In contrast to the above, the ethnocentric view:

(1) sees egocentricity as unassimilation, and ethnocentrism as socio-functional assimilation;

(2) that is, the person's conduct and consciousness emerge by virtue of acculturation, not competence;

(3) talk is a natural and spontaneous product of involvement in social occasions. The uninvolved, the non-participant, the unassimilated do not talk;

(4) instead, they engage in a form of communication involving an exchange of signals and meanings. The contrast talk/communication is crucial for the ethnocentric view. Communication is a psychocentric component: it implies encoding and decoding operations inside the brain, as well as noise, and memory storage mechanisms; it implies breakdowns, tuneups, and finite capacity. Communicative competence implies a competitive ethic with the usual socio-political implications. Ordinary skills on the daily round are ethnocentric and products of ethnicity or community cataloguing practices, rather than symptoms of individualized modes of adjustment, i.e., "achievement". In contradistinction, the ethnocentric orientation:

(5) sees the ordinary practices that are on-going on the daily round of regulars in a community, as an "accomplishment" of the participants in the state of relationship;

(6) the notion of individualized achievement as a sociopolitical selection system is shunned in favor of the recognition that topicalizing and referring are situationally determined arguments or presentations; that is, an individual's topicalizing and referring activities in talk and thought are not "expressions" of ideas and "construction" of coherence, but rather, indications of the person's positions along the ethnodynamic map---one can say, the spots or social occasions the person occupies in the course of ordinary interchanges on the daily round;

(7) in fact, one can find no acts, thoughts, feelings, states, that are outside the catalogued boundaries of community practices;

(8) "community" implies a socio-cultural manifold that excludes uncharted zones, positions, or spots; i.e., there is no place, activity, dilemma, perception, reaction, etc. that isn't recognized and claimed by some membership in the community;

(9) this claim upon everything culturally possible is supported or validated through topicalizing and referring: community organized knowledge, in the forms, i.e., registers of science, poetry, wisdom, dictionaries, almanacs, etc., is a technology of discourse that records the topicalizing and referring activities in the community;

(10) ''community" is the socio-cultural environment in which particular practices (i.e., ethnicity) grow, are maintained, and change on a continuous historical basis;

(11) "community practices" (e.g., socialization, assimilation) consist of managing recurrent and ritualized social occasions: thus, an individual's conduct on the daily round consists of participating in transactional exchanges in social settings;

(12) "participating" as a regular (or regular member) in the community implies that the individual occupies various role type positions (or social spots) in the course of exchanging, transacting, and relating;

(13) these role type positions "involve" the individual in an ethnocentric orientation or mode of viewing: the behavior is the outcome of the position, not the brain or the psyche;

(14) since all forms of behavior are the outcome of the ethnodynanic position of the individual, we use the terms standardized imaginings and interior dialogue to refer to the modes of operation that are familiar to regulars of a community;

(15) "familiar to the community" implies recognition or framed reconstruction: whatever the experience or observation that is being referred to by the person, its presentation within a framed social occasion implies that it conforms to a standard (accepted) method of referring to experience;

(16) the cataloguing of standard methods of referring used in a particular community, yields ethnosemantic descriptions, i.e., morphotopological representations of situated arguments;

(17) "situated arguments" are identifiable routines participants use in sequencing their transactional exchanges;

(18) these sequencing activities are spontaneous and occasioned by the features of the setting which capture the person's involvement.

It is particularly important that the language teacher understand the nature of the mechanism that "captures the person's involvement".5 This is the essence of the proposal we are calling the transactional engineering approach to language teaching, inasmuch as transactional engineering is the technique participants in an exchange use to control each other's involvements.6 The language teacher can use principles of frame control in the classroom; that is, engineering transactional involvements is accomplished when the students are placed or positioned into social occasions or "spots". When students find themselves involved in a social occasion, topicalization and referring activities appear spontaneously. These spontaneous enactments are consequences of the students' involvement; they cannot be "taught" directly as in play-acting rehearsals. Involvement is an ethnodynamic component: it springs only from relationship; i.e., the persons' relatedness to the community of others. Hence, to produce involvement as a routine instructional accomplishment in the classroom, every student must experience his relatedness to whatever activity is being required of him in the role of student. Managing this involvement is possible in frame control.

3. Transactional Engineering as Frame Control:

The teacher's routine concerns involving common dilemmas about how to "best" sequence, select, motivate, diagnose, correct, remedy, and so on, are symptoms of a psychocentric pedagogic orientation: these dilemmas imply that the teacher subscribes to the view that language is in the brain, that the brain can be modified through certain sorts of practice, etc. (e.g., Stevick, 1976). In this mode of behavior, the teacher experiences the process of teaching as fighting, conflicts, blocks, and errors (e.g., Curran, 1972; Jakobovits, 1970; Rivers, 1968). There is an imbalance due to excessive fragmentation of the teacher-student transactions: the fragmentation is evident in the psychodynamic involvement of teachers and students in the "learning process".

In contradistinction to this, the notion of engineering transactions to produce involvement, carefully avoids assumptions about what happens inside the head of "the learner" and effectively dimensionalizes the problem of content through re-focusing on the frames of language teaching. Thus, rather than ask "What-questions" (e.g., What shall I teach, use, do next, etc.), the teacher can focus on the available means for producing involvements in relating. No other kind of involvement can produce spontaneous talk. To the extent that one's involvement is with relationship rather than with meaning, to that extent the participant's conduct in exchanges will be genuine, spontaneous, natural, ordinary. On the contrary, to the extent that one's involvement is with performance rather than relationship (i.e., responding, communicating, improving, etc.), then to that extent the student's involvement is only indirectly and distantly concerned with talking; in that case, the students' "talking performances" are not genuine forms of spontaneous talk: the student is beset with all sorts of psychocentric preoccupations (e.g., What do I say? How do I say it?).

The ethnodynamic orientation recognizes talk as spontaneous behavior occasioned in social exchanges between participants in relationship. Therefore, the pedagogic focus is switched from teaching language to teaching talk; and as well, from teaching per se to not-teaching, i.e., from teaching content to controlling frame. Frame control in language teaching can be exercised in two dimensions simultaneously: information and involvement. We shall discuss each in turn.

3a. Information Frame Control:

Information frame control is also known to the teacher operating in the psychocentric mode where it is referred to as "knowledge of a language" along a number of hierarchical networks (phonological, syntactic, grammatical, lexical, historical, cultural). This familiarity with controlling information can be duly exploited in the technique of information frame control. We know of three available methods for accumulating socio-cultural facts a foreigner needs in the process of getting re-acculturated to a new milieu; these are (1) the use of informants; (2) microdescriptions of cataloguing practices; and (3) information projects. These we shall now describe briefly, after which we will go on to discuss involvement frame control.

First, the use of informants. This is a peculiarly well suited application of an ethnocentrically oriented approach to the teaching of talk. This involves engineering transactions by introducing cooperative teacher aids into the classroom and course setting; e.g., paraprofessionals, guests, visitors, older students, peers, community people and places. In the psychocentric mode, not anyone may be a teacher aid since the "skills" to be "taught" were "technical" (e.g., linguistics and supervision). No such skills are involved in the execution of the role of informant. It is sufficient to insure that the informant is an ordinary and cooperative person: whatever additional characteristics are apparent can be exploited (i.e., making special use of it) or ignored. Activities may be specified by the teacher and all sorts of instructions may be given to direct their context (i.e., to "frame"). The goal of all activities is to provide the medium of relationship; that is, the students and the informants, diadically or in groups, become the participants to social occasions created by their exchanges in the course of these activities prescribed by the teacher. Note that simulated social occasions, as in practice dialogue and role-acting, are not transactional engineering procedures for teaching oral literacy, since the setting features occasioning the topical interchange are all imaginary, or imagined. In that case, the students' standardized imaginings are related to acting skills and not to relationship features. As a result, practicing simulated social occasions produces spontaneity in acting, not in talking. One is a psychocentric concern (acting), while the other is ethnocentric (involvement in relationship).

Second, microdescriptions of cataloguing practices. We use this expression to refer to the preparation of reports in which a person gives a detailed and <../society/hp.html">objectified description of a social occasion. The reports are about small segments of behavior (e.g., sneezing, shaking hands, preparing to ask a question, etc.) as well as large (e.g., an episode, a relationship, a time period). Each report contains details about the situational context of the reported event 90 that a reader may be able to reconstruct the event in sufficient detail to imagine or visualize what happened as an actual scene. In this manner, the units of reporting the person uses are common sensical and natural. In the context of the second language course, the students can be assigned various tasks, small, very small, or large, and then prepare objectified reports of the experience. Or, a daily log of activities on the daily round may be kept, and so on. Students prepare these reports orally on tape or in writing, or both, and using the first language, the second, or both.

Information frame control thus consists of the exploitation of community facilities in the teaching of a second language; first, through informants who have a small or a considerable degree of familiarity with the practices of the target speakers, as the case may be; second, through microdescriptions of social occasions which serve as opportunities for the student to rehearse and practice "focusing techniques", i.e., the requirement to objectify in micro-detail the student's involvements in a social occasion, serves to dedramatize and de-emotionalize them, thus freeing the student from overly self-conscious involvements that are common in re-acculturation; and third, through assigning all sorts of activities that build up the information pool the student accumulates: e.g., philology projects based on dictionaries, thesaurus, and sources of topical information about the target community's cataloguing practices, i.e., what's being talked about, what's being noticed, what's being held in common what's being held by sectarian groups, and so on.

3b. Involvement Frame Control

This involves a shift in the teacher's focus from "issues" to presentations. In the psychocentric orientation, practice dialogue and assumed roles in framed exchanges are commonly used techniques intended to improve the speech performances of students. Note the common symptoms associated with these attempts: students have to overcome all sorts of reluctances to engage in them and report such dilemmas as not knowing what to say and not knowing how to say it; as well, both students and teachers are preoccupied with responding, making errors, translating or not, paraphrasing, composing, and so on. All these involvements are consequences of the frame being used: in the psychocentric mode, "the issue", or "topic", or "assigned role" are the frames applied by the teacher; hence, the resultant involvements are self-conscious, performative, and non-spontaneous. In contradistinction to this, in the ethnocentric mode, episodal presentations in relationship are the frames applied by the teacher: whatever activities are set-up by the teacher, they are always framed as taking place within an actual social episode. This can only happen in actual relationship and cannot be duplicated or simulated in play acting or role acting. This is so because play-acting or role acting are necessarily self-conscious performances: i.e., the person is imagining his involvements rather than living them. It is not a genuine social involvement of talk, though it may be of something else. For talk itself, the involvement is ordinarily and naturally spontaneous: it springs from relating, not from practicing nor imagining relatedness through simulation.

Thus, the teacher can shift focus from the content of instructional activities ("issues" oriented) to frames for arranging relationship episodes on behalf of the students. Transactional engineering refers to these social arrangements the teacher engineers rather than to the teacher's social competence and expertise in handling people' The latter notions are, of course, psychocentric and foreign to transactional engineering. Instead, the teacher uses pedagogical skills for the engineering of transactions in the classroom, not psychological ones. These pedagogical skills are applied to framing the conditions of relationship between the participants brought together by the teacher's directives, either diadically or in groups. In this manner, the students' involvements are natural and spontaneous. Talk springs naturally from such involvements (Martin, et al., 1976; Rosen and Rosen, 1973). In no time at all, the student evolves an expanding repertoire of transactional skills in the context of which talk assumes an increasing role. This is a natural process: talk should not be taught directly; instead, talk emerges from involvements in relationship. As in

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