English Language Teaching in its Social Context

22 ROSAMOND MITCHELL AND FLORENCE MYLESreceiving.This ensures that the input is well adapted to thcir own internal needs (i.e. to thepresent state of development of their L2 knowledge). What this means is that learnersneed the chance to talk with native speakers in a fairly open-ended way, to ask questions, andto clarify meanings when they do not immctliately understand. Under these conditions, itis believed that the utterances that result will be at the right level of difficulty to promotelearning; in Krashen’s terms, they will provide true ‘comprehensible input’. Conversationalepisodes involving the regular negotiation of meaning have been intensively studied by manyof the Krashen-influenced researchers.Interaction is also interesting to linguistic theorists, because of recent controversies overwhether the provision of negative evidence is necessary or helpful for L2 development. By‘negative evidence’ is meant some kind of input which lets the learner know that a particularform is not acceptable according to target language norms. In L2 interaction this might takethe shape of a formal correction offered by a teacher, say, or a more informal rephrasing ofa learner’s L2 utterance, offered by a native-speaking conversational partner.Why is there a controversy about negative evidence in L2 learning? The problem is thatcorrection often seems ineffective ~- and not only because L2 learners are lazy. It seems thatlearners often cannot benefit from correction, but continue to makc the same mistakcshowever much fcedback is offered. For some current theorists, any natural language mustbe learnable from positive evidence alone, and corrective feedback is largely irrelevant. Otherscontinue to see value in corrections and negative evidence, though it is generally acceptedthat these will be useful only when they relate to ‘hot spots’ currently being restructured inthe learner’s emerging L2 system.These different (psycho)linguistic views have one thing in common, however; they viewthe learner as operating and developing a relatively autonomous L2 system, and see interactionas a way of feeding that system with more or less fine-tuned input data, whethcr positive ornegative. Sociolinguistic vicws of interaction are very different. Here, the language learningprocess is viewed as essentially social; both thc identity of the learncr, and their languagcknowledge, are collaboratively constructed and reconstructed in the course of interaction.Some theorists strcss a broad view ofthc second language learning process as an apprenticeshipinto a range of new discourse practices (e.g. Hall 1995); others arc more concerned withanalysing the detail of interaction between more expert and less expert speakers, to determinehow the learner is scaJolded into using (and presumably learning) new L2 forms.Views of the language learnerWho is the second language learner, and how are they introduced to us, in current SLLresearch? ‘Second language’ research generally deals with learners who embark on thelearning of an additional language, at least some years after they have started to acquire theirfirst 1anguage.This learning may take place formally and systematically, in a classroom setting;or it may take place through informal social contact, through work, through migration, orother social forces which bring speakers of different languages into contact, and makecommunication a necessity.So, second language learners may be children, or thcy may be adults; they may belearning the target languagc formally in school or college, or ‘picking it up’ in thc playgroundor the workplacc.They may be learning a highly localized language, which will helpthem to become insiders in a local speech community; or the targct language may be alanguage of widcr communication relevant to thcir region, which givcs access to economicdevelopment and public life.