English Language Teaching in its Social Context

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT FOR LANGUAGE LEARNING 125learning outcomes, or to explain possible relationships between strategic behaviourand language learning, then we need to locate these relationships sonally. How and whylearners do what they do will be strongly influenced by their situation, who they are with,and by their perceptions of both.4Given that we wish to understand how the external social situation of a classroom relatesto the internal psychological states of the learncr, the metaphor of the classroom as providerof optimal input or reinforcer of good strategies is inadequate. It reduces the act or experienceof learning a language to linguistic or behavioural conditioning somehow independentof the learner’s social reality. Not only is SLA research currently offering us a delimitedaccount of language learning, reducing active cognition to passive internalisation andreducing language to very specific grammatical performance, the mainstream of SLAresearch is also asocial. It neglects the social significance of even those variables which theinvestigators regard as central. The priority given to linguistic and mentalistic variablesin terms of the efficient processing of knowledge as input leads inevitably to a partialaccount of the language learning process.The social context of learning and the social forceswithin it will always shape what is made available to be lcarned and the interaction ofindividual mind with external linguistic or communicative knowledge. Even Wundt, thefirst experimental psychologist, bclicvcd that he could not study higher mental processessuch as reasoning, belief, thought, and language in a laboratory precisely because suchprocesses were rootcd within authentic social activity.’ A more recent research tradition -an offspring of work in SLA - does address intervening social variables. This traditionprovides my second metaphor.The classroom as discourseRecent classroom-bascd or classroom-oriented research explicitly seeks to describe whatactually happens in a rather special social situation. This research relies upon methods ofconversational and sociolinguistic data collection and analysis, thereby seeking to offer aricher and less prcscriptive account of classroom language lcarning than earlier investigationsof the comparative effects of different teaching methodologies.6 Classroom-orientedresearch focuses primarily upon the discourse of classroom communication. It sees teacherand learners as active participants in the generation of the discoursc of lessons. Here, theresearcher explores the classroom as a text which reveals such phenomena as variableparticipation by learners, various error treatments by teachers, and specific features ofclassroom talk such as teacher evaluation, teacher-learner negotiation, and prevalentinstructional speech acts including display questions, formulation or explanation, andmessage adjustment. Although much of this research seems to avoid being intentionallyexplanatory in terms of the possible effects of classroom discourse upon language learning,some investigators seek to correlate selected features of classroom talk with certain learningbehaviours or learned outcomes. Classroom-oriented rcscarch rests on the assumptionthat the discourse of a language class will reveal what is special and important about thatlanguage learning situation. It intends no practical implications for the teacher, althoughsome of the more overtly correlational studies may encouragc thc teacher to assume thathe must endeavour to orchestrate his own and the learners’ contributions to the discourseaccording to Conversational moves or speech acts which exemplify “good” instruction and“good” learner participation.Clearly, this focus upon the actual discourse of classroom communication providesa valid location if we wish to begin to understand the experience of learning a language in