English Language Teaching in its Social Context

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT FOR LANGUAGE LEARNING 123event with the aim of influencing psychological development. The teacher is obligedcontinually to integrate the learning experiences of individuals with the collective andcommunal activities of a group of which, unlike the researcher, he is not an outsider. Theresearcher enters the classroom when a genuine sociocognitive experiment is already wellunder way. In evaluating the findings of research, because of abstraction from the daily lifeof the class, we need to discover and make clear for ourselves the particular perceptions of aclassroom which we, as researchers, hold either before we enter it or subsequent to thecollection of our data. It is a truism of social anthropology that no human social institutionsor relationships can be adequately understood unless account is taken of the expectations,values, and beliefs that they engage. This is no less true of the institution of research. Thedefinition of the classroom situation that we hold will influence how we perceive theclassroom group and how we might act within it, and this is as unavoidable for the researcheras it is for a teacher or a learner. One of the paradoxes of research is to challenge taken-forgrantedbeliefs whilst, at the same time, clinging to beliefs which sustain the rescarchendeavour. Belief allows the researcher (and many teachers and learners) to take for grantedthe capacity of a classroom to metamorphose instructional inputs into learning outcomes.Is there psychological proof for this relationship between teaching and learning, or is it abelief sustained primarily by the social purpose that we invest in a gathering of teacher andtaught?Can we detect particular definitions of the classroom situation within current languagelearning research? What metaphors for a classroom are available to us as researchers atpresent? I wish to explore two metaphors for the classroom that emerge from two recentand influential rcscarch traditions. I am conscious that there may be as many metaphorsfor the classroom as there are researchers in language learning. But I have to be brief and Iam encouraged to generalise here by the tendency of researchers to seek security aroundparticular dominant paradigms or ways of seeing. ’ One prevailing metaphor is the classroomas experimental laboratory, and another, more recently emergent, is the classroom asdiscourse. I will briefly explore both.The classroom as experimental laboratoryWe are encouraged to regard the classroom as experimental laboratory by the area of theoryand research known as Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Its tradition can be traced backto studies in first language acquisition, through investigation of the natural order ofacquisition of certain grammatical morphemes, through the comprehensive theoricsof Krashen, and up to the recent flowering in the identification of learner strategies fromretrospective accounts offered by individual learners - either verbally or within learningdiaries. The primary function of the language classroom as implied or sometimes directlyrecommended by SLA research is that the learner, by being placed in a classroom, can beexposed to a certain kind of linguistic input which may be shown to correlate with certaindesirable learning outcomes. Here, the value and purpose of the classroom is its potentialto provide linguistic data that are finely tuned for the efficient processing of new knowledge;classrooms can wash learners with optimal input. Researchers’ more recent inferences fromlearners’ accounts of their own strategies encourage us to deduce further that the classroomis a place in which we might reinforce good language-learning strategies so that the inputbecomes unavoidably optimal. As thc mainstream of SLA rcsearch rests on the assumptionthat the comprehension of input is the catalyst of language development, it implies arole for the teacher that is delimited yet complex. In essence, either the teacher must