English Language Teaching in its Social Context

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 53A number of more recent discussions of the relationship between SLA and languagepedagogy have grappled with this issue. Gass (1 995: 16), for example, suggests that one wayround the insider/outsider problem is for researchers and teachers to work ‘in tandem todetcrmine how SLA findings can be evaluated and be made applicable to a classroomsituation, and to detcrmine which SLA findings to use’ .The kind of collaborative endeavourGass has in mind is one where rcsearchers and teachers seek to understand each other’s goalsand needs and she suggests a number of areas where the concerns of the two groups coincide(c.g. the issue of correction). However, true collaboration involves not just agreement aboutwhat to investigate but also how. Gass partly addresses this by quoting from Schachter (1 993:181):We need to create a mindset in which both teachers and researchers view classroomsas laboratories where theory and practice can interact to make both better practice andbetter theory.The problem here is that whereas researchers may feel comfortable in viewing classroomsas laboratories, teachers may not. It is also mistaken to imply ~ as Schachter seems to do-that researchers engage in theory and teachers in practice. SLA and language pedagogy areboth characterized by theory and practice, albeit of different kinds. The issue of howresearchers and teachers can effectively collaborate is complex. It is one that has beenaddressed in some depth in the education literature. As Gass acknowledges, however, SLAresearchers have paid scant attention to this literature.From this initial exploration of what it means to apply SLA research it is clear thatthere is no easy answer. For some, the immaturity of SLA as a field of enquiry precludesapplications. For others, SLA can only hope to shape teachers’ expectations of what is possiblein the classroom. Others have developed specific proposals on the basis ofgeneral theoriesof L2 acquisition. Others have suggested that the gap between SLA and teaching can be filledby conducting research in and on L2 classrooms. Finally, some researchers have argued foran approach where they act as consultants addressing issues raised by teachers or where theyparticipate in collaborative research with t~achers.~As we have seen, each of these approacheshas something in its favour but none of them is entirely successful in closing the gap betwecnSLA rcscarch and language pedagogy. In the next section we consider the views of a numberof educators on how research can be made relevant to teachers.Educational perspectivesEarlier we noted that the once close connection which SLA researchers initially envisagedbetween SLA and language pedagogy has not continued.To understand the gulf that frequentlydivides the theory and practice of research on the one hand, and the theory and practice ofteaching on the other, we need to examine the guiding principles and assumptions of each. Weneed to consider the culture of research and the culture of teaching.Let us begin with research. It is customary to distinguish two broad traditions in empiricalcnquiry ~ the confirmatory and the intcrpretative. The confirmatory tradition is intcrventionist.It is manifest in carefully designed experiments, such as the agricultural experimentsof R. A. Fischer (1935) in the United States, which wcrc designed to discovcr whichtreatment produced the best crop yields.The key characteristics of the confirmatory traditionare the use ofrandom sampling (i.e. subjects are randomly distributed into an experimentaland a control group) and the careful control of cxtraneous variables (i.e. those variables that