English Language Teaching in its Social Context

NAVIGATING THE DISCOURSE 317learners navigate that discourse in different ways. It is inevitable that different learners willdifferentially achieve in such circumstances. In fact, the variables to which I have referredin reviewing second language classroom research are an important explanation for suchdifferentiation.Implications for classroom pedagogyWe might deduce from the evidence that there is only a very tenuous relationship betweensuccessful participation by learners in the discourse of lessons and their actual progress inlearning the language. At least it seems that overt participation in lessons has little impacton actual learning whilst overt negotiation for meaning in small group and dyadic tasks isseen by SLA researchers as pivotal for learning. But a crucial issue is that overt participationseems to be relatively rare for individual learners in the kinds of lessons from which mostdata for second language classroom research are obtained. Navigating the discourse in manylanguage classrooms, whilst resulting in different learning outcomes for most learners, isnot a difficult thing for most of them to do. Since their early years at school, languagelearners have gradually discovered what is expected of them as discursive practitioners ina classroom. In many cases, they have had years of practice at interpreting the texts oflessons, learning and adopting appropriate discursive practices, and understanding andcontributing to the social practices of classrooms. As we have seen, the data from secondlanguage classroom research primarily reveals that teachers orchestrate the discourse whilelearners play their parts as a kind of counterpoint to their individual learning agendas. Thediscourse may momentarily harmonise with these agendas while at other times, there isdiscordance between the discourse and genuine learning. To be provocative, we mightconclude that some learners’ highly attentive efforts to avoid trouble by successfullynavigating the prevailing discourse of language lessons might actually distract their attentionfrom actually learning something.There is a growing body of evidence which suggests that the discourse of the languageclassroom is distinctive. And it is distinctive in many ways from the discourse in which weparticipate in other contexts (Riley 1977, Gremmo et al. 1978, Edmondson 1985, Kramsch1985, Glahn and Holman 1985, Kasper 1986, Ellis 1992). If, for most learners perhaps,language learning is embedded in the discourse of the classroom, if they learn how to becomemembers of a new language community through the discursive practices which they adoptor are obliged to adopt in the classroom, how will these practices prepare them forparticipation in discourse beyond the classroom? In other words, how are learners totranscend what they have learned in managing classroom discourse in order to participateas speakers of the new language in other realms of discourse?A paradoxical but central issue for language pedagogy is how it may facilitate the gradualduembeddmg of language learning from what appears to be the prevailing discourse of lessons.In raising this issue I am not intending to imply that all the features of such discourse inhibitthe learner’s capacity to participate in other kinds of discourse. However, I believe it doesimply that we need to consider how we might identify and mobilise the discursive work of‘learners which actually benefits learning while also identifying and reducing those mutableconstraints within the current discursive and social practices of language classrooms whichmay inhibit it.If a lcarncr is positioned in a largely responsive role within the discourse, the rcscarchsuggests that the learner has to fall back upon covert and unguided ways of making sensebecause the opportunities for overt negotiation which entail the added benefits of individual