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TESOL Matters Vol. 11 No. 1     (December 2000/January 2001)

by Julian Edge

I was delighted to read Suzanne Scott's article about the development of TESOL's research agenda (TM, August/September 2000). At about the same time, I had just been checking something in Lightbown and Spada's (1999) book, and the coincidence made me wonder if second language acquisition (SLA) might not be a powerful illustration of the case thus far for research and its agendas in TESOL. Summarizing the findings from their chapter on L2 learning in the classroom, Lightbown and Spada note,

Classroom data from a number of studies offer support for the view that form-focused instruction and corrective feedback provided within the context of communicative programs are more effective in promoting second language learning than programs which are limited to a virtually exclusive emphasis either on accuracy or on fluency. (p. 152)

And that, in turn, reminded me of Lightbown's earlier (1985) review of the state of the art in SLA as it then affected TESOL: "Second-language acquisition research does not tell teachers what to teach, and what it says about how to teach they had already figured out" (p. 182).

So, there we are. And sometimes I wonder. I mean, certainly we need to congratulate SLA on its success in establishing itself as an academic field of study, but I do sometimes wonder about its (possibly parasitic?) relationship with TESOL. And I worry that what I see in ESOL teacher education programs sometimes risks being a (rather onanistic?) progression through an SLA course book on a one-theory-after-the-other-plus-implications basis.

I would say that if anyone starts off with the expectation that learning about TESOL consists of deciding on the best SLA "theory" and then getting on to "apply" it with learners (not, I hasten to add, an impression they could get from Lightbown and Spada), then they will very soon be disillusioned. Such disillusion must be a good thing as far as responsive and responsible teaching is concerned, but where does that leave a great deal of SLA research and its theories? What are they for?

Well, quite properly, they have their own motivations. So much SLA research is concerned with quasi-experimental studies regarding universal grammar, for example, or functional sentence perspective, acculturation theory, neural activation, or some other field of knowledge, as well as with securing more funding for more research. It is all very interesting. Of course it is interesting. I just listened to a talk on the radio by a London-based academic who has spent 14 years (so far) studying the social arrangements of the naked mole-rat (found in some areas of South Africa), and that was interesting, too. But you have to care. You have to want to know for its own sake. And what is more, the aforementioned mole-rat did not pretend to be wearing the Emperor's new clothes.

Sorry for slipping off into hyperbole there. What I meant to say is that a lot of effort has gone into the SLA/TESOL relationship as a theory/application deal, and whether or not you personally want to continue to buy into that, might it not be time to look for alternative or complementary relationships?

I am intrigued by how we might go about building a form of SLA theory from inside TESOL, classroom-based in its questions as well as in its answers. Let me run an example by you in terms of a piece of frameworking taken from van Lier (1998). Van Lier proposes four hierarchical levels of consciousness, with each one presupposing what comes before:

1. intransitive consciousness -- an on/off issue of being alive and awake;
2. transitive consciousness -- which can be varied in terms of focus and intensity;
3. metaconsciousness -- which is consciousness focused upon itself, on the workings of the mind, on the rules of language, for example;
4. purposive consciousness -- which involves deliberate and reflective engagement in social processes. (p. 131)

Let me run through the scheme again, pausing to reflect on what each level might mean in terms of TESOL classroom practice. Level 1 is pretty fundamental and, for the most part, taken for granted. But only for the most part. I certainly know of teachers in the Middle East and Japan for whom sleeping students are an issue. What do they do about this? How does what they do about it affect their students' language learning, both those who sleep and those who do not? Well, let us note that we have established a research question or two here, and move on.

Level 2 clearly interacts with Level 1 in the sense that variation of the focus and intensity of transitive consciousness might affect the rate of loss of intransitive consciousness. That is another research question. To what extent does my teaching (or yours, come to that) allow for deliberate variations of focus and intensity? How would we research that?

At this point, I want to differ with van Lier as far as the idea of hierarchy is concerned. Putting 4 after 3 fits in well with "critical" approaches to the human sciences, in the sense that it suits those among us who make a living by representing ideological perspectives as the pinnacle of scholarship (let's not go there right now, it is a whole other argument.), but I think that we can do better without this final sequencing.

I see 3 and 4 not as hierarchical levels above 2 but as complementary functions of 2. That is to say, our transitive consciousness can be focused either inwards, in a metaconscious function, or outwards, in a socially purposeful function. In ecological terms, an effective organism must concentrate on, and mediate between, both its internal processes and its external relations with its environment. In TESOL terms, we encourage the former function to the extent that we believe that conscious awareness of language and learning processes is helpful to our students. We engage the latter focus to the extent that we believe that meaningful and socially aware language use is helpful to our students. How are these focuses represented, balanced, and integrated in my teaching? How would I begin to observe and interpret what I do so as to be able to come to authentic conclusions in these areas?

This brief discussion has raised a number of research questions, each of which raises further issues of data collection, interpretation, and evaluation. The point that I am trying to make is that these are important questions, but they are not going to be answered by our waiting for SLA researchers to come up with experiment-based theories for ESOL teachers to apply. First, as I have suggested above, SLA researchers have their own fish to fry. Second, such answers cannot arise from the kind of positivist tradition to which SLA is wedded. These questions can be responded to most effectively by teachers who address them directly through aware practice: To what extent have I thought through my teaching in terms of a balance between internal and external focusing of attention? To what extent am I monitoring the results of my classroom efforts (from differing participant perspectives) and making adjustments to my teaching?

Is it perhaps in the continuing, context-specific pursuit of such questions as these that the data of a TESOL-active SLA might become available for further theorizing in its own terms? And if so, perhaps what ESOL teacher education programs need is more specific input on how the pursuit of such questions can be meaningfully integrated into a busy professional life. And this might be true of a whole approach to the development of TESOL's research agenda.

I tend to call this sort of work action research. Others (with differing and overlapping emphases) prefer to use terms such as exploratory teaching or reflective practice, or investigative pedagogy. The main thing for me is not the differences implied here, or what we call the work (although these issues are also interesting in their own right), or whether you are attracted by ecological frameworks such as the one I borrowed above, but that we wise up to the fact that we have to theorize our practice in ways meaningful to that practice if we are to move ahead with it. Heaven help us if we continue to wait for others, working on different agendas, to come up with "theories" for us to "apply."

So, as I await more news on the development of TESOL's research agenda, I do hope to see a real emphasis on the question of who is to be doing the research, and a constant monitoring of whose agenda it is to serve. And I do feel sincerely grateful to those colleagues doing this important work.

References

Lightbown, P. (1985). Great expectations: Second language acquisition research and classroom teaching. Applied Linguistics, 6, 173-189.

Lightbown, P., & Spada, N. (1999). How languages are learned. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Van Lier, L. (1998). The relationship between consciousness, interaction and language learning. Language Awareness, 7, 128-145.

Julian Edge (e-mail j.edge@aston.ac.uk) teaches in the distance-learning TESOL master's and doctoral programs at Aston University, England.