English Language Teaching in its Social Context

312 MICHAEL P. BREENor explicit discursive work while devoting their discursive energies to keeping track of theteacher’s text and being alert to the moments when they have to contribute to it and to theteacher’s reactions to their contributions.Learners’ discursive practices in the classroomSo far, on the basis of language classroom research, I have suggested that the discourse oflessons is significantly shapcd by the teacher, that learners are positioned in particular waysby this, that the discourse manifests a shifting inter-textuality, and that learners are obligedto undertake pragmatic navigation within this inter-textuality if they arc to find their waythrough it in order to make scnse of it. For a fuller picture, however, we need to focus uponvariations in the overt participation of learners in the discourse which may be sccn as furthercontributory factors in their differential achievement in learning.There arc fcw studics of learner input in the classroom apart from the body of workon controversial modifications during group or dyad work on tasks, some of which havingbeen undertaken in classroom settings. Perhaps this is not surprising when, if we examinethe research on learner participation and, by implication, their contributions to the text oflessons as discursive practitioners, we find that learners are most often positioned by thediscourse in a responsive role (Polit7er et al. 1981). Generally, it seems that, through theircontrol of the discursive practices of lessons, through their use of questions, explanations,procedural instructions, and, crucially, their evaluation of much of the language producedby learners immediately after it is uttcred, teachers construct learners as primarilyresponsive and scemingly fairly passive participants in the discourse. In offering anexplanation for the failure of French immersion students to fully attain native-speaker likelevels in their own speech despite years of exposure to content-based and comprehensiblelanguage input resulting in very high levels of receptive understanding, Swain (1 985)suggests that this failure may bc partially due to the relative lack of opportunities for themto participate overtly in classroom discourse through their own speech production.Howcvcr, cvcn responsive discursivc practices appear to lead to variation in learning.In investigating whether greater learner participation had an cffcct upon lcarning, Strong(1 983 and 1984) discovered that a high response rate among certain learners corrclatcdwith thcir achievement in tests based upon the grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary ofclassroom speech. Scligcr (1977) suggcstcd that those learners which he identified as “highinput gcncrators” performed better on an aural comprehension task than did lessparticipating learners. In their classic study of the good language learner, Naiman et al.(1 978) found that lcarners who raised their hands more and more often responded toteacher elicitations did better on tests than other learners.Studies by Larsen-Freeman (1 976a and 1976b), Hamayan and Tucker (1 980),Lightbown (1 983), and Long (1 980), all suggest that the frequency of occurrence of certainlinguistic forms in classroom text is likely to correlate with thc accurate production of theseforms by learners. More significantly, studics by Lightbown (1980 and 1991), Snow andHoefnagel Hohle (1 982), and White et al. (1991) not only confirm this but also show highretention rates of question forms. Given the regular occurrcncc of questions in the text oflessons, this may not be surprising. Learners are obliged to be alert to questions in case theyare directed to them individually.These studies also found that, not only questions, but otherkinds of utterances directed specifically at individual learners correlated with higher gainscores in tests taken by those individuals. It appears that, while it may not be surprising thatfrequent occurrence of certain features in the text of lessons render them more accessible,