English Language Teaching in its Social Context

EVALUATION OF CLASSROOM INTERACTION 289understood. The interactive process lends itself to the creation of an infinite set of learningopportunities which are not pre-established by the teacher’s plan. In such circumstances,it appears to be practically impossible to undertake the complicated task of designing a testto assess the effects of interaction as it occurs, especially since the test has to be administeredat the end of the lesson. However, the major problem encountered when attempting toresearch the issue of the direct impact of interaction on the subjects’ claims is that of findinga way to identify and collect the learners’ performance data or ‘uptake’. Once identified,uptake needs to be related to the classroom environment which might subsequently explainits emergence.To do this, uptake has to be captured some time after the interactive eventtook place, but before too much could happen to the informants that would obscure thedirect impact of the event on the learners’ claims.The problem is not restricted to formal test-based evaluation procedures. SLAelicitation techniques would also fail to meet the objectives of getting unmediated learnerdata. Elicitation procedures, similar to those used by Lightbown (1983), provide theinformants with an obligatory context of use; this enables the researcher to evaluate, underexperimental conditions, the informants’ accuracy when using the features which are beinginvestigated. By their nature, these procedures assume that one is looking for particularfeatures which are predicted from the teacher’s plan. However, what is needed is a way ofidentifying what learners have got from their experience of being in a particular class session.The solution eventually adopted to the problem of ‘uptake’ identification must seemsomewhat naive at first sight: simply asking the informants to tell the researcher what theybelieved they had learned in the lesson they had just attended. It was felt that the advantagesof the procedure outweighed its obvious shortcomings.The great advantage of this approach is that it offers an operational way of getting atwhat learners perceive they have learned. It makes it possible to relate learning claims tothe immediate environment from which they emerged in order to see if it is possible toestablish a relationship. The idea of requiring learners to tell us what they thought they hadlearned would supply the researcher with manageable amounts of data, directly referableto the classroom data. For instance, if some learners claimed that they had learned thedifference between ‘list’ and ‘least’, the investigator could trace the words back in thetranscripts and study the opportunities where ‘list’ and ‘least’ arose and scrutinise also thecircumstances which might have made those items particularly outstanding to the point ofprompting learners to claim them as learned.It should be acknowledged at this stage that I am dealing here with the learners’perceptions of what they believed they have uptaken rather than with ‘facts’. However, inthe absence of a satisfactory means of getting at learning in such a way as to relate it to itspotentially determining environment, a qualitative approach based on the study of uptakeseems to be an interesting phenomenon to guide investigation into a possible relationshipbetween interaction and learning outcomes.Prior to moving to the description of the method, it is relevant to provide briefinformation about the participants in the study. They were thirteen Algerian male first yearuniversity students at 1’Institut National d’Electricit6 et d’Electronique (INELEC). Theywere aged between eighteen and twenty. They all spoke Arabic as their mother tongue andFrench as a second or foreign language. They were on a six-month intensive languageprogramme (24 hours per week) to prepare them to undertake their engineering studiesin English. To benefit from their language training, the students were put in small groups(in this case thirteen) according to the results of a placement tcst.Their exposure to Englishoutside their classes was limited to their classroom work and occasionally to listening tofolk music. Their instructor was a trained Algerian male teacher.