English Language Teaching in its Social Context

130 MICHAEL P. BREENThe outside observer has access to the compromise which results, but we would be naiveto deduce that such a compromise represents what is actually intended or perceived as thesocial reality for any one person in the class.The culture of the classroom is collectiveThe culture of the classroom represents a tension between the internal world of theindividual and the social world of the group, a recurrent juxtaposition of personal learningexperiences and communal teaching- learning activities and conventions. The culture of theclass has a psychological reality, a mind of its own, which emerges from this juxtaposition.The psyche of the group ~ the group’s values, meanings, and volitions - is a distinct entityother than the sum of the individual psychological orientations of teacher and learners.Socially, the sometimes ritualised and sometimes overtly dynamic behaviour of the groupwill both contain and influence the behaviour of the individual just as the overt contributionsof a teacher or a learner will fit, or divert the workings of the class. But this social frameworkbuilds upon and constructs a particular world which has to be accommodated as a point ofdeparture for psychological change. A teacher and a learner have to discover that definitionof situation which seems to maintain the group and its activities ~ that definition of situationwhich will be relatively distinct from their personal definitions. This involves all membersof the group in empathising with the roles and views of others and continually checkingsuch external frames of reference. The individual has to adapt his learning process to thesocial-psychological resources of the group. So also the group’s psychic and social processwill unfold from the individual contributions of a learner.This interplay between individualand collective consciousness (and the values, beliefs, and attitudes it generates) implies thatthe researcher should be wary of crediting the classroom with powers separable from whatindividual learners actually make classrooms do for them, and similarly wary of creditingindividual learners with powers separable from what the claysroom group provides. Anindividual learner in a classroom is engaged in both an individual learning process and agroup teaching-learning process. Therefore individual psychological change will continuallyrelate to group psychological forces.The researcher is obliged to discover these two worldsbecause they are distinctive. To infir individual learning process from classroom process orvice versa will lead to a partial understanding of classroom language learning. We need toexplore both and how they relate one to the other.The culture of the classroom is high’y normativeOur membership in any culture implies that our behaviour will be evaluated against certainnorms and conventions ~ membership entails showing we belong. However, in all our lives,classrooms are very special in this regard. Schools and classrooms are among the mainagencies for secondary socialisation and, as the first public institution most of us enter duringour lives, our views of classrooms will be significantly colourcd by this initial experience.More importantly, our personal identities as learners within a group derive much from suchexperience. This is due to the fact that our public learning selves have been moulded by acontinual and explicit evaluation of our worth as learners. When a language learner enters aclassroom, he anticipates that the evaluation of him as a learner is going to be a crucial partof that experience. This implies that the search for cxternal criteria for success in copingwith language learning and, less optimistically perhaps, the day-to-day search for ways ofreducing the potential threat of negative judgements of one’s capabilities will impinge uponwhatever internal criteria a learner may evolve regarding his own learning progress.