English Language Teaching in its Social Context

CONSTRAINTS AND RESOURCES IN CLASSROOM TALK 103is a standardized, official code (a set of cultural habits) to which the learner has to or wantsto conform, linguistic affordances marked as appropriate and desirable must be presentedin the environment, and access to these affordances must be facilitated. Here organiclanguage development and external language demands (socioculturally and institutionallymandated) meet each other halfway, and Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development is thespace wherein internal and external realms (inner resources and outer constraints) oflanguage are mediated.This mediation takes place under the guidance of parents, teachers, and othercompetent persons, and the different ways they do this can be captured by terms such asBruner’s scafolding. (Teaching, didactics, instruction, training, drilling, and so on are of coursealso terms that have traditionally been used for such expert-novice activities.)If this view of the relations between language learning and social interaction has merit,then the dynamic connections between more didactic (asymmetrical, less contingent) andmore conversational (symmetrical, more contingent) forms of interaction are of centralimportance in the language learning enterprise.A practical conclusionIn a book on talented teenagers, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Kevin Rathunde, and SamuelWhalen (1 993) compare current teaching with the traditional role of the master in anapprentice system.They observe that the teacher, instead of being a practitioner in a domain,is now a transmitter of information and thus discourages the development of extended andtransforming relationships such as those between master and apprentice. Relationshipsbetween teachers and students are depersonalized and “kept highly specialized,programmatic, and brief”. Technical terms such as “instructional delivery systems” anddetailed specifications of instructional objectives corroborate this tendency.Things can onlyget worse when, as is currently happening in many parts of the Western world, class sizesand school sizes keep increasing, as do teachers’ workloads.There are thus physical and institutional constraints that tend to minimize the possibilitiesfor meaningful interaction between teachers and students. In Giddens’s structurationtheory, constraints ideally direct and guide, facilitating the deployment of resources. But ina defective institution (definable as one in whch constraints and resources arc out of balance),constraints may obstruct the very purposes for which they were brought into being. Againstconstraints of this second type, thc teacher must marshal all the resources, meager thoughthey often appear to be, that are available to provide learning opportunities to students. Asthe history of educational reform movements shows, large-scale reforms tend to achievelittle transformation of the status quo. But grassroots, bottom-up innovations, usually basedon individual initiative, can produce dramatic results, albeit at the local level only.Marshaling available resources to promote rich and varied interaction with and amongstudents must be the individual responsibility of every teacher. For teacher developmentthis responsibility means the promotion of what Max van Manen (1 991 ) calls “pedagogicalthoughtfulness” or “tact,” a mindful, understanding orientation in dealings with students andan ability to act wisely. Many teachers have responded to calls for more interactive andresponsive ways of teaching by reducing their teacher-fronted activities and increasinglearner-learner interaction through cooperative learning and task-based learning. In currentjargon, they have become a “guide on the side” instead of a “sage on the stage”.However, before we swing the pendulum from teacher-centered entirely to teacherperipheral,it may be worth reflecting on what the optimal roles of a teacher should be.