English Language Teaching in its Social Context

Chapter 19Michael P. BreenNAVIGATING THE DISCOURSE:ON WHAT IS LEARNED IN THELANGUAGE CLASSROOMIntroductionCENTRAL CONCERN FOR LANGUAGE teachers is what learners can learnA from language lessons. Allwright, in a somewhat startling paper some years ago,deduced that, regardless of what a teacher taught in a lesson, the learners will inevitablylearn different things from the same lesson (Allwright 1984). He explained thisunpredictable trend with reference to the overt spoken interaction that takes place betweenteachers and learners and the covert interaction that takes place between the learner andthe various sources of input during a lesson, including the text of the lesson and otherwritten texts available to the learners. Such interaction, he argued, mediates between whatthe teachers teach as “input” and what learners actually “uptake” from the lesson. In otherwords, the interactive process of teaching and learning in the particular context of theclassroom ensures variation in learning outcomes.In this chapter, I wish to explore this phenomenon further by focusing upon thediscourse of language lessons as revealed by current research. I want to suggest that one ofthe crucial things which learners learn in the classroom is how to navigate the opportunitiesand constraints provided by classroom discourse. A central argument will be that relativesuccess or failure in classroom language learning can be at least partly explained withreference to how learners choose or are obliged to undertake such navigation. Of course,the particular features of the classroom context which I describe can not provide a fullyadequate explanation of variation in language teaching. The influences of the context oflearning are only one set of variables in the broader picture. However, I wish to assert thatan account of such influences can enrich Second Language Acquisition research and theoryand usefully inform the practical concerns of language pedagogy.Explaining Second Language AcquisitionAny adequate theory of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has to account for three keyfactors and, crucially, their interrelationship. These are: (1) what the learner brings orcontributes to the process, from innate predispositions, through the activation of certain