engineering technologies of human discourse: information sciences, library sciences, commercial publishing, bureaucratic documents and files, the educational curriculum, the classic arts, and so on; all of these informational practices create the socio-functional world of "topic domains" or topics;

(9) the standardized routines for processing information on the daily round, i.e., standardized imaginings, is thus the medium that establishes the community as a socio-functional environment, system, or manifold;

(10) standardized imaginings are routinized in the activities we call reasoning, figuring out a problem, reacting, reporting, and describing.

Language Teaching is, in our opinion, the place in education and training where standardized imaginings occupy a primary focus. This follows if we redefine the goals of language teaching, away from speaking-listening-reading-writing, and towards oral and written literacy. The so-called four skills appear to us socio-functionally empty: they are legendary products of a prior and older technology. Instead, language teaching today can recognize itself as the locus of the new engineering age: the place where it intersects with a social psychology of the daily round's standardized imaginings. Language Teaching can encompass Philology, ethnosemantics, information science, and transactional engineering, since these are the organized community activities that comprise the display repertoire of whatever socio-cultural position of viewing and experiencing may be available to an individual. Display repertoire defines ethnicity: ethnicity is accounted in the terms of topic domains, usages, and registers as represented by the cataloguing practices of the community.

The Language Teacher can assume a central role in the acculturation process, inasmuch as enculturation, socialization, and assimilation are visible in the cataloguing practices of the community---what we would propose to refer to as "oral and written literacy". The social psychology of language teaching allows the language teacher to draw upon specialized skills already presupposed in a prior language teaching with a focus on linguistics, communication, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, literature, and cultural history or ethnography. These traditional activities of language teaching have evolved a special tradition of content, focus, and process in connection with discourse, language, and speech, i.e., oral and written literacy. Unique in this orientation is the involving commitment on the part of the language teacher as a natural ethnosemanticist and student of the social ritual: that is, his commitment and absorption with describing, contrasting, cataloguing and indexing units of information and topic; it is a concern with the adequacy of the records of society and the community; it is thus at the very base of meaning, coherence, and reference. The Language Teacher is verily the keeper of the sacred seal of the covenant that establishes and validates ritual. Instead of history, linguistics, sociolinguistics, and ethnography---all of which have a socio-political and psychocentric orientation, the language teacher can de-politicize his status as an agent of assimilation; instead of skills, competencies, personality, learning, and motivation---all of which imply the competitive socio-economic myth of "the reference group" and of "above standard" or "below-standard"' "achievement"; instead of a focus on society and group, with a consequent preoccupation with content and norms, the Language Teacher can shift focus towards a social psychology of the community and of relationship, one that objectifies life on the daily round through the study and practice of ritual (i.e., ethnopractice). We propose therefore that ethnopractice be the content of Language Teaching; that is, the study and practice of oral and written literacy through such activities as philology, ethnosemantics, and transactional engineering. Details of this proposal now follow.

2. Ethnocentric vs. Psychocentric Views on Language Teaching "Language and speech" represents a familiar contrast to language teachers: one usually says that language is a "system" while speech is a "process"; the first is static and abstract, while the second is dynamic and concrete. One also is generally aware that, in the historical perspective, linguists have largely confined themselves to the study and description of language as a system, while psychologists and language teachers have focused centrally on language as a process or activity itself, involving such sub-activities as articulating, expressing, and communicating.

While it is useful for some purposes to study the processes of articulation, expression, communication, composition, and so on, there are consequences to the fragmenting into separate parts that which is quite simply and unalterably a whole. Odd results are produced when we consider that a language learner may be able to articulate--as shown by tests of articulation--and as well, the learner may be able to arrange words in appropriate grammatical sequences--as shown by tests _ of grammar and reading comprehension--and yet may not be capable of participating in an ordinary conversation.

Currently in the United States, very intensive efforts are being; made in the language teaching field, to overhaul philosophy, methods, materials, and tests, so as to overcome these odd results (see current issues of TESOL, LL, and MIJ).

In the area of testing, the latest efforts are directed towards developing tests of communicative competence (e.g., Savignon, 1969; Jakobovits, 1970). In materials, publishers provide group and individualized packets for studying dialogue and practicing role act exchanges. Various methods of sequencing and structuring are applied, as derived from new proposals on the syntactic mechanisms underlying speech behavior (e.g., Hines, 1977). In philosophy, language teachers are being exposed to a new spectrum of dimensions in the process of speech; "The Silent Way" of language teaching (Gattegno, 1972), "Counseling or Community" language teaching (Curan, 1972), and "Transactional Engineering Approach to Language Teaching" (Jakobovits, 1974).

It is to be hoped that these renewed efforts in language teaching--perhaps the oldest of all school subjects (see Kelly, 1969)--may indeed improve the conversational performances of millions of language learners throughout the schools of the world's nations. Be that as it may, we feel there is a critical need for a general theory of social settings that may be able to guide these efforts at teaching language and literacy to millions. Such unified theories have served importantly in other sectors of society (e.g., economics, management sciences, and urban development). We would like to present some general observations concerning the nature of social settings and the place of talk in social relations. We hope these observations will contribute to the development of the "social psychology" of language teaching.4

The contrast language/speech implies a psychodynamic or psychocentric orientation. For instance, linguists today generally see their work on language as related to a "cognitive psychology" (Chomsky, 1968; Steinberg and Jakobovits, 1971), while psycholinguists see their work on speech as related to a "psychology of learning and motivation" (Jakobovits and Miron, 1967; Gardner and Lambert, 1972; Staats, 1975). Language teachers are exposed to the psychodynamic orientation through the professional literature (Jakobovits, 1970; Rivers, 1968; Stevick, 1976).

The psychocentric orientation is a familiar perspective on language and culture. The current modern views on communication and cognitive processes are preceded by a rich and vigorous history in literary criticism, historical reporting, and biography, to name but some important areas of culture where the psychocentric view has prevailed. It would be foolhardy to question the wisdom of so much precedence in favor of psychocentrism, and yet, what about ethno-centrism? The contrast ethnocentric/psychocentric corresponds to such other contrastive pairs as are indicated in the accompanying Table 2. The two orientations towards the social psychology of language teaching contrast significantly at the level of approach (Cluster A), theory (Cluster B), and method (Cluster C). We present in this table a "stereoscopic view", that is to say, the synthesis we propose as a frame for understanding the actual position of language teaching today. (Underlined words appear in Table 2.)

2a. Approach: Concerning approach, the ethnocentric view is focused on the community: the community, not the person, is the unit of analysis. The psychocentric view is focused on the interpersonal: the learner, not the community, is the unit of analysis. Language learning is seen as a psychological "problem": the person is visualized as a psychodynamic battlefield of conflicts; the person is seen as devising strategies at the cognitive-brain level, progressing on various scales of maturity, mental adjustment, and control over external and internal "pressures". Instead of these subjectifying legends and reified myths of the interpersonal world, the ethnocentric view reveals a socio-functional dialectic:

(1) it sees individual behavior as a role type enactment, not a distribution of interpersonal acts or dispositions to act, i.e., personality;

(2) an enactment derives from particular community practices, whereas acts derive from personality and mental adjustment;

(3) enactments imply an ethnodynamic perspective on the individual's place as framed by the community;

(4) the individual's behavior in its totality is to be catalogued by reference to community practices or social membership, i.e., in conduct, sentiments, conceptualizations, style;

(5) nothing is left over as a psychological responsibility of the person; everything is objectified and externalized;

(6) egocentricity is seen as indicating the relative position of the individual within the community (e.g., children and foreigners are unassimilated);

(7) cross-cultural differences are seen as specialized and abstract references to community legends: these characterize differences in self-claims rather than in actual ethnological differences in cultural ritual or in operations.

2b. Theory: Concerning theory, the ethnocentric view is focused on the exchange as the unit of analysis: the exchange, not the response, carries the transactions. In the psychocentric view, the individual's behavior is explained as a stimulus-response conditioning slowly and gradually building into a complex cognitive network of processes located in the brain. Once the person has acquired built-in automaticities or habits of responding and problem solving, he can respond appropriately to stimuli in interactions. In this psychocentric view, dialogue and discourse are "compositional" skills, i.e., individualized in motivation and intent. In contradistinction, the ethnocentric view:

(1) sees a social situation as the ethnodynamic occasion for talk;

(2) the person's subjective involvements are tied to features of a social episode in which he is a participant;

(3) the "tie" or hookup between the individual and the social occasion is accomplished through ethnodynamic principles: enculturation, socialization, and assimilation .

(4) the individual's consciousness and awareness are entirely accounted for: no social occasion is left uncatalogued in the standardized imaginings ;

(5) no experience, idea, position, or state is seen possible outside of a standardized transactional exchange, both public and in private with the self;

(6) social episodes are not interactional dialogues with primarily individualized though coordinated acts;

(7) social episodes are transactional, incidental, and legendary; they speak of the community and the standardized, not the intra-personal and psychological.

2c. Methods:

Concerning methods, the ethnocentric view sees language teaching as a process of "re-acculturating" the person into an additional community membership. Transactional engineering is the explicit attempt to make visible or crystallize the features of a social occasion to the participants who are involved in the exchange. The pedagogic issue in teaching talk concerns techniques for framing the student's already available repertoire of transactional displays. The individual does not need to be taught how to communicate, how to compose, how to express ideas: in the psychocentric view these are seen as individualized competencies, performances, and skills, to be taught in the target language. However, talk and displays are spontaneous activities; like walking and eating, the emerge in the ordinary course of dealing with the immediate environment (see Lenneberg, 1967).

In the psychocentric views of Vygostsky (1972) and Piaget (1954), European psychologists who have been enormously influential in American psychology, children are represented as internalizing formal operations of language and speech at a definite rate. Egocentricity is described as an operation with a "restricted" and/or defective logic, one incapable of standard patterns. Aarons, Gordon and Stewart (1969) and Gordon (1962) document recent attempts in the United States to accelerate the cognitive development of minority culture children.

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