English Language Teaching in its Social Context

300 ASSIA SLIMANIfigures are particularly striking as the teaching style was not individualised in any sense. Itwas unidirectionally addressed to the class as a whole. One, therefore, might expect thesame items or linguistic features to be claimed by many learners. What happened howeveris that individual learners reacted individually despite the centrality of the teaching style.Further evidence that learners show autonomy when undergoing instructions is alsoclearly illustrated in the 1 1 per cent or fourteen uptaken items that were mentioned earlierunder the heading of the importance of topicalisation. While 1 12 linguistic features claimedto be learned were the focus of instruction, fourteen happened as a part of the classroomdiscourse without any specific attention drawn to them. Despite a teaching situation wherethe classroom discourse is highly controlled by the teacher and does not involve any groupwork activity, learners have shown considerable individual reaction by claiming items whichdid not receive any kind of attention in terms of topicalisation, as defined earlier.The aboveproportion might have been even higher if the teacher had allowed more room for learnersto express themselves.While some of the 1 1 per cent of the claims were traced back as part of the discourseto deal with classroom routines, some were not found at all in the transcripts. To explaintheir presence on the learners’ uptake charts, one can only assume that what went on duringthe lessons possibly reinforced some previous learning and brought those particular wordsback to the learners’ minds.The word ‘slippers’, for instance, remained a complete mysteryas I did not even recall the teacher having dealt, however remotely, with a situation whichmight have led to such a claim on the part of the learner. Moreover, the examination of thelearners’ charts revealed also the presence of a few examples of appropriate generalisation.For instance, when the words ‘thick’, ‘thickness’, and ‘thin’ were explained, one of the mostable learners reported having learned the word ‘thinness’ even though the latter was notuttered in class. The word ‘narrow’ was also claimed to have been learned by the samelearner in relation to ‘thick’ and ‘thin’.It is interesting to notice here this learner’s tcndcncy to generalise so successfully froma lesson event that he can believe the generalisation was taught. In this respect, it has beensuggested that one of the good language learner’s attributes is to be able to organise thediscrete and disparate information they receive about the target language into coherent andordered patterns (Rubin 1975; Stern 1975).ConclusionThe problem of making sense of instruction seems to lie in the difficulty of findingappropriate research techniques capable of evaluating learning outcomes in relation to input.In this paper, input is seen as a co-production by the participants in an instructional settingand therefore renders the task of using traditional testing measures rather difficult. Weattempted to find a way of relating the learners’ claims to their immediate interactiveenvironment.The technique used proved to lie a useful means of shedding light on what is claimedto be lcarncd from the on-going interactive work which takes place in the classroom. Byasking learners to reflect on their perceptions of what they have uptaken, one could see, byexamining the interactive work, some of the factors which characterise the emergence ofthese particular uptaken features.Most of the learners’ claims were topicalised. In this sense, White’s (1987)recommendations seem to broadly match the present teacher’s bchaviour in this particularcontext. She suggests that