English Language Teaching in its Social Context

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 45Many of these researchers were, in fact, originally teachers themselves.’ The papers theywrote and published about their research typically concluded with a section in which theapplications and implications for language pedagogy were spelled out. The studies of learnererrors, for example, were used to address issues concerning teachers’ attitude to errors, whaterrors should be corrected and how learner progress could be cvaluatcd.The case studies ofindividual learners were used to support the radical proposal that teachers should desistfrom trying to ‘intervene’ directly in the process of L2 acquisition and, instead, developapproaches that would allow learners to learn ‘naturally’ (Newmark 1966 and Dulay and Burt1973).SLA has grown exponentially since its beginning in the 1960s. One of the outcomes ofits growth and diversification is that much of the research is no longer directly concernedwith pedagogic issues. According to a theory advanced by Chomsky, children are able tolearn their mother tongue because they have innate knowledge of the possible form that thegrammar of any language can take. Their task is to establish how the abstract principles thatconstitute this knowledge are manifest in the particular grammar they are learning. One ofthe main goals of UG-based SLA is to investigate whether and how these principles operatein L2 acquisition. This research, then, has been motivated by a desire to test a linguistictheory rather than to address the practical problems of teaching; it is oriented towardslinguistics rather than language pedagogy (Gass 1989).jOther sub-fields of SLA have continued the tradition of strong links with languagepedagogy.Two in particular stand out.The first is the study of the role of input and interactionin L2 acquisition (c.g. Long 1981 and Pica 1992).The question of what constitutes optimalinput for language learning is potentially of considerable relevance to teachers. Indeed, oneway of characterizing teaching is in terms of providing learners with opportunities to hearand use the L2. The theories and findings which this research has generated have fed intoclassroom research, as, for example, in studies which have investigated the kinds of input andinteraction afforded by different types of language tasks (see Crookes and Gass 1993) andby different modes of classroom participation (e.g. Pica and Doughty 1985). The secondsub-field of SLA with clear links to language pedagogy is the study of form-focused instruction.SLA researchers have investigated whether teaching learners particular grammaticalstructures actually results in their being learnt (e.g Spada and Lightbown 1993) and, also,what methodological options for teaching grammatical structures arc most effective (e.g.VanPatten and Cadierno 1993).However, irrcspectivc of whether SLA addresses issues of likely relevance to teachers,there is the problem of a gap between SLA and language pedagogy. Ultimately, this gap isnot so much a question of what issues SLA addresses, but of the manner in which SLA isconducted.The goal of SLA, like that of all academic disciplines, is to contribute to technicalknowledge.This is reflected in the fact that SLA is, by and large, the preserve of univcrsitybasedresearchers, whose primary allegiance is to the conduct of well-designed studies andtheory development in their field.This is as true of those researchers who are concerned withareas of potential relevance to language pedagogy (c.g. input/interaction and the study ofform-focused instruction) as it is of researchers who see SLA as a means of contributing toother disciplines such as linguistics or cognitive psychology. In contrast, language pedagogyis concerned with practical knowledge. Textbook writers draw on their experience of thekinds of activities that work in classrooms and, of course, on their familiarity with otherpublished materials. Teachers draw on their hands-on knowledge to perform the myriad oftasks that comprise teaching.Given that a gap exists between SLA and language pedagogy and assuming that SLA is,at least, of some potential relevance, the question arises as to how the gap can be bridged.