English Language Teaching in its Social Context

248 NEIL MERCERDescribing shared experienceClassroom activities often rely on students reading instructions, whether in print or on acomputer screen. It is important that thcy understand properly what is expected of them,if the activity is to succeed.Teachers therefore often amp1~instructions with the intentionof making them clearer and less ambiguous. Other texts may also contain information whichstudents necd to make sense of before they continue any further. In classrooms it is commonto hear tcachcrs explaining these texts to students as either a preliminary to activities or ifsome confusion about them seems to arise. For example, in this cxtract from a Spanishlesson for adult students:Sequence 4: Ser and EstarTeacher: It says (readingfrom text) ‘ This is one of the main difficulties for English speakinglearners’ meaning the two verbs ser and estar which both, uh, translate as ‘to be’ inEnglish. (Reading again) ‘Ser means to exist while estar means to be situated’. Thatsounds horribly complicated, I think to start by thinking of ser as being aboutpermanent things and estar as temporary ways of being. Vamos u ver . . . (He continuesin Spanish)An important task for a teacher is to help learners see how the various activities they do,over time, contribute to the development of their understanding. Education cannot bemerely the experience of a series of consecutive cvcnts, it must bc a developmental processin which earlier experiences provide the foundations for making sense of later ones. Forthose involved in teaching and Icarning, continuous sharcd cxpericncc is one of the mostprecious resources available. There are many ways that teachers try to create continuiticsin the experience of lcarncrs ~ by sequencing activities in certain ways, by dealing withtopics in order of difficulty, and so on.Tcachcrs can hclp lcarncrs perceive continuity in whatthey are doing. Through language there is the possibility of rcpcatcdly rcvisiting andreinterpreting that experience, and of using it as the basis for future talk, activity andlearning.‘We’ statements (as in a teacher saying to a class ‘last week we learned how to measureangles’) are often used when teachers are trying to rcprcsent past experience as relevant topresent activity. They show how teachcrs hclp learners see that they have significant pastcxperience in common and so have gained sharcd knowledge and collective understandingwhich can be drawn upon to progress further. Teachers also often recap shared classroomcxpericnce from earlier in a lesson, and from previous Icssons, usually emphasising thepoints or events they consider of most cducational significance.I have described and illustrated cach of the techniques as separate items, each with anobvious function; but this is a simplification, for the sake of clarity of exposition, of therclationship between language form, function and context. An analyst of classroom discoursehas to recognize that (a) any particular utterance can perform more than one function (sothat, as in the first part of Scqucncc 3, a repetition can also be an elicitation); (b) any particulartechnique can serve more than one pedagogic purposc, and be used effectively or otherwise;and (c) the functional meaning of any interaction for participants may bc shapcd bycontextual factors not available to the analyst (such as information gaincd from their sharedpast expcricncc of interaction; see Brccn, Chapter 7, for further discussion of such matters).However, despite these caveats, I have found the identification of thcsc techniques a useful,practical aid to analysis.