English Language Teaching in its Social Context

INTRODUCTION 7not only a medium for exchanging and constructing information but also as a tool forthinking. Language is seen byvygotsky both as a cultural and a cognitive tool, helping us toorganize our thoughts but also used for reasoning, planning and reviewing. Of greatestsignificance for the argument and the map of this book, then, is Vygotsky’s insistence thatlearning is interactive and social. Such a position resonates well with the earlier papers inthis collection, notably those by van Lier and Breen, especially with their highlighting of theimportance of studying teacher and learner discourses. Neil Mercer’s paper provides anexample of an in-depth study of these discourses of classroom life, as the data from whichinferences may be drawn about the processes of language learning. Mercer’s socio-culturalapproach to the analysis of classroom behaviour sits well with earlier papers in Part I1 of thisbook, and paves the way for a detailed discursive and linguistic analysis of such classroominteraction provided by Pauline Gibbons’ exhaustive example in her paper. She draws onHallidayan systemic functional grammatical analysis to provide her description, incidentallysuggesting a link between the work of Michael Halliday and that of LevVygotsky, one whichmany other contemporary researchers of classroom interaction have also made. Gibbons’paper is also noteworthy for her careful analysis of the immediate contexts of that meaningnegotiation which we have earlier identified as central to language learning.It may be useful to recall here our comment at the outset of this Introduction that thepapers in this collection are all in different ways intimately concerned with the definition ofcontext, in its various interpretations.The relationship between language and context is neitherdirect nor unitary. We can see in the papers by Gibbons and Mercer two possibleinterpretations of this relationship. On the one hand, context is a feature of texts, somethingenduring that belongs to the text-as-entity that linguists seek to describe. In this sense,perhaps that found more in Pauline Gibbons’ paper, context may be the texts that learnersand teachers produce, or the physical settings within which their texts are produced. On theother hand, perhaps more along the lines suggested by Mercer, context is dynamic, a productof people’s thinking, more the configuration of information that people use for making senseof language in particular situations. In this sense, context is more of a mental rather than aphysical phenomenon, something dynamic and momentary, but dependent for its creationin the classroom on the careful constructing by thc teacher of a continuity and a communityof shared understanding with learners.Such avygotskian view of context places a premium on the exploration of the emotionaland affective engagement of learners in the acts and processes of learning. Such anengagement is not explicable, however, only from an analysis in terms of the activities of theclassroom. As in earlier papers in this collection, wider social factors play a role. In her paper,Angel Lin’s experience as a teacher-researcher into second language learning in Hong Kongis linked to the work of the French sociologist Bourdieu in an attempt to explain the natureof these factors. Are classrooms replicative of learners’ social worlds or do they have thepower to challenge and transform them? In reading how Lin addresses this question there isa clear resonance with the papcrs by Canagarajah and Chick in the second part of this book.One key example of a site for such a transformation is that of the cultural perspectives andideologies present in typical textbooks and the degree to which classroom practices maintaina conformist, or can exercise a challenging stance in relation to them.The papers by Mercer, Gibbons and Lin all present analyses of the interactive processesof teaching and learning. Although rather different, the research described in each of themencourages the view that the quality of the interaction between teachers and learners inthc language classroom, and between learners if they work together, is a strong determiningfactor on what, and how much, is learned and understood by learners. The issue of howclassroom interaction can be related to assessment of the outcomes of student learning is the