English Language Teaching in its Social Context

Chapter 5Leo van LierCONSTRAINTS AND RESOURCES INCLASSROOM TALK: ISSUES OF EQUALITYAND SYMMETRYOST CURRENT VIEWS OF LANGUAGE education are based on theM assumption that social interaction plays a central role in learning processes, as aquick glance at the dominant terminology shows. “Communication,” “negotiation ofmeaning,”“co-construction,”“coopcrative learning,”“responsive teaching,” and many otherterms like them testify to a fundamental shift from conditioning, association, and otherlaboratory-based notions of learning to human learning as it is situated in the everyday socialworld of the learner.This shift to the social context (and construction) of language learning does not makethe invcstigation of learning processcs any easier. On thc contrary. The security of isolatingvariables and defining them operationally, a security obtained by laboratory-like experimentsand statistical inferences, is largely lost, as the researcher is forced to look for determinantsof learning in the fluid dynamics of real-time learning contexts.Traditionally we have thought of scientific research as a matter of looking into causesand effects, and the benefits have been cast in the shape of generalizations from a sample toa population and of accurate predictions of future occurrcnces.This research scenario, whileadequate for simple physical processes and laboratory-controlled behaviors, will no longerwork once we venture forth into the real world of complexity, in which many people andcircumstances act and interact. Here there are no simple causes, and predictability mustyield to contingency. Research must be aimed at increasing our understanding, bothholistically and in the smallest details, of the social setting as a complex adaptive system.Increased understanding allows us not to generalize but to particularize, that is, to adaptour skills, ideas, and strategies to the changing circumstances and the multifarious influencesof the contexts in which the investigated processes occur.It is of the utmost importance to realize how different the job ofresearching languagelearning becomes once we decide that the social context is central.To continue looking foroperationally defined, discretely measured, statistically manipulated, and causally predictivevariables would be to approach one job with tools that belong to another. It would belike going to an archaeological site with a combine harvester or like shining shoes with anail file.In this essay I examine social interaction in language-learning settings from the pointof view that such settings are complex systems in which both attention to detail and global