English Language Teaching in its Social Context

52 ROD ELLIS(1 979: 71-7) has so amusingly demonstrated in his fictional account of how a teacher grappleswith the attempt to apply the results of research concerning strategies for teaching aboutrace relations, classroom research is unlikely to produce clear answers to teachers’ questionsbecause it only demonstrates what works by and large or for the most part whereas teachersare conccrncd with what will work in their own particular teaching contcxts. Stenhouse(1975: 25) has stated the essential problem more formally elscwhcrc:The crucial point is that the proposal (from research) is not to be regarded as anunqualified rccomrnendation but rather as a provisional specification claiming no morethan to be worth putting to the test of practice. Such proposals claim to be intelligentrather than correct.In other words, classroom rcscarch, although potentially closer to thc realities teachers haveto grapple with than non-classroom research, is still remote from actual practice. The gapbetween SLA and practice may be narrowed somewhat but it cannot be filled by classroomresearch, even when this is research on, rather than just in, classrooms.So far we have considered what various SLA researchers have had to say regarding theapplication of rcscarch/theory to language pedagogy. The view of change implicit in all ofthe positions we have examined is a top-down one. Applied linguists draw on informationfrom SLA to initiate - tentatively or confidently - various pedagogic proposals.The proposalsmay be based on pure research, on a theory of L2 acquisition, or on classroom-centredresearch but in each case the presumed originator of the proposal is the SLA researcher/theorist. It is timc now to briefly consider an alternative way in which SLA can bc used toinform language pedagogy.When the researcher functions as a consultant he or she functions AS a resource helpingteachers solve the practical problems they have identified. A good example of this approachcan be found in Pica (1 994). Pica’s starting point is not SLA itself but rather the questionsthat teachers have asked her ‘both in the privacy of their classrooms and in the more publicdomain of professional meetings’ (ibid.: 50). Pica offers a list of ten questions dealing withsuch matters as the relative importance of comprehension and production, the rolc of explicitgrammar instruction, and thc utility of drill and practice.‘ Pica provides answers to thesequestions based on her understanding of the SLA research literature.The obvious advantage of such an approach to applying SLA is that the informationprovided is more likely to be heeded by teachers because it addresses issues they haveidentified as important. Bahns (1 990: 1 15) goes so far as to claim:The initiative for applying research results of any kind to any field of practicewhatsoever should come from the practitioners themselves.Such a statement ignores, however, some obvious limitations in this insider approach.Teachers can only ask questions based on their own expericncc.They cannot ask questionsabout issues they have no knowledge of. If Bahns’s dictum were to be religiously adhered tomany of the developments in language pedagogy over the last twenty years would probablynot have taken place. For example, teachers would have been unlikely to ask‘what is the bestway to organize a syllabus - in terms of structures, notions, or tasks?’ because they wouldnot have known what ‘notions’ or ‘tasks’ (in its technical sense) wcrc.These concepts havebeen derived from the work of linguists or applied linguists, hut have not arisen spontaneouslythrough the practice of teaching. Thus, although much can be said in favour of an insiderapproach, there is also a case for the outsider application of SLA.