English Language Teaching in its Social Context

288 ASSIA SLIMANIemotional dispositions, arise in the course of the ‘planned’ lesson and create the learningopportunities from which learners presumably grasp whatever gets learned. Hence,considered from this point of view, lessons are ‘co-productions’ and ‘socially constructedevents’ brought to existence through the ‘co-operative enterprise’ (Corder 1977: 2) of bothparties.The learners’ role in the creation of the co-production is not to be underestimatedin comparison with the role played by the instructor. No matter how powerful the latter’sinfluence, ‘no teacher teaches without consent’ (Corder 1977:66).The perspective of viewing discourse as a co-production adds a new dimension whichties the teacher, in his/her attempts to make instruction relevant and comprehensible, withthe learners, in their attempts to understand instruction and manage their own learning. Ifthe classroom negotiation process is disregarded then what learners get might be differentfrom what the instructor or the researcher had intended (see also Allwright 1984b, 1984cfor a fuller discussion of these ideas). In fact, teachers’ exclamations of surprise, such as,‘But I taught them that last week!’, are only too common in staff rooms.They bear witnessto the fact that much more than the investigation of the teacher’s plan is needed to providefuller explanations of the learners’ reactions.Seen from this point of view, it appears quite misleading to predict which linguisticitems will be ‘uptaken’ by learners even before the lesson has taken place. As argued byAllwright (1 984a), each lesson is a different lesson for each individual learner as differentthings arc likely to be drawn by different learners from the same event.Some researchers (Lightbown, 1983; Ellis 1984; Ellis and Rathbone 1987) make priorassumptions about what learners might see as optimal in the input. Hence, choosing toexamine the teaching effect on the learners’ accuracy of use of the -s morphemes(Lightbown 1983), ofWH-questions (Ellis 1984), and German word order and verb endings(Ellis and Rathbone 1987) might provide the investigators with the advantage of having arich description of the developmental stages of such features in first and second languagedevelopment. However, by predicting the subjects’ learning outcomes, such investigatorsmight be missing out on what has actually attracted the learners’ attention in discourse.Therefore, Allwright ( 1 984a) suggested the study of the notion of ‘uptake’, that is, theinvestigation of what individual learners claim to have learned from the interactive classroomevents which have just preceded. What follows is a discussion of uptake, and of itscontribution to a better understanding and evaluation of what gets claimed to be learnedduring classroom interaction.UptakeLearning a language is defined by some proponents of communicative curricula ‘as learninghow to communicate as a member of a socio-cultural group’ (Breen and Candlin 1980:91).Hence, it is amply acknowledged that learning a language is not merely a matter of recallingbeads of items but rather of coming to grips with the ideational, interpersonal and textualknowledge which is realised through effective communication in the target language.Therefore, one might argue that attempting to measure learning at the end of a lessonimplies a narrow definition of what language learning involves. In this chapter, it isconsidered to be the realisation of communicative competence as well as performance inrelevant situations.However, since we are concerned with relating learning outcomes to their immediateand potentially determining environment, it appears rather difficult to think of ways ofgetting at learning evidence through testing and elicitation procedures as traditionally