English Language Teaching in its Social Context

LANGUAGE FOR TEACHING A LANGUAGE 2554I have described the process of tcaching-and-learning as ‘the guided construction ofknowledge’ (Mercer, 1995).This is a process which is carried on over time, so that,as the language researcher Janet Maybin (1 994) has put it, the talk on any occasionbetween a teachcr and their regular class of students can be considered part of the‘long conversation’ of their relationship. Language is a tool for building the future outof the past: the meaningfulness of current and future joint activitics of teachers andlearners depends on the foundations of their common knowledge (Merccr, 2000).Classroom interuction follows implicit ‘ground rules’. The socio-cultural perspectiveemphasises that evcryday human activity depends heavily on participants being ableto draw on a considerable body of shared knowledge and understanding, based ontheir past shared experience or similar histories of experience. The conventions or‘ground rules’ which ensure that speakers and listeners, writers and readers areoperating within the same genres of language are rarely made explicit, but so long asparticipants can safely assume shared knowledge, the language of everyday interactionfollows its conventional patterns. If the contextual foundations of shared knowledgeare lacking - such as when students’ home backgrounds have not prepared them wellfor making sense of the language and culture of the classroom - misunderstandingsmay easily arise and persist unresolved (Heath, 1983; LoCastro, 1997). Making the‘ground rules’ of classroom activity explicit can help overcome misunderstandingsand misinterpretations, and there is growing evidence that students’ progress issignificantly enhanced if teachers do so (Christie, 1990; Mercer, Wegerif and Dawcs1999).ConclusionRecordings and transcriptions of classroom talk, analysed from a socio-cultural perspective,offer us glimpses of the social, cultural, communicative process of education being pursuedand, with varying degrees of success, accomplished. They may capture illustrations of thebest practice, in which teachers enable students to achieve levels of understanding whichmight never, or at least not nearly so quickly, have been achieved without a ‘scaffolding’guidance; they as often reveal misunderstandings being generated, and opportunities forguided development being squandered. As teachers, as well as researchers, we can learnmuch from what they reveal. It is of course unrealistic to expect any busy teacher to monitorand evaluate every interaction in their classroom; but recent research (in arcas of thecurriculum other than language teaching) has shown that through a better understandingof the use of language as a pedagogic tool, teachers can help students improve theircurriculum-related learning and their use of language as a tool for constructing knowledge.(Brown and Palincsar, 1989; Wcgerif, Rojas-Drummond and Mercer, 1999; Mercer, Wegerifand Dawes, 1999.) A socio-cultural perspcctive has only quitc recently been brought tobear on teaching and learning in the modern language classroom (sec Chapters 5, 16 and19 of this book, by Van Lier, Gibbons and Breen), but I am convinced that its applicationwill have significant practical implications for this field of educational endeavour.ReferencesArthur, J. (1992) ‘English in Botswana classrooms: functions and constraints’. Centre f.rLanguage in Social Lfe Working %pus No.46. University of Lancaster, U.K.