English Language Teaching in its Social Context

98 LEO VAN LIERIt is therefore useful to consider other forms of interaction, including conversational(such as learner-learner interactions) and see what characteristics they have that might berelevant to language learning. For a general examination of interaction, I suggest that thereare two main groups of issues:Issues of equality and inequality, including control and power. In this context, one thinksprimarily of teacher talk, but more generally the question of equality may play a role in anyinteraction between native and nonnative speakers or between a more proficient and a lessproficient nonnative speaker (van Lier and Matsuo 1995).Issues of negotiation and the joint construction of talk. This relates to shared rights andduties of participation, that is, interactional symmetry. Such symmetry, most clearly visiblein conversation among equals, may be more difficult to achieve for less proficient speakers.But, as the conversation between two ESL students quoted above demonstrates, it is by nomeans impossible.The phenomena relating to, on the one hand, control, power, and equality and, on the other,conversational symmetry and negotiation of meaning are connected: unequal participantstend to have asymmetrical interactions. But a distinction must be made between interactionsthat are oriented toward achieving symmetry and those that are not (IRF, lectures,instructions, and other common teacher talk belong to the second category).An Orientation toward symmetry does not necessarily involve an assumption of equalityor some sort of abdication of authority. A separation between symmetry and equality iscrucial for the possibility of fruitful communication between teachers and learners and,indeed, between native speakers and nonnative speakers. If true communication werepossible only hetween equals, then teachers and learners (and even parents and theirchildren) would be forever condemned to pseudo-communication.This is obviously not so.Having postulated that communication, whether between equals or unequals, requiresan orientation toward interactional symmetry, I now show, first, how such an orientationmay be visible and, second, what benefits it might have for language learning.In what ways can utterances be oriented toward symmetry? Basically, the orientationexpresses itself in relations of contingency between an utterance and other entities -primarily other utterances (preceding, concurrent, and following), shared knowledge, andrelevant features in the world (Gibson (1 979) calls them affordances; see further below).ContingencyThe term contindeny refers to two distinct characteristics of interaction: first, the signalingof relations between a current utterance and previous utterances, either directly (utteranceto utterance) or through shared knowledge or shared affordances in the environment;second, the raising of expectations and the crafting of deliberate ambiguities so that futureutterances can find a conversational home (see van Lier 1992, 1994 and 1996a). The firstcharacteristic has been well studied under the heading of contextualization by John Gumperz(1 992). The ways in which utterances are linked to one another have also been studiedextensively by ethnomethodologists,j who have used related concepts such as conditionalrelevance and reflexive tying (Garfinkel 1967; Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974).My preoccupation with contingency originates in the belief that speakers, by usinglanguage contingently, unite structure and function in the most fundamental way possible