English Language Teaching in its Social Context
English Language Teaching in its Social Context
English Language Teaching in its Social Context
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EVALUATION OF CLASSROOM INTERACTION 289understood. The <strong>in</strong>teractive process lends <strong>its</strong>elf to the creation of an <strong>in</strong>f<strong>in</strong>ite set of learn<strong>in</strong>gopportunities 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 design<strong>in</strong>g a testto assess the effects of <strong>in</strong>teraction as it occurs, especially s<strong>in</strong>ce the test has to be adm<strong>in</strong>isteredat the end of the lesson. However, the major problem encountered when attempt<strong>in</strong>g toresearch the issue of the direct impact of <strong>in</strong>teraction on the subjects’ claims is that of f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>ga 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 expla<strong>in</strong><strong>its</strong> emergence.To do this, uptake has to be captured some time after the <strong>in</strong>teractive eventtook place, but before too much could happen to the <strong>in</strong>formants 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 gett<strong>in</strong>g unmediated learnerdata. Elicitation procedures, similar to those used by Lightbown (1983), provide the<strong>in</strong>formants with an obligatory context of use; this enables the researcher to evaluate, underexperimental conditions, the <strong>in</strong>formants’ accuracy when us<strong>in</strong>g the features which are be<strong>in</strong>g<strong>in</strong>vestigated. By their nature, these procedures assume that one is look<strong>in</strong>g for particularfeatures which are predicted from the teacher’s plan. However, what is needed is a way ofidentify<strong>in</strong>g what learners have got from their experience of be<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> a particular class session.The solution eventually adopted to the problem of ‘uptake’ identification must seemsomewhat naive at first sight: simply ask<strong>in</strong>g the <strong>in</strong>formants to tell the researcher what theybelieved they had learned <strong>in</strong> the lesson they had just attended. It was felt that the advantagesof the procedure outweighed <strong>its</strong> obvious shortcom<strong>in</strong>gs.The great advantage of this approach is that it offers an operational way of gett<strong>in</strong>g atwhat learners perceive they have learned. It makes it possible to relate learn<strong>in</strong>g claims tothe immediate environment from which they emerged <strong>in</strong> order to see if it is possible toestablish a relationship. The idea of requir<strong>in</strong>g learners to tell us what they thought they hadlearned would supply the researcher with manageable amounts of data, directly referableto the classroom data. For <strong>in</strong>stance, if some learners claimed that they had learned thedifference between ‘list’ and ‘least’, the <strong>in</strong>vestigator could trace the words back <strong>in</strong> thetranscripts and study the opportunities where ‘list’ and ‘least’ arose and scrut<strong>in</strong>ise also thecircumstances which might have made those items particularly outstand<strong>in</strong>g to the po<strong>in</strong>t ofprompt<strong>in</strong>g learners to claim them as learned.It should be acknowledged at this stage that I am deal<strong>in</strong>g here with the learners’perceptions of what they believed they have uptaken rather than with ‘facts’. However, <strong>in</strong>the absence of a satisfactory means of gett<strong>in</strong>g at learn<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> such a way as to relate it to <strong>its</strong>potentially determ<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g environment, a qualitative approach based on the study of uptakeseems to be an <strong>in</strong>terest<strong>in</strong>g phenomenon to guide <strong>in</strong>vestigation <strong>in</strong>to a possible relationshipbetween <strong>in</strong>teraction and learn<strong>in</strong>g outcomes.Prior to mov<strong>in</strong>g to the description of the method, it is relevant to provide brief<strong>in</strong>formation about the participants <strong>in</strong> 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 <strong>in</strong>tensive languageprogramme (24 hours per week) to prepare them to undertake their eng<strong>in</strong>eer<strong>in</strong>g studies<strong>in</strong> <strong>English</strong>. To benefit from their language tra<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g, the students were put <strong>in</strong> small groups(<strong>in</strong> this case thirteen) accord<strong>in</strong>g to the results of a placement tcst.Their exposure to <strong>English</strong>outside their classes was limited to their classroom work and occasionally to listen<strong>in</strong>g tofolk music. Their <strong>in</strong>structor was a tra<strong>in</strong>ed Algerian male teacher.