English Language Teaching in its Social Context

138 MICHAEL P. BREENand it could lead to a positive erosion of the distinctions between doing research, doingteaching, and learning.This paper is not intended as some Rousseauesquc appeal for a return to the primitivcsavagery of classroom life, in reaction, perhaps, to a vision of finely-tuned classroomswherein learners might be discoursally programmed. Nor is it intended as a rejection ofthe metaphors of classroom as experimental laboratory or classroom as discourse.Classrooms are experiments and they are places where the discourse symbolizes significantactions and thoughts of those participating. And classrooms are specific cultures. All threemetaphors seem to me to be true, but all three are also partial. I have tried to show that theclassroom as culture cmbraccs variables which we may have formerly neglected in research.The metaphor can allow us to see the classroom more distinctly and to re-explore itspotential more precisely. However, we still need to develop, during the research process,sufficiently sensitive methods of investigation so that the culture of the language class maybe less of a metaphor and more of a revelation.I am pleased to be able to end with one of Edward Sapir’s enlightening observationsbecause he expressed, sixty years ago, a crucial consideration regarding the relationshipbetween scientific efficiency and genuine culture. Sapir comments on his importantdistinction between human progress and cultural experience:We have no right to demand of higher levels of sophistication that they preserve tothe individual his manifold functioning, but wc may wcll ask whether, as acompensation, the individual may not reasonably demand an intens$cation in culturalvalue, a spiritual hcightening of such functions as are left him.’6(1 949: 97 [my emphasis])In this paper, I have tried to argue that our professional concern with one of the individual’smost socially motivated functions - learning how to communicate with members of anothersocial group, another culture ~ requires us to understand how the individual may bestachieve this. And if the individual undcrtakcs the task in a classroom, we need to understandthe socio-cognitive expcricnce made available through the meeting of individual andclassroom group. The classroom may be a relatively inefficient cnvironment for themethodical mastery of a languagc system, just as it is limited in providing opportunities forreal world communication in a new language. But the classroom has its own communicativepotential and its own authentic metacommunicative purpose. It can be a particular socialcontext for the intensification of the cultural experience of learning.Notes1 This tendency has bccn captured by Kuhn’s (1962) analysis of scientific rcscarch.Research exemplifying the first view I wish to cxplorc is represented in the cxcellentanthologies of Hatch (1 978), Felix (1 980), Scarcella and Krashen (1 983) and Baily, Long,and Peck (1 984). The second prevalent view is implicd by recent studies of classroomlanguage learning, fairly represented in the valuable collections of Larscn-Freeman(1980), Seliger and Long (1983) and Fzrch and Kasper (1983). Of course, muchlanguage learning research makes no rcfercnce to thc classroom and several researchersdo not assume the perspectives discussed in this paper. My emphasis is upon currentlyinfluential views of language learning and what these imply for the functions of thcclassroom.