“I Had a Stereotype That American Were Fat”: Becoming a Speaker of Culture in a Second Language HANH THI NGUYEN Hawai’i Pacific University Department of International Studies MP 441, 1188 Fort Street Mall Honolulu, HI 96813 Email: hnguyen@hpu.edu GUY KELLOGG Kapi’olani Community College Languages, Linguistics, and Literature Kalia 101, 4303 Diamond Head Road Honolulu, HI 96816 Email: gkellogg@hawaii.edu This article examines how adult learners were socialized by one another in the context of content materials in conjunction with the teacher’s participation. Based on the premise that second language learning is experiential and emergent and using discourse analysis of stu- dents’ asynchronous electronic postings and writing assignments together with ethnographic observations, we traced the students’ evolving understandings of a culturally rich word, stereo- type , over the course of one semester. We first looked at how the students understood the meaning of stereotype in early discussions, then at how these initial understandings changed as the students engaged in social activities in which their stances and identities became relevant, and finally at how these changes were exhibited in later discussions and written essays. Our analysis demonstrates concretely that learning a second language involves the acquisition not only of linguistic forms but also ways of thinking and behaving in new communities of practice. THE FIELD OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISI- TION (SLA) has made significant strides by tak- ing a social approach to language and language learning. The realization that “the process of ac- quiring a language is part of a much larger pro- cess of becoming a person in society” (Ochs, 2002, p. 106), originally applied only to first language learning, has become fundamental for research on SLA. As observed repeatedly (e.g., Firth & Wagner, 1997; Hall, 1997; Stoller, 2006: van Lier, 2000, 2002), classroom exercises that are decon- textualized and detached from real-life concerns, activities, and sense of self fail to help students learn to use the target language. We are com- pelled, together with Hall and Verplaetse (2000), Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000), and Young and Miller (2004), among others, to reconceptualize second language (L2) learning as participation; that is, when a person learns an L2, she or he not only learns new ways of expressing ideas but also The Modern Language Journal, 94, i, (2010) 0026-7902/10/56–73 $1.50/0 C 2010 The Modern Language Journal new ways of thinking, behaving, and being in new communities (cf. Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). In this sense, a crucial part of becoming a competent participant in a new social group, or “becoming a speaker of culture” (Ochs, 2002, p. 99), in an L2 is the process of associating particular linguistic forms with their situational meanings (i.e., meanings in social contexts; Ochs, 1996). Our goal in this article, therefore, is to understand how learning of meanings in an L2 is enabled by participation in social activities in which actions, stances, and identities are made relevant. EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING, SITUATED LEARNING, AND LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION According to van Lier (2002), language emerges from semiotic activities in which the learner actively engages with affordances in the environment and interacts with other people. As explained by van Lier (2000), the word affordance was first used by the perceptual