English Language Teaching in its Social Context

FOCUS ON FORM 181problematic. However, the second view is supported retrospectively by descriptive studieswhich have found the same classroom practices surviving differences not only in “methods”(Nunan 1987), but also in professional training (Long and Sat0 1983), materials (Phillipsand Shettlesworth 1975; Long, Adams McLean and Castanos 1976; Ross, to appear),teaching generations (Hoetker and Ahlbrand 1969) and tcaching experience (Pica and Long1986).Fourth, method may or may not be a useful analytic construct for teachers in training,but it is not a conceptual basis for how they operate in practice. Numerous studies of theways content teachers plan lessons and recall them afterwards show that they think of whattranspires in the classroom in terms of instructional activities, or tasks (for review, seeShavelson and Stern 198 1 ; Crookes 1986). The same appears to be true of FL tcachers.Swaffer, Arens and Morgan (1 982) conducted a six-month comparative methods study(“comprehension” and “four skills” approaches) of Gcrman teaching at the UniversityofTexas. Classroom observations and debriefing interviews with teachers at the end of thestudy showed that, despite the teachers having received explicit training in the methods and(supposedly) having each used one or the other for a semester, there was no clear distinctionbetween them in their minds or in the classroom practices used across groups.For these and other reasons, it is clear that “method” is an unverifiable and irrelevantconstruct when attempting to improve classroom FL instruction. Worse, it may actuallydo harm by distracting teachers from genuinely important issues. Saying that methods donot exist and so do not matter at the classroom level does not mean, after all, that what goeson in classrooms does not matter. On the contrary, there is growing evidence of theimportance of classroom processes, of pedagogic tasks, and of qualitativc differences inclassroom language use for success and failure in FLs (for review, see Chaudron 1988).Rather than focus on method as the key, however, we would do better to think in terms ofpsycholinguistically relevant design features of learning environments, preferably featureswhich capture important characteristics of a wide range of syllabus types, methods,materials, tasks, and tests. It is to one of these,focus onform, that we now turn.Focus on form in language teachingMany developments in foreign language syllabus design, materials writing, methodologyand testing during the past 30 years reflect the tension between the desirability ofcommunicative use of the FL in the classroom, on the one hand, and the felt necd for alinguistic focus in language learning, on the other. However, while discussion has occurredin staff-rooms and journals alike, it has generally concerned how best to achieve such afocus, not whether or not to have one. Most applied linguists and pedagogues continue toadvocate teaching and testing isolated linguistic units of one kind or another in one way oranother.Thus, whle procedural, process and task-based alternatives are available (see Prabhu1987; Breen 1987; Long and Crookes 1989), the overwhelming majority of syllabi are stillstructural, notional-functional or a hybrid, and superficially different “mcthods”, like ALM,TPR and the Silent Way, all teach one linguistic item at a time (or assume they do), inbuilding-block fashion. Pervasive classroom practices, such as grammar and vocabularyexplanations, display questions, fill-in-the-blanks exercises, dialog memorization, drills anderror correction, all entail treatment of the language as object, and so do discrete-pointlanguage tests.There have always been a few dissenting voices. Newmark (1 966), Ncwmark and Reibel(1 968), Corder (1 967) and Allwright (1 976), among others, have argued strongly against