English Language Teaching in its Social Context

awhichLEARNING A NEW REGISTER 267had been part of the teacher’s recasting, and this was particularly evident when the studentsthemselves had reformulated their own talk. Compare, for example, Hannah’s written text(3.1) with what she says in interaction with the teacher. There is also evidence that thereporting back sessions influenced not only the interactants themselves but also those wholistened to the interactions as part of the larger group: Text 3.2 was written by a studentwho had not taken part in this particular experiment herself.ConclusionsWhile the research I have described illustrates the value of ‘learning by doing’ (especiallyfor second language learners where concrete experiences help to make languagecomprehensible), it also illustrates the critical role of teacher-learner talk in children’slearning and language development, and the way that such scaffolded interactions can beginto co-construct a new register. Teacher-guided reporting in particular appears to offer arich potential for second language dcvclopment.The research also suggests that in analysing how interactions are made comprehensibleto ESL students in the classroom context, we need to look further than the linguistic featuresof the interactions themselves (for example the simplicity or otherwise of syntacticstructures), and examine the on-going context in which those interactions are situated. Ofparticular significance within the sequence of lessons was the scaffolding of new language.Occurring as this did gter students had already developed some understanding of keyconcepts through the small group work, it allowed the teacher to use new wordings andways of meaning ~ new register ~ were then more readily interpretable by thestudents.The broader principle is that language which would normally be beyond students’comprehension is likely to be understood when students can bring their experiences andunderstandings as a basis for interpretation. The degree to which interactions arecomprehensible for ESL students should therefore be related not only to the interactionalfeatures themselves, and to the immediate situational context in which they occur, but alsoto what has preceded them ~ in this case the learning which the students had gained throughparticipation in the small group work. For second language learners, the ‘long conversation’(Maybin 1994; Mercer 1995) is an important part of the total teaching and learning context,because students and teacher ‘relate discourse to context, and build through time a jointframe of rcfcrcncc’ (Edwards and Mercer, 1995). As Wong-Fillmore states in her study ofan ESL kindergarten class, “the prior experience becomes a context for intcrprcting thcnew cxpcriencc . . . prior experiences serve as the contexts within which the languagebcing used is to be understood” (Wong-Fillmore 1985).The overall sequence of activities also presents a challenge to more traditional ways ofsequencing teaching and lcarning activities in the second language classroom, where a unitvery often begins with the pre-teaching of vocabulary or a grammatical structure. While thisapproach may be appropriate in some teaching contexts, it is underpinned by the notionthat learners must first ‘learn’ language before they can ‘use’ it. Aside from questions aboutthe nature of language and language lcarning which this sets up, it is also clear that it is anapproach which cannot be easily applied to the school ESL context, where children mustfrom the outset use their target language in specific social contexts and for specific purposes.In this class, students used their current language resources at the beginning of the unit whilethe focus on new language occurred at later stages, a scqucnce which allowed for studentsto build on their existing understandings and language, and to link old learning with new;in effect to movc successfully towards target texts, rather than beginning with them.