English Language Teaching in its Social Context

64 ROD ELLISthe innovation’s feasibility because, for example, the teachers lacked the commandof English required for fluency-based teaching.There are problems with Beretta’s study ~ forexample, we cannot be sure whether the regular teachers really failed to adopt the innovationor whether they simply lacked the English needed to produce narrative accounts of theirexperience ~ but, nevertheless, it demonstrates the potential of an innovationist perspectivefor evaluating pedagogic proposals derived from SLA theory and research.Probably the most comprehensive study of innovation in language pedagogy is to befound in Stoller’s (1994) study of innovation in intensive English language programmesin the United States. Stoller obtained completed questionnaires from 43 such programmesand also conducted in-depth interviews with five programme administrators. She foundthat the most frequently cited innovations related to the development of new curricula orthe restructuring of the old. Some attributes were perceived as more important than othersfor successful innovation. Attributes rated as particularly important were usefulness(relevance), feasibility, improvement over past practices (which would seem to relate toinitial dissatisfaction) and practicality (which relates to acceptability). Stoller was able toidentify three major factors in the questionnaire responses. One factor was what she termeda ‘balanced divergent factor’. The attributes involved here were explicitness, complexity,compatibility with past experiences, visibility, flexibility, and originality. In the case of thisfactor, however, the attributes operated in a zone of innovation in the sense that they facilitatedinnovation when they were present to a moderate degree but not when they were stronglyor weakly present.The second factor was dissatisfaction and the third factor viability. Stolleralso demonstrates that there appear to be different paths to innovation depending on thenature ofthc innovation.Thus, in the case of curricular innovation, viability was seen as themost important followed by dissatisfaction and finally the balanced divergent factor. Theemphasis that Stoller places on viability in this type of innovation reflects the importance thatBeretta attaches to feasibility in the communicational teaching project.An innovationist perspective, then, would seem to afford applied linguists a way ofevaluating the extent to which their propods are likely to succeed. It will not be possible,of course, to make very precise predictions about which proposals will be taken up andwhich ones will not, but, arguably, the very act of evaluating their potential will helpresearchers to make them more practical. One might also add that an innovationist analysis,using the kinds of categories discussed in this section, may provide teachers with an explicitand relatively systematic way of determining whether specific proposals derived from SLAare of use to them.The study of innovations, therefore, offers another possible way ofbridgingthe gap between SLA and language pedagogy.Applied linguist’s perspectiveI have defined an applied linguist as a person who seeks to apply ideas derived from linguistics,psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, education, and any other area of potentially relevantenquiry to language pedagogy. It is important to make a clear distinction between ‘appliedlinguistics’ and ‘linguistics applied’. One obvious reason is that applied linguistics utiliyesinformation sources other than linguistics, as the above definition makes clear. There is,however, a deeper reason. Widdowson (1 984) argues that ‘it is the responsibility of appliedlinguists to consider the criteria for an educationally relevant approach to language’ (7bid. :17) and that this cannot be achieved by simply applying linguistic thcory.This is because theway linguists conceive of their task is inherently different from the way teachers conceiveof theirs. Linguists are concerned with the precise description of language and with its