Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Implications for teaching
One overall moral is that there is no such thing as the classroom, as classrooms
vary in so many ways. Some students have been hypnotized, some have studied
in their sleep, some have seen Lego blocks built into sentences, some have had 
the world of meaning reduced to a set of coloured sticks, some have sat in groups
and bared their souls, others have sat in language laboratories repeating after the
tape. The classroom is a variable, not a constant. Teachers can shape it to suit 
their students and their aims, within the limits set by their school or educational
system. Nor should we forget that instruction does not only take place in class-
rooms. The self-motivated autonomous student can learn as efficiently as any
taught in a class.
What advice can be given about input in the classroom?
●
Be aware of the two levels at which language enters into the classroom. Overusing
the ‘leader’ pattern of IRF teacher talk undermines a communicative classroom
by destroying the usual give-and-take typical outside the classroom.
●
Be aware of the different sources of input. Language may come first from the
teacher, second from the textbook or teaching materials, and third from the
Classroom interaction and Conversation Analysis
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other students, not to mention sources outside the classroom. All these provide
different types of language: the teacher the genuine language of the classroom,
the textbook purpose-designed non-authentic language or authentic language
taken out of its usual context, the other students’ interlanguage full of non-
native-like forms but at the same time genuine communicative interaction.
●
The input that the students are getting is far more than just the sentences they
encounter. The whole context provides language; this includes the patterns of
interaction between teacher and class, and between students in the class, down
to the actual gestures used. Many teachers ostensibly encourage spontaneous
natural interaction from the students, but they still betray that they are teach-
ers controlling a class with every gesture they make.
●
Students learn what they are taught. This truism has often been applied to lan-
guage classrooms: in general, students taught by listening methods turn out to
be better at listening; students taught through reading are better at reading.
The major source of language available to many learners is what they
encounter in the classroom. This biases their knowledge in particular ways. A
teacher I observed was insisting that the students used the present continuous;
hardly surprisingly his students were later saying things like, ‘I’m catching the
bus every morning.’ The teacher’s responsibility is to make certain that the lan-
guage input which is provided is sufficient for the student to gain the appropri-
ate type of language knowledge and that it does not distort it in crucial ways.
While in many respects L2 learners follow their own developmental sequences,
and so on, their classroom input affects their language in broad terms.
Much of what we have seen so far implies that language itself is the most impor-
tant ingredient in the classroom, the core of the syllabus, the basis for the teaching
technique, and the underlying skeleton of the class, whether considered as conversa-
tional interaction, authentic or non-authentic, simplified grammatical structures, or
whatever. This has been challenged by those who see the classroom as a unique situ-
ation with its own rationale. Prabhu (1987), for example, talked of how the class-
room consisted of particular processes and activities; his celebrated work in Bangalore
organized language teaching around the activities that could be done in the class-
room: interpreting information in tables, working out distances, and so on. Michael
Long and Graham Crookes (1993) describe teaching arranged around pedagogic tasks
‘which provide a vehicle for the presentation of appropriate language samples to
learners’. A task has an objective and has to be based on tasks that the students need
in their lives. Language is far from the crucial factor in the language teaching class-
room; the students will suffer if all the teacher’s attention goes on organizing lan-
guage content and interaction. The task-based learning approach is described further
in Chapter 13.