English Language Teaching in its Social Context

46 ROD ELLISMy perspective is that of the outsider-insider, for an applied linguist is not a practitioner oflanguage pedagogy (see Corder 1973) but rather someone who looks at language pedagogyfrom the vantage point of knowledge gleaned from technical sources. In my case, the sourceis SLA.Technical and practical knowledgeI have suggested that two types of knowledgc can be distinguished: technical knowledge andpractical knowledge. This distinction is, in fact, common in the literature on professionalknowledge (e.g. Calderhcad 1988 and Eraut 1994).Technical knowledge is explicit; that is,it exists in a declarative form that has been codified. For these reasons it can be examinedanalytically and disputed. Technical knowledge is acquired deliberatcly either by reflectingdeeply about the object of enquiry or by investigating it empirically.The lattcr involves theuse of a well-defined set of procedures designed to ensure the validity and reliability of theknowlcdge obtained. Technical knowledge is generalixd; that is, it takes thc form of statementsthat can be applied to many particular cases. For this reason, it cannot easily be applied‘off the shelf’ in the kind of rapid decision-making needed to deal with problems as they occurin day-to-day living.Over the years, SLA has provided a substantial body of technical knowledge about howpeople learn a second 1anguage.This is reflected in the ever-growing set of technical termsused to label this knowledge: overgcneralization and transfer errors, order and sequence ofacquisition, foreigner talk, input and intake, noticing, learning and communication strategies,the teachability hypothesis (see the glossary in Ellis 1994).This technical knowledgc and theterms that label it constitute the goods that are carefully guarded by practitioners of SLA.In contrast, practical knowledge is implicit and intuitive. We are generally not aware ofwhat we practically know. For example, 1 know how to tic my shoe laces but I have littleawareness about the sequence of actions I must perform to do this and could certainly notdescribe them very well. In contrast to technical knowledge, practical knowledge is acquiredthrough actual experience in the context of performing actions by means of procedures thatare only poorly understood. Similarly, practical knowlcdge is fully expressible only inpractice, although it may be possible, through reflection, to codify aspects of it. The greatadvantage of practical knowledge is that it is proceduralixd and thus can be drawn on rapidlyand efficiently to handle particular cases.Practising professionals (lawyers, doctors, and teachers) are primarily concerned withaction involving particular case? and for this reason draw on practical rather than technicalknowledge in the pursuit of their work. Freidson (1 977, cited in Eraut 1994: 53) describeshow medical practitioners opcrate:Onc whose work requires practical application to concrete cases simply cannotmaintain the same frame of mind as the scholar or scientist: he cannot suspend actionin the absence of incontrovertible evidence or be skeptical of himself, his experience,his work and its fruit. In emergencies he cannot wait for discoveries of the future.Dealing with individual cases, he cannot rely solely on probabilities or on generalconcepts or principles: hc must also rely on his own senses. By the nature of his workthe clinician must assume responsibility for practical action, and in so doing he mustrely on his concrete, clinical cxperiencc.Teachers, faced with thc need to makc countless decisions to accomplish a lesson, must also