English Language Teaching in its Social Context

218 A. SURESH CANAGARAJAH(c)(d)(e)(f)(g)(h)(i)(j)Teacher: Army? What makes you say that?Shanthi: He is wearing a uniform.Teacher: Well. . . Indran?Indran: He is in the hospital. . . . He is seated on a bed.Teacher: But what about the bars? . . . Don’t you see the bars? He is actually inprison.Shanthi: Okay, but he is wearing good clothes. He is wearing shoes.Indran: And he is said to bc going to the library and having regular meals. . . . Andhe is seated alone in the room.Teacher: (Explains in detail the difference between prison life in Sri Lanka and theUS.)The students’ image of prison life as overcrowded, dirty, and more repressive (basedon Sri Lankan conditions) interferes with their interpretation. The other situations visuallyrepresented, such as an orchestra playing, air travel, department store shopping, andapartment living, also confused the students. Such cultural estrangement created anadditional layer of problems to the linguistic ones students were already confronted with.Other tensions in the course resulted from the styles of learning desired by the students.The students seemed uncomfortable with a collaborative approach to learning whenever itwas encouraged. Because the textbook specified pairwork occasionally, and I myself wantedto create more linguistic interaction among students, I insisted that the desks be arranged ina circle. But before each class, the students rearranged the desks into a traditional lecturcroomformat, with the teacher’s desk in front of the room and their own in hori7ontal rows.Thus, students minimi7ed interaction among themselves and failed to take initiative in theflow of classroom discourse. As the conversation cited above suggests, typical interactionsfollow the features of traditional teacher-centered classroom discourse (see Mehan, 1985;Stubbs, 1976), in which the teacher regulates and dominates talk. Turn taking follows thetripartite Structure of Question (see Turn a above), Answer (Turn b), and Evaluation(Turn c); such sequences follow in c-tlx, e-f-g.Turns for students arc assigned by the teacher(seeTurns a and e); for each single turn by the student, the teacher takes two, thus dominatingthe quantity of talk. The questions asked are display questions for which the teacher alreadyknows the answer. In a quite atypical move here, Shanthi and Indran attempt to contradictthe teacher’s explanation; significantly, these were not framed as questions but simply as casualasides. It was only Supendran who asked for clarifications or challenged my explanations moreexplicitly. For most of the time, the rest preferred to sit, pen in hand, and write down whateverwas on the board or simply listen to the teacher’s lccture (as inTurn j). Ironically, one of theglosses above an interactive pair-work exercise said, “This is a job for the jobless.”Accompanying this desire for teacher-centered learning, students made learning aproduct rather than process. Students expected to be provided with the abstract forms andrules of language deductively or prescriptively for them to store in memory rather than toinductively formulate the rules for themselves through active use of the language incommunicative interactions. Disregarding activities, students demanded notes. Whenevercharts or grammatical paradigms were presented, the students eagerly wrote them down.They demanded more written work rather than speech or listening exercises because theyfelt that they could retain it for personal study and revision before tests. My diary recordsmuch time taken in discussing the importance of“use rather than rules.”But the slogan failedto create changes in their attitude. Gradually students noted my practice of reserving the2-hr classes for activities and 1 -hr slots for the more overtly grammar-oriented sectionsof the textbook and attended the latter while cutting the former.