connectionism. Third, I introduce sociocognitive views of language and posit a social interpretation of connectionism as bridging the gap between cognition and social action. Fourth, I discuss sociocognitive perspectives on first language acquisition. Fifth, I describe the cognitivist biases of much SLA research, then suggest how sociocognitive approaches can help overcome them. I end by considering implications of the perspective I develop in this paper.Theorists and researchers tend to view SLA as a mental process, that is, to believe that language acquisition resides mostly, if not solely, in the mind. (Davis, 1995, pp. 427-428) Most SLA researchers view the object of inquiry as in large part an internal, mental process. (Long, 1997, p. 319) SLA has been essentially a psycholinguistic enterprise, dominated by the computational metaphor of acquisition.

This article argues for the crucial role of alignment in second language acquisition, as conceptualized from a broadly sociocognitive perspective. By alignment, we mean the complex processes through which human beings effect coordinated interaction, both with other human beings and (usually human-engineered) environments, situations, tools, and affordances.The article begins by summarizing what we mean by a sociocognitive approach to second language acquisition. We then develop the notion of alignment, first in terms of general learning/activity and next in relation to second language (L2) learning. Following that, we provide an extended example of alignment-in-action, focusing on the coordinated activities of a Japanese junior high school student and her tutor as they study English in their sociocognitively constructed world. Next, we speculate on possible uses of the alignment concept in L2 research and teaching, and finally we conclude by restating our claim-that alignment is a necessary and crucial requirement for L2 development.ALIGNMENT IS THE COMPLEX MEANS BY which human beings effect coordinated interaction, and maintain that interaction in dynamically adaptive ways. It is a fundamental tenet of the sociocognitive approach to second language acquisition (Atkinson, 2002; cf., Gee, 1992; WatsonGegeo, 2004) that L2 development takes place through such articulated mind-body-world activity, of which the cognitive internalization of input The Modern Language Journal, 91, ii, (2007) 0026-7902/07/169-188 $1.50/0 C 2007 The Modern Language Journalis only a part. In this sense, language learning is akin to improvisational dance, team sports, conversation, driving, and in fact all forms of interaction-what goes on between is of equal importance to what goes in and how it gets processed. Indeed, if thinking, feeling, doing, and learning are all part of a larger ecological circuit, as we will argue, then what goes on between and what goes in cannot properly be separated.In this article, we begin by summarizing what we mean by a sociocognitive approach to second language acquisition. Next, we develop the notion of alignment, first in terms of general learning/activity, and then specifically in relation

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Culture is a central yet underexamined concept in TESOL. In comparison to other fields such as anthropology and cultural studies, there has been little serious discussion and critique of the concept in TESOL over the last two decades. This article offers a reassessment of the notion of culture in TESOL, taking recent work in critical anthropology and cultural studies, and to a lesser degree TESOL itself, as a starting point. It proposes a revised view of culture that is intended to serve TESOL practitioners into the 21st century, or that can at least provide a takeoff point from which such a view may be developed. E xcept for language, learning, and teaching, there is perhaps no more important concept in the field of TESOL than culture. Implicitly or explicitly, ESL teachers face it in everything they do. Yet there has been remarkably little direct attention given to the notion of culture in TESOL over the past 15 years. The 1991 volume of TESOL Quarterly, for instance, devoted in part to describing major trends and concepts in the field, featured no general discussion of the concept; and only 10 full-length articles in the journal over the past 15 years have included the term (or alternate forms of the word) in their titles.One possible interpretation of this trend is that the field in general has adopted a received, commonsense view of culture that seems to merit little discussion, as it is so widely held in academia and the world at large. This appears in fact to be the case in several related fields, such as cross-cultural communication and psychology. A second possibility is that the standard notion of culture has fallen into such disrepute in recent years that TESOL practitioners and theorists have gradually come to eschew it largely or altogether, finding other concepts and categoriessuch as identity and difference -by which to treat some of the phenomena that were earlier dealt with under culture. This appears actually to be the case in parts of cultural anthropology and cultural studies.Whatever the truth in regard to general approach or approaches to