Dick Allwright, Summer Institute in English and Applied Linguistics,

Linguistics, University of Cambridge,

Lancaster University. July 1995.

CONTEXTUAL FACTORS IN CLASSROOMLANGUAGE LEARNING:

AN OVERVIEW

1. INTRODUCTION: OTHER PEOPLE DO MAKE A DIFFERENCE, DON'T THEY?

1.1 The relevance of social inhibitions.

My starting point here is to ask you to pay serious attention to a document that you may well think is quite unremarkable: just a brief out-of-context comment about classroom language learning from an Algerian secondary school student (from Cherchalli, 1988:185):

"Sometimes I feel like asking the teacher a question, but just realizing that perhaps the rest of the class understand, I hesitate."

It is unremarkable, I suggest, precisely because it is so very familiar and so very understandable, from the perspective of our own language classroom memories. But it is, I also suggest, at the same time all too easy for us to dismiss it as a comment of no real consequence - just a somewhat sad little anecdote, worth a wry smile of recognition and even sympathy, but not really worth more serious contemplation. I want in this presentation to persuade you that a casually dismissive attitude to such an anecdote is actually a mistake, and perhaps a highly damaging one, because it may prevent us from examining what could be a very fruitful area of enquiry - the importance to classroom language learning, and therefore to language teaching, of the presence in the same room of other people. Perhaps it is precisely because such anecdotes are so familiar and so immediately 'understandable' that we underestimate their potential significance. A moment's thought, however, might convince us that it does indeed seem to be a very common, almost universal, experience for people in language classrooms to feel inhibited from asking the questions they would really like the teacher to address, just because other more confident or more competent people are around. And if that is the case, then the cumulative effect such inhibitions might have on otherwise good, intelligent learning behaviour could perhaps add up to an important overall inhibition on effective classroom language learning, for most people, most of the time.

1.2 Questioning the obvious.

If this analysis is correct, then we have a good example of the application of a guiding principle of research - the potential value of investigating something that we have overlooked precisely because we have taken it so much for granted. Certainly applied linguists in recent decades do seem to have largely neglected the potential importance of the presence of other people in the language classroom - the immediate social context for language learning.

2. SO WHY HAVE APPLIED LINGUISTS LOOKED ELSEWHERE?

2.1 The problem.

The key initial question for this overview lecture, then, is why this should have been the case. Why should applied linguists have not seen the potential interest and importance of such an apparently ubiquitous phenomenon as social inhibition on classroom language learning (and teaching) behaviour? Or more generally, how could they have found it possible to neglect the whole area of investigating the importance of the classroom itself as the social context for language learning?

2.2 Have other researchers made the same mistake?

To answer the questions in the previous subsection the first thing to ask is perhaps whether or not applied linguists are alone in their neglect of this area. Even a casual review of the literature, however, suggests that although they may not be alone, researchers in second and foreign language education do seem to be largely 'out-of-line' with researchers in general education, who have for many years have been taking such things more seriously, as I will hope to demonstrate later, in section 5 below.

2.3 So why have applied linguists been different?

What has happened to make people in language education so very different? Here the answer seems to lie in the recent history of the subject. The field of language education has enjoyed a period of great development and expansion over recent decades, but in the process it has tried perhaps too hard sometimes, and in some hands, to establish language teaching and learning as a largely independent field for research. And it has looked for connections with linguistics, rather than with education, and so it has arisen as a discipline with a view of itself as having hardly anything to learn from educational research in general. Certainly we applied linguists have had plenty of our own special notions to occupy our research time. It may therefore be helpful to address them here, to see how they might have served to deflect our attention from the role of social contextual factors in the language classroom.

2.3.1 Faith in 'method'.

Among applied linguists there has been, I suggest, a pre-occupation in the last three decades with other candidates for the role of 'key causal factor', with research tending towards the search for 'the' key causal factor above all others. We first see this very clearly in the work done principally in the 1960s to establish the 'best' language teaching method. The implication of this line of enquiry, as exemplified in the Pennsylvania Project (Smith, 1970), was necessarily to suggest, at the very least, that the choice of method was the most significant decision facing language teaching professionals, precisely because the choice of method would override all other decisions in terms of the expected overall effect on the rate of language learning, and therefore on school achievement in languages.

The highly publicised failure of the Pennsylvania Project to live up to the expectations of the research team (captured dramatically in the project leader's remarkably human, but rather unsettlingly 'unscientific', statement that "these results were personally traumatic to the Project staff" (Smith, 1970:271)) was seen as a failure in general education research, necessitating a change of research strategy (and an at least temporary 'ceasefire' according to one contemporary commentator (Grittner, 1968:7, cited by Otto, 1969:420).

2.3.2 Faith in the linguistic context - 'input'.

It was also a failure associated strongly with the area of 'modern' language teaching, just at a time when interest in language acquisition was building up among people whose prime concern, significantly, was with the rapidly developing field of English as a foreign or second language. The fact that the research failure was in the 'modern' language area may well have helped the people setting up second language acquisition studies to feel that educational research in general was unlikely to have anything of value to offer them, and to be confident that they would do well to look elsewhere for assistance. In any case, they found some of their roots in bilingualism studies (Leopold, 1939, 1947, 149a, 1949b), and in psycholinguistics as it had been developed in research on first language acquisition, which with its pre-occupation with preschool children (see Brown, 1973) naturally saw little need to concern itself with educational research in general. Second language acquisition researchers soon made their mark and established their professional relevance at major international meetings of language teachers. For example, the TESOL 1975 proceedings, entitled "New Directions in Second Language Learning, Teaching, and Bilingual Education" and edited by two second language acquisition specialists - Burt and Dulay - contain six papers in the Second Language Acquisition category. Of the remaining eleven categories, two contain four papers each, three contain three papers each, and six contain just two papers each. But, in North America at least, second language acquisition researchers chose to seek academic acceptance among linguists rather than educationalists. For example, there was great euphoria among second language acquisition specialists at Amherst in 1974 when the Linguistics Society of America at last gave their work its own designated space on the annual convention programme, and thus conferred legitimacy, within academic linguistics, on the new discipline of second language acquisition (SLA). There was no parallel move to gain acceptance within the American Educational Research Association.

This pre-occupation with linguistics in general and psycholinguistics in particular translated into an interest in the linguistic context for language learning, with its implication that, replacing method, input would emerge as the new factor that could now be expected to override all others in determining classroom language learning. The difference now was that 'rate' of learning (the concern of the methods researchers) was seen as less interesting than 'route' - the sequence of events during the acquisition process. After early skirmishes with the idea that the relative frequency of items in the input might alone suffice to explain the processes of second language acquisition (see Larsen-Freeman, 1976), and after Krashen's attempts to explain sequence through his 'monitor theory' (1991, 1982), the field came to be largely dominated by Krashen's Input Hypothesis (1985). Krashen, returning to rate of acquisition as a main concern, posited that for most effective learning input merely needed to be made comprehensible. Grading it or explaining it, or even deliberately practising to say it, would be, for all practical purposes, a pointless enterprise - a way of slowing things down rather than speeding them up. In his conception of second language acquisition the relevance of social contextual factors was first of all limited to the role of conversational gambits in securing more input for the learner, and eventually became related to the notion of an 'affective filter' (Krashen, 1985), whose role would be to determine what input got through to the brain's central language acquisition mechanism. Comprehensible input itself remained the main causal variable.

2.3.3 Faith in 'natural processes'.

Alongside this priority given to input came a related implication: that once input had got past the 'affective filter' then natural psycholinguistic processes would take over to determine what happened to it - the route and rate of linguistic development. We thus had a position, exemplified well in the work of Felix (1981), that whatever a teacher did to teach a language in the classroom would be powerless against the natural forces of the learners' natural psycholinguistic processes. All a teacher could, or should, do was to ensure the occurrence of a plentiful supply of comprehensible input that would be, in affective terms, acceptable. And to achieve this, it could suffice for a teacher to teach some other subject matter well, thus eliminating the need for any classes that would actually appear on a timetable as language lessons. It is difficult to see how the potential importance of the social context of the language classroom could be any more effectively ruled out of serious consideration by applied linguists.

Some people did try to establish, however, even within the new second language acquisition 'tradition', a role for social contextual factors. Schumann, for example, elaborated his ideas on acculturation (1978) as a potential explanatory construct, but in that work he was primarily concerned with social relations outside the classroom, between language communities. In his work on diary studies with Francine Schumann (Schumann and Schumann, 1977) he did begin exploring social factors within the classroom, however, and his work was followed up by Bailey's multiple diary study analysis, which, in 1983, drew attention to the potential importance of competitiveness and anxiety as features of individual psychology that affected classroom language learning behaviour. But such excursions into the realms of social psychology failed to make much impact upon those more concerned to pursue what was undoubtedly for them the more 'central' notion of input. Even the development of input studies to include interactional features (Long, 1981) managed to hold on to an essentially asocial notion of interaction, by ignoring, for example, the possibility that overhearers of interaction might benefit as much as, if not more than, those actively involved in it.

2.3.4 Faith in 'communication in the classroom'.

But second language acquisition studies did not completely take over the world, or even all of applied linguistics. Alongside all this psycholinguistic work came the internationally equally influential development of communicative language teaching. Communicative language teaching (and its near-relative in some respects - language teaching for specific purposes) was developed as a way of putting into practice the long-held position that language teaching was ultimately intended to give people the practical ability to cope linguistically in some social context other than their own first language one. The notion of 'relevance' came in as at least of equal importance to the notions of 'route' and 'rate' previously considered so central. It was felt that previous approaches had merely paid lip service to this aim, because they had not seriously attempted to reproduce, in the language classroom, the conditions for target language use. In practice this meant devising ways, such as more or less elaborate role-plays and simulations, in which the target language situation could be brought into the classroom, so that the classroom would become as realistic as possible a rehearsal room for life outside it.

2.4 The story so far.

This effectively brought the notion of social context into centre stage for language teaching methodologists, but, deeply ironically, it simultaneously served to further deflect their attention away from the language classroom as already a social situation in its own right. So we have a situation where, over three decades, the preoccupations of people centrally concerned with language teaching and learning somehow contrived to divert attention from what would appear to be a most promising line of enquiry, one that has, as I shall later show, proved fruitful elsewhere. But so far I have taken for granted myself how I intend to interpret the key term in my overall title - 'contextual factors'. It is time to consider in more detail what I am talking about here.

3. WHAT DO I MEAN BY 'CONTEXTUAL FACTORS', THEN?

3.1 What is included.

It is probably abundantly clear by now that I am especially concerned with those particular contextual factors that result from the fact that the language classroom is a social setting - a setting where people have to take account, in some way or other, and for good or ill, of the fact that they are not entirely alone there. And I am concerned with the effects of such a situation of 'co-presence' on classroom language learning and teaching behaviour, and therefore on the rate, the route, and the relevance of language development. Furthermore I would also wish to add here a concern for the possible effects on the 'ceiling' - the potential limits to the extent - of language development.

3.2 What is excluded.

I am not therefore directly concerned with other potential candidates for designation as 'contextual factors'. For example, the term could reasonably be used to refer to the purely physical characteristics of language learning settings, the buildings and other physical resources available, but these, while potentially influential in their own right (see Dreeben, 1973, on 'The school as workplace'), are much less my concern here than the human, social contextual factors implied by the presence in the classroom of others. I am primarily concerned with establishing the possible role of co-presence in helping us to understand classroom language learning and teaching.

4. BUT TWO BACKGROUND ISSUES REMAIN.

4.1 The two issues.

This still leaves two matters to be disposed of. Firstly, since all classroom-based education, by definition, has co-presence as an essential feature, is the language classroom really so very special? Does it need to be studied separately? And, secondly, can it really be satisfactory to consider the language classroom as a micro social context in itself, in isolation from the macro, even geopolitical, context in which language education takes place?

4.2 The macro/micro issue.

To take the second issue first, because co-presence is a characteristic of the immediate social setting of the classroom itself, a focus on co-presence could suggest an exclusive concern for the classroom as the appropriate level of analysis, with a consequent neglect of the obvious fact that classrooms are necessarily embedded in their own wider social settings. However potentially fruitful it may appear to try to take seriously the immediate social context of life inside the classroom, are we not likely to badly misinterpret what goes on in the language classroom if we neglect the much wider social issues that could surely impinge on classroom life? Must we not always try to take into account the macro context? Or could a micro perspective suffice for our purpose of trying to throw light on what happens in language classes?

4.2.1 It is difficult to know just how far back to go in the history of educational research for evidence of a concern with wider social issues, but we can easily find such evidence from the years before modern language teaching got caught up in the 1960s battle between methods. Getzels and Thelen published their paper on "The Classroom Group as a Unique Social System" in 1960, and in their first footnote recorded that their paper drew on work done by the first author throughout the 1950s. Although they were concerned to establish the classroom group as a social system in its own right, it is clear that they did not intend to neglect the wider social issues, which they summarised as the 'anthropological' dimension: 'The pupil cannot be expected to learn Latin in a culture where knowledge of Latin has little value, nor can he (sic) be expected to identify with teachers in a culture where teachers have little value' (1960, adapted for reprinting 1972:24).