English Language Teaching in its Social Context

CONSTRAINTS AND RESOURCES IN CLASSROOM TALI< 93conversation at the request of a researcher. But time and place may make a difference in theway talk is conducted, and lcarning talk inside lessons may differ structurally from learningtalk outside lessons. This possibility needs to be taken into account when learners’ andteachers’ interactions are analy7ed.There arc practical consequences of this constraints-resources view of languagc lcarningcontexts. In an article entitled “NoTalking in Class,” J. H. Lii (1 994) depicts the traditionalrole of teacher as one of lecturing and that of students as “mostly listening passively in class.”Indeed, a student is quoted as saying that he used to have “trouble concentrating because hewas so bored by lectures.”These comments fit the known stereotypes of teaching wellenough.The interesting twist here is that in the innovative class described (whch has twentyfivestudents), the problem is solved not by the teacher’s changing his way of speaking andinteracting with the students but by the placing of a computer between the teacher and thetaught. Thanks to the insertion of the computer, students “now have the opportunity tointeract with teachers and receive instant feedback.” A skeptical person might ask, Why dointeraction and feedback require an artificial interface? Why can’t professors interact withtheir students without a computer?Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, in their work on cultural reproduction,suggest that the institution equips the teacher with certain distancing techniques; the mostefficient technique is “magisterial discourse,” which condemns the teacher to “theatricalmonologue.” So powerful is this institutional control over the teacher’s language use,according to Bourdieu and Passeron (1 977) that “efforts to set up dialogue immediately turninto fiction or farce”. The possibility that computer use may be able to circumvent theseinstitutional constraints is intriguing.This characterization of teacher-student interaction may seem overdrawn andunrepresentative of today’s classrooms, many of which are more dynamic and democratic.But there is no doubt that in various subtle or overt ways the institutional setting constrainsthe types of talk that can occur within its domain; and it is an open question whether ateacher is free to ignore such constraints in the interests of pedagogical action. Bourdieuand Passeron are clearly skeptical about the possibility of that freedom, though perhapstransformation-minded educators may want to see how far they can go, and to what effect.The institutional setting, of course, offers resources and facilitates their deployment inthe tangible form of budgets, materials, equipment, and the likc, but also in the form, lesspalpable though perhaps more important, of authority and power: the authority to set theagenda, the power to judge (and grade, test, pass, fail); the authority to speak, the powerto control and evaluate the speech of others. This authority and this power have traditionallydefined the teacher and the work of teaching, but they are increasingly viewed as no longerappropriate in today’s learning environments. John Merrow reports the story of a teacher’snot knowing how to continue with a multimedia project after a specialized instructor waslaid off. It had not occurred to this teacher that she could ask the students to teach her;asking them did not fit her concept of the teacher’s role. As Merrow (1 995) suggests,“teachers won’t survive, and school will become increasingly irrelevant, if teachers don’tchange their style of teaching,” a style he refers to as “the bank deposit approach”.It is within the structure of institutional constraints and resources that the teacher’sinteraction with learners must take place. When teacher talk and teacher-learner interactionare examined, particularly when recommendations for changes are made, these structuringforces must be kcpt in mind. If interaction is as important for language learning as currenttheories claim it is, then the kinds of interaction the classroom permits and the changes theteacher can realistically make to those kinds of interaction are of great importance toresearch.