English Language Teaching in its Social Context

INTRODUCTION 3learning, and in which ways, is a central question for teachers of language. Patsy Lightbownand Nina Spada take up this necessary dualism in their account of the cognitive andbehavioural characteristics of what some researchers have referred to as the ‘good languagelearner’. As we will see later in the argument of this book, there has to be a third aspect toany such account, namely the influence of the social conditions of language learning on theeffectiveness of language learning. Many learners don’t learn languages in classrooms. Theylearn them more or less well or badly, on the street, in the community, and in the workplace.Certainly, Lightbown’s and Spada’s territory abuts that of Mitchell and Myles. Factors suchas motivation, aptitude, personality, intelligence, learner preferences and learner beliefs, willbe high on any teacher’s list, but so will factors of age, social background, gender andeducational attainment.Researching second language learning, and exploring the relationship between researchingand teaching is a key element in what some have referred to as the teacher as ‘reflective’practitioner. Rod Ellis’ paper on research and pedagogy in the context of second languageacquisition squarely addresses this relationship. Questions of decision-driven researchemanating from practical classroom problems, or knowledge-driven research starting fromtheoretical hypotheses, are but two sides of the same coin. At the heart are the practices ofthe classroom, or encounters with the target language in other contexts.That these worldsof teaching and research have often been at odds is an issue for this paper, and for this bookas a whole to explore. What Ellis identifies, however, is the importance of mapping thecultures of teaching and researching and achieving at least mutual understanding, if not activecollaboration. What is clear after reading Ellis is that it isn’t going to be enough for teachersto write ‘Here be dragons’ and steer the teaching ship away from the rocky coastline ofresearch. One useful and productive ground for such collaboration is that of researchinglearners’styles and strategies in language learning, loolung at what learners do as aspects of theirpersonality, or in response to problems and tasks that teaching, or just life itself, confrontsthem. Peter Skehan’s paper has this dual focus and he locates his discussion in the key areaof learners’ comprehension of foreign language texts, written or spoken, examining therelationship between input to the learner, what the learner confronts, and what the learnerproduces herself, the output of Icarning. Important for Skehan, and for our general argumentin this book, are the ways in which learners negotiate meaning, guided by teachers, in theirroad towards understanding the foreign language.If negotiation of meaning smacks of the marketplace, then perhaps that is no bad imagefor the exchange of language goods which characterizes both classrooms and socialinteractions more generally. Estimating the values to be placed on these goods is, after all,what a good deal of teaching (and learning) is all about. Leo van Lier’s, Celia Roberts’and Michael Breen’s papers are all sited in the markctplace of learning and teaching. It is time,then, to begin to look at the contexts oflearning. Now a new set of questions arise. Howlearners interact with each other and other speakers, what do they do when they arc learninga language, what effect their attitudes, beliefs and feelings have on language learning, whatkinds of personal investment they are prepared to make, how far they can draw on the supportof others, what effects teaching has on learning, and to what extent the social conditions andpriorities of the social world outside the classroom, and the learners’ places in that world,affect what learners do in classrooms and how effectively they can learn.Addressing these questions suggests a need for some redrawing of the dimensions of thesecond language learning map. In fact, as we will see in the papers which follow in thecollection, such questions make us redraw our projection in a number of important ways:to take account of the learning of strategic competence not merely of language competence;of the appraisal of learning sites, contexts and modes as key variables in language acquisition;