English Language Teaching in its Social Context

264 PAULINE GIBBONSanother magnet with the north and south pole on top, the magnet on the bottom will repelthe magnet on the top and the magnet on the top would look like it is floating in the air.Text 3.2 (another student’s journal entry)The thing made out of polystyrene with paddle pop sticks, one group put one magnet facingnorth and another magnet on top facing north as well and they repelled each other. It lookedlike the top magnet was floating up in the air.DiscussionStage 1 textsThe small group activities produced situationally embedded, ‘here-and now’ language. Note,for example, the exophoric references: like that; like thls; that way in text 1.1 (Thesereferences, of course, carry meanings which, in the absence of a visual context, must bercalised in a different way, and it is precisely this aspect of discourse which causes Hannah,and many of the other students, difficulty in the later reporting session.)Talk at this stage also foregrounds the interpersonal aspects of language. Students areconcerned with directing each other’s actions, rather than exchanging information. Text1.1 is about social interaction as much as it is about magnets: subject specific language issimply not necessary for communication between the interactants because of the visual faceto-facecontext in which the discourse occurs. There arc also personal comments indicatingaffect, such as the expression of attitude and feelings: in this text, magic! mad! Participantsarc generally human and frequently thematised, and they relate to thc interactantsthemselves: We tried that; I’ll put north pole facing north pole.What is important about the activities, however, is that they allowed children to exploreand develop together certain scientific understandings (the position of the poles is significantto the movement of the magnets). As the discourse progresses (text 1.2), individualutterances become longer and more explicit, and this occurs as the students begin toformulate explanations for what they see (notc the logical connectives so, because).Interpersonal elements are reduced; there is now a non-human participant (the north pole)and this, rather than the interactants themselves, becomes the topic of conversation. Thecognitive challenge inherent in the teacher’s instruction to ‘try to explain what you see’ mayhave been significant here, since it extended the task from simply ‘doing’ to ‘doing andthinking’. This explicit focus on thinking is an important one in the light of this type ofteaching context, where a teacher must balance the need for suitably high levels of cognitivelearning with learners’ relatively low levels of English, and where learning activities aimedat development of the second language must also be linked to cognitive growth. Clearlywithin these texts there is evidence of children’s learning of science: the beginnings of anunderstanding of why the magnets are behaving as they are, and attempts to hypothesiseabout the causal relations involved. Through the kind of exploratory talk which begins tobe ebident here in the small group work, “knowledge is made more publicly accountableand reasoning is more visible” (Wegerif and Mercer, 1996: 51).From the point of view of second language learning, it is also important to note thatthe children developed some understanding? about magnets before they were expected tounderstand and use more scientific discourse. For example, at the beginning of the reporting