English Language Teaching in its Social Context

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT FOR LANGUAGE LEARNING 135My practical purpose in exploring the metaphor of the classroom as culture has beento seek to offer a possible means for relating social and coptive variables which may influencelanguage learning; to suggest a particular frame through which we may come to understandlanguage learning in a more contextually valid way. The culture of the class resembles asingle person through its integration of psychological and social factors. A teacher or alearner is not either individual mind or social actor when participating in lessons. Each is atonce cognitive and social, and so are the classroom realities which each perceives. Currentlanguage learning research tends to examine psychological change in an asocial way or socialevents in a non-cognitive way. Either approach implies distinctiveness of psychological andsocial dimensions of learning and, thereby, risks offering both a partial account and asimplistic causal explanation of the relations between social phenomena and individualdevelopment. The metaphor of the classroom as culture allows us to perceive the twodimensions as irrevocably linked and mutually engaged. The metaphor also captures theclassroom group as a socio-cognitive dynamic which is an extension of the individual withinit. Because the classroom culture is a human enterprise, it provides the researcher with aliving subject, an informant, not unlike a single learner. When investigating an individual'slearning process, we may endeavour to account for the particular permutation of attributesand activities of that learner which may influence the learning. Similarly, the study of alanguage class as culture can provide us with a holistic and integrated framework whichincorporates the experimental and discoursal attributes of a classroom, but which alsolocates these attributes within a richer cluster of typical characteristics.The eight features I have described are selective, and there are further features whichreflect and create the socio-cognitive realities of a language class. A classroom group willachieve interaction, collectivism, or significance in its own ways. But all of the featuresoverlap and interrelate, and a class will evolve particular permutations of features over time.Just as each feature will vary as the life of the class proceeds, there will also be changes inthe patterning and interaction of all the features. Although I would suggest that the classroomas culture and the features which represent its cultural nature are universal to languageclassrooms wherever they may be, a particular classroom will evolve both individual featuresand a synthesis of features in particular ways at particular times. And it is the synthesis offeatures which is the specific culture of a classroom group. If such proposals are acceptableand valid, what do they imply for undertaking research with a language class? Also, whatdoes thc metaphor of classroom as culture offer to the languagc tcacher? I wish to concludeby briefly outlining some major deductions for researching and teaching.Researching within the classroom as cultureA researcher's sympathies with what I have argued so far may be strained by the seemingcomplexity suggested for methods of investigation. If our goal is to move closer to therealities of language learning and to understand the experience of discovering a ncwlanguage in a classroom group, then such an audacious inquiry demands anthropologicalsensitivity. The culture of the language class will resist exposure from a single source ~ asampled informant or a special moment perhaps - or through a single investigatory lens.Cautious triangulation has to be married with longitudinal patience! We are required toenter a cultural world - as if from Mars, perhaps ~ and intrude upon a relatively uniquesocio-cognitive process, unavoidably participating within as many realities as there arc peoplein the room. In essence, we have to critically reexamine our own assumptions and familiarways of collecting information. We will be obliged to employ what Garfinkel referred to asmethods ofunderstand~ng.'~ And such methods will lead us in the following directions: