English Language Teaching in its Social Context

theas128 MICHAEL P. BREENlanguage learning. One of the characteristics of my third metaphor is that it is likely to bemore expenentially familiar to most language teachers and learners than it may be to someresearchers.The classroom as coral gardensA proposal that the classroom situation could be perceived as coral gardens may be initiallyreacted to as rather odd. The metaphor derives from Malinowski’s classical studies ofTrobriand island cultures, in particular those investigations he described in Coral Gardensand Their Magic. I offer the metaphor because it entails three requirements for researchdevoted to classroom language learning. First, in order to understand the process of learningwithin a human group, our investigations are necessarily an anthropological endeavour.Second, the researcher should approach the classroom with a kind of anthropologicalhumility. We should explore classroom life initially as if we knew nothing about it. And,third, it is more important to discover what people invest in a social situation than it isto rely on what might be observed as inherent in that social situation. Just as gardens ofcoral were granted magical realities by thcTrobriand islanders, a language class ~ outwardlya gathering of people with an assumed common purpose ~ is an arena of subjective andintersubjective realities which are worked out, changed, and maintained. And these realitiesme not trivial background to the tasks ofteaching and learning CI language.They locate and definethe new language itself as if it never existed before, and they continually specify and mouldthe activities of teaching and learning. In essence, the metaphor of classroom as coral gardensinsists that we perceive the language class as a genuine culture and worth investigating assuch.XIf we can adopt this definition of the classroom situation, then research may get closerto the daily lives of teachers and learners. We can approach the raison d’etre of a languageclass ~ working upon and rediscovering of language knowledge ~ involving sociocognitiveconstruction and reinterpretation. A particular culture, by definition, entailsparticular relationships between social activities and psychological processes and changes.SLA research asserts comprehension as central, whilst the classroom as culture locatescomprehension within the intersubjective construction of meaningfulness and the subjectivereinterpretation of whatever may be rendered comprehensible. In other words, input isnever inherently optimal, for any new knowlcdgc is socio-cognitively rendered familiar orunfamiliar by those who participate in its exploration. The culture of the class generatesknowledges and a focus upon any internalised linguistic outcomes will tell us little aboutclassroom language learning in action. Classroom-oriented research explores the discourseof lessons, whilst the classroom as culture extends across islands of intersubjective meaningand depths of subjective intentions and interpretations which only rarely touch the surfaceof talk and which the discourse itself often deliberately hides.The discourse of lessons willmainly ymbolise what participants contribute to those lessons and it will not signify whatthey actually invest in them or derive from them.It is, of course, incumbent upon me to justify my own belief in the classroom as genuineculture. In order to meet the charge that such a metaphor may be too idealiscd or abstract,I need to identify some of the essential features of the culture of the language classroom. Iwill briefly describe eight essential features: