English Language Teaching in its Social Context

~ uponTHE SOCIAL CONTEXT FOR LANGUAGE LEARNING 127definitions, conventions, and procedures which enable a working together in a crowd. Ofcourse, the discourse of a classroom may provide a window onto the surface expressionof the intersubjective experience and even onto momentary expressions of subjectiveexperiences, for these two dimensions of experience must interrelate and influence oneanother. However, classroom discourse alone allows us a partial view from which we areobliged to dcscribc others’ experiences as if “through a glass darkly.”Classroom-oriented research shares with SLA studies the tendency to reduce or avoidconsideration of certain intervening variables which inevitably influence how and whylearners may internalise input and how and why learners interact with a teacher in the waysthey do.Ths reductionism is characterised by an emphatic focus upon linguistic performanceobservable features of language and discourse. To be fair, neither research traditionmay intend to undcrstand or even explain language learning in the classroom situation.However, any researcher who tries to correlate features of linguistic Performance data interms of classroom input with some learning outcome is, at lcast implicitly, seeking apossible explanation of that learning outcome. And such an cxplanation can only be causal.Classroom rcscarch is not asocial like SLA research, but it does share a non-cognitive viewof learner comprehension and reconstruction of input despite its potentially richer view ofinput as discourse rather than merely grammatical data. Classroom-oriented researchperceives the learner as actively contributing to the discourse. But how can we relate suchcontributions or even non contributions to language learning? Learners and tcachers arenot dualities of social being and mental being ~ an idea apparcntly unfortunately supportedby the very separateness of SLA and classroom-oriented research priorities. It is incumbentupon classroom-based investigations of language learning to account for those socialpsychological forces which gcnerate classroom discourse and for those socio-cognitiveeffects of the discourse even fits objective is primarily to describe social phenomena. If thesubjective and intersubjective experiences of and from classroom discourse are reduced towhat we can find in the discourse alone, then we are allowed to deduce that classroomlanguage learning results from discoursal conditioning ~ no more nor less than socialdeterminism!It appears that the two metaphors for the classroom which we have availablc to u3 atprcsent offer definitions of the classroom situation which seem to neglect the social realityof language learning as I t IS experienced and created by teachers and learners. Both metaphorsunfortunately constrain our understanding of language learning because each takes forgranted crucial intervening psychological and social variables which arc the fulcra uponwhich language learning is balanced. The reconstructive cognition of learners and the socialand psychological forces which permeate the processes of teaching and learning must residewithin any explanation conccrning how and why people do what thcy do when they worktogether on a new language. More seriously, perhaps, both contemporary metaphorsimplicitly reduce human action and interaction to classical conditioning, wherein learnersthough superficially participating are essentially passive respondents to observable linguisticand discoursal stimuli. It thcrefore appears nccessary that research has still to adopt adefinition of the classroom which will encompass both cognitive and socd variables 70 thattheir mutual influence can be better understood. More precisely, we need a metaphor forthe classroom through which teacher and earners can be viewed as thinking social actorsand not reduced to generators of input-output nor analyzed as dualities of either conceptualor social beings. Perhaps the metaphor we require can providc a basis for the synthesis ofSLA and classroom-oriented research endeavours whilst necessarily being more comprehensivethan both. These deductions lead me to propose a third metaphor for theclassroom in the hope that it might further facilitate our understanding of classroom