English Language Teaching in its Social Context

NAVIGATING THE DISCOURSE 307psychological processes such as attention or memory, and through affective involvement inthe process, to strategic behaviour which may rcnder the process more manageable andunthreatening; (2) the nature of the actual language learning process; and (3) the outcomesfrom the process in terms of linguistic or, more broadly, communicative competence in thetarget language.In exploring this rclationship, SLA research to date has primarily focused upon theinteraction between what learners contribute, particularly their innate template for languageor their cognitive processes, and the language data made available to them. In a recent reviewof SLA research, I argued that the research appears to favour particular paradigms of learningand, thereby, constructs the learner in particular ways (Brcen, 1996). Summarising verybriefly, SLA research tells us a great deal about the learner as being interpretative,accommodating, and strategic. That is, the interpretation of meaningful input and thc effortto express meaning appear to be thc catalysts for language 1earning.The accommodation bythe lcarner of language data is typified by the learner’s creative construction ofintcrlanguages which represent gradual approximations to the target language. And bothlearning strategies and communicative strategies are adopted by learners in order to maketheir interpretative and accommodating work much more manageable. These threeconstructs of the learner which we can deduce from the research contribute significantlyto an explanation of how language is learned.However, this explanation will remain partial if much of SLA research persists indecontextualising learner contributions, the learning process, and learning outcomes fromthe location in which these three factors are realised. Mainstream SLA research, in focusingupon the relationship between the learner and language data, is conducted and reported onin ways that appear to overlook the social reality in which the research is actually conducted.Dyadic encounters between caretakers and young learners or between native spcakerresearchers and non-native speaking informants, experimental situations using elicitationtechniques, quasi-experimental negotiation tasks undertaken by non-native speakers, orobserved interactions during lessons are never socially neutral activities. To reduce the datafrom such events to a psycholinguistic objectivity of inputs and outputs is to dislocate themfrom their intersubjectivc nature. The evidence we obtain from any learning evcnt, even ina quasi experimental setting, is significantly shaped by thc social situation and the socialrelations within that event.If we used Ellis’s recent very comprehensive review of SLA research (Ellis, 1994) as anindicator of the major focus of SLA researchers to the present time, we find that more thantwo thirds of the chapters in his account refer to work which assumes that the interactionbetween the learner’s mental resources and features of linguistic input will provide asufficiently adequate explanation for language learning Ellis fairly reflects current SLAresearch in devoting just over a quarter of his review to more recent studies which locatethe interaction between learner and language in the context of interpersonal or socialsituations. His account reveals that context has been defined or framed in particular waysby SLA research. It is addressed in a fragmentary way as a diversity of“socia1 factors”- fromidentification by the learncr with the target language group to the possible effects of differenttypes of language programs ~ or as the specific features of classroom interaction, or as thepossible impact of formal instruction. Ellis himself concludes that “the relationship betweensocial factors and L2 achievemcnt is an indirect rather than a direct one” (1994: 239). Inreferring to classroom interaction studies, he concludes that they have “contributed littleto our understanding of how interaction affects acquisition” (1994: 607). And he deducesthat formal inytruction can, at most, be credited with “facilitating natural languagedeve1opment”in terms of increased accuracy and accelerated progress (1994: 659).