158 The Social Construction of Age
can offset this tendency. For example, the use of ageist humor, while still
socially acceptable in many sectors of society, is potentially offensive. In the
same way, treating younger adult students as children or adopting a patron-
izing attitude toward mature students can be degrading.
" Learning a new language involves fundamental experiences of a social
nature that shape this undertaking in significant ways. The formal lan-
guage class can be seen more broadly as an experience that leads to both
linguistic and nonlinguistic outcomes for adults of all ages. Thus, a teach-
ing focus that is exclusively aimed at mastery of the language overlooks
opportunities for the lessons to provide a rewarding and meaningful expe-
rience for the learner, seen as a complex person who lives in and partici-
pates in a world extending far beyond the classroom. What takes place in
the classroom often spills over into the students lives outside it and vice
versa. Ideally, the language class satisfies the real-world concerns and aspi-
rations of the learners, including, but not limited to, linguistic attainment.
An awareness of this signifies taking a different pedagogic approach to the
lessons, activities, classroom dynamics and relations with the students.
Implications for SLA Research
Looking at age as social also has repercussions for the field of SLA
research, which has traditionally focused on age only as an isolated biological
factor that could account for differential success in language learning. A
social constructionist approach offers a more nuanced understanding of age,
one that contemplates the experiential side of language learning and extends
to both linguistic and nonlinguistic outcomes. While a growing body of
SLA work in the sociocultural tradition has undertaken studies of socially
constructed dimensions of identity, including gender, social class and eth-
nicity, age has not been included. This is a major oversight. Age, as I have
argued, is an important part of the complex of a person s identities.
Understanding the language learner as a whole person means taking into
account their temporality  where they position themselves and are posi-
tioned by others at a specific moment in time, as well as where they have
been. One of the purposes of this book has been to rectify this gap.
Another is to add a different perspective on age to what has been learned
in psycholinguistically oriented SLA research. Because of the CPH debate,
age has been a central topic in discussions surrounding language learning.
The social constructionist focus on age taken in this book is intended to
provide a complement to work carried out in the cognitive tradition of SLA.
Implications for Age Studies
Lastly, the research has relevance for the growing interdisciplinary field
of age studies, whose  founding proposition [is] the priority of culture in