Summer Institute in English and Applied Linguistics,

University of Cambridge,
July 1995

Contextual Factors In Classroom Language 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 paper 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, 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

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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 'cease-fire' 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 pre-school 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

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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.

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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
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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.

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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

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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).

It is perhaps just fortuitous that Getzels and Thelen chose to make their point with reference
to societal values regarding Latin, but it is striking to read such a reference in 1995, after a
decade or more of growing concern at the implications of the social value placed on English
around the world. Again it is difficult to know quite how far to go back into history for
appropriate examples, but Auerbach and Burgess's 1985 title is indicative: 'The hidden
curriculum of survival ESL', as are the earlier 'Language and culture in conflict' from
Wallerstein in 1983, and the even earlier 'The world for sick proper' from Rogers in 1982.
From the 1990s we have Phillipson's 1992 volume entitled 'Linguistic Imperialism' to show
us one direction for current thinking, and Pennycook's work in a series of papers (1989,
1990a, 1990b), perhaps best exemplified here in his 1990 title: 'Towards a critical applied
linguistics for the 1990s'. Peirce has very recently (1995) taken the argument a stage further
by arguing, as I have begun to do in section 2 above, that second language acquisition
researchers have effectively diverted their own and other people's attention away from social
issues, by focussing exclusively and unhelpfully on an asocial conception of the individual.
She proposes the notion of 'social identity' as a key to helping us understand the processes of
second language development, and draws her examples from her work with immigrant
women in Canada, who, in a context of an apparently continuous opportunity to interact with
native speakers of English at work, report considerable difficulty in establishing their right to
speak. I have no quarrel with Peirce's analysis here, but, without intending to detracting from
the force of her argument, I would suggest that the factors she is concerned about can readily
be found to be operating at the micro level. Her wider social concern could even,
unfortunately, work against her - by focussing attention on 'hard' cases that perhaps resistant
readers could relatively easily dismiss as unrepresentative of their own situations. They
might therefore fail to relate Peirce's argument to the fact that learners have difficulty

8
establishing their 'right to speak' even inside the language classroom, as suggested in the
quotation I started this paper with:

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

I suggest, therefore, that Peirce's interest in immigrant women's difficulties OUTSIDE the
classroom in Canada could, ironically, serve to divert attention yet again from examining
social pressures INSIDE the classroom, and delay even more an adequate response from
applied linguists to Getzels and Thelen's 1960 call for studying the classroom itself as a
'unique social setting'.

4.2.2 For this reason I am personally willing to stay focussed on micro issues, therefore,
within an avowedly narrow institutional social context, conscious of what I may be missing
by so doing, but even more conscious of what I may be missing if I am so bound up in trying
to take vast geopolitical issues into account that I fail to do anything like justice to the role of
social forces in everyday classroom interaction.

4.3 Is the language classroom special?

The above arguments should suffice to commend the language classroom as a fit object of
separate study, given the probable educational importance of the notion of social identity and
the nature of the special issues that arise in the relationship between social identity and
language. But there is still another important case to be made for treating the LANGUAGE
classroom as special, from the history of language teaching method in recent decades, as
suggested above in section 2.2.4.

4.3.1 Communicative language teaching stressed the reproduction of the target language
social context within the language classroom, and therefore promoted classroom interaction
as rehearsal for 'real-life'. As we saw above, this methodological innovation, and the amount
of work involved to develop appropriate classroom practices, effectively made it easy for
applied linguists, with their historical connection to methodological concerns, to fail to notice
that the language classroom was already, like all other classrooms, a setting for social
interaction. But it did, at the same time, turn the language classroom into an even more
special social situation, since it had now become a setting in which other social settings
(target language ones) would be reproduced, precisely for the purpose of helping learners
become able to cope with them linguistically.

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So, yes, the language classroom is potentially special, both because language teachers and
learners are dealing with a subject that can evoke impassioned discussions about such major
geopolitical issues as linguistic imperialism, and also because, but again 'potentially',
wherever a communicative language teaching approach is being seriously employed, language
teachers may attempt to reproduce within the classroom the target social setting. But my
somewhat insistent repetition of the cautious 'potentially' is important here, given that
communicative language teaching has clearly not been adopted everywhere in the world, and
given that that it is not everywhere that language teaching evokes geopolitical debates.

It may even be more important, for our purpose of trying to understand better what happens
inside language classrooms, to insist that a foreign language is probably most often 'just
another school subject' for very many learners and teachers around the world.
So it does make sense to look at language classrooms separately, especially in situations
where one might expect the ideas of communicative language teaching, or the spectre of
linguistic imperialism, to be influential. But it would very probably be quite unhelpful to
assume that all language classrooms were all different from all other subject classrooms in all
important respects. It would seem much more productive to look at the language classroom
in the light of what has been done in educational research more generally, and not risk
missing out on what has been happening in that field.

5. Co-presence As The Focus

5.1 Why the term: 'co-presence'?

I have so far spent my time largely on trying to establish why co-presence has been neglected
in the field of research on classroom language learning and teaching. It is time to attempt to
do justice to the work that has nevertheless been done in this area. But first I perhaps need to
clarify further what my interest is here.

I have already narrowed my concern, in this paper, to 'co-presence' - the mere fact that
classroom language learning and teaching have to take place in the presence of others. And I
am proposing co-presence as a key contextual factor in classroom language learning. But to
propose it as a 'key factor' must mean that I think it important for its relevance to something
else, and so I need to say what that 'something else' refers to. I have in fact already suggested
four possibilities: the RATE of classroom learning, its ROUTE, its RELEVANCE, and its

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potential CEILING. I will leave these here as my summary of what I have in mind when I say
that the overall research question I want to throw light on is the following:

What difference does it make that classroom teaching and learning take place
in the presence of others?

In the remainder of this paper I will sketch some of the work that has explored this overall
question, starting with general educational research, and moving finally to relevant research
on classroom language learning.

5.2 General educational research on co-presence - some illustrative examples.

The term 'co-presence' is not easily found in the indexes of books on educational research. It
is a term I suspect I have half-borrowed and half-coined myself from social psychology by not
being content with 'co-action', 'audience-effect', and suchlike (see Davis, 1969: 12-16). I find
it convenient to use it here because of its conciseness. Studies using the general concept itself
have a very long history - certainly back to 1898 (Triplett's work on cycling with or without
pacers and/or competition). For the first three decades of the century they seem to have
focussed on such issues as the influence of co-presence on task performance. Subsequently
they moved away from task performance rather, to focus more on the development or
manipulation of social relations (see Davis, 1969: 16). I find the term particularly helpful as a
cover term for a wide range of intriguing possibilities. For example, learners might be
expected to perform differently on tests according to whether they think that the shadowy
figure they can see through the semi-opaque glass partition is a senior teacher, or someone
without such academic authority. In my own work, I have not pursued the issues surrounding
test performance under different conditions of 'co-presence', but I have found it useful to
consider the curious case of the possible influence on the classroom behaviour of learners and
teachers of unexpected absences - the converse of co-presence.

Back in the 1960s, while language teaching researchers were trying to establish which
teaching method was 'best', general education researchers were already beginning to offer
detailed descriptions of the social life of classrooms, typically with a debt to Waller's 1932
work on "The Sociology of Teaching". The best known is probably Jackson's 1968 study of
"Life in Classrooms", but that influential volume was not the first in the field. "Realities of
the Urban Classroom" was published by an anthropologist (Moore) in 1967, from work done
between 1962 and 1964 by a team at Hunter College in the USA. It is intended not as a
research report so much as 'a guide for newcomers to urban schools' (op cit: 1), and

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principally for newcomers to teaching. The flavour of the enterprise (and its explicit concern
for the importance of what I am calling 'co-presence') is perhaps best captured in one of the
follow-up discussion questions to a description of several hours in the life of a fourth grade
class: 'How might it influence the class's morale to have a fifth grade vandal demoted and
thrust in its midst?'

In 1976 Karp and Yoels drew attention to, and developed, a distinction made by Riesman et
al. in 1950 (and discussed briefly in general terms by Getzels and Thelen in 1960 (op cit: 25))
between 'getting on' and 'getting along', as two orientations to classroom participation among
learners - i.e. as features of social identity in the classroom. This distinction is intended to
capture the two major ways in which learners react to the presence of other learners in the
classroom - they either compete with them, emphasizing achievement in educational terms or,
perhaps more commonly, prefer to focus on social rather than academic success. Karp and
Yoels use the distinction to explore the question in their title: "Why don't college students
participate?" They focus more on the relationship between students and their teachers and
suggest that:

it might be argued that the current norm in college classrooms is for both
students and teachers to avoid any type of direct personal confrontation with
one another. It might be that 'amicability' in the classroom is part of a larger
process, described by Riesman in The Lonely Crowd, in which the desire to
'get ahead' is subordinated to the desire to 'get along'. In the college classroom
'getting along' means students and teachers avoiding any situation that might
be potentially embarrassing to one or the other.

In the same year, 1976, Delamont published her influential book on 'Interaction in the
Classroom', intended to establish the importance of taking a sociological perspective on
classroom learning and teaching. Drawing attention to how previous research had not really
allowed individual differences between learners to be taken properly into account, Delamont
describes (1976:106-110) an incident in a biology lesson as a result of which the teacher can
only respond appropriately to one learner by risking appearing to be dismissing the important
contribution of another. Delamont focuses on the individual differences between the two
learners directly involved and does not draw attention, as I now would, to the possible overall
effect such an incident might have on other members of the class.

Cortis, writing one year later (1977) on 'The Social Context of Teaching' does consider how
learners might more or less directly affect each other's learning:

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 pupils have different statuses, provide different models for imitation, act as
reinforcers, give or withhold attention and communicate with differing
amounts of noise (1977: 127).

but he does not pursue the issue of the potential overall effect on learning rate, route,
relevance or ceiling.

5.3 An illustrative example from the language classroom: the work of Breen

At a time when I was pre-occupied (1984) with the nature of lessons as co-productions, and
with the importance of interaction in that connection (see my companion presentation), my
then colleague at Lancaster Mike Breen called attention to the potential value and importance
of looking at a language classroom as a culture in its own right (1985), echoing Getzels and
Thelen's work from a quarter of a century before. Breen drew attention to the problems
inherent in the reductionist stances of both second language acquisition studies and classroom
oriented research. He emphasized that:

It is incumbent upon classroom-based investigations of language learning to

account for those social psychological forces which generate classroom
discourse and for those socio-cognitive effects of the discourse... (1985: 141)

and proposed an anthropological approach, as captured in his metaphorical conception

(following Malinowski) of the classroom as 'coral gardens'. A language class, suggested
Breen (op cit: 142):

is an arena of subjective and intersubjective realities which are worked out,

changed, and maintained. And these realities are not trivial background to the
tasks of teaching and learning a language. They locate and define the new
language itself as if it never existed before, and they continually specify and
mould the activities of teaching and learning.

It is this last point which for me takes us further than work in general educational research in
the previous decade had done - the insistence on the effects of social factors on 'the activities
of teaching and learning'. Breen went on to describe eight 'essential features of the culture of
the language classroom', and then offered nine objectives for an adequate approach to
research into classroom language learning, if it is to avoid reductionism.

Breen has also been concerned to relate his research perspective to his interest in curriculum
and syllabus design, particularly in respect of the notion of negotiation in the language
classroom. For him, since classroom life is inevitably a matter of collectively interpretating
and reconstructing whatever plans people bring into the room, it is only natural to want to

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address the question: "How might we best exploit the special contributions which the social
context of the classroom can provide for language learning?", and to propose a Process
Syllabus which will offer "a framework within which individual learners and classroom
groups can directly participate in the creation of plans" (1984: 59).

Breen has subsequently (1987) distinguished between two 'orientations' among learners, much
as Karp and Yoels had done in 1976, but labelled them somewhat differently: 'achievement'
and 'survival', and stressed that he sees them as endpoints on a continuum, not as a simple
dichotomy. I will take up this issue of different orientations among learners (and teachers) in
my companion presentation.

6. The Story So Far, Then

6.1 What I have set out in these pages is a picture of several decades of research on the
language classroom having quite different priorities from those current over the same period
in general educational research, and suffering accordingly from a comprehensive
marginalisation of social contextual factors, for a variety of more or less intellectually
justifiable reasons.

6.2 I have also documented a relatively recent new interest in macro social (geopolitical)
concerns, highlighting the special nature of the language classroom from a wider social
perspective, but potentially contributing, paradoxically, via its primary concern for influences
outside the classroom, to a continued neglect of the classroom itself as a social setting worthy
of investigation.

6.3 I have therefore attempted to make out a convincing case for an increased interest in
micro concerns, and illustrated both from the general educational research literature and from
Breen's work in the field of language education how such an increased interest could
potentially help us understand how social processes in the classroom might affect the learning
that takes place there.

6.4 But can I yet answer the question of how important all this might or might not be to my
chosen issues of rate, route, relevance, and ceiling? No, not yet. In fact all that I can state
with total confidence is that the question is clearly unanswerable in anything like precise,
numerical terms (no percentage figures will be forthcoming, unlike for aptitude or motivation
in the 1950s). But I can also state with some confidence that if my overall analysis is

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anything like appropriate, then we can look forward to a progressively richer sense of
understanding of how language classrooms do or do not 'work' for the people in them.

6.5 Over the last quarter of a century, I have made successive attempts to develop a personal
contribution, my own 'sense of plausibility' (Prabhu, 1990: 172-176, 1992: 237-240), to our
understanding of the role of contextual factors in classroom language learning and teaching.
What follows by way of finale here is a very brief summary of this (my own writings are
indicated by year of publication alone).

6.5.1 It was the unsatisfactorily individualistic nature of psychology that led me, in the early
1970s, to begin including a social dimension in my academic teaching of applied linguistics
and my thinking about language teaching and learning. This led initially to a focus in my
work on systematic classroom observation as the key tool (Allwright, 1972), but by the mid
1970s this too had proved too limited and was soon replaced (1980) by a more discursive type
of analysis (more recently paralleled by developments in psychology itself, see Harré and
Gillett, 1994). For a while I played with conceptual mapping (1976), but this too proved
unsatisfactory and I settled on macro analyses in the form of conceptual frameworks as my
preferred way of representing my attempts at understanding language classroom phenomena
(1982). More significantly, I began to take seriously Mehan's notion of lessons as a social
'accomplishment', and to reconceptualise lessons in terms of more or less well accomplished
learning opportunities rather than more or less well taught teaching points (1984a).

6.5.2 This reconceptualisation in terms of learning opportunities was expressed in the form of
a conceptual framework for classroom language learning, including learners and teachers both
as 'managers' of learning and as 'doers' of learning. Within this framework it became possible
to posit mechanisms that would throw more light on such language classroom curiosities as
the indirectness of the relationship between teaching and learning (1984b), the apparent
failure of both teachers and learners to pursue pedagogic goals as determinedly as one might
have expected, and the frequent appearance of some sort of conspiracy between teachers and
learners to ensure that this is the case, which itself would help us understand the problem for
learners who really want to learn but find it impossible, for social reasons, to 'bring off' the
intelligent language learning behaviour they are intellectually capable of.

6.5.3 My concern with 'mechanisms' soon broadened out again to the overall social dimension
of language classroom behaviour (1989a and b), wherein teachers and learners might delude
themselves, and each other, that 'all must be well pedagogically if all is apparently well
15
socially'. I began to see this in the context of an essential discoursal dilemma for classroom
teachers and learners (not only of language), which proposed a simple conflictual relationship
between social and pedagogic pressures.

6.5.4 Nothing could be so simple, however, and so I soon found myself trying to get to grips
with the whole notion of socialisation in the classroom by developing a new conceptual
framework for that area of my work (1996). At the same time I needed a new way of
reflecting the complexities of participants' orientations to life in classrooms. First of all I
wanted to extend the Karp and Yoels distinction between 'getting on' and 'getting along' to the
teacher, and secondly I wanted to incorporate Breen's third orientation of 'survival' ('getting
by'?). This led me to reconceptualise the relationships such that the first two orientations
would be bipolar notions, offering both negative and positive poles, with 'getting by' being the
appropriate term for the neutral position on either or both of the other two orientations.

6.5.5 Throughout all these successive conceptualisations and reconceptualisations it has

become increasingly clear to me that the only useful goal for me to adopt for my work is some
sort of understanding, of things as they are, of the workings of the social context as it
currently is. Such understandings as I can develop may or may not add up to ‘significatn
generalisations’, but I can hope at least that they may help other people in their attempts to
reach their own understandings of their own situations, of the workings of the social context
as it currently is for them. And such understandings might then both illuminate and inform
classroom practice.

Dick Allwright

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