English Language Teaching in its Social Context

54 ROD ELLISmight confound the study of the particular variable under investigation). The interpretativetradition is reflected in Weber’s (1961) famous definition of sociology: ‘Sociology . . . is ascience which attempts the interpretative understanding of social action.’ It is manifest innon-interventionist studies that seek to develop an understanding of the social rules thatunderlie a particular activity by examining the meaning that the social actors involved in theactivity themselves put on it. As Van Lier (1 990) points out, where confirmatory researchseeks causes, interpretative research looks for reasons.Both of these traditions can be found in SLA. As we have already noted, SLA began withcase studies of learners (e.g. Ravem 1968). Thcsc studies focused on individual learners,collecting samples of spoken language by observing the learners in naturally occurringenvironments.’ These case studies investigatcd naturalistic lcarning by examining thelanguage produccd by lcarncrs, the processes and strategies they used and how individualand social factors affected their progress. One of the outcomes of this tradition of researchin SLA was descriptive information about the order in which learners acquired diffcrcntgrammatical structures and the scqucncc of stages they followed in mastering particularstructures such as negatives, interrogatives, and relative clauses. Another branch of theinterpretative tradition of research in SLA can be found in ethnographic studies of L2classrooms (c.g.Van Lier 1988, Markee 1994a).These studies have sought to describe thckinds of discourse in which classroom learners engage and how thcse influence their L2development.The confirmatory tradition is evident in much of thc work based on Universal Grammar(e.g. Flynn and Martohardjono 1995), where data elicited by mcans of such instruments asgrammaticality judgement tests have been used to examine whether learners with diffcrcntfirst languages manifest access to particular principlcs of language. It is also evident in studiesof form-focuscd instruction (e.g. Spada and Lightbown 1993,VanPatten and Cadierno 1993).Where applications to teaching arc conccrned, the confirmatory tradition frcqucntlyentails a particular view of what it means for a teacher to be professionally competent.According to this vicw, education is an applied science. Rcsearchcrs do research, discoveringthe best ways to achieve predetermined educational goals. These are then passed on toteachers, who function as tcchnicians carrying out the researchers’ prescriptions. Thispresupposes a means-to-end view of education (Tyler 1949), where the curriculum is viewedas a delivery system, with research providing information about the most effective meansfor delivering the curriculum. Research, therefore, is concerned with means rather thanends, which are taken as given.This view of thc rclationship between research and educationis evident in thc opinions of Johnston (1 987) and, in part, of Long (1 983a, 1990) discussedin the prcvious section.There arc many problems with the applied science view of thc rclationship betweenresearch and practice. As we have already notcd, the information provided by even the bestdesigned cxperirnental study may not be applicable to other tcaching contexts. Also, it isdoubtful whether the information obtained from experimental research has the objectivestatus often claimed for it, as subjcctivc and social factors play a crucial role in the productionof any kind of knowledge, including that obtained experimentally (see Kuhn 1970). As Carrand Kemmis (1986) point out, the separation of ends (or values) and means is not reallypossible. Also, ends should not bc takcn as given but should thcmsclves be the subject ofcritical scrutiny, as protagonists of critical pedagogy have argued (SCC Pcnnycook 1989). Agood example of the need to consider ends as well as means can be found in investigationsof teachers’ questions. A number of L2 studies have investigated the effect of display andreferential questions on learner output (e.g. Brock 1986). In these studies it is assumed thatteachers will and should ask questions and the only issue is what kind of questions work best