English Language Teaching in its Social Context

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 49The concerns voiced by Tarone et al. (1 976) and Hatch (1978) are very real ones. Theyreflect the understandable reticence of researchers to plunge in before they arc certain oftheir results.This uncertainty about the quality of the research being produced may have beenone of the reasons why some researchers stopped adding sections on the applications of theirresearch to their published articl~s.~ In retrospect, however, I am not so sure that researchersneed to be so cautious. As Corder (1980) noted, teachers cannot wait until researchers arecompletely satisfied that their results are robust and generalizable. Should teachers not bepermitted to base their pedagogical decisions on the best information available even if thisis still inadequate in the eyes of researchers? More importantly, the apply-with-cautionapproach makes certain assumptions about the relationship between research/theory andpractice which are themselves challengeable. It appears to view the practitioner as a consumerof research. From such a stance, of course, it is essential to make sure that the product beingmarketed is a sound one. But, as we will see later, th~s rather positivist view of the relationshipbetween research and practice 5 is not acceptable to many educators and may not serve as themost appropriate model for discussing how SLA can aid teaching.There are alternatives to the instrumental view of SLA implicit in the early articles byTarone et al. (1976) and Hatch (1978). One is that SLA should not so much be used to tellpractitioners what to do, as to inform their understanding of how L2 acquisition takes placeso that they will know better what it is possible to achieve in a classroom.This is the positionadopted by Lightbown ( 1985). She argues that SLA has nothing to tell teachers about whatto teach but serves as a guide about how to teach. Lightbown recognizes that teachers willneed to rely primarily on their own practical experience of which approaches work andwhich do not but she suggests that familiarity with the results of SLA research will helpteachers make up their minds. For Lightbown, then, the value of SLA lies not in identifyinginnovative techniques or new teaching approaches but rather in shaping expectancies and inlending support to particular approaches, such as communicative language teaching. Fromthis perspective, however, SLA is of limited relevance to language pedagogy, for as Lightbown(ibid.: 182) comments:Second-language acquisition research does not tell teachers what to teach, and what itsays about how to teach they have already figured out.If this is all SLA can do for teachers, one might well ask whether it is worth their whilemaking the effort to become familiar with it.Not all researchers/theorists have felt the need to play down the contribution that SLAcan make to language pedagogy. Some have looked for ways of bridging the gap betweenresearch and classroom practice. One way is to construct a theory of L2 acquisition that iscompatible with the available research but which also is tuned to the needs of teachers.Thisis what Krashen has tried to do. Krashen (1 98 3) argues that it is not the research itself thatshould be used to address pedagogical issues but rather the theory derived from the research.Even applied SLA research should be related to practice via thcory. Theory is importantbecause it provides teachers with ‘an underlying rationale for methodology in general’(Krashen 1983: 261) and thus helps them to adapt to different situations and constitutes abasis for evaluating new pedagogical ideas. Krashen argues that the theory must be a theoryof L2 acquisition as opposed to a linguistic theory or a theory of general learning. Indeed,he claims that teachers have grown suspicious of ‘theory’ because of the failure of linguisticand psychological theories to solve pedagogic problems. He believes that SLA theory, becauseit explains how learners actually learn a second language, is of more direct relevance. Krashenalso argues that theory must be empirically grounded (i.e. based on actual L2 research)rather than on armchair speculation.