English Language Teaching in its Social Context

298 ASSIA SLIMANIimportant and those which are not.To this particular teacher everything was relevant. It istherefore possible that the reason why the participants of this study were not affectedby the teacher’s efforts is that in his attempts to focus their attention on everything, nospecific aspect appeared as particularly promincnt in his discourse. Having little opportunityto raise topics for instruction, learners might have made some features outstanding to theirpeers if only for the reason that, coming from learners, topicalisation appeared as amemorable event rather than the routine procedure of the teacher (see Slimani 1989 forfurther details).Finally, in this discussion it is worth mentioning that the majority of the unnoticed or‘lost’ items (36 per cent) are instances of error treatment provided most often by theteacher. Their analysis has allowed the identification of a limited number of features whichdifferentiate their treatment from that allocated to the topicalised and claimed items (112,or 44 per cent). As the illustrations below show, it appears that absence of metalanguage inthe teacher’s talk and straight provision, most often by the teacher, of the correct form ofthe item under focus, without further involvement from the teacher or the learners,characterise the strategies used to deal with these items (see examples 8, 9, 10 below).Cueing by the teacher is another common corrective strategy sometimes followed by theimmediate provision of the expected forms by the speaker himself, if he swiftly manages tospot the error (example 1 l), by his peers (example 12) but less often by thc instructor.8 L: . . . and uh sometimes uh on Wednesday.T: And sometimes on Wednesdays. Why on Wednesdays?9101112L:T:. . . I looking for my pen.You are looking for your penL1: . . . [Reading from the book] Bob drink a glass.L2: Drinks [Interrupts the speakcr].L2: Bob drinks a glass of milk every day and Gcorgc does too.L: Pencils have been sharpT: Sharp?L: SharpenedT: Sharpened, yes.L: . . . Thc simplest method is by swimming on one side. The rcscucr pulls the victimby the /hair/LS: Hair, hair [correct pronunciation]T: Yes, hair, by the hair. All right . . .Nearly a third of the lost items consists of corrections of tenses and -s morphemes.Informants can, however, be assumed to be already familiar with these features as they havebeen the explicit content of instruction in other lessons or in high school. Despite previousexposure to explicit explanation of the rules and recurrent repetitions of the correct formsof these features, the subjects of this study persisted in misusing them when using the targetlanguage. It is possible that the informants are not ready to learn these structures as part oftheir interlanguage system and consequently their continued treatment remains pointless,at least, at this stage of their training. It is widely accepted that features such as the use ofarticles by Arab speakers and some of the -s morphemes, for many English as a secondlanguage speakers, remain unmastered in oral production till an extremely advanced stageof their training even if these features are explicitly known to the trainees. This situationmakes us question the necessity or otherwise of attempting to keep on correcting features