Interaction in the Language Curriculum

Awareness, Autonomy and Authenticity

Leo Van Lier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317891222
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

Interaction in the Language Curriculum offers an innovative theory of language education integrating curriculum practice, research and teaching. It emphasises the interdependence of knowledge and values and stresses the central importance of learning as a social process.Leo van Lier argues that moral as well as intellectual and practical principles must underlie curriculum development and everyday teaching, captured in his triple focus on Awareness, Autonomy, and Authenticity. In addition to its rich grounding in language education practice, the book draws support for his position from diverse sources in sociology, philosophy and cognitive science, from the work of Bourdieu, Giddens, Wittgenstein, Peirce, Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Dewey. In the current broadening context of language education this study makes an important contribution to research. It presents a coherent philosophical theory as well as considering practical issues in implementation of a new language curriculum. As such, it will be of great benefit to teachers, applied linguists and educationalists generally.

1
The AAA curriculum

Introduction

The curriculum outlined in this book grew out of an action research project I conducted a few years ago. The project started when, after having taught linguistics and second language acquisition to graduate students for a number of years, a nagging concern could no longer be put aside. This concern is probably quite familiar to most fellow-teacher educators, since it relates to a central problem in graduate programs: the relationship (or lack thereof) between theoretical course content and the practical issues and exigencies of everyday language teaching. Teachers often ask: ‘How does this relate to classroom teaching?’ and: ‘What’s the use of all this theory?’ Sometimes an answer may be available, other times we may have to reply with an evasive: ‘Theoretical knowledge is part of being a professional teacher.’ The latter sounds a bit like ‘We know what’s good for you,’ an admonition which, in my experience as a parent, is not terribly effective.

The action research project consisted of teaching a beginning ESL grammar class¹ in order to investigate the following question:

Standing with both feet firmly planted on the classroom floor, what are the theoretical issues in linguistics, education, and other fields, that are relevant, here and now, to the teaching job and the learning job?

Since I was also teaching introductory linguistics and second language acquisition at that time, I consciously tried to investigate the issue of relevance in both directions:

• (a) What part of the academic content matter is relevant to the ESL class?
• (b) What part of the ESL class is relevant to the academic content matter?

In some ways the research was a failure. I found that, in the midst of the complex demands of classroom practice, I had little time to worry about, say, universal grammar, parameter setting, or the interface hypothesis. In that sense, SLA researchers and other theoreticians are surely correct when they say that much of their work may not have direct pedagogical implications or applications. Does that mean that such kinds of research and theories can be ignored by language teaching practitioners? I would, most emphatically, reject such a conclusion as being extremely shortsighted. I agree with Halliday, when he says:

… we should beware of thinking that every subject exists simply to serve the needs of education. There is a tendency for educators to demand an immediate pay-off: if we can’t apply these ideas directly here and now in our teaching, then we don’t want anything to do with them. This attitude passes for a healthy pragmatism: we’re practical people with a job to do, no time for the frills. In fact it is simply mental laziness – a refusal to inquire into things that may not have any immediate and obvious applications, but which for this very reason may have a deeper significance in the long run. Most of linguistics is not classroom stuff; but it is there behind the lines, underlying our classroom practices, and our ideas about children, and about learning and reality. (Halliday 1982: 15)

Teachers who hope, in these pages, to find advocacy for omitting various theories of SLA, linguistics, or education (among others) from graduate programs or inservice courses, will be disappointed. There are many important ways in which theoretical knowledge can be useful other than those dictated by immediate applicability. I cannot specify these ways in a general sense, since I believe that every professional must labor to discover such relevance. My action research did not yield any direct clues, but that does not mean much. Intangibles are often more influential than tangibles. If you can’t see it, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. If you can’t count it, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t count.

However, there are some ways in which my action research did turn up fruitful results. Several avenues of research became prominent that had hitherto rather taken a back seat in my teacher development activities, as I expect they have in the work of others as well. These avenues, pointing to such concepts as awareness, attention, intrinsic motivation, self-regulation, and pedagogical (inter)action, gradually suggested the outlines of a way of theorizing, from the perspective of the language classroom, that deserved to be brought into focus as a guiding metaphor for practicing teachers. Once in focus, and in progress, this way of theorizing itself may lead to a need to become familiar with less immediately applicable theories in cognitive science, linguistics, and other areas. What the work presented here aims to do, in other words, is to put the horse of professional awareness before the cart of theoretical subject matter.

The ideas put forward in this book are not intended as a theory, in the sense of an organized body of knowledge, or a depository of research findings and hypotheses. Rather, the book treats theory, research, and practice as an essential unity in the process of doing curriculum (there should be a verb associated with curriculum: ‘curriculizing,’ perhaps). Theorizing, researching, and practicing are thus inseparable ingredients in the professional conduct of a language educator. Rather than speaking of a new theory, or a new approach or method, I will use the term language education curriculum, defining curriculum in a holistic and process sense. It is holistic in the sense that every part and every action must be motivated by and understood in relation to all other parts and actions, in an integrative way; it is process-oriented in the sense that pedagogical interaction is motivated by our understanding of learning rather than by a list of desired competencies, test scores, or other products. The setting of goals and objectives, and the construction and assessment of achievement, are themselves integral parts of the curriculum process, rather than pre-established constraints that are imposed on it from the outside.

Lawrence Stenhouse once said that the curriculum has to be brought into the room ‘on a porter’s barrow’ (Rudduck & Hopkins 1985: 67). A curriculum, in this view, is a systematic collection of accumulated knowledge and experience, from a multitude of sources, that guides classroom practice. Stenhouse envisaged that the porter’s barrow contained boxes of books, collections of charts and pictures, films and tapes, and so on.

The language curriculum that I will conceptualize in this book is, like Stenhouse’s example, drawn from a variety of disciplines and classroom worlds. This does not mean that it is a collection of objects to be delivered to educational recipients, but rather a process of assisting learning informed by a background of knowledge and experience which I try to make as rich and varied as I can. Let me just briefly sketch the main ingredients (without going into detail just yet), so that the reader will know where we are going.² In the pages that follow I will address the following points, which will be elaborated in detail in subsequent chapters:

1. three foundational principles
2. relationships between theory, research, and practice
3. theory of learning
4. theory of curriculum and instruction
5. the centrality of interaction

The curriculum is based on a triad of foundational principles or ‘constants’ which themselves cannot be further reduced or grounded, since they constitute what I consider essential properties of the educational enterprise. These principles, awareness, autonomy, and authenticity, or AAA for short, are amalgams of knowledge and values, or in other words, they are a unity of epistemological and axiological beliefs. Although I would not wish to claim that they are universal, valid for everyone in any cultural or temporal context, they represent, I suggest, a fair consensus of our current intellectual knowledge and moral aspirations as language educators. However, rather than suggesting that all readers adopt my principles as a canon for the construction of their own curriculum, I suggest that they be used as merely an example for the construction of one’s own set of foundational principles. The first and most crucial step of developing a curriculum is the articulation of the knowledge and values upon which it is founded. And in order to avoid the seductive comfort of fads and bandwagons, it is preferable to articulate one’s own principles than to take over someone else’s uncritically.

I have modeled my foundational principles on the Peircean concepts of firstness, secondness, and thirdness, together forming what he called a genuine triad, in which each member can only be explained in relation to the other two. These connections will be discussed in a number of places in the book. Since they are based not only on what we know – or think we know – about the nature of language learning, but also on the ethical basis, the purpose of our work, the AAA curriculum cannot be the application of rational or utilitarian strategies or techniques to achieve predetermined outcomes or objectives. Instead, it has to grow from an understanding of our learners and what they want to achieve.

Next, the concepts of theory, practice, and research, and their dynamic interrelationships, are reexamined, redefined, and reconstructed to allow for the development of an educational theory of practice, taking guidance from the work of Bourdieu, Freire, Foucault, inter alia. Notions such as action research, teacher research, and pedagogical thoughtfulness, familiar to many educators from the work of Lawrence Stenhouse, Stephen Kemmis, Ken Zeichner, Max van Manen, and many others, are anchored in and motivated by this theory of practice, and are therefore integral to the language curriculum and to teacher development for the language curriculum.

As mentioned above, any curriculum must be based on our knowledge of the learning process and the learning context, as well as on our values and purposes (including those of the teacher, student, parent, and any other stakeholder). The key to responsible (and effective) pedagogical interaction is understanding the learner (which includes understanding learning), and a theory of learning is therefore needed to underpin the development of strategies for pedagogical interaction. The theory of learning which informs the AAA curriculum is based on the developmental psychology of Vygotsky, in which social interaction is seen as the key to learning, and in which language and cognition are interdependent processes. Vygotsky’s central notion of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) can be profitably related to Bruner’s process of scaffolding, as well as to Piaget’s ‘grasp of consciousness,’ and the growth of self-determination underlying work on intrinsic motivation by Deci and colleagues, on achievement motivation by Heckhausen and others, and autotelic learning as described by Csikszentmihalyi.

Finally, the importance of interaction in language education cannot just be taken for granted, but the interaction itself must be meticulously described and understood. For one thing, there are many ways of interacting, and it is safe to assume that some will be more beneficial to learning than others. Furthermore, the relations between wider social processes and conditions (such as power and control) and social interaction for learning need to be investigated. Thirdly, interpersonal language use must work in tandem with innately constrained processes of language development which, though they are as yet ill understood, undoubtedly exert a strong influence on all social and academic development.

For these reasons, as well as for others which will undoubtedly come to light, interaction is the most important element of the curriculum, and this is manifested in several different ways. First of all, the study of interaction is a major focus of teacher research, as well as a key element in teacher development. That is, improvements and innovations in professional practices require a close monitoring of interactional work and systematic attempts at changing it in desired directions. For this research, conversation analysis and the microsociological work of Goffman provide crucial tools and insights. Secondly, learning tasks must be designed so as to promote the types of interaction which our research identifies as providing optimal opportunities for learning. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the concept of interaction itself – in all its manifestations – must be illuminated so as to avoid a narrow definition leading to superficial communication or even pseudo-communication.

The three foundational principles: Awareness, Autonomy, and Authenticity, or AAA for short,³ allow language education to unfold in a regulated yet creative manner, within a framework of individual and social constraints and resources. Unlike most curricula and learning theories, the AAA curriculum is explicitly grounded not only in knowledge but in human values as well. The general curricular framework that is drawn up on this basis can, like any other, be realized in a wide variety of practical syllabuses, by which I mean flexible specifications and provisions of means for instructional action. Although this book is concerned with the curriculum rather than any specific syllabus, practical examples of and suggestions for classroom work will be given throughout the book. Indeed, this is inevitable since I set out to construct a language curriculum based on classroom experience, although bearing in mind the many relations that exist between the classroom and the wider social and political context.

The AAA curriculum presented in this book is relevant to all branches of language education, native language (e.g. literacy, grammar composition), second language, and foreign language. In addition, it makes specific proposals for a language policy across the curriculum. However, given my own interests and experiences as an educational linguist and a teacher educator, most classroom illustrations are taken from second and foreign language classrooms, and classrooms with language minority students. In spite of that explicit bias, I try to ensure that it will be possible for language educators in other areas to see the relevance of all the points under discussion. My aim is to draw together what all language educators share in terms of professional concerns and options, regardless of the many differences which make every setting, classroom, and pedagogical encounter unique.

It will not take the reader long to realize that most, if not all, of the ideas put forward in the coming chapters are familiar to the professional educator in one form or another. I do not pretend to have discovered any new educational or pedagogical facts or concepts. What I plan to do is to go on a new journey through a well-known and well-traveled landscape, plotting my own map as I travel, while consulting all the other maps that already exist. The journey will show language education in a new light, even though its components, if inspected one by one, may reveal things we have always known.

The purpose of a curriculum is to guide the processes of teaching and learning. It can do this in quite explicit, controlling ways, or in more subtle, flexible ways. In the former case, external control may cause curriculum and pedagogical needs to drift apart, and a situation similar to Peddiwell’s ‘saber-tooth curriculum’ (1939) arises. In this satirical tale of Paleolithic times, the curriculum consisted of ‘tiger-scaring, fish-grabbing, and hgrse-clubbing,’ skills that were essential for survival in those days. However, Paleolithic pedagogues continued to teach these skills even when, due to various environmenta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author’s Preface
• 1 The AAA curriculum
• 2 The curriculum as a theory of practice
• 3 The growth of proficiency
• 4 Language awareness and learning to learn
• 5 Motivation, autonomy, and achievement
• 6 Authenticity
• 7 Contingency
• 8 The curriculum as interaction
• 9 The profession of teaching: development and research
• References
• Index