One of Schegloff's points was to speak to the audience there about
"communicative competence." The notion of competence has, despite its rich
contextual arguments, in many ways built-in assumptions about individual
language speakers who "store" their language competence somewhere in the
body-mind for use in a variety of contexts (a point Alessandro Duranti
brought up in a later session at the AAAL meetings).
Schegloff's rhetorical strategy, as Jay alludes to, was to show how a
particular man's actual _performance_ of interaction involved his carrying
out tasks that a test-situation diagnosis of his ability to understand
pragmatic and metapragmatic cues predicted he could not do (based on some
form of brain injury).
While on the one hand, this rhetorical strategy is one that I think we are
accustomed to using in sociocultural research, I'm not sure it is convincing
enough to address the claims at stake in the communicative competence view.
From that standpoint, it is not enough to argue that someone does something
_once_: the notion of communicative competence embeds an assumption about
decontextualization of skill and being able to re-contextualize language
skills in a variety of settings.
While some of us might object to the "storage" metaphor altogether, it is
challenging to find convincing sociocultural arguments for how participation
accounts of cultural activities can interpret these data and make convincing
arguments. As others on this list have suggested in the past, some of the
answer to this particular dilemma may rely on the relations among activities
and homologies between forms of participation across different cultural
activities that make it easier to re-contextualize language practices in
alien or new settings.
Bill Penuel
_________________________
PreventionInventions
PO Box 40692
Nashville TN 37204
(615) 297-5923