English Language Teaching in its Social Context

126 MICHAEL P. BREENa classroom. However, even with such an ecologically valid point of departure, currentclassroom-oriented research leaves us with two important areas of uncertainty. We haveto question the extent to which the surface text of classroom discourse can adequatelyreveal the underlying social psychological forces which generate it (the expectations, beliefsand attitudes of the participants) and also reveal the sociocognitive effects it may have(the specific interpretations and learning it provokes). This central issue leads us back intothe long-established debate on the possible relationships between communicating andlearning, between language and cognition. A number of the correlational studies withinclassroom-oriented research avoid the complexities of this debate by appearing to assumethat certain phenomena in classroom discourse cuuse learning to occur. Any correlationbetween observable features of discourse and testable learning outcomes ~ a teacher’sformulation of a rule, for example, and a learner’s later use or reformulation of that rule- does not explain how or why a learner actually achieved such things. This dependencyon the superficial features of classroom talk can force us to deduce that if other learners inthe class failed to use the rule correctly or were unable to reformulate it then the teacher’soriginal formulation was inadequate. Rut what of the internal dimensions of classroomCommunication: the learners’ variable perception, reinterpretation, and accommodation ofwhatever may be provided through classroom discourse? In these matters, classroomorientedresearch seems to share a psychological naivety with SLA research.The second area of uncertainty is perhaps more fundamental. Most currentclassroom-oriented research paradoxically reduces the external dimensions of classroomcommunication, the actual social event, to observable features of the talk between teacherand learners. Sixty years ago, Edward Sapir pointed out that we cannot use observable dataalone from social events even if we merely aim to describe them adequately. Nor can weinterpret the observable data through our eyes only if we ever seck to explain what thosedata actually mean. Even Del Hymcs, who was foremost in proposing the ethnography ofspeaking which now underlies much sociolinguistic research, also insisted that if we wishadequately to explain any speech event we need to discover its existential and experientialsignificance for those taking part.7 These proposals imply that the meanings and values ofclassroom discourse reside behind and beneath what is said and unsaid. A researcher’sinterpretation of the “text” of classroom discourse has to be derived through the participants’interpretations of that discourse. Is the teacher’s treatment of an error taken as errortreatment by a learner? Is a learner’s request for information even if responded to as suchby the teacher ~ actually a piece of time-wasting or even expressing something else entirely?Is superficial negotiation of meaning or a learner’s generation of further input evidence ofthe wish to learn more?To begin to understand language learning experience in a classroom the researchermust discover what teacher and taught themselves perceive as inherent within the discourseof lessons. More importantly, recent classroom research clearly shows the researcher assomeone who invests into his text of classroom discourse certain patternedness ormeaningfulness. Classroom communication, like any text, realizes and carries meaningpotential. Because of this, if we wish to discover what the teaching and learning of a languagein a classroom is for the people undertaking it, we need to know what orderliness and sensethey invest in the overt communication of the class. Put simply, the discourse of the classroomdoes not itself reveal what the teacher and the learners experience from that discourse.Such experience is two-dimensional: individual-subjective experience and collectiveintersubjectiveexperience. The subjective experience of teacher and learners in a classroomis woven with personal purposes, attitudes, and preferred ways of doing things. Theintersubjective experience derives from and maintains teacher and learner shared