English Language Teaching in its Social Context

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 57What then can be done about all this? Clearly, something is needed to bring the worldsof the researcher/theorist and the teacher closer together. One way might be to find waysof familiarizing teachers with the technical knowledge obtained from research and, also, ofmaking it meaningful to them. Another way is by encouraging teachers to become researchersin their own right. We will briefly examine both of these.An assumption of many educators, is that both pre-service and in-service teachereducation courses should provide studcnts with an undcrstanding of a range of academicissues considered relevant to their work as teachers. Teacher preparation and furthereducation programmes, therefore, typically offer courses designed to familiarize teacherswith these basic clemcnts. In the case of programmes for L2 teaching there is a broadconscnsus regarding what these elements consist of: what language is; how it is used in speechand writing; how language reflects the workings of different social groups; how languagecurricula can be developed, taught, and evaluated and how language is learnt.” One of thegrounds for offering this kind of education is to develop an awarcncss in teachers that thereis no one ‘best’ way to teach a language, but rathcr options from which teachers must selectin accordance with the particular contexts in which thcy work.The need for a foundation in these basic elements has been strongly argued by Stern(1 983). In the introduction to his book Fundamental Concepts In LanguageEaching, Stern arguesthe need for guides to help the student teacher ‘pick his way through the mass of accumulatedinformation, opinion, and conflicting advice; to make sense of the vast literature, and todistinguish between solid truth and ephemeral fads or plain misinformation’ (Ibd : 1-2). Hesees such guides as not telling teachers what to think but rather helping them to sharpen theirown judgements. He works on the common-sense premise that judgements that areinformed, based on sound theoretical foundations, will produce better results than those thatarc not. Stern’s own guide is comprehensive, involving sections dealing with historicalperspectives, concepts of language, concepts of society, concepts of language learning andconcepts of language teaching. Other guides have focused on specific areas, including SLA(e.g. Larsen-Freeman and Long 1991, Lightbown and Spada 1993, Ellis 1994).The aim of these guides is to make technical knowledge available to teachers in adigestible form. There is still the qucstion of’ how teachers are to integrate this knowledgeinto their own practice. As Hirst (1 966: 40) has pointed out:To try to understand the nature and pattern of some practical discourse in terms ofthe nature and patterns of some purely theoretical discourse can only result in its beingradically misconceived.Often enough, teachers in training, particularly pre-service, complain about the lack ofrelevance of the foundation courses they have taken to the actual task of teaching (see forexample Schuyler and Sitterley 1995).This has led to the suggestion that teachers shouldbecome more than consumers of theories and research; they should become researchersand theorists in their own right.The case for teachers conducting research in their own classrooms is now wellestablished in education, largcly as a product of the pioncering work of such educators asStenhouse (1975), Elliott and Ebutt (1985) and Kemmis and McTaggert (1981) amongothcrs. More recently, educators of language teachers (e.g. Nunan 1990 and Crookes 1993)have also argued the need for teachers to rcscarch their own classrooms. Onc form of teacherrcscarch that is commonly advocatcd is action research.Action research originates in the work of Kurt Lewin in the United Statcs (sccAdelman 1993 for a review of Lewin’s work and its contribution). Lewin was concerned withdecision-making centred around changes in practice in the work place. He was interested in