TABLE OF CONTENTS

QUARTERLY Volume 33, Number 2 h Summer 1999

A Journal for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages

Founded 1966
and of Standard English as a Second Dialect

Editor
CAROL A. CHAPELLE, Iowa State University
Research Issues Editor
PATRICIA A. DUFF, University of British Columbia
Brief Reports and Summaries Editors
ROD ELLIS, University of Auckland
KAREN E. JOHNSON, Pennsylvania State University
Review Editor
DAN DOUGLAS, Iowa State University
Assistant Editor
ELLEN GARSHICK, TESOL Central Office
Assistant to the Editor
BARBARA S. PLAKANS, Iowa State University
Editorial Advisory Board
Ralph Adendorff, Ann Johns,
University of Natal San Diego State University
Caroline Clapham, Karen E. Johnson,
Lancaster University Pennsylvania State University
Susan Conrad, Keiko Koda,
Iowa State University Carnegie Mellon University
Kathryn A. Davis, Frederick O. Lorenz,
University of Hawaii at Manoa Iowa State University
Rod Ellis, Numa Markee,
University of Auckland University of Illinois at
Dana Ferris, Urbana-Champaign
California State University, Sacramento Tim McNamara,
Thomas N. Huckin, University of Melbourne
University of Utah Teresa Pica,
Joan Jamieson, University of Pennsylvania
Northern Arizona University James W. Tollefson,
University of Washington

Additional Readers
Roberta Abraham, Janet Anderson-Hsieh, Elsa Auerbach, Lyle Bachman, Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig,
Margie Berns, Ellen Bialystok, Robert Bley-Vroman, J. D. Brown, Patricia Carrell, Joan Carson,
Micheline Chalhoub-Deville, Craig Chaudron, James Coady, Ron Cowan, Graham Crookes,
Deborah Crusan, Fred Davidson, Robert DeKeyser, John Esling, John Flowerdew, Sandra Fotos,
Sandra Fradd, Carol Fraser, Fred Genesee, Christa Hansen, Linda Harklau, Eli Hinkel, Noël Houck,
Thomas Hudson, Jan Hulstijn, Susan Jenkins, Nan Jiang, Bill Johnston, B. Kumaravadivelu,
Anne Lazaraton, Ilona Leki, Patsy Lightbown, Brian Lynch, Peter Master, Mary McGroarty,
Bernard Mohan, Denise Murray, Cynthia Myers, Gayle Nelson, Bonny Norton, Alistair Pennycook,
Kenneth Rose, Steven Ross, Patricia Rounds, Mary Schedl, Fredericka Stoller, Merrill Swain, Jean Turner,
Roberta Vann, Sara Weigle, Terrence Wiley, Devon Woods, Richard Young

Credits
Advertising arranged by Suzanne Levine, TESOL Central Office, Alexandria, Virginia U.S.A.
Typesetting by Capitol Communication Systems, Inc., Crofton, Maryland U.S.A.
Printing and binding by Pantagraph Printing, Bloomington, Illinois U.S.A.
Copies of articles that appear in the TESOL Quarterly are available through ISI Document Solution, 3501 Market Street,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104 U.S.A.
Copyright © 1999
Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc.
REVIEWS i
US ISSN 0039-8322
 VOLUMES MENU

QUARTERLY
Founded 1966 CONTENTS

ARTICLES
Going Beyond the Native Speaker in Language Teaching 185
Vivian Cook
“English Is Here to Stay”: A Critical Look at Institutional and Educational
Practices in India 211
Vai Ramanathan
Processing of Idioms by L2 Learners of English 233
Thomas C. Cooper

THE FORUM
Comments on Liz Hamp-Lyons’ “Ethical Test Preparation Practice:
The Case of the TOEFL”
Polemic Gone Astray: A Corrective to Recent Criticism of
TOEFL Preparation 263
Paul Wadden and Robert Hilke
The Author Responds . . . 270
Liz Hamp-Lyons
Comments on Graham Crookes and Al Lehner’s “Aspects of Process in an ESL
Critical Pedagogy Teacher Education Course”
A Plea for Published Reports on the Application of a Critical Pedagogy to
“Language Study Proper” 275
Jennifer D. Ewald
An Author Responds . . . 279
Graham Crookes

RESEARCH ISSUES
Poststructural Approaches to L2 Research
Between Psychology and Poststructuralism:
Where Is L2 Learning Located? 287
Celia Genishi
Exploring Cross-Cultural Inscriptions and Difference: The Effects of
Researchers’ Positionalities on Inquiry Practices 292
Marylin Low

ii TESOL QUARTERLY
 Volume 33, Number 2 h Summer 1999

REVIEWS
Conversations of the Mind: The Uses of Journal Writing for
Second-Language Writers 299
Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk
Reviewed by Joy Kreeft Peyton
Immersion Education: International Perspectives 300
Robert K. Johnson and Merrill Swain (Eds.)
Reviewed by Constance L. Walker
Theory and Practice of Writing: An Applied Linguistic Perspective 302
William Grabe and Robert Kaplan
Reviewed by Yong Lang
Revisualizing Boundaries: A Plurilingual Ethos 303
Lachman N. Khubchandani
Reviewed by Yvonne Godoy-Ramos
Onna Rashiku (Like a Woman): The Diary of a Language Learner in Japan 304
Karen Ogulnick
Reviewed by Natasha Lvovich
Productive Instructional Practices for English-Language Learners: Guiding Principles and
Examples from Research-Based Practice 306
Russell Gersten, Scott K. Baker, and Sussan Unok Marks
Reviewed by Fernando Polito

BOOK NOTICES 309

Information for Contributors 313
Editorial Policy
General Information for Authors
Publications Received 321
TESOL Order Form
TESOL Membership Application

REVIEWS iii
 is an international professional organization for those concerned
with the teaching of English as a second or foreign language and of
standard English as a second dialect. TESOL’s mission is to develop
the expertise of its members and others involved in teaching English to speakers of
other languages to help them foster effective communication in diverse settings
while respecting individuals’ language rights. To this end, TESOL articulates and
advances standards for professional preparation and employment, continuing educa-
tion, and student programs; links groups worldwide to enhance communication
among language specialists; produces high-quality programs, services, and products;
and promotes advocacy to further the profession.
Information about membership and other TESOL services is available from TESOL
Central Office at the address below.
TESOL Quarterly is published in Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. Contributions should
be sent to the Editor or the appropriate Section Editors at the addresses listed in the
Information for Contributors section. Publishers’ representative is Helen Kornblum, Director
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without the permission of TESOL, beyond the exemptions specified by law, is an infringement
involving liability for damages.
Reader Response You can respond to the ideas expressed in TESOL Quarterly by writing directly
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OFFICERS AND BOARD OF DIRECTORS 1999–2000

President Sandra Briggs Jim Rogers
DAVID NUNAN Burlingame High School Utah State University
University of Hong Kong Burlingame, CA USA Logan, UT USA
Hong Kong Mary Ann Christison Mary Romney
Snow College Quinebaug Valley Community-
President-elect Ephraim, UT USA Technical College
BARBARA SCHWARTE Willimantic, CT USA
Iowa State University Virginia Christopher
Ames, IA USA Vancouver YMCA Amy Schlessman
English Language Institute Northern Arizona University
Past President Vancouver, BC Canada Flagstaff, AZ USA
KATHLEEN BAILEY Donna T. Fujimoto University of Arizona
Monterey Institute of International University Tucson, AZ USA
International Studies of Japan Consuelo Stebbins
Monterey, CA USA Niigata, Japan University of Central Florida
Elizabeth Hanson-Smith Orlando, FL USA
Secretary Computers for Education Nancy K. Storer
CHARLES S. Sacramento, CA USA Baker University
AMOROSINO, JR. Baldwin City, KS USA
Alexandria, VA USA Martha Grace Low
University of Oregon Gail Weinstein
Treasurer Eugene, OR USA San Francisco State University
MARTHA EDMONDSON Adelaide Parsons San Francisco, CA USA
Washington, DC USA Southeast Missouri
State University
Cape Girardeau, MO USA
iv TESOL QUARTERLY
 QUARTERLY
Founded 1966

Editor’s Note

■ In my first issue as editor of TESOL Quarterly, I would like to express my

appreciation to Sandra McKay and Ellen Garshick for their patience in
guiding me through the process of producing this issue. I am also grateful to
have Barbara Plakans as my assistant in Ames and to have Ellen staying on as
assistant editor.
With this issue, I welcome Dan Douglas as the new editor for Reviews and
Book Notices and express thanks to H. Douglas Brown for his work on this
section. I am also happy to welcome the following new members to the
TESOL Quarterly Editorial Advisory Board: Caroline Clapham, Susan Conrad,
Kathryn A. Davis, Thomas N. Huckin, Joan Jamieson, Frederick O. Lorenz,
Numa Markee, Tim McNamara, and James W. Tollefson. I offer sincere
thanks on behalf of TESOL, TESOL Quarterly, Sandra McKay, and myself for
the work of those members who are rotating off the Editorial Advisory
Board: Elsa Auerbach, Graham Crookes, Deborah Curtis, Sandra Fotos, Eli
Hinkel, Noël Houck, B. Kumaravadivelu, Alastair Pennycook, Terrence
Wiley, and Jerri Willett.
I am happy to report that Patricia A. Duff, Rod Ellis, Karen E. Johnson,
and Bonny Norton will continue to serve as editors for their respective
sections of the journal. I am grateful to them as well as to former and current
members of the Editorial Advisory Board for helping to make the transition
of the editorship smooth.

In This Issue

■ The articles in this issue of TESOL Quarterly address diverse areas of

concern for the profession.
• Vivian Cook offers a valuable perspective on the continuing discussion
of the role of native speaker models in English language teaching.
Drawing primarily on evidence from psycholinguistic research, he

IN THIS
TESOL ISSUE Vol. 33, No. 2, Summer 1999
QUARTERLY 181
 argues that L2 learners are inherently different from monolingual
native speakers and that attaining the competence of a native speaker
is an impossible goal for an L2 learner. It follows, he suggests, that
alternatives to native speaker models are needed for language teach-
ing, and he makes some initial recommendations for moving beyond
native speaker models in the ESOL classroom.
• Vai Ramanathan reports a revealing examination of institutional and
instructional practices affecting English learners in higher education
in India. Although India has been referred to as an outer-circle
country relative to an inner circle of English-speaking countries, her
research showed that even within India inner and outer circles are
constructed through practices that limit access to Indian English. She
found that learners who had not completed English-medium instruc-
tion before entering the university were kept in India’s own outer
circle through practices such as streaming them into non-English-
medium classes, not letting them major in English literature, and using
instructional methods that did not develop their ability to communi-
cate in English.
• Thomas C. Cooper describes his research into ESOL learners’ process-
ing of English idioms. Using a think-aloud methodology in a con-
trolled setting, he documented the strategies that learners used to
arrive at the meaning of idiomatic expressions. The results indicated
that none of the L1 idiom-processing models reviewed was sufficiently
complex to account for the variety of strategies that the L2 learners
used. He therefore proposes that L2 idiom processing be considered a
heuristic process characterized by strategic experimentation. Cooper
suggests the think-aloud methodology as an aid in teaching idiomatic
expressions.
Also in this issue:
• The Forum: Paul Wadden and Robert Hilke comment on Liz Hamp-
Lyons’ “Ethical Test Preparation Practice: The Case of the TOEFL” by
drawing on their experience in developing and using preparation
materials for the Test of English as a Foreign Language, and the author
responds. Jennifer D. Ewald offers her perspective on Graham Crookes
and Al Lehner’s “Aspects of Process in an ESL Critical Pedagogy
Teacher Education Course,” and Graham Crookes responds.
• Research Issues: Celia Genishi and Marylin Low explore poststructuralist
approaches to second language acquisition research.
• Reviews and Book Notices: Reviewers comment on six recent titles, and
notices are provided for seven new books.
Carol A. Chapelle

182 TESOL QUARTERLY

Going Beyond the Native Speaker
in Language Teaching
VIVIAN COOK
University of Essex

This article argues that language teaching would benefit by paying

attention to the L2 user rather than concentrating primarily on the
native speaker. It suggests ways in which language teaching can apply an
L2 user model and exploit the students’ L1. Because L2 users differ
from monolingual native speakers in their knowledge of their L2s and
L1s and in some of their cognitive processes, they should be considered
as speakers in their own right, not as approximations to monolingual
native speakers. In the classroom, teachers can recognise this status by
incorporating goals based on L2 users in the outside world, bringing L2
user situations and roles into the classroom, deliberately using the
students’ L1 in teaching activities, and looking to descriptions of L2
users or L2 learners rather than descriptions of native speakers as a
source of information. The main benefits of recognising that L2 users
are speakers in the own right, however, will come from students’ and
teachers’ having a positive image of L2 users rather than seeing them as
failed native speakers.

L anguage professionals often take for granted that the only appropri-
ate models of a language’s use come from its native speakers.
Linguists look at the intuitions of native speakers or collect quantities of
their speech; language teachers encourage students to be like native
speakers. This article argues that the prominence of the native speaker
in language teaching has obscured the distinctive nature of the success-
ful L2 user and created an unattainable goal for L2 learners. It
recommends that L2 users be viewed as multicompetent language users
rather than as deficient native speakers and suggests how language
teaching can recognise students as L2 users both in and out of the
classroom.

DEFINING THE NATIVE SPEAKER

Davies (1991) claims that the first recorded use of native speaker was
the following: “The first language a human being learns to speak is his

TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 33, No. 2, Summer 1999 185

native language; he is a native speaker of this language” (Bloomfield, 1933,
p. 43). In other words, an individual is a native speaker of the L1 learnt
in childhood, called by Davies (1996) the “bio-developmental definition”
(p. 156). Being a native speaker in this sense is an unalterable historic
fact; individuals cannot change their native language any more than they
can change who brought them up. This definition is echoed in modern
sources such as The Oxford Companion to the English Language (McArthur,
1992) and the corpus-based Collins COBUILD English Dictionary (1995).
This core meaning of native speaker is often supplemented by detailing
the nondevelopmental characteristics that they share. Stern (1983)
claims that native speakers have (a) a subconscious knowledge of rules,
(b) an intuitive grasp of meanings, (c) the ability to communicate within
social settings, (d) a range of language skills, and (e) creativity of
language use. The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Applied Linguistics (Johnson &
Johnson, 1998) adds (f) identification with a language community.
Davies (1996) adds (g) the ability to produce fluent discourse, (h)
knowledge of differences between their own speech and that of the
“standard” form of the language, and (i) the ability “to interpret and
translate into the L1 of which she or he is a native speaker” (p. 154).
Some of these characteristics are in a sense obvious: Native speakers
are not necessarily aware of their knowledge in a formal sense ([a] and
[b]), nor could they explain how they ride a bicycle. Others are
debatable: Many native speakers are unaware how their speech differs
from the status form (h), as shown, for example, in the growing use of
the nonstandard between you and I for between you and me even by
professional speakers such as news readers. Many native speakers are far
from fluent in speech (g), some, such as Stephen Hawking and Helen
Keller, having to communicate via alternative means. Some native
speakers function poorly in social settings (c). In the Chomskyan sense
of creativity, any novel sentence uttered or comprehended is creative (e);
a computer can create new sentences, for instance, by means of the
speech program that answers telephone directory enquiries with every
possible telephone number. In a general literary sense, creativity charac-
terizes a small percentage of native speakers, such as poets and rap
singers. Only native speakers who have an L2—and not necessarily all of
them—possess the ability to interpret from one language to another (i).
Native speakers, whether Karl Marx in London, James Joyce in Zurich, or
Albert Einstein in Princeton, are free to disassociate themselves com-
pletely from their L1 community politically or socially (f) without giving
up their native speaker status.
These characteristics are therefore variable and not a necessary part of
the definition of native speaker; the lack of any of them would not
disqualify a person from being a native speaker. A monk sworn to silence
is still a native speaker. In addition, nonnative speakers, almost regardless

186 TESOL QUARTERLY

of their level of proficiency in the language, share many of these
characteristics: Nonnative speakers show a rapidly developing awareness
of gender-linked pronunciation (Adamson & Regan, 1991) and of the
status of regional accents (Dailey-O’Cain, 1998); what level of L2 English
did it take for Marcel Duchamps to create “surrealistic aphorisms” such
as My niece is cold because my knees are cold (Sanquillet & Peterson, 1978,
p.␣ 111)?
The indisputable element in the definition of native speaker is that a
person is a native speaker of the language learnt first; the other
characteristics are incidental, describing how well an individual uses the
language. Someone who did not learn a language in childhood cannot
be a native speaker of the language. Later-learnt languages can never be
native languages, by definition. Children who learn two languages
simultaneously from birth have two L1s (Davies, 1991), which may not be
the same as being a monolingual native speaker of either language. L2
students cannot be turned into native speakers without altering the core
meaning of native speaker. Asserting that “adults usually fail to become
native speakers” (Felix, 1987, p. 140) is like saying that ducks fail to
become swans: Adults could never become native speakers without being
reborn. L2 learning may produce an L2 user who is like a native speaker
in possessing some of the nine aspects of proficiency detailed above to a
high degree but who cannot meet the biodevelopmental definition. The
variable aspects of proficiency (Davies, 1996) or expertise (Rampton, 1990)
relate to a separate issue of quality rather than being defining character-
istics of the native speaker (Ballmer, 1981).
Another common assumption is that the native speaker speaks only
one language. Illich and Sanders (1988) point out, “From Saussure to
Chomsky ‘homo monolinguis’ is posited as the man who uses lan-
guage—the man who speaks” (p. 52). Ballmer (1981) and Paikeday
(1985) include monolingualism in their extended definitions of native
speaker. In Chomskyan linguistics, monolingualism is part of the abstrac-
tion involved in obtaining the idealized native speaker. “We exclude, for
example, a speech community of uniform speakers, each of whom speaks
a mixture of Russian and French (say, an idealised version of the
nineteenth-century Russian aristocracy)” (Chomsky, 1986, p. 17). Impor-
tant as it is for other purposes to consider the different types of native
speakers and the different abilities that native speakers possess, the
distinction here is between people who speak the language they grew up
with and those who speak another language as well—that is, between
monolingual native speakers and L2 users. The meaning of native speaker
here is thus a monolingual person who still speaks the language learnt in
childhood.
In contrast to native speaker, the term L2 user refers to someone who is
using an L2. The L2 user is further distinguished from the L2 learner, who

GOING BEYOND THE NATIVE SPEAKER IN LANGUAGE TEACHING 187

is still in the process of learning the L2. The point at which an L2 learner
becomes an L2 user may be debatable because of the difficulty in
defining the final state of L2 learning; moreover, some learners are
regularly users whenever they step outside the classroom. Although this
distinction is in some ways imprecise, its rationale will emerge during the
argument.

IMPLICIT STATUS OF THE NATIVE SPEAKER

In recent years the role of the native speaker in language teaching and
second language acquisition (SLA) research has become a source of
concern. Some analysts have seen the issue in quasi-political terms as the
exercise of power and status (Holliday, 1994); the native speaker concept
has political and economic benefits for the countries from which
particular languages originated (Phillipson, 1992). Others see it in
cultural terms as the imposition of native speaker interaction norms
contrary to the students’ own preferred types of interaction (Kramsch &
Sullivan, 1996). Still others point out that “one man in his time plays
many parts”: English-speaking people show they are men by using /In/
in waiting (Trudgill, 1974), that they are American by having /r/ in corn,
or that they are British working class by dropping the h in hair (Milroy,
1983). Native speakers form only one of the social groups to which a
speaker belongs (Rampton, 1990); the role of native speaker is no more
basic than any other (Firth & Wagner, 1997). In practice, despite these
objections, the native speaker model remains firmly entrenched in
language teaching and SLA research.

The Native Speaker in Language Teaching

Overt discussion of the native speaker as a model is rare in language

teaching. However, indirect evidence for the importance of the native
speaker in English language teaching is indeed the perennial issue of
which kind of native speaker should be the model for language teaching
(Quirk, 1990). This discussion assumes that the choice lies between
different types or aspects of native speakers, not in whether to use them
as models at all. Stern (1983) puts it bluntly: “The native speaker’s
‘competence’ or ‘proficiency’ or ‘knowledge of the language’ is a
necessary point of reference for the second language proficiency con-
cept used in language teaching” (p. 341). The Practice of English Language
Teaching (Harmer, 1991) describes different areas of language compe-
tence in a chapter entitled “What a Native Speaker Knows” and goes on
to say that “students need to get an idea of how the new language is used

188 TESOL QUARTERLY

by native speakers,” although the usage shifts to the combined expres-
sion “native speakers (or competent users of the language)” (p. 57).
Kramsch (1998) sums up the issue pithily: “Traditional methodologies
based on the native speaker usually define language learners in terms of
what they are not, or at least not yet ” (p. 28). Or, one might add, not ever.
Another source of implicit views about the native speaker in language
teaching is the course book, which provides a structure for many classes
(Hutchinson & Hutchinson, 1994). The description of English underly-
ing course books seems implicitly native based, reflecting the teaching
tradition’s idealised normative view of English rather than actual descrip-
tion. The Collins COBUILD English Course (Willis & Willis, 1988), for
example, “focuses on the real English students will encounter and need
to use in today’s world” (back cover) based on a large database of native
speaker usage. The model situations met in course books almost invari-
ably involve native speakers interacting with native speakers, apart from
the typical opening lessons in which students introduce each other and
exchange personal information, for example, Unit 1 in Headstart (Beavan,
1995) and in True to Life (Collie & Slater, 1995).

The Native Speaker in SLA Research

SLA research in the 1960s borrowed from L1 acquisition research the

assumption that learners have language systems with distinctive features
of their own (Cook, 1969; Corder, 1967). This assumption formed one
aspect of the well-known interlanguage hypothesis (Selinker, 1972),
implicit in the continuing aim of the SLA research field to describe and
explain the L2 language system in its own right. In other words, SLA
research aims in principle to detach L2 learning from the native speaker.
In practice, however, SLA research has often fallen into the comparative
fallacy (Bley-Vroman, 1983) of relating the L2 learner to the native
speaker. This tendency is reflected in the frequency with which the words
succeed and fail are associated with the phrase native speaker, for example,
the view that fossilisation and errors in L2 users’ speech add up “to
failure to achieve native-speaker competence, since in Chomsky’s words,
native speakers (NSs) are people who know their language perfectly”
(James, 1998, p. 2). The success and failure of L2 learners are often
measured against the native speaker’s language use in statements such as
the following: “learners often failed initially to produce correct sentences
and instead displayed language that was markedly deviant from target
language norms” (Ellis, 1994, p. 15). Many SLA research methods, such
as grammaticality judgments, obligatory occurrences, and error analysis,
involve comparison with the native speaker (Cook, 1997b; Firth &
Wagner, 1997).

GOING BEYOND THE NATIVE SPEAKER IN LANGUAGE TEACHING 189

 An unknown object is often described in terms of one that is already
known (Poulisse, 1996); someone who has never seen a tomato before
might describe it as a rather soft apple with a large number of pips. But
this description is no more than a temporary expedient until the
individual has understood the unique properties of the object itself. The
learner’s language is an unknown object, so SLA research can justifiably
use native speakers’ language as one perspective on the language of L2
learners, provided it does not make native speakers’ language the
measure of final achievement in the L2. Klein and Perdue (1992) warn
in particular of the danger of the “closeness fallacy” (p. 333), in which
one is deceived by learner utterances that bear a false resemblance to
those of the native speaker. The avowed aim of their large multilanguage
project was to discover “why . . . adults attain the state they do” (p. 334).
Despite some recognition that the L2 user should be treated as indepen-
dent in SLA research, the native speaker often maintains a ghostlike
presence.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MULTICOMPETENT

LANGUAGE USERS AND L1 USERS

Interlanguage refers to the knowledge of the L2 in the speaker’s mind.

But this L2 interlanguage exists in the same mind as the L1 does.
Because no word existed to describe the knowledge of both the L1 and
the L2, the term multicompetence was coined to refer to the compound
state of a mind with two languages (Cook, 1991). Multicompetence
covers the total language knowledge of a person who knows more than
one language, including both L1 competence and the L2 interlanguage.
Competence is a neutral term in linguistics for the native speaker’s
knowledge of language; it does not involve a judgment about whether
such competence is good or bad according to some outside criterion. In
a sense, whatever the native speaker does is right—subject, of course, to
the vagaries of performance and the like. Multicompetence is intended
to be a similarly neutral term for the knowledge of more than one
language, free from evaluation against an outside standard. The diffi-
culty is that, whereas all the speakers of an L1 arguably have similar
competences, L2 users notoriously end up with widely differing knowl-
edge. Nevertheless, so far as any individual is concerned, a final state of
L2 competence exists for the L2 learner just as a final state of L1
competence exists for the native speaker, difficult as this state may be to
generalise across many L2 learners.
The term multicompetence implies that at some level the sum of the
language knowledge in the mind is relevant, not just the portions

190 TESOL QUARTERLY

dedicated to the L1 or the L2. Language teaching is concerned with
developing an L2 in a mind that already contains an L1; as Stern (1992)
puts it, “whether we like it or not, the new language is learnt on the basis
of a previous language” (p. 282). Multicompetent minds that know two
languages are qualitatively different from those of the monolingual
native speaker in a number of ways.

The L2 Knowledge of Multicompetent Language Users

Nobody is surprised that the second language of L2 users differs from

the language of L1 users. Very few L2 users could be mistaken for native
speakers. Most L2 learners resign themselves to “failing” to reach the
native speaker target. Some research looking at ultimate attainment in
L2 learning shows that even fluent bilinguals can be distinguished from
monolinguals in grammaticality judgments (Coppieters, 1987; Davies,
1991), but other studies have demonstrated that some L2 users are
nevertheless indistinguishable from native speakers in syntax (Birdsong,
1992) and phonology (Bongaerts, Planken, & Schils, 1995). As White
and Genesee (1996) noted, “Ultimate attainment in an L2 can indeed be
native-like in the UG [universal grammar] domain” (p. 258). But the
comparison with the native speaker again creeps in; valid ultimate
attainment seems to be phrased with reference to the native speaker’s
competence rather than in its own terms.
The ultimate attainment of L2 learning should be defined in terms of
knowledge of the L2. There is no reason why the L2 component of
multicompetence should be identical to the monolingual’s L1, if only
because multicompetence is intrinsically more complex than mono-
lingualism. Whether or not one accepts that some L2 users can pass for
native speakers, these passers form an extremely small percentage of L2
users. Research with this group documents the achievements of a few
unusual people, such as those described by Bongaerts et al. (1995), as
typical of human beings as are Olympic high jumpers or opera singers.

The L1 Knowledge of Multicompetent Language Users

An early definition held that transfer between the L1 and the L2 went
in two directions, producing “instances of deviation from the norms of
either language which occur in the speech of bilinguals as a result of
their familiarity with more than one language” (Weinreich, 1953, p. 1).
Whereas the effects of the L1 on the L2 interlanguage are easy to see, the
effects of the L2 on the L1 have been little discussed. Yet everyone who
has been exposed to an L2 can tell anecdotes about its effects on the L1.

GOING BEYOND THE NATIVE SPEAKER IN LANGUAGE TEACHING 191

For example, my own speech has sentences such as What do you want for
a book? and vocabulary such as pulli for pullover, probably showing the use
of L2 Swiss-German as a child.
A body of research shows that this effect of the L2 on the L1 exists in
most aspects of language. In terms of phonology, the timing of voicing at
the beginning of plosive consonants (i.e., voice onset time [VOT]) in the
L1 moves slightly towards that found in the L2, French L1 speakers of
English having a slightly longer VOT for /t/ in their L1 than French
monolinguals do (Flege, 1987). In vocabulary, L2 words affect their twins
in the L1. For example, the meaning of the English word coin (piece of
money) affects the way French L1 speakers who know English under-
stand the French word coin (corner) (Beauvillain & Grainger, 1987).
Loanwords have a slightly different meaning in the L1 for people who
know the L2 from which the words are derived; for instance, Japanese
bosu (gang leader) is perceived as less related to crime by Japanese who
know English boss (Tokumaru, 1999). In syntax, too, L1 grammaticality
judgments are affected by the L2: English speakers who know French
judge English sentences with null subjects, such as Is raining, differently
than monolinguals do (Cook, 1996); Francophones and Anglophones
learning the respective L2s have different reactions to middle verb
constructions in their L1s than monolinguals do (Balcom, 1998). Several
experiments have shown that L2 users become slightly slower at process-
ing the L1 as they gain proficiency in an L2 (Magiste, 1986). In reading
also, Greeks who know English read Greek differently than monolinguals
do to some extent; for example, they are more affected by the order of
presentation (Chitiri & Willows, 1997). In short, multicompetent L2
users do not have the same knowledge of the L1 as monolinguals do; for
some this may indeed amount to partial loss of their L1 (Seliger & Vago,
1991).

Language Processing by Multicompetent Language Users

During language processing, multicompetent language users have the

L1 constantly available to them. For example, L2 users compensate for
gaps in their vocabulary with the same communication strategies that
they use in their L1 (Poulisse, 1996). L2 users are faster and more
accurate in a language-switching task than in a monolingual condition
on an auditory version of the STROOP test, which asks people to decide
whether voices saying the words high and low are actually high or low
(Hamers & Lambert, 1972). L1 Spanish users of English understand
sentences that are translations of Spanish idioms more quickly than
monolinguals do (Blair & Harris, 1981). L2 users tend to switch from
one language to another for their own private purposes; 61% prefer the

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L1 over the L2 for working out sums, and 60% prefer it for praying,
whereas 61% use the L2 for keeping their diary, and 44% for remember-
ing phone numbers (Cook, 1998).
A distinctive process that multicompetent users engage in is code
switching. When multicompetent users are talking to other people who
know both languages, they may alternate between languages. For ex-
ample, a Bahasa Malaysia teacher of English was overheard saying to
fellow teachers in the staff room, “Suami saya dulu slim and trim tapi
sekarang plump like drum” (Before my husband was slim and trim, but
now he is plump like a drum). They can not only use either language
separately but also use both languages at the same time—what Grosjean
(1989) calls the monolingual and bilingual modes. Code switching has
complex rules, partly at the pragmatic level of the speaker’s and listener’s
roles, partly at a discourse level for topic, and partly at a syntactic level
(see the range of articles in Milroy & Muyskens, 1995). Code switching is
the most obvious achievement of the multicompetent user that monolin-
gual native speakers cannot duplicate, as they have no language to switch
into. It shows the intricate links between the two language systems in
multicompetence: In the mind, the L1 is not insulated from the L2.

Thought Processes of Multicompetent Language Users

Multicompetent speakers and monolingual native speakers also differ

in certain thought processes. It may not be surprising that people who
know two languages are slightly less effective at language-related cogni-
tive tasks in the L2 than are monolinguals (Cook, 1997a). Long-term
memory of information gathered in lectures is less efficient in an L2
(Long & Harding-Esch, 1977); working memory span in the L2 is usually
slightly below the L1 level at all stages of L2 performance (Brown &
Hulme, 1992; Service & Craik, 1993). L2 users perform slightly below the
level of L1 peer monolinguals in naming objects and following instruc-
tions to mark letters in words (Magiste, 1986); “the very fact of having
available more than one response to the same stimulus may lead to
slower reaction times unless the two response systems are hermetically
isolated from each other” (p. 118). In other words, the minds of L2 users
differ from the minds of monolinguals in several respects other than
sheer knowledge of language.
Indeed, this difference is one reason why, in many educational
systems, L2s are taught in the first place. Learning a foreign language is
seen as leading to “an interest in language and culture” in Japan (Tokyo,
1990), to the ability “to recognize cultural attitudes as expressed in
language and learn the use of social conventions” in the United King-
dom (The National Curriculum, 1995), and to “courage, honesty, charity

GOING BEYOND THE NATIVE SPEAKER IN LANGUAGE TEACHING 193

and unity” in Malaysia (Kementarian Pendidikan Malaysia, 1987, p. 2). A
particular benefit has often been claimed to be brain-training—learning
other mental skills. SLA research has indeed shown some truth in these
claims, particularly the bilingual’s keener awareness of language itself.
Bilingual children are aware of grammatical properties of their L1
sooner than monolinguals are (Galambos & Goldin-Meadow, 1990) and
are better at judging how many words there are in a sentence. In
particular, bilingual children are more capable of separating meaning
from form (Ben Zeev, 1977; Bialystok, 1986). Most remarkably, English-
speaking children who learnt Italian for an hour a week in the first class
of primary school showed advantages over monolingual children in
learning to read (Yelland, Pollard, & Mercuri, 1993). Diaz (1985) lists
many advantages for bilinguals, such as measures of conceptual development,
creativity, and analogical reasoning.
Clearly, multicompetent people differ from monolinguals in many
ways. L2 users are different kinds of people, not just monolingual native
speakers who happen to know another language. The native speaker–
based goal of language teaching cannot be achieved in part because the
students, for better or for worse, do not remain unchanged by their new
languages.

L2 DIFFERENCE OR DEFICIT?

Most L2 users differ from L1 monolinguals in the way they know and
use the L1 and the L2, but how are these differences relevant to ques-
tions about the role of the native speaker as a model for L2 learners?
Should such differences be seen as deficits from the native speaker
standard?
Labov’s (1969) classic argument held that one group should not be
measured against the norm of another, whether Whites against Blacks or
working class against middle class; Labov’s argument was in a sense a
belated recognition of ethnocentrism (Sumner, 1906) in linguistics.
People cannot be expected to conform to the norm of a group to which
they do not belong, whether groups are defined by race, class, sex, or any
other feature. People who speak differently from some arbitrary group
are not speaking better or worse, just differently. Today almost all
teachers and researchers would agree that a comparison between groups
yields differences, not deficits.
However, teachers, researchers, and people in general have often
taken for granted that L2 learners represent a special case that can be
properly judged by the standards of another group. Grammar that
differs from native speakers’, pronunciation that betrays where L2 users
come from, and vocabulary that differs from native usage are treated as

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signs of L2 users’ failure to become native speakers, not of their
accomplishments in learning to use the L2. Just as it was once claimed
that women should speak like men to succeed in business, Black children
should learn to speak like White children, and working-class children
should learn the elaborated language of the middle class, so L2 users are
commonly seen as failed native speakers.
According to the definition used above, L2 users are not monolingual
native speakers and never will be; they are as incapable of changing
places as are most women and men. L2 users have to be looked at in their
own right as genuine L2 users, not as imitation native speakers. It is no
more relevant for language teaching that a few L2 users can pass for
native speakers than it is for the study of gender that the female novelist
James Tiptree Jr. wrote as a man or than it is for the study of race that the
clarinet player Mezz Mezzrow claimed to be a White Negro. The study of
L2 learning should not be based on a handful of extraordinary people.
L2 users should not be treated as an exception to the dictum that one
group should not be measured against another. Comparing the charac-
teristics of native speakers and of L2 users is like comparing tomatoes
and apples, useful only at a gross level.
L2 users should be treated as people in their own right, not as
deficient native speakers. Halliday (1968) wrote, “A speaker who is made
ashamed of his own language habits suffers a basic injury as a human
being: to make anyone, especially a child, feel so ashamed is as
indefensible as to make him feel ashamed of the color of his skin” (p.
165). Clearly, until now many people have had little compunction about
treating L2 users in this way.
An illustration is that the measure of success in L2 learning is often
held to be the amount of foreign accent—the extent to which people’s
pronunciation conforms to native standards. Joseph Conrad is taken as a
failure at L2 learning because Virginia Woolf, among others, claimed he
was “a foreigner, talking only broken English” (Page, 1986, p. 64) despite
the excellence of his written English and, indeed, of his L2, French.
Apart from a few die-hard writers of letters to the newspapers, nobody
would claim that speakers of Brummy and Glaswegian fail to acquire
native speaker language because they were born in Birmingham or
Glasgow. Consciously or unconsciously, people proclaim their member-
ship in particular groups through the language they use. However, L2
learners are not supposed to reveal which part of the world they come
from; they are considered failures if they have foreign accents, as much
research into age differences in language learning assumes (Cook,
1986). Why should English-speaking people who sound as if they come
from Houston be accepted as L1 successes when Polish people speaking
English are deemed L2 failures for sounding as if they come from
Warsaw? A French winegrower once said, perfectly sensibly, “My English

GOING BEYOND THE NATIVE SPEAKER IN LANGUAGE TEACHING 195

is not good but my French accent is perfect.” L2 users belong to the
general group of L2 users, to smaller groups of L2 users with particular
L1s, and to many other language groupings in the languages they know.
The one group they cannot belong to is the group of native speakers of
their L2. Only if the native speaker is the sole arbiter of language can L2
learners be seen as failures for revealing the social groups to which they
belong.
An objection that is sometime raised to the argument against the
native speaker model is that it is the L2 users themselves who want to be
native speakers. Even bilinguals, according to Grosjean (1989), “often
assume and amplify the monolingual view and hence criticize their own
language competence” (p. 5). Their attitudes are the product of the
many pressures on them to regard L2 users as failed natives. Bilinguals
have accepted the role assigned to them in a society that is dominated by
monolinguals and where bilingualism is a problem but monolingualism
is not, just as psychologists once used to talk of African precocity in
children’s development, not Euroamerican retardation (Berry, Poortinga,
Segall, & Dasen, 1992). But this acceptance of the native speaker model
does not mean these attitudes are right. Members of various groups have
indeed wanted to change the color of their skin, the straightness of their
hair, or the shape of their eyes to conform to other groups, but this
desire highlights the status of various groups in society not the intrinsic
deficits in other groups. The only occasion on which L2 users can
justifiably be measured against native speakers is when they are passing
for natives, for example, when making translations to be read as native
rather than nonnative texts.
Monolingual bias is also reflected in the prevalent use of the term L2
learner for anybody who knows an L2, whereas the term L1 learner is not
applied to an adult native speaker. People who learn an L2 are implied to
be in a permanently unfinished state, never reaching a final form (Firth
& Wagner, 1997, p. 292). Hence L2 user here refers to the person who
uses a second language and L2 learner to the person in the process of
learning it. Although complete consistency is impossible, it seems
preferable at least to attempt to credit successful L2 learners with the
status of users. It does, incidentally, seem condescending to reduce L2
acquirer to L2er (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996, p. 42).

CONSEQUENCES FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING

The logical consequence of the arguments raised above is that

language teaching should place more emphasis on the student as a
potential and actual L2 user and be less concerned with the monolingual
native speaker. Abandoning the native speaker totally may be unrealistic

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because this model is so entrenched in teachers’ and students’ minds, yet
some steps in the right direction can be taken. The following suggestions
apply to an EFL setting. Some may apply rather differently to the
teaching of English to students residing or intending to reside in an
English-speaking country; indeed, some of them, for example, the use of
students’ L1s in special alternative instructional programs in the U.S.
(Lucas & Katz, 1994), have already been assimilated. These suggestions
are more concerned with syntax, vocabulary, and phonology than with
pragmatics.

Set Goals Appropriate to L2 Users

Language teaching has traditionally balanced the educational gains

for the student’s mind, attitudes, and personality from learning the L2
against the social and communicative gains from being able to use the L2
for practical purposes. The aims of language teaching can be divided
into internal classroom goals that relate to the students’ life within the
classroom, such as communicating their backgrounds and feelings to
each other, and external goals that relate to the students’ use of English
outside the classroom, such as traveling or living in an English-speaking
environment (Cook, 1983). The classroom-internal goals are not explic-
itly related to the actual use of the L2 in the world outside, whether by
native speakers or by L2 users, and so may be relatively unaffected by any
change in the status of the native speaker. The process syllabus in which
students negotiate continuously over what they want to do and achieve
(Breen, 1984) relates neither to the native speaker nor to the L2 user,
only to the students’ own wishes. Community Language Learning allows
the students themselves to shape the processes and goals in the class-
room without reference to anything outside (Curran, 1976). Though the
students are still doubtlessly influenced in their choices by target-based
perceptions of what they will need as L2 users and of the status of native
speakers, in principle they can decide what they like.
Similar emphasis on the classroom-internal goals can be found in
task-based learning, a movement that now brings together areas ranging
from the procedural syllabus (Prabhu, 1987) to the psychology of
attention (Skehan, 1998). Writers on task-based learning seem divided
over the extent to which tasks should be related to what happens outside
the classroom. Nunan (1995) divides tasks into real-world tasks, that is to
say, “the sorts of tasks required of [learners] in the world beyond the
classroom,” and pedagogic tasks, “things which it is extremely unlikely
they would be called upon to do outside the classroom” (p. 62); Willis
(1996), however, does not make external relevance one of the categories
of task. Skehan (1998) considers it desirable for tasks to have real-world

GOING BEYOND THE NATIVE SPEAKER IN LANGUAGE TEACHING 197

relevance “but difficult to obtain in practice” (p. 96). Task-based teach-
ing has not been concerned with external goals because of its primary
concern with how best to create conditions for learning within the
classroom. Issues about native speakers and L2 users are relevant only to
the extent that tasks are designed to mirror “the world beyond the
classroom.”
Approaches focusing on classroom-internal goals value language
teaching as an educational activity benefiting the students in many ways,
not only for utilitarian ends outside the class. The native speaker model
is unnecessary because students get many things out of learning the
language other than sounding like native speakers. The alternative aims
of proficiency or expertise could be applied to these classroom-based
goals. Skehan (1998), for instance, sets the goals of fluency, accuracy,
and complexity, without explicitly mentioning either the native speaker
or the L2 user. These are L2 student goals rather than L2 user goals—
abilities that students acquire through L2 learning that can be defined
independently of native speaker models.
At the other extreme, target-based external goals were emphasized in
the heydays of the audiolingual and communicative methods of teach-
ing. Audiolingualism stressed the situations and language used by natives
(Rivers, 1964). Communicative teaching analysed the students’ needs in
terms of notions, functions, topics, and so on (Van Ek, 1975), leading to
the familiar lists of vocabulary and structures in course books such as
Reward (Greenall, 1994) to this day. As communicative needs have
seldom been established by empirical research into what happens in L2
user situations, the native speaker model is all-pervasive. External
target-based teaching is also sometimes found in English for specific
purposes, in which detailed analyses are made of the English used by
native speakers in specific situations—restaurants (Bung, 1973), medical
research papers (Nwogu, 1997), or science lectures (Jackson & Bilton,
1994). Again, insofar as such descriptions reflect what native speakers,
not skilled L2 users, do, they have only indirect links to the L2 user
target.
A practical way of moving towards an L2 user model is to present
students with examples of the language of L2 users and of the language
addressed to L2 users; the pedagogic corpus (Willis, 1993) of language the
students encounter should be expanded to include specimens of the
language that L2 users rather than native speakers need. This is not the
same as saying that the students should listen more to each other. Rather,
they should encounter skilled L2 use. Willis (1996) points out that an
“internationally acceptable version of the target language” (p. 12) rather
than a native speaker variety could be used. At least some of the
authentic recordings used in the classroom could show skilled L2 use; at
present such recordings are authentic for native speakers, not for L2

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users. Many examples of L2 English are available from the media. Most
continental European politicians manage to give fluent television inter-
views in English, even if English and U.S. politicians rarely manage the
reverse. English language newspapers from many parts of the world can
easily be accessed over the World Wide Web; for example, the Straits
Times from Malaysia (http://www.straitstimes.asia1.com/) and the Santiago
Times from Chile (http://santiagotimes.cl/) provide examples of good
L2 user English as well as native-produced articles.
Teaching can also reflect the language L2 users employ with other L2
users, the most extreme perhaps being code switching. For example, the
New Crown English course in Japan (Morizume et al., 1997) uses some
code switching in dialogues. Some of the language that students encoun-
ter could reflect the modifications L1 users make in their speech to L2
users, for example, by providing information more explicitly (Arthur,
Weiner, Culver, Young, & Thomas, 1980). Students who have heard only
native-to-native speech should not be expected to use such features
effectively when they eventually encounter them.

Include L2 User Situations and Roles

The situations in course books fall into two broad types: those
featuring all native speakers and those including L2 users. The exclu-
sively native situations cast native speakers in all roles, as seen on virtually
every page of any course book, particularly the “authentic” conversations
in the COBUILD course (Willis & Willis, 1988), which rely on recordings
of English native speakers talking about themselves and carrying out
tasks with each other, such as giving directions and identifying photos.
Although such conversations may well cover the relevant vocabulary of
native speakers, which is indeed the main aim of the course, the
conversations are between native-speaking friends and acquaintances,
with hardly an L2 user in sight. The communicative aims in the
beginners’ course Flying Colours (Garton-Sprenger & Greenall, 1990)
include “asking who people are,” “greeting people,” “talking about
people’s homes,” and so on (pp. v–vi); the word people is not explained,
but the text shows that, with few exceptions, they are native speakers of
English, even if they reflect multiethnicity.
In the situations in some materials, an L2 learner or a low-level L2 user
plays a role; a typical example seen in virtually all communicative or
audiolingual materials is the foreigner asking the way of the native
speaker. Situations involving low-level L2 users may be relevant, provided
they do not fall into the funny foreigner stereotype of Manuel, the comic
Spanish waiter in Fawlty Towers who perpetually misunderstands every-
thing addressed to him in English. One possibility is to reverse the roles

GOING BEYOND THE NATIVE SPEAKER IN LANGUAGE TEACHING 199

so that the native speaker is ignorant and the L2 learner omniscient, as
in some English courses, in which a native shows an English person the
sights and customs of the home country; the course Angol Nyelv Alapfoken
(Edina & Ivanne, 1987), for example, features English used by travel
agents and tour guides in Hungary. It is, to say the least, unhelpful and
unmotivating if the only L2 user models that the students see in the
classroom are incompetent and ignorant.
The basic need is to present situations in which L2 users take part. The
unequal gender roles in EFL textbooks have been pointed out by, for
example, Sunderland (1992), with women being fewer in number, lower
in status and age, and less active conversational participants. The status
of L2 users is in even more need of redress, because they are virtually
never represented positively. At one level, materials simply need to
demonstrate that L2 users exist in the world as role models for students
to emulate. Psychology books have lists of famous bilinguals, including,
for instance, Mohandas Gandhi, Pablo Picasso, Marie Curie, and Samuel
Beckett (Grosjean, 1982, p. 285); the famous people in EFL course books
tend to be Ronald Reagan, Queen Elizabeth II, and the Beatles (Greenall,
1994, p. 83), none of whom are known for their L2 skills. Making some
parts of language teaching reflect an L2 user target would at least show
the students that successful L2 users exist in their own right and are not
just pale shadows of native speakers.
A possible technique for introducing L2 user situations into teaching
is found in the cross-cultural training in Cushner and Brislin’s (1996)
volume, which presents a series of key intercultural problems. Students
discuss the alternative interpretations suggested and then see which of
them is most likely to apply. For example, one case study features a U.S.
student in Germany who is perplexed by her apparent rejection by her
German colleagues; the students discuss the possible causes and discover
that the most likely reason is her lack of interest in politics. Although
selecting such situations or alternatives would be difficult, including
them would at least bring the figure of the L2 user into the classroom as
a person between two cultures.
An interesting type of L2 user role is the nonnative-speaker teacher.
Often native speakers are assumed to intrinsically make better teachers
than nonnatives do; “learn French from the French” is an advertising
slogan for a language school in London. Medgyes (1992) comes to a
more balanced conclusion about the possible advantages and disadvan-
tages of being a native speaker. However, students may feel overwhelmed
by native-speaker teachers who have achieved a perfection that is out of
the students’ reach; as Kramsch (1993) puts it, “Nonnative teachers and
students alike are intimidated by the native-speaker norm” (p. 9).
Students may prefer the fallible nonnative-speaker teacher who presents
a more achievable model.

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Use Teaching Methods That Acknowledge the Students’ L1
Most orthodox EFL teaching methods minimise the role of the L1
(Howatt, 1984, p. 212), called by Stern (1992) the intralingual strategy.
Apart from the never-dying but usually decried grammar-translation
method, virtually all language teaching methods since the Reform
Movement of the 1880s, whether the audiolingual and audiovisual
methods, the communicative method, or the Silent Way, have insisted
that teaching techniques should not rely on the L1; “inventories of
classroom techniques exist of which only a handful are not intralingual”
(Stern, 1992, p. 289). Given that much EFL methodology arose from
multilingual adult classes, teachers could not use the L1s of their pupils
to convey meaning, as the teachers might know at most one or two of
those languages. Methodologists’ insistence on the L2 does not mean
that the L1 has not in practice been used in most classrooms but that
doing so goes against the official doctrine. The U.K. national curriculum
for modern languages is typical in stating, “The natural use of the target
language for virtually all communication is a sure sign of a good modern
language course” (Department of Education, 1990, p. 58).
Exceptions to this orthodoxy are Community Language Learning,
with its reliance on translation (Curran, 1976), and a small group of
teaching methods that employ alternating languages. These include the
New Concurrent Method, which advocates controlled code switching
(Jacobson & Faltis, 1990); reciprocal language teaching, in which
matching pairs or groups of students who want to learn each other’s
language alternate languages as they choose (Cook, 1989; Hawkins,
1981); and the Tandem computer network (http://tandem.uni-trier.de/),
which gets pairs of students learning different languages to send each
other e-mails in their respective L2s. Apart from these more radical
alternatives, at best course books supply meanings for words or an
occasional discussion topic in the L1; The Beginners’ Choice (Mohamed &
Acklam, 1992), for example, asks students to decide whether adjectives
go before or after nouns in their L1s.
At least two ways of using the L1 in the classroom should be
distinguished. One is for presenting meaning: When students need the
meaning of a new word or grammatical structure, they can access it
through translation into their L1, which can come from the teacher or a
dictionary, or through an explanation in the L1, from the teacher or a
grammar book. Multicompetence theory supports the development of
links between the languages, such as translation, rather than viewing the
languages as residing in two separate compartments. One reason for the
lack of reliance on the L1 has undoubtedly been convenience for the
teacher. Given that much EFL methodology arose from multilingual
adult classes, teachers could not use the L1s of their pupils for conveying

GOING BEYOND THE NATIVE SPEAKER IN LANGUAGE TEACHING 201

meaning as the teachers might know at most one or two of those
languages.
The other main use of the L1 is for communication during classroom
activities. The orthodox view encourages teachers to use the L2 through-
out the class, as I have noted; students are expected to use the L2 even in
activities in which they would naturally code switch with fellow students
who share the same L1. A typical remark is, “If they are talking in small
groups, it can be quite difficult to get some classes—particularly the less
disciplined or motivated ones—to keep to the target language” (Ur,
1996, p. 121). Although the practical issue of diverse L1s requires the
consistent use of the L2 in multilingual classes, this restriction should not
apply to those classes where the students share a common L1. L2 users
have the L1 permanently present in their minds. Every activity the
student carries out visibly in the L2 also involves the invisible L1. The
apparent L2 nature of the classroom covers up the presence of the L1 in
the minds of the students. From a multicompetence perspective, all
teaching activities are cross-lingual in the sense of Stern (1992); the
difference among activities is whether the L1 is visible or invisible, not
whether it is present or altogether absent.
Many approaches to teaching seem to convey the message that the
students should aim at L2 use that is unrelated to the L1, something that
is virtually impossible to achieve and that denies their status as L2 users.
Though teaching manuals such as Willis (1996) or Scrivenor (1994) now
countenance some L1 use, the implication is that ideally the students
would not be using their L1; “as an ideal I would like a classroom where
learners were free to use their own tongue but in fact mostly chose to use
English” (Scrivenor, 1994, p. 192). Use of the L1 is seen not as desirable
but as a necessary evil. One practical suggestion is for teachers to see the
L1 as a positive factor in the class rather than as a negative factor to be
endured. Doing so may simply put a more positive light on what already
happens in many classrooms. Such a change has already taken place in
some L2 classrooms (Lucas & Katz, 1994); teachers can come to accept
mixed languages in the classroom, however reluctant they are to do so at
first (Giauque & Ely, 1990).
A second suggestion is to introduce activities that deliberately involve
both languages. The Institute of Linguists (1988) examination, for
instance, asks elementary students to listen to messages in the L2 and to
relay them in either the L1 or L2; it tests advanced students by getting
them to write a report in either language based on a series of interviews
and texts in the L2. The classic dual-language task was translation, which
might be used as a vehicle for more communicative exercises, for
example, “Write down your favourite recipe in your L1 and then decide
how you would explain it in the L2 to a fellow student with a different

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L1.” These activities above all see the student as an intercultural speaker
(Byram & Zararte, 1994), not an imitation L1 user. The use of such
activities in teaching may go some way towards developing the student as
a multicompetent speaker rather than an imitation native speaker.

Base Teaching on Descriptions of L2 Users

If the aim of teaching is to create L2 users, the description of English
that is logically required is a description of L2 English. Applied linguis-
tics has always claimed that language teaching can make use of descrip-
tions supplied by linguists (Corder, 1973); much of applied linguistics
today is indeed description oriented rather than problem oriented.
Descriptive approaches often use language corpora as data for devel-
oping linguistic description. The COBUILD project, for example, pro-
duced a large database of English from which it could derive grammars,
dictionaries, and teaching materials (see, e.g., the list in Payne, 1995).
Such descriptions would be far more useful if L2 users were represented
in the corpora. Applied linguists do not at present have a clear idea of
what typical successful L2 users know except through the distorting
mirror of descriptions of native speakers. Furthermore, corpus-based
description may be relevant to teaching only insofar as it is linked to a
testable theory of language learning; it needs to attain explanatory
adequacy, that is, show how language is learnt, not just observational
adequacy, that is, list thousands of occurrences said by hundreds of
people (Cook, 1985).
In the absence of descriptions of L2 users on which to base language
teaching, one possibility is to see what can be gleaned from accounts of
L2 learning. Collections of learners’ English, such as The Longman
Learners’ Corpus (n.d.), could act as stepping-stones. Syllabuses and
teaching materials could suggest intermediate goals for the students on
their way to becoming successful L2 users. For example, the European
Science Foundation project (Klein & Perdue, 1997) discovered that L2
learners of European languages acquired a basic grammar consisting of
three rules: A sentence may be (a) subject-verb-object (e.g., Jane drinks
beer), (b) subject-copula-adjective (e.g., Beer is good), or (c) verb-object
(e.g., Drinking beer). This L2 grammar is valid not just for L2 English but
also for L2 German, Dutch, French, and Spanish, almost regardless of
the learner’s L1. Although these rules represent an interim stage of L2
learning, they nevertheless provide a useful description of an L2 target
for the beginner stage. An additional claim made in much contemporary
work with syntax is that the initial stages of SLA depend upon word order
rather than inflection (Klein & Perdue, 1997; Pienemann, 1985), a

GOING BEYOND THE NATIVE SPEAKER IN LANGUAGE TEACHING 203

finding of major importance for the teaching of English, which tradition-
ally spends considerable effort on the plural -s, past tense - ed, and so on
at early stages.
The suggestion to rely on descriptions of L2 user language should not
be overstressed in that the differences between L2 users and native
speakers described above could be marginal. L2 user goals could be hard
to define because of the great variation among L2 users. Nevertheless,
taking the description of the native speaker as the basis of language
teaching is in a sense a temporary shortcut that avoids describing what
L2 users are like and postpones the more satisfactory solution of tackling
the description of L2 users themselves.

CONCLUSION

Going beyond the native speaker lies not so much in following the
specific suggestions as in adjusting the perspectives about models that
underlie language teaching. If students and teachers see L2 learning as a
battle that they are fated never to win, little wonder they become
dispirited and give up. L2 learners’ battle to become native speakers is
lost before it has begun. If students are convinced of the benefits of
learning an L2 and recognise their unique status as standing between
two worlds and two cultures, more students may go on higher levels of L2
use; those who do give up may feel more satisfied with the level of L2 use
they achieve. The graded objectives movement in language teaching
tried to set interim targets (Harding, Page, & Rowell, 1981) so that
students take away something of benefit no matter the level at which they
stop learning a language. A beginners’ EFL course took a worldwide
external goal to be traveling abroad using English (Cook, 1980); the
students who stopped after 1 year still gained a useful skill based on the
L2 user, not the monolingual native.
Together with the change in attitude, placing more emphasis on the
successful L2 user and on using the L1 more in teaching can bring
language teaching to the realization that it is helping people use L2s, not
imitate native speakers. Students, teachers, or indeed L2 researchers are
unlikely to give up their reliance on the native speaker overnight, but
judicious changes such as these can at least begin to acknowledge that L2
users have strengths and rights of their own by giving the students role
models of L2 users in action and by requiring the use of both languages
by one person. In short, these changes can convince students that they
are successful multicompetent speakers, not failed native speakers.

204 TESOL QUARTERLY

THE AUTHOR
After teaching EFL and writing EFL course books, Vivian Cook concentrated on
linguistics and language learning in books such as Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An
Introduction (Blackwell) and Inside Language (Edward Arnold). His current interests
are linking SLA research to language teaching and the writing system. He was
founding president of the European Second Language Association.

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GOING BEYOND THE NATIVE SPEAKER IN LANGUAGE TEACHING 209

“English Is Here to Stay”:
A Critical Look at Institutional and
Educational Practices in India
VAI RAMANATHAN
The University of California, Davis

Based on an ongoing ethnographic project, this article examines ways

in which the Indian middle class, with its relatively easy access to
English, represents an inner circle of power and privilege that for a
variety of reasons remains inaccessible to particular groups of people in
India. Specifically, the data revealed that certain institutional and
teaching practices keep English out of the reach of lower income and
lower caste groups and push them into outer circles. The students
central to this article are Dalit (lower-caste) students and students from
the so-called Other Backward Classes who have been socialized in
Gujarati-medium schools in Grades K–12 and who have to contend with
English at the tertiary level.

Confronted by the double authority of the book itself and the English teacher
endorsing and buttressing it by painful explication, they read and listen patiently
in the classroom. Then they go back to the colorfully translated Hindi version of
the text in the crib and memorize the “proper” answers from the same source, thus
making both the text and teacher redundant; or they improvise in halting English
their expressions of sympathy for Desdemona and Joe Keller and make clear their
incomprehension at original sin, and contribute their own malapropisms to an
account of Mrs. Malaprop’s contribution to the humor of the play. (Rajan, 1986,
p. 33)

S tudies of World Englishes in the 1980s and 1990s have called

attention to the growing number of Englishes used internationally
(Kachru, 1985; Quirk, 1985) by documenting features of the varieties of
English (Pakir, 1991) and raising issues about the socioideological
underpinnings of their use (Canagarajah, 1993). A key assumption has
been that the inner circle of countries (Britain, the U.S., Canada, and
Australia) with native speakers of the language sets English language
standards for countries in the outer circle (e.g., India and parts of

TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 33, No. 2, Summer 1999 211

Africa), where English is used nonnatively but extensively and has been
given official-language status. The different varieties of English used in
outer-circle countries make inner-circle standards difficult or impossible
for them to meet. Research has largely concentrated on describing
English language varieties or discussing the unequal power relations
between inner and outer circles of countries resulting from the privi-
leged standard-setting position of inner-circle countries (Pennycook,
1998; Phillipson, 1992), but little attention has been paid to examining
how power relations operate within the outer circle itself.
Extending the study of hegemonic practices associated with English
language use to the outer-circle country of India, this article examines
how English and the privileges associated with it remain inaccessible to
those who are disadvantaged because of their economic situation, their
caste, or both. Thus, even within an outer-circle country, an English-related
inner-outer power dichotomy appears to exist. The Indian middle class
assumes a position of relative power through its access to English in
Circle 1, with Dalit, or lower caste, students and students from so-called
Other Backward Classes (OBCs)1 in Circle 2 (see Figure 1). By focusing
on three specific educational and institutional practices influencing
their access to Indian English, I show how some students remain within
the relatively less powerful Circle 2. The three practices I address are (a)
tracking students into college-level streams that bar some students from
English-medium instruction; (b) teaching English literature rather than
the English language throughout India, which limits English to the elite
and middle class; and (c) using grammar-translation methods, which
inhibit the communicative competence of some students, thus keeping
them in their disadvantaged position.

FIGURE 1
Inner and Outer Circles of Power in India

Circle 2:
Dalits and OBCs

Circle 1:
The Indian
middle class

1
Patronizing as this term is, I use it because it is the current political term used in India for
members of tribal groups who are not Hindu (and therefore do not fall into the caste system).
Like Dalits, OBCs have been and still are discriminated against.

212 TESOL QUARTERLY

 The discussion and conclusions offered in this study are based on an
ongoing ethnographic case study of an English-medium college (Rama-
nathan & Atkinson, 1998) that explores how students in India who have
used the vernacular in Grades K–12 adjust to the use of English at the
tertiary level. Rooted in the same context and data, this article focuses on
how the people most disadvantaged in Indian society—namely, Dalits
and OBCs, who are also typically the most economically and education-
ally handicapped—negotiate with English but are unable to acquire
proficiency in it. I draw on a range of data types, including interviews
with students, faculty members, and administrators; class observations;
and textbooks and other written documents.
The primary motivation for this study stemmed from the fact that,
when I was a student at the college myself 14 years before, several friends
who had been educated in Gujarati-medium schools experienced serious
difficulty with English at the college level. Some were constantly on the
verge of dropping out because they found English classes too difficult;
many felt enormous pressure to perform on exams and would even go to
great lengths to get “leaked” exam questions prior to the exam date in
order to prepare responses to them. Only much later in my graduate
education and teaching career and during the research for this project
did I realize how integrally their problems were tied to the above-
mentioned institutional and educational practices. Although I had
received a bachelor’s degree from the institution and was thus very
familiar with the general workings of the system when I began the
research, some aspects of the college, including its general focus and the
arrangement of classes, had changed. Thus, as a researcher, I returned to
the site as both an outsider (having lived outside the culture for the past
11 years) and a relative former insider (having spent the first 23 years of
my life in India and having attended the institution).
To provide some cultural orientation for the research, I begin with a
brief exploration of societal practices in India. I then describe the insti-
tution, the students, and the data collected and report on the institu-
tional and educational practices that keep Dalit and OBC students out of
Circle 1. Finally, I locate the findings within the larger issue of the role of
English in India and offer suggestions for improving the language
situation at the institution.

HEGEMONY, CASTE, AND DISCRIMINATION:

SOME GENERAL CONNECTIONS

Hegemonic practices, as Gramsci (1988) maintains, are repressive

practices in any given social structure that ensure that the means and
ownership of production remain in the hands of a few. These practices

“ENGLISH IS HERE TO STAY” 213

are perpetuated at every stratum of society by a variety of invisible
factors—including institutions, religions, and legal practices—that justify
unequal distributions of goods (Gee, 1990) and disallow minority groups
access to and ownership of means of production. The construct of caste
and its entailing social practices in India exemplify hegemonic practices
that are historically and currently associated with keeping Dalit and
OBCs in a disadvantaged position (Sarkar, 1984). According to Quigley
(1993, p. 1), the Hindu world is made up of a number of castes, which
are closed social groups: One may marry only within one’s caste, and the
children of the marriage belong to the caste of the parents. In this way
the system is perpetuated ad infinitum.2 Castes are hierarchically ranked
on a purity-pollution scale according to their traditional occupations.3
Brahmins, the caste traditionally associated with people who became
priests, are considered in some ways the most pure. Kshtriyas, or the
traditional warriors, are second on the scale; Vaishyas, who were origi-
nally business oriented, are third; and the Shudras, the scheduled caste
people or laborers, are fourth.4
Although Quigley (1993) maintains that this conceptualization of
caste in India is at best a drastic simplification and at worst misleading,
he acknowledges that it has remained singularly resistant to modifica-
tion. The discussion of caste is often framed within two mutually
exclusive conceptions of history: materialist versus idealist. According to
the former view, caste is simply a rationalization and obfuscation of more
basic inequalities; those higher on the caste scale are generally wealthier
than those lower on the scale. In hegemonic terms the higher castes have
more access to means of production, including better schooling, better
jobs, and more social goods. The idealist position, on the other hand,
maintains that caste is a cultural construct and that people are placed
higher or lower on the scale based on religiously sanctioned notions of
purity and impurity. From such a point of view, “material considerations
are largely irrelevant because caste is essentially an ideological frame-
work for explaining universal problems of social order . . . where the
structure of caste is to be found in a system of ideas and not in concrete
manifestations of those ideas” (Quigley, 1993, p. 3).

2
Marrying within one’s caste is definitely a criterion for arranged marriages. Marriages of
choice, on the other hand, are not particularly stringent about matters of caste, although
marriages between an upper- and lower-caste person are not common.
3
Caste and occupation, as Quigley (1993) points out, do not necessarily go hand-in-hand.
Although the relationship between the two is one way of explaining the social stratification in
the caste system, it is extremely outdated. Today, a person born into the tailor caste may not be
locked into the tailoring profession but may simply have once had an ancestor who was a tailor.
4
These four divisions are the broadest in the caste scale. Each contains several subcastes,
with rules regulating social practices and behavior—including language use—within and across
caste groups.

214 TESOL QUARTERLY

 The general stance on caste adopted in this article is that both the
materialist and the idealist positions are relevant. Material aspects of
castes have been historically present and are still evident in several
spheres of existence in India, most especially in the lack of opportunities
for upward mobility for Dalits and OBCs. Although India has adopted
and reinforced a strong affirmative action policy whereby slots are
reserved for Dalits and OBCs in almost all walks of life—including
education and employment—discrimination against them still exists
(Kamble, 1983; Sarkar, 1984). The idealist perspective of caste is evident
as well in a society that legitimizes discriminatory social practices cate-
gorizing some people as pure and the rest as impure.

METHOD

As mentioned, this study draws on data gathered over 2 years as part of

a larger ethnographic project (Ramanathan & Atkinson, 1998) that seeks
to understand how students who have been socialized in Gujarati
throughout Grades K–12 adjust to English in a largely English-medium
college. In keeping with the ethnographic tradition (Ramanathan &
Atkinson, 1999), our research questions evolved only after we had spent
some time immersed in the field (Holliday, 1994; Prior, 1995), and our
larger, somewhat inexplicit goals narrowed over time.

Data
The Students and the Institution

All the students under investigation in this study were attending a

well-established college in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. After observing a
range of students and classes for some weeks, we chose to focus on Dalit
and OBC students for two reasons: First, the institution had in recent
years committed itself to empowering them in a variety of ways.5 Apart
from adopting an open-door policy regarding admission for all Dalit and
OBC students,6 the institution, run by the Jesuit community based in the

5
These included awakening them to their rights by organizing regular group meetings
wherein Dalits and OBCs talked about discrimination and practiced and performed street plays
depicting problems in their current general condition. One such meeting, called Ahmedabad
Ekta (United Ahmedabad) became so well known that many non-Dalits and non-OBCs began to
join.
6
Most institutions in the state do not have such a policy in place. Although all state- and
government-funded institutions must reserve seats for students from this group, the college
under investigation had chosen in recent years to open more than the required quota of seats
as a way of generally uplifting this historically disadvantaged group.

“ENGLISH IS HERE TO STAY” 215

city, also offered them extracurricular support during their first year in
the form of tutorials in English language, one area in which these
students needed a great deal of help. We felt an investigation of how the
institution handled its commitment to Dalit and OBC students would be
potentially revealing. Second, because these students were taught in
separate English classes during their first year at the college, we were
able to conveniently narrow our focus and observe them intensely in a
classroom context.
The choice of the institution was deliberate as well. Not only did the
college have the reputation of being one of the premier English-medium
colleges in the state, it was also the only college in the city that catered
extensively to Dalit and OBC students. Furthermore, several depart-
ments in the college, including biochemistry, English, Sanskrit, and
economics, were recognized as strong departments that were active in
research and that graduated students with top marks on university final
exams. In recent years, however, the institution’s academic standards
were thought to have gone down because it was willing to admit Dalit and
OBC students who had not done as well as the other students in their
12th-grade exams.7 Despite this college’s deliberate pro-Dalit and -OBC
stance, its institutional and educational practices were representative of
all English-medium colleges in the state.
According to the vice principal of the college, an average of 1,500
students were enrolled at any given time. Of these, 500–600 students
were enrolled in the arts, and the remaining were in the sciences.
Approximately 375 of the arts students came from Gujarati-medium
schools, and more than half of this number (56%) were Dalit or OBC
students. The proportion of Dalit and OBC students in the science
section was lower (30–40%). The number of Dalit and OBC students
admitted each year to both the arts and the sciences had increased
steadily because of the Jesuit community’s commitment to “serve the
poor and the oppressed” (F4, p. 2).8

The Exam System

All students were expected to take external exams set by the university
with which the college was affiliated. Performance on these exams

7
In fact, Dalit and OBC students need only passing marks to gain admission into the college
whereas all other students have to secure a minimum percentage of marks on their 12th-grade
exams (in 1997, 62% for the arts section and 65% for the sciences).
8
Each interview excerpt is identified by the participant (S = student, F = faculty member), a
number assigned to the participant, and the transcription page on which the quotation is
found. All interviews took place between June 15 and August 3, 1997. Excerpts from field notes
are designated FN; the date the notes were taken is indicated.

216 TESOL QUARTERLY

determined admission to the next year in the college as well as to
master’s programs. Much instruction in the college was therefore geared
toward getting students ready to take the exams. Instructors typically
began the first day of English Compulsory (EC) classes by putting up the
university exam format on the board (see Table 1), and every new topic
in the class was introduced in terms of its relative importance (i.e., the
point value assigned to it) on the exam. Such stress on the exam at every
crucial stage of the teaching and learning process partially accounts for
students’ resorting to extensive memorization of material (especially
material they did not fully understand) only to get through the exams.
Memorizing seemed to be a way to succeed at all levels of college, but it
was particularly prevalent among the group of students relevant to this
article; it became a way for the Dalit and OBC students to manage
despite their English language handicap.

Procedures

Data were gathered from multiple sources: 75 hours of classroom

observation; interviews with 27 students, with all five faculty members of
the English department, and with two chief administrators (the principal
and vice principal of the college); and copies of required class texts,
diagnostic exams, exam questions, and students’ writing. Total time in
the field was 12 weeks: 6 weeks in 1997 and 6 weeks in 1998; I conducted
follow-up interviews with four of the students during the latter period.

TABLE 1
Structure of the Second-Year English Compulsory Exam

Marks
Test section Task assigned
Short notes Write a paragraph on a specific term, concept, 10
or character
Short-answer question Write a paragraph in response to a question 10
Advertisements Answer questions based on advertisements 5
(e.g., for jobs available, products for sale)
Short news items Interpret excerpts from newspapers or other 5
general news sources
Reading passage Note the main points 5
Letter writing Write a job application letter or a letter to a friend 7
Pronunciation Identify which syllable in a list of words is stressed 10
Word building In Scrabble-like games, create a certain number of 10
words from an assortment of letters
One-word substitutes Choose one of four phrases that best represents 7
the meaning of a word

“ENGLISH IS HERE TO STAY” 217

 Interviews with teachers and administrators took place entirely in
English and typically lasted 1–11/2 hours. Interviews with Gujarati-medium
students took place primarily in Gujarati or Hindi and were translated
into English during transcription.
Contact with first-year (FY) students was made when we began to
observe their EC classes; contact with second-year (SY) and third-year
(TY) Gujarati-medium students was made when we went into their classes
and asked for volunteers to participate in our project. Student interviews
were conducted at times when students did not have class and in
relatively quiet areas on campus, such as an empty classroom or the
basketball court. Typically lasting for about an hour, these interviews
sometimes involved groups of two or three students (generally friends)
and at other times just one student.
For the purposes of this article, I draw primarily on 16 of the 27
student interviews with Dalit and OBC students as well as on the rest of
the data collected over the two 6-week periods. Of these students, 3 were
FY students who had just gained admission to the college, 6 were SY
students who had opted to major in English literature, and 7 were TY
students.
The students were interviewed about a range of issues: their general
background in English, aspects of learning English that they liked or
didn’t like, the advantages that fluency in English would bring them,
possible resistance to learning the language, the quality of English
language instruction they had received in school, the adequacy of the
instruction they were receiving in college, the relative importance they
gave to spoken English, and any feelings of cultural conflict they
experienced when reading literary texts based in U.S. or British culture.
The interviews were largely open ended and unstructured, with the
students’ views and responses informing the flow of talk. (See Appendix
A for a general schema of interview questions.) Most of the students felt
shy about speaking in English; many of them worried about how “wrong”
their English would sound (“Maaru English khotuu chhe, sharam aaveh
chhe” [My English is wrong, I am shy]; S6, p. 2). In the sections that
follow, I draw on themes that emerged in at least 12 of the 16 interviews.

FINDINGS
Within the setting described above, I found the following institutional
and educational practices that appear to keep Dalit and OBC students
out of the more powerful Circle 1.

218 TESOL QUARTERLY

Practice 1: Tracking
Instruction in the college is broken down into two divisions: the A
division, in which Gujarati is the medium of instruction for all courses,
and the B division, in which English is the medium of instruction.
Students are placed in these divisions depending on whether their
primary medium of instruction in Grades K–12 was Gujarati or English.
Unlike students in the B division, students in the A division are
tracked into either the a or the b stream9 depending on the years of
English language instruction they have had in school (see Table 2).
Students in the a stream typically had English as a subject in Grades 5–12
and are assumed to have a moderate grasp of the language. According to
the Teacher’s Handbook issued by the central university of which the
college is an affiliate, this group is at the intermediate level. Students in
this stream are generally from middle-class homes, and their literacy
levels in Gujarati are relatively high. Three of the six SY students
interviewed for this study came from this background.
Students in the b stream, on the other hand, are those who opted to
drop English as a subject in Grades 10–12, thus having had instruction in
it only from the fifth to the ninth grade. Students in this stream are
primarily Dalit and OBC students with rural backgrounds. Many come
from farming communities outside Ahmedabad, and most have attended
municipal schools. Mainstream Gujarati is, in some instances, an L2 or
second dialect, with English constituting the third (or sometimes fourth)
language. The three FY, the remaining three SY, and the seven TY
students whose views inform this article shared this background. Al-
though the b-stream students are of most concern in this article, when
relevant I call attention to a-stream and English-medium students to
highlight the general condition of b streamers and their position relative
to Circle 1.

TABLE 2
Placement of Students in English Compulsory Classes

Student’s K–12 Prior English language Stream

medium Division instruction (EC placement)
Gujarati A Grades 5–12 a
Grades 5–9 b
English B n.a. None

9
This division into a and b streams occurs only in the first and second years; in the third year
all a- and b-stream students are amalgamated into one EC class, as b-stream students are
assumed to have picked up enough English to compete with the a-stream students.

“ENGLISH IS HERE TO STAY” 219

 Several themes related to this tracking emerged from the student
interviews. None of the students articulated any resentment at being
tracked into a and b streams in the college because this tracking was seen
as a consequence of an individual choice to continue or to stop taking
English in Grades 10–12. However, all of the students believed that the
quality of English language instruction they were currently receiving in
their EC classes was not markedly different from what they had received
in school; they felt that instruction in neither place prepared them to use
English in the real world. Many explained their struggle in EC classes as
a result of the poor English language instruction they had received in
school. Twelve of the 16 students said that they had felt pressure to drop
English after the ninth grade because they could not cope with it.
According to the students, their teachers were themselves poor speakers
of English, and it was thus not surprising that the students found English
difficult (“Teacher ne English nathi aavadthu ne, tho amne kevi phaave?”
[The teacher does not know English, so how do we cope?]; S3, p. 1).
Tracking into a and b streams, then, although justified by the institution
on the basis of these students’ need for special attention, built on their
already disadvantaged position with regard to English.

Practice 2: Extensive Use of Grammar-Translation

The special attention given to students tracked into the b stream

resulted in EC classes with methods that may have inhibited the
communicative competence of these students and limited the choices
students could make at the institution.
FY, SY, and TY EC classes for both a- and b-stream students were
observed to get a comprehensive sense of the general focus of the classes.
These classes emphasized language tasks, with grammar being the
primary focus in the FY classes and more text- and comprehension-based
tasks being incorporated at the SY and TY levels. However, grammar was
not entirely discarded at the SY and TY levels because at least two of five
sections of the final exams for these years were devoted to grammar.
Eventually, we observed only the FY a- and b-stream EC classes
intensively because all FY Dalit and OBC students are placed into the b
stream. These classes were typically held 4 days a week for 50 minutes
each. Detailed notes were taken on any aspect of the class that had a
bearing on how English was being taught and learned there. We noted
that the young women sat toward one side of the class, that the young
men sat toward the other, and that the two groups seldom had anything
to say to each other. By contrast, in English-medium classes interaction
between the sexes was more common. The instructor began the class
sometimes with a joke and sometimes by referring to homework assigned

220 TESOL QUARTERLY

in the previous class. Typically, the teacher asked questions; the students
almost never did. Female students were especially shy about reading
aloud in class. All the students were generally very careful to note down
the homework expected of them for the next class.
Two pedagogical practices in particular seemed to be significant.

Use of Gujarati and Hindi

First, the teachers of both a- and b-stream classes frequently resorted

to Gujarati and Hindi while teaching the class. A TY instructor who
tended to use more English in class was generally seen as more difficult
to understand and was not seen as a good teacher. (“Gujarati ane Hindi
nathi vaparthi, ane amne mushkil laage chhe” [She doesn’t use either
Gujarati or Hindi and we find that difficult]; S19, p. 3). On the whole,
faculty members believed that they had to use native languages (Flower-
dew, Li, & Miller, 1998) because it was the only way they could “get
through to the students” (F5, p. 4). Students, likewise, had come to
expect this way of teaching because they had been used to it in their
English language classrooms in schools.
Almost all language in the b-stream class—directives, vocabulary
items, entire paragraphs from short stories—was translated. Teachers
frequently called on students to read a passage aloud from their text-
books and then had them translate it into either Gujarati or Hindi as a
way to check comprehension. This reliance on translation extended to
directions in grammar workbooks as well. When asked if using Gujarati
and Hindi in the classroom hindered their English language learning, all
the students maintained that it helped; translating everything into the
vernacular helped them understand (“samjan padeh”; S8, p. 1). None of
them seemed to see how it could take away from their gaining fluency in
English.
The almost exclusive focus on grammar (discussed below), combined
with little or no attention to developing speaking skills (because develop-
ing fluency in speaking English was not part of the university-mandated
curriculum) left students shy about using English outside the classroom
(“sharam aave che” [I am shy about using it]; S14, p. 6). Indeed, when
asked to read passages or their responses to grammar drills aloud, many
students seemed self-conscious.

Emphasis on Grammar

The second significant pedagogical practice was that all of the FY

b-stream classes were devoted exclusively to the teaching of grammar.
The class instructor felt that such intensive attention was warranted

“ENGLISH IS HERE TO STAY” 221

because “the students’ hold on grammar and the basics was so poor” (F4,
p. 6) that he could proceed with the readings in the textbook only after
he had addressed all the necessary grammar points. Thus, in class the EC
instructor taught various grammatical features, with tenses taught in one
class, nouns in the next, and verbs in the class after. Although the
instructor occasionally established connections between different gram-
matical units—how nouns and verbs are related to each other in
sentences, for instance—he did not do so in a communicative context (as
is common in language classrooms in the West; Holliday, 1994). The
extract below is culled from my field notes from one such class. I have
interspersed some of the teacher’s utterances (denoted by T ) into my
field notes; note that the teacher gave all of the instructions in Gujarati
and English.

T: Homework kone karayu? Who has done the homework?

*Teacher asked how many of the students did the assigned homework; goes
over drill on negative forms that he had assigned in the previous class.
T: Overcome etle suu? What does overcome mean?
*Goes over different meanings of to overcome—to succeed, to master
T: Aaje ame tenses karvaana chhe. We will do tenses today.
*Says they are going to do tenses today and that they have to memorize the rules;
says this thrice: “there is no other way of learning the rules.”
T: Badhhuj gokhi kaado. Memorize all of them by heart.
*Lays out the following three columns on the board:
Present Past Past participle
leave left left
complete completed completed
forget forgot forgotten
*Continues this list in the next class, where again he reiterates the impor-
tance of memorizing these lists. (FN, June 22, 1997)

Equally strong emphasis on discrete units of language was evident in the

FY a-stream classes, although the focus in these classes seemed less on
sentence-level units than on paragraph-level features (e.g., students
reordered jumbled sentences into the correct order).
When asked, all of the students said that this almost exclusive
attention to grammar helped them speak correctly but did not really
prepare them to use English in contexts like job interviews (“Amne tho
ahinya grammaraj sikhwade chhe; English ma vaat karvani practice nathi
malthu . . . tho job interviews maa mushkil hoye amne” [We only get
taught grammar here; we don’t get to practice speaking English . . . so we
find job interviews difficult]; S9, p. 2). Despite the students’ feeling that
they might not have been learning exactly what they needed to learn,
their recognition that English was a passport to social successes in their

222 TESOL QUARTERLY

culture prompted them to take the grammar instruction in EC classes
seriously. (“Thoda kuch tho seekh lenge” [At least I’ll learn something];
S6, p. 1). All students in the a and the b stream alike voiced the need to
be able to speak English fluently, because, as one student put it, this
would give them an “impressive personality” (in English; S6, p. 2).
Regarding their study methods, 13 of the 16 students said that they
dealt with the material in the EC classes by memorizing grammar rules,
entire chunks of lessons, texts, and ready-made responses from study
guides or notes of students who had taken the class previously (“ghokhi
kaadwaa nu” [we parrot it all]; S6, p. 4). They reported being unable to
comprehend what they read and saw teachers as generally ineffectual at
helping them understand what they were reading or learning about
(features noted as well by Bhattacharya, 1992). Although all the students
conceded that extensive memorizing did little to enhance their flu-
ency—a concern that was echoed over and over in the interviews—many
thought they had little choice.

Practice 3: The Teaching of English Literature

The teaching of English literature in English departments in India is

best interpreted within a historical context. Thomas Babington Macaulay,
who in 1834 was put in charge of reforming the educational system in
India (MacCabe, 1985; Suleri, 1992), defended the teaching of English
literature in India in a proclamation—often referred to as the Macaulay
Minute—that announced the general superiority of English literature:

I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic—But I have done what I

could to form a correct estimate of their value. . . . I am quite ready to take the
Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never
found one of them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European
library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. (cited in
MacCabe, 1985, pp. 38–39)

Macaulay further maintained that “all historical information which had

been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less
valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at
preparatory schools in England” (Moorhouse, 1984, pp. 77–78). Views
such as these, coupled with the sense that the British needed Indians
who were English in every sense but color, set in motion the intensive
study of British literature in India’s schools and colleges in the 1800s
(Rajan, 1992; Vishwanathan, 1989).
Today, majoring in English literature—including British, U.S., and
Indian writings in English—seems to be one of the only ways Gujarati-
medium students in the college feel they can master the English

“ENGLISH IS HERE TO STAY” 223

language. Four relevant themes emerged from the data regarding the
effect of literature teaching on students’ access to English. These factors,
related to bureaucratic procedures, cultural practices regarding learn-
ing, and areas of cultural conflict, apply to all a- and b-stream students,
although the implications for b-stream students are the most extreme.
Cumulatively these issues shed light on the complexity and conflict
surrounding literature teaching in a postcolonial context and the fact
that practices associated with literature teaching keep English within the
reach of a few and out of the grasp of millions.

Gatekeeping

One important theme related to literature involves the gatekeeping

procedures that affected the Gujarati-medium students. Majoring in
English literature appeared to be an option available largely only to
English-medium students. As one faculty member put it, “With
English-medium students you can at least assume a degree of language
proficiency that does not make the task of teaching Chaucer and
Shakespeare seem insurmountable” (F1, p. 11). Among Gujarati-medium
students, only a handful of exceptionally good a-stream students were
allowed to major in English, but only after they had successfully passed a
test administered by the English faculty. Because their English language
proficiency was generally deemed poorer than that of their English-
medium counterparts, Gujarati-medium a-stream students majoring in
English were required to take intensive grammar, reading, and writing
instruction in a remedial English class or tutorial. As for Dalit and OBC
b-stream students, who had stopped studying English after Grade 9,
majoring in English literature was not even a possibility. The institution-
alized practice of tracking, therefore, affects who can major in literature,
which in turn has consequences regarding the general accessibility of
English for both a- and b-stream students.

English Teachers’ View of Their Role

A second important theme that emerged through the faculty inter-

views was that English department faculty saw themselves as literature not
language teachers. All five faculty members mentioned that the language
problems of the Gujarati-medium students were not really their respon-
sibility. None of the faculty had had any formal training in applied
linguistics or language teaching methods, and all felt at a loss at having
to address grammar-related problems when teaching Chaucer and
Shakespeare. All but one teacher also expressed discomfort at teaching
EC classes, where language-related concerns were addressed. Many of

224 TESOL QUARTERLY

the faculty also believed that the college’s recently adopted stance on
promoting the English language skills of Dalit and OBC students worked
at odds with the faculty’s literature background. Many seemed to resent
the management’s not fully understanding that “literature and language
teaching are two separate endeavors” (F3, p. 4). Thus the value histori-
cally placed on teaching British literature manifests itself today in an
English faculty composed solely of literature teachers who lack the
expertise to help Gujarati-medium students access English.

Heavy Use of Study Guides

A third significant practice that emerged was the students’ extensive

use of study guides. Several of the Gujarati-medium students who were
majoring in English literature admitted to relying heavily on such guides
to get them through exams (Ramanathan & Atkinson, 1998). Many
students felt that their English language proficiency was inadequate for
understanding and explaining concepts in literary theory and poetry.
Study guides, several maintained, explained difficult literary concepts in
Gujarati. As for poetry, all of the students believed unequivocally that
poetic language and metaphors (especially in contemporary poetry as
opposed, e.g., to the nature poetry of the romantics) were generally
difficult to grasp. Resorting to memorizing summaries and explanations
of such poetry from their study guides afforded the students a way of
comprehending these poems.

Cultural Dissonance

A final finding related to literature teaching was the students’ feeling

of cultural dissonance between themselves and the topics portrayed in
the literature. Students in literature classes also voiced feelings of
alienation from texts with overly Western themes. When asked what
sense they made of romantic love—a theme predominant in much
Western literature—several students admitted to sometimes being at a
loss (“mushkil laage chhe” [I find it difficult]; S3, p. 2). This is under-
standable, as in India’s culture love between the sexes typically operates
in the framework of an arranged marriage. Some students said they had
come to terms with such Western themes by experiencing them vicari-
ously; others would try to translate them into local terms. Students
contending with race relations in the abridged version of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin (the required text for the TY EC class), for example, made sense of
the text by understanding race-related issues in terms of unequal power
relations between castes in India (“Vaat jevi chhe?” [Is it like caste?];
“Tho bahu power inequality chhe?” [So is there a lot of power inequality

“ENGLISH IS HERE TO STAY” 225

involved?]; S6, p. 2). Several students also believed that they often had to
forgo comprehending certain experiences and themes that were too far
removed from their everyday realities or that could not be culturally
transposed into local terms. Lukmani (1992), based on an in-depth
survey of Marathi-speaking literature students, surmises that “Indian
students . . . tend to remain aloof from involvement in the representation
of life in English texts. Their interest is in the medium rather than the
message, the language rather than the culture, and the benefit they hope
to attain is proficiency in English rather than integration in a western,
cultural ethos” (p. 170), a generalization that seems applicable to the
study of English literature at this institution.
Although students may have been interested in literature for its
potential to improve their English, the institutional practice of keeping
b-stream students from majoring in literature precluded any potential
benefit from this interest. This practice, like the teaching of grammar
and the streaming of students, on the surface may seem to have made
good sense for all involved. In fact, however, these practices worked
together to deny b-stream students access to English proficiency.

DISCUSSION, IMPLICATIONS, AND CONCLUSIONS

The data from this institution illuminate the institutional and educa-
tional practices that keep standard Indian English within the reach of
the middle class and inaccessible to those students that it is attempting to
help. In this section I locate the discussion of this institution within a
larger framework of the general role of English in India and offer some
suggestions for ways that English language inequality at the institute can
be rectified.

English Versus Regional Languages in India

Dua (1994) maintains that English in India no longer coexists with
other languages in a complementary relationship but seems to have
acquired such a privileged status that literacy in local, indigenous
languages is threatened10 (Pennycook, 1994, 1998; Phillipson, 1992;
Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, 1995). Indeed, many of the students we
interviewed wished that their parents had kept them in English-medium
schools because good jobs and social successes are directly tied to how
fluent one is in English (Kumar, 1993). This preference for English-

10
Gujarat, the state in which the institution under investigation is located, is one of the few
states in India that offer tertiary-level education in the regional language as well as in English.
Most other states impart college education exclusively in English.

226 TESOL QUARTERLY

medium schools is echoed in other studies as well. Jayaram (1992) cites
Reddy’s (1979) study, wherein he examined “students’ reactions towards
English and regional languages as media of instruction” (p. 103) and
found that students overwhelmingly favored English. On the basis of this
study and others, Jayaram concludes that a “fear of being treated as an
inferior category among the educated unless the courses are taken in the
English medium” is an important factor in “their aversion to the regional
language medium” (p. 103).
The Indian government has tried to balance English language teach-
ing with the teaching of other languages by promoting the teaching of
regional languages, including the students’ L1 and Hindi as an official
language (see Jayaram, 1992, for an in-depth discussion of the three-
language formula adopted by the Indian educational system). It has not
been easy. According to several scholars (e.g., Chitnis, 1993; Jayaram,
1992), not much has been done to build infrastructure that would
support regional languages, such as developing reading materials or
ensuring administrative autonomy. Although anti-English advocates fre-
quently voice the need to do away with English in the curriculum
altogether because it represents colonial and neocolonial vestiges, aca-
demics such as Chitnis (1993) maintain that India can give up English
only at the grave peril of the educational system. Certainly the students at
the institution under study echoed this sentiment. Although the quality
of language teaching—of regional languages and English, but of English
in particular—needs to be addressed seriously, the fact remains, as one
student put it, that “English is here to stay; we have to deal with it” (S4,
p. 5). Thus, it looks as if English language teaching will continue in India
whether or not the teaching of regional languages develops.

Widening Access to the Inner Circle

Although the motivation to learn English is very strong in India

(Altbach, 1993; Chitnis, 1993; Lukmani, 1992), practices such as those at
the institution under investigation keep the poorest and the most
disadvantaged students from learning it. The cumulative effect of
institutional and universitywide mandates is to keep b-stream students in
India’s own outer circle. The specific factors creating this effect were
found to be the institutional practices of teaching, teaching practices in
the EC classrooms, the faculty’s lack of training in language teaching
despite the administration’s resolve to provide English instruction to
Dalit and OBC students, and the students’ own prior learning practices
and views about effective language teaching and learning.
Multipronged as this problem is, some measures may ameliorate the
general situation:

“ENGLISH IS HERE TO STAY” 227

1. The administration as well as the university should be aware that
English language teaching is a completely separate enterprise from
the teaching of literature. The English department faculty recog-
nized this distinction clearly and acutely because they had to
contend with the vagaries involved on an everyday, local level, but
the management seemed to be less conscious of the pedagogical
problems involved in having literature faculty teach language. Cer-
tainly, raising the consciousness of the administration to classroom
problems is necessary.
2. Especially at the university level, the EC class is an area that begs for
change. Because fluency in spoken English is so important but
currently neglected in the lives of all the a- and b-stream students,
the EC class must include a speaking component that actually helps
the students communicate in the real world. The current, almost
exclusive emphasis on grammar and the general use of native
languages in these classes (Flowerdew et al., 1998), although aiding
comprehension and accuracy, does not provide an opportunity for
the development of communicative fluency. Balancing these meth-
ods with those intended to develop the communicative skills of
students while being mindful of local constraints (Holliday, 1994; Li,
1998) is a possible first step.
As a relative outsider to the scene now, I realize that these changes are
easier to recommend than to carry out, especially because both faculty
and management feel they can do little to alter the situation. The syllabi,
the curricula, and the final, external exams, they say, are out of their
hands. Their role, as one teacher cynically put it, “lies in merely
dispensing what is in a prescribed set of texts into the heads of the
students” (F3, p. 6). This lack of autonomy on the part of both the
management and the teachers may partially explain why teaching is
oriented toward exams, why teachers opt for particular teaching meth-
ods over others, why the students resort to memorizing and using study
guides to get through the exams, and why English language speaking
skills are not emphasized.
The Dalit and OBC students seem to struggle more than others. Not
only do they enter the college on the fringes of Circle 2 with poor
English language skills, having been educated entirely in Gujarati, but
they are also unable to develop their English in the college because they
are tracked into streams. These are the students most in need of English,
yet English seems farthest from them. Their economically disadvantaged
status does not permit them to enroll in language classes in the city, nor
does it afford them access to other realia available to learners in Circle 1:
the Internet, newspapers, TV shows in English, and English movies. They
realize more and more that they need to be computer literate for the

228 TESOL QUARTERLY

simplest of jobs, but to gain access to knowledge about computers they
have to first become fluent in English—that is, they have to develop the
language that allows them to enter and become part of Circle 1. For
most, however, their worst fears become reality: They never really gain
fluency in English or entry into that circle and thus never become
qualified for the jobs they desire.
This in-depth look at one English language teaching situation in a
postcolonial context raises several questions: Will current English lan-
guage teaching methods remain? How can the communicative fluency of
the most disadvantaged students be facilitated? Would Western commu-
nicative language teaching practices work well in the Indian context?
What local constraints will influence attempts to implement change?
Much more research needs to be done to reveal additional insights, but
this article represents a beginning toward understanding some of these
issues in a postcolonial reality; in the meantime “education [in India]
drifts along” (Jayaram, 1992, p. 111), and English stays.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank the Spencer Foundation for supporting the research presented in this article.
I also thank the students, faculty, and administrators at the institution under study.
This article has benefited enormously from the comments of Suguna Ramanathan,
Sarvar Sherry Chand, Carol A. Chapelle, Robert B. Kaplan, Dwight Atkinson, Jody
Abbott, and the anonymous reviewers.

THE AUTHOR
Vai Ramanathan teaches in the MA-TESOL program in the linguistics department at
the University of California, Davis. Her research interests include teacher education,
discourse analysis, and issues in L2 literacy.

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“ENGLISH IS HERE TO STAY” 229

Gee, J. (1990). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideologies in discourses. Philadelphia:
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230 TESOL QUARTERLY

 APPENDIX A
Schema of Interviews With Students
General Information
Name
Place of origin
Parents’ occupation
Name of high school
Major in college
Plans after graduation
Stream in the college (a or b)
English Language Learning and Teaching
1. How do you view English? How long have you had exposure to it?
2. Do you use English outside the classroom? (with whom? access to TV, newspapers, radio?)
What are some ways you seek exposure to English?
3. What were your English language classes in middle and high school like?
4. How would you rate your high school preparation in English? Was it adequate for dealing
with English in the college?
5. What is the general importance you give English in your life? What advantages is fluency
over it likely to give you?
6. Can you tell me about specific instances illustrating your struggles with English?
7. Are English Compulsory classes a help? What would you like to see changed about these
classes?
8. Should the college provide you more English language instruction?
9. Do you have difficulty dealing with American and British literary texts? What are some of the
difficulties? How do you overcome them?

“ENGLISH IS HERE TO STAY” 231

Processing of Idioms by
L2 Learners of English
THOMAS C. COOPER
The University of Georgia

This study investigated the on-line processing strategies used by a

sample of nonnative speakers of English who were asked to give the
meanings of selected common idioms presented in a written context.
Data were collected by means of the think-aloud procedure: Partici-
pants were asked to verbalize their thoughts as they arrived at the
meanings of the idioms. Analysis revealed that most of the participants
engaged in a heuristic approach to idiom comprehension, employing a
variety of strategies through trial and error to find the meanings of the
idioms. Models of L1 idiom acquisition did not apply well to the
comprehension of idioms by the L2 users. Some pedagogical sugges-
tions derived from the findings are included.

A n idiom is an expression whose meaning cannot always be readily

derived from the usual meaning of its constituent elements. It is
hard to tell from the literal meaning of the individual words, for
example, that to kick the bucket or to bite the dust means to die. Because
figurative meaning is unpredictable, idioms present a special language
learning problem for virtually all groups of learners: native speakers
(Gibbs, 1994; Nippold, 1991), language-disordered students (Nippold,
1991; Nippold & Fey, 1983), and bilingual and L2 learners (Adkins, 1968;
Cooper, 1998; Irujo, 1986a; Yandell & Zintz, 1961). Nippold (1991), in
fact, underscores the never-ending challenge in the acquisition of idioms
by maintaining that “there is no clear point in human development
when it can be said that idioms have been mastered” (p. 101).
Even though complete mastery of idioms may be nearly impossible,
every language learner must be prepared to meet the challenge simply
because idioms occur so frequently in spoken and written English
(Hoffman, 1984; Irujo, 1986b). Pollio, Barlow, Fine, and Pollio (1977)
analyzed political debates, psychology texts, novels, and psychotherapy
sessions to estimate the overall use of nonliteral language. They figured
that “most English speakers utter about 10 million novel metaphors per
lifetime and 20 million idioms per lifetime. This works out to about 3,000

TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 33, No. 2, Summer 1999 233

novel metaphors per week and 7,000 idioms per week” (p. 140). Because
of a lower level of linguistic competence in the target language, L2
learners are at a distinct disadvantage in understanding L2 figurative
expressions, yet they will meet idioms in all forms of discourse: in
conversations, lectures, movies, radio broadcasts, and television pro-
grams; in all forms of print, such as newspapers, magazines, and books;
and throughout the world of electronic communication. Indeed, mas-
tery of an L2 may depend in part on how well learners comprehend
initially and produce eventually the idioms encountered in everyday
language.
How idioms are acquired in an L2 is clearly an area worthy of in-
vestigation, but with the exception of studies by Kellerman (1978, 1979,
1983) and Irujo (1986b), most of the research on idioms has involved
native speakers of English. Models of L1 idiom acquisition therefore
offer a starting point for investigating the acquisition of idioms in an L2
and for comparing the extent to which L1 idiom comprehension models
apply to the comprehension of idioms by L2 speakers. In this article, I
first review research on L1 and L2 idiom comprehension and describe
my study of the on-line processing strategies a group of nonnative
speakers (NNSs) of English used to interpret a set of idioms. I then use
results from the study to propose a model for idiom acquisition that
describes and captures more fully the processes involved when L2
learners encounter idiomatic expressions.

RESEARCH ON IDIOM COMPREHENSION

Four Theories of L1 Idiom Comprehension

Four theories try to explain how native English speakers comprehend

idioms. The first, called the idiom-list hypothesis (Bobrow & Bell, 1973),
states that a native speaker who encounters an idiom first interprets it
literally. If a literal meaning does not fit the context in which the
expression is situated, the native speaker searches for the idiom in
question in a special mental idiom lexicon and then chooses the
figurative meaning. This hypothesis was formulated on the basis of an
experiment in which participants were first presented with either a set of
four literal sentences or a set of four sentences containing idioms. The
participants were then instructed to indicate which meaning of a test
sentence—which could be interpreted either literally or figuratively—
came to mind first, the literal or the idiomatic. The default mode of
processing seemed to be the literal interpretation of the idiom test
sentence, whereas the idiom-processing mode seemed to be active only
when the participants were presented with the sentences containing

234 TESOL QUARTERLY

idioms. Only after seeing the set of sentences containing idioms did the
participants interpret the test sentence figuratively.
Findings from later studies have led to the rejection of the idiom-list
hypothesis, for idioms are understood at least as quickly as comparable
literal expressions. In experiments that timed the speed of recognition
of the meaning of idioms, participants never understood the literal
meanings more quickly than they understood the figurative ones (Glucks-
berg, 1993). This would not have been true if the participants had had to
compute the literal meaning of the expression first (Gibbs, 1980).
The second model for idiom processing is called the lexical representa-
tion hypothesis (Swinney & Cutler, 1979). In this model idioms are
considered to be long words that are stored in the mental lexicon along
with all other words. A native speaker who encounters an idiom
processes both the literal and the figurative meanings of the expression
simultaneously, which results in a “horse race” in which the context
determines the more fitting interpretation. In the timed experiments
that led to the formulation of this hypothesis, participants viewed a word
string on the computer and had to decide whether or not the string
formed a meaningful, natural phrase in English. In addition to meaning-
ful strings, the list contained in random order of appearance idioms and
literal phrases: for example, take him for a ride/take him for a beer or wrap it
up/lift it up. The participants responded significantly faster to idioms
than to matched control phrases. Based on these results, Swinney and
Cutler were able to confirm their hypothesis that “idioms are stored and
retrieved from the lexicon in the same manner as any other word,” and
they therefore refuted the idiom-list hypothesis, stating, “There is no
special idiom list nor any special processing mode . . . individual words
are accessed from the lexicon and structural analysis is undertaken on
these words at the same time that the lexical access of the entire [idiom]
string (which is merely a long word) is taking place” (p. 525).
The third model, the direct access hypothesis (Gibbs, 1980, 1984;
Schweigert, 1986), is an extension of the lexical representation hypoth-
esis, for it posits that a native speaker rarely considers the literal meaning
of an idiomatic expression but instead retrieves the figurative meaning
directly from the mental lexicon. According to Glucksberg (1993), idiom
access is normally “completed more quickly because it does not require
the lexical, syntactic, and semantic processing required for full linguistic
analysis. Thus, familiar idioms will be understood more quickly than
comparable literal expressions” (p. 5). Gibbs (1980) posited that the
conventionality of the idiom affects how easily it is understood and
claimed that native speakers do not need to interpret the literal meaning
of a common idiomatic expression before deriving the figurative mean-
ing. This assumption was borne out by an experiment in which subjects
were presented with short vignettes that each set up the context for

PROCESSING OF IDIOMS BY L2 LEARNERS OF ENGLISH 235

either a figurative or a literal interpretation of a concluding idiom. More
often than not, the subjects chose the figurative meaning more quickly
than they chose the literal meaning, leading Gibbs to observe that native
speakers do not process idioms literally by default. Instead, they can
access the conventional figurative meaning of idioms directly.
The fourth idiom-processing model, the most current one, is the
composition model (Gibbs, 1994; Tabossi & Zardon, 1995), which super-
sedes the three models described above. The composition model was
first proposed by Gibbs, Nayak, and Cutting (1989) in the context of a
series of reading-time experiments in which participants had to decide
whether a given word string formed a meaningful English expression.
The participants needed significantly less time to process decomposable
idioms—that is, idioms in which the figurative and literal meanings are
close (e.g., hit the jackpot)—than to process nondecomposable idioms—
that is, idioms in which the literal meaning offers no clue for the
construction on the figurative meaning (e.g., kick the bucket). According
to Gibbs (1984), “these data suggest that people attempt to do some
decompositional analysis when understanding idiomatic phrases. When
an idiom is decomposable, readers can assign independent meanings to
its individual parts and will quickly recognize how these meaningful parts
combine to form the overall figurative interpretation of the phrase”
(p.␣ 285).
In general, the composition model states that people do not inhibit or
shut down their normal language-processing mode when they encounter
an idiomatic phrase: Their syntactic parser automatically analyzes the
grammatical structure of the words and phrases they hear or read; the
lexical processor accesses the lexical items in the mental lexicon and assigns
a meaning to them; and a semantic analysis is undertaken on the basis of
the grammatical structure and the meaning of the lexical items of the
phrase (Flores d’Arcais, 1993). Idioms are processed as any phrase or
sentence is, and the meanings of the individual words of the idiom
generally contribute to the overall figurative interpretation of the
phrase. Van de Voort and Vonk (1995) write, for example, that
During processing people try to analyze an idiomatic expression composition-
ally, much like they analyze a literal expression. They try to assign indepen-
dent idiomatic meanings to the individual parts of the idiom, which then can
be combined to form the overall figurative interpretation of the phrase. This
assumption implies that access to the meaning of an idiom is dependent on
the extent to which an idiom can be compositionally analyzed; that is,
meaning access is dependent on the compositionality of an idiom. (p. 284)

An important point, therefore, is that idioms range along a con-

tinuum of compositionality or analyzability. At one end of the continuum
are normally decomposable or analyzable idioms, such as pop the question,

236 TESOL QUARTERLY

in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between the figurative
and literal meanings: pop means ask and the question means marriage
proposal. Idioms at the opposite end of the continuum are nondecom-
posable or nonanalyzable—e.g., kick the bucket and bite the bullet. Here an
initial compositional analysis will fail because the meanings of the
individual parts of the idioms have little relation to the stipulated mean-
ing or the meaning agreed upon by native speakers—die and endure in a
difficult situation.

Comprehension of L2 Idioms

Research on processing of L2 idioms and figurative language has

focused on the influence of L1 transfer. Irujo (1986a) conducted a study
to determine whether advanced learners of English used their knowl-
edge of their mother tongue, Spanish, to understand and produce L2
expressions. Using recognition and production tests, she assessed sub-
jects’ comprehension of three groups of English idioms: those that were
identical to, those that were very similar to, and those that were
substantially different from Spanish idioms. The results showed that
English idioms identical to their Spanish equivalents were the easiest to
comprehend and produce. Participants understood idioms similar in the
two languages almost as well as they understood identical idioms, but in
the production tests interference from Spanish was prevalent. The
idioms that were different in the two languages—for example, to have a
free hand is rendered in Spanish by tener carta blanca (to have carte
blanche)—were the hardest for the participants to comprehend and
produce, but there was little evidence of positive or negative transfer
from Spanish in the test results. The test results varied greatly from
subject to subject, and Irujo notes that the participants comprehended
and produced most easily and correctly the idioms that were frequently
used in everyday speech, had simple vocabulary and structure, and were
metaphorically transparent in that their literal meanings were closely
related to their figurative meanings.
Kellerman (1978, 1979, 1983) also addressed the relationship between
L1 knowledge and interpretation of the figurative use of the L2. In a
study focusing on the meaning of the Dutch word breken (break), he
investigated the role of L1 transference in L2 learning with Dutch
students learning English. In his study, Kellerman (1979; cf. Ellis, 1994,
pp. 324–327) first asked native speakers of Dutch to sort 17 sentences
containing breken into groups by similarities in meaning. Analysis re-
vealed that there were two dimensions of semantic space, core/noncore
and concrete/abstract. In the second stage of the study, Kellerman asked 81
Dutch students in their first and third years of university study to say

PROCESSING OF IDIOMS BY L2 LEARNERS OF ENGLISH 237

which of the 17 Dutch sentences they would translate with the English
verb break. In a rank order of transferability, Kellerman found that even
though both verbs have a focal meaning (He broke his leg) and a set of
peripheral meanings (His fall was broken by a tree or His voice broke when he
was 13), a greater percentage of Dutch students (81%) accepted as
translatable the English sentences corresponding to the core or proto-
typical meaning of the Dutch verb than accepted the English sentences
corresponding to peripheral meanings. For example, breken was accept-
able for the English sentence He broke his leg but not for the sentences
Some workers have broken the strike or The tree broke his fall (cf. Bialystok &
Hakuta, 1994, pp. 109–110). Thus, knowledge about the semantic space
occupied by the meaning of words in the L1 is not necessarily transferred
to the L2, even though the words may on the surface have similar
meanings in the two languages.
These studies showed that the L1 plays a role in L2 idiom processing
even though L2 learners are less likely to transfer L1 knowledge when
they perceive the meaning as figurative. Thus, it is likely that L1 transfer
may play some role in learners’ processing of L2 idioms, but there is a
need to better understand when and how this and other comprehension
strategies are used in L2 idiom processing. Therefore, the present study
examines the comprehension processes that NNSs employ when they
attempt to interpret the meanings of English idioms at the moment they
are encountered.
The purpose of the study was to investigate the on-line processing
strategies used by NNSs of English who were asked to interpret the
meanings of 20 idioms presented in a written context. The computer
term on-line refers to the immediate thought processes activated in the
minds of L2 learners as they try to comprehend a given idiomatic
expression on the spot, without time for reflection. The theoretical
models developed for L1 idiom comprehension were examined to see if
they could explain the comprehension of idioms in an L2.
The research questions underlying the study were
1. To what extent did the idioms chosen for the study vary in difficulty
as measured by the Idiom Recognition Test (IRT)?
2. What kinds of strategies did the participants employ to comprehend
the idioms?
3. To what extent do the theoretical models of comprehension of
idioms in the L1 apply to the comprehension of idioms by L2
speakers?

238 TESOL QUARTERLY

METHOD

Participants

A total of 18 NNSs of English served as participants for the study. They

ranged in age from 17 to 44 years, the average age being 29.3 years (see
Table 1). There were eight native speakers of Spanish, three of Japanese,
five of Korean, one of Russian, and one of Portuguese. The participants
had lived in the U.S. for 5.1 years on average and had spent 7.3 months
on average studying English in the U.S. Many of the participants had
studied or were studying English in special language programs designed
to increase the language proficiency of international students so that
they could achieve a high enough score on the Test of English as a
Foreign Language to apply for admission to a U.S. university. With the
exception of three participants (Nos. 7, 9, and 11), all had studied
English in their home countries for an average of 6.5 years. Ten of the
participants were working in the U.S. in positions that required them to
communicate with their coworkers in English. For the sample group

TABLE 1
Background of Participants

English English study Job Time with

study in in home requires U.S. friends
Years in the U.S. country use of or colleagues
No. Age L1 the U.S. (months) (years) English (hours/week)
1 42 Spanish 12.0 0 4.0 Yes 40
2 32 Portuguese 3.0 6 3.0 Yes 40
3 26 Japanese 1.5 3 8.0 Yes 4
4 26 Japanese 3.5 0 10.0 Yes 10
5 24 Japanese 1.5 1 8.0 Yes 5
6 34 Spanish 18.0 1 12.0 Yes 40
7 32 Spanish 3.0 0 0.0 No 1
8 29 Spanish 10.5 0 3.0 No 7
9 28 Spanish 9.0 0 0.0 Yes 2
10 29 Spanish 5.0 3 3.0 Yes 25
11 30 Spanish 15.0 36 0.0 Yes 8
12 35 Korean 0.8 10 10.0 No 7
13 26 Korean 0.7 8 10.0 No 5
14 44 Korean 0.8 10 7.0 No 4
15 17 Spanish 0.8 9 13.0 No 7
16 25 Korean 0.8 10 6.5 No 5
17 24 Korean 0.8 10 11.0 No 7
18 25 Russian 5.0 24 9.0 Yes 40

M 29.3 5.1 7.3 6.5 14.3

SD 6.5 5.5 9.5 4.3 15.0
Mdn 28.5 3.0 4.5 7.5 7.0
Mode 26.0 0.8 0.0 3.0 40.0

PROCESSING OF IDIOMS BY L2 LEARNERS OF ENGLISH 239

overall, the average number of hours per week spent with U.S. friends or
colleagues was 14.3.

Materials

Participants were given the IRT (see Appendix A), in which they were
asked to give orally the meanings of 20 frequently used idioms selected
from A Dictionary of American Idioms (Makkai, Boatner, & Gates, 1995).
The idioms chosen represented a mixture of different levels of discourse.
According to the dictionary’s categorization, eight of the expressions
were representative of standard English, eight were informal or collo-
quial in level of discourse, and four were slang expressions (see Table 2).
The standard English expressions would be more likely to occur in
written English than the colloquial and slang expressions would.
To aid the participants in deciphering the meanings of the 20 idioms,
each idiom was incorporated into a one- or two-sentence context
selected from studies of L1 idiom comprehension conducted by Cronk
and Schweigert (1992) and Nippold and Martin (1989). Each idiom with
its context was typed on a separate note card and given to the partici-
pants in sequence.

Think-Aloud Protocols

From the point of view of methodology, this study derives its impetus
from native language research with speakers of English and Italian. The
research used on-line measures of comprehension to analyze the pro-

TABLE 2
Idioms on Idiom Recognition Test, by Level of Discourse

Standard English Informal or colloquial Slang

(more formal) (conversational) (informal)

To burn the candle at both ends To pull the wool over To have a big
someone’s eyes mouth
To see eye to eye To have a chip on one’s shoulder What’s cooking?
To suffer from burnout To have something in the bag To get sacked
To tighten one’s belt To have a green thumb To be chicken feed
To roll up one’s sleeves To rob the cradle
To see things through To be up the creek without
rose-colored glasses a paddle
To be a little frog in a big pond To let the cat out of the bag
To stir up a hornet’s nest To get off the ground

240 TESOL QUARTERLY

cessing of idioms immediately after aural or visual perception (Cacciari,
1993; Cacciari & Tabossi, 1988; Flores d’Arcais, 1993; Gibbs, 1994;
Tabossi & Zardon, 1993).
To investigate comprehension processes, the researchers used think-
aloud (TA) protocols to gather data while students took the IRT. In the
course of a TA protocol, subjects are asked to verbalize their thoughts to
the researcher while completing a cognitive task such as solving a
mathematical problem or comprehending a reading passage (Ericsson &
Simon, 1993). The focus of the TA task, according to Olson, Duffy, and
Mack (1984), “should be to get subjects to report the content of their
immediate awareness rather than to report explanations of their behav-
ior. Further, subjects should be asked to report what they are thinking
right now, not what they remember thinking some time ago . . . . TA data
should not be taken as direct reflections of thought processes but rather
as data that are correlated with underlying thought processes” (p. 254).
TA methodology has been used intermittently as an investigative instru-
ment in L2 reading research (Block, 1986; Brown, 1996; Davis &
Bistodeau, 1993). Given that, during the reading process, not under-
standing idioms is probably one of the most troublesome barriers to
comprehension, TA procedures may prove a fruitful approach to investi-
gating the process of comprehension. TA data provide evidence of what
is on the subject’s mind during the task, thereby allowing the researcher
to zero in on the mental efforts involved at the very moment an NNS
encounters a potentially problematic idiom.
In conducting the IRT and collecting the resultant TA data, the
present study followed the procedures suggested by Olson et al. (1984):
Along with detailed instructions (see Appendix B), the subjects were
given a list of examples of the types of things they could talk about to
help them verbalize their thoughts. As Olson et al. state, “The important
point vis-à-vis the use of the [TA] task to study comprehension is that one
be explicit with the subject about what to talk about. The exact list of
suggestions should be motivated by theoretical ideas or by prior re-
search” (p. 258). For the present study, I hypothesized that the recogni-
tion of the idioms might be influenced by such factors as the context of
the idiom, the literal meaning of the idiom, the meaning of a particular
word in the idiomatic phrase, the experiences and background knowl-
edge of the participant, or an expression in the native language. Thus,
the participants were asked to keep these factors in mind as they
verbalized their thoughts on how they arrived at possible meanings of
the 20 expressions.
Three researchers interviewed the participants. To ensure uniformity
of procedure, I discussed the process of collecting TA data with each
researcher and gave each a set of directions (see Appendix B) to read to
each participant at the beginning of a data-collecting session. The

PROCESSING OF IDIOMS BY L2 LEARNERS OF ENGLISH 241

sessions were conducted in a private office and were recorded on
audiotape.

Data Transcription

The audiorecorded interviews were transcribed verbatim, yielding 165

double-spaced pages containing approximately 25,000 words. The unit
of analysis was the minimal terminable unit (T-unit), described by Hunt
(1970) as “one main clause plus any subordinate clause or nonclausal
structure that is attached to or embedded in it” (p. 4). According to
Hunt, “cutting a passage into T-units will be cutting it into the shortest
units which it is grammatically allowable to punctuate as sentences. . . .
Any complex or simple sentence would be one T-unit, but any com-
pound or compound-complex sentence would consist of two or more
T-units” (p. 4). For example, in the following excerpt from the transcrip-
tion, each T-unit is numbered and begins a new line. The note card given
to the participant read, “Robert knew that he was robbing the cradle by
dating a sixteen-year-old girl. What does robbing the cradle mean?”

Participant: 1. Cradle is something that you put the baby in/

Interviewer: That’s where a baby sleeps
Participant: 2. So that means robbing the cradle/
3. That means, I think, you are robbing a child/
4. You’re stilling [stealing] a child from a mother/
5. A 16-year-old girl is still too young to date/
6. So robbing the cradle is like dating a really young person/

Data Analysis

The data were analyzed in two phases. In the first phase, the
participants’ definitions of the 20 idioms were scored on a 3-point scale.
One point was given for an answer of “I don’t know” or for a wrong
definition (e.g., defining to see eye to eye as to watch out very carefully for
someone); 2 points for a transitional-stage response that was partially
correct (e.g., defining to have a green thumb as to do horticulture stuff ); and
3 points for a correct definition (e.g., defining to get off the ground as to get
started).
In the second phase of analysis, the participants’ responses for each
idiom were divided into T-units, and each T-unit was analyzed and
marked according to the idiom comprehension strategy used by the
participant. The comprehension strategies for which evidence was found
in the data (see Table 3) were named with reference to previous studies

242 TESOL QUARTERLY

 TABLE 3
Strategies Used to Comprehend the L2 Idioms

Strategy Example

Preparatory
RP: Repeating or paraphrasing “To tighten your belt is . . . uh . . . to make belt more
the idiom without giving narrower . . .”
an interpretation
DA: Discussing and analyzing “Chicken feed . . . uh . . . Compared to people, uh,
the idiom or its context without chicken usually eat, uh, less than people, you know.
guessing at the meaning Chicken feed is little and people eat a lot . . . . It has
something to do with eating and stuff, but I’m not sure
of meaning.”
RI: Requesting information about “What does [usually a single word from the idiom or
the idiom or context context] mean?”
Guessing
GC: Guessing the meaning of the “I don’t know it [the meaning] at all, so I have to guess
idiom from the context from the first clause [We decided that Molly was a bad
worker] . . . . These people want to fire Molly, so I
think to get sacked means to get fired.”
LM: Using the literal meaning of “When I make an image of this phrase, to roll up his
the idiom as a key to its sleeves, I think of somebody who is trying to get ready to
figurative meaning do something, to work, so I think that’s what it means.”
BK: Using background knowledge “What’s cooking? I think my boyfriend might be using
to figure out the meaning of this often. I’ve never asked him what it means, but I
the idiom learned the expression through hearing it all the time.
At first I didn’t know it, but then since he uses it all the
time, I realize the meaning: What’s going on?”
L1: Referring to an idiom in the “Look at the world through rose-colored glasses. We have a
L1 to understand the L2 idiom sentence that has almost the same meaning in
Portuguese, ‘cause a rose-colored world is something
nice.”
OS: Using other strategies

dealing with on-line L1 idiom comprehension (Cacciari, 1993; Flores

d’Arcais, 1993) and on-line L2 reading comprehension (Block, 1986;
Brown, 1996; Davis & Bistodeau, 1993), for such terminology had been
shown to be effective in analyzing and categorizing data from TA
protocols.
The idiom comprehension strategies fell into two groups: preparatory
strategies and guessing strategies. The preparatory strategies allowed the
participants to clarify and consolidate knowledge about the expression
(Strategy RP, repeating or paraphrasing the idiom); to gain more time
before uttering a guess, perhaps to rehearse an answer, and to sift
through the new linguistic information (Strategy DA, discussing and
analyzing the idiom); and to gather additional information in order to

PROCESSING OF IDIOMS BY L2 LEARNERS OF ENGLISH 243

make a better informed guess about the idiom’s meaning (Strategy RI,
requesting information about the idiom). The guessing strategies repre-
sent cases in which the participant actually ventured an interpretation of
the expression, and the strategy leading to the guess was categorized as
guessing from context (Strategy GC), using the literal meaning (Strategy
LM), using background knowledge (Strategy BK), referring to an L1
idiom (Strategy L1), or using other strategies (Strategy OS).
To test the reliability of the researchers’ scoring of the IRT and coding
of the idiom comprehension strategies, I trained a second rater, an
experienced foreign language teacher, to score the IRT and categorize
the TA responses by going over examples of correct, partially correct,
and incorrect IRT responses and the respective comprehension strate-
gies shown in Table 3. After the training session, the second rater
independently scored the IRTs and coded the T-units from the TA
protocols. For both phases of the data analysis, the number of agree-
ments between the second rater’s responses and my responses was
divided by the number of agreements plus disagreements, and this value
was multiplied by 100. Interrater agreement was 98% for the IRT and
87% for the coding of comprehension strategies. All disagreements were
subsequently resolved through discussion so that 100% agreement was
attained.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Research Question 1: To What Extent Did the Idioms Chosen

for the Study Vary in Difficulty as Measured by the IRT?

Average scores on the individual items in the IRT ranged from 1.67 for
the idiom to have a chip on one’s shoulder to 2.78 for the two idioms to have
a big mouth and to be suffering from burnout (see Table 4). The mean score
was 2.32. Three idioms—Items 3 (to have a chip on one’s shoulder), 11 (to be
up the creek without a paddle), and 12 (to let the cat out of the bag)—were the
most difficult to understand. The average scores on these items ranged
from 1.5 to 2.0. The easiest expressions to interpret were Items 5 (to have
a big mouth), 6 (to be suffering from burnout), 7 (to have something in the bag),
and 15 (to get sacked ). The average scores on these idioms were between
2.5 and 3.0.
In comments recorded in the TA protocols, participants indicated that
a stumbling block in comprehension was often the lack of a clear and
close relationship between the literal and figurative meanings of the
idiom. The following comments, dealing with the idiom to let the cat out of
the bag, describe the typical struggle for the correct fit between the
meaning of the metaphor and the meaning of the expression.

244 TESOL QUARTERLY

 TABLE 4
Means and Standard Deviations for Individual Idioms

Idiom M SD
1. To burn the candle at both ends 2.33 0.77
2. To pull the wool over someone’s eyes 2.22 0.81
3. To have a chip on one’s shoulder 1.67 0.84
4. To see eye to eye 2.17 0.99
5. To have a big mouth 2.78 0.55
6. To be suffering from burnout 2.78 0.55
7. To have something in the bag 2.56 0.86
8. What’s cooking? 2.44 0.92
9. To have a green thumb 2.50 0.79
10. To rob the cradle 2.11 0.96
11. To be up the creek without a paddle 1.83 0.86
12. To let the cat out of the bag 1.89 0.96
13. To get off the ground 2.28 0.75
14. To tighten one’s belt 2.17 0.86
15. To get sacked 2.61 0.78
16. To roll up one’s sleeves 2.50 0.79
17. To see something through rose-colored glasses 2.39 0.78
18. To be a little frog in a big pond 2.44 0.70
19. Something is chicken feed 2.33 0.84
20. To stir up a hornet’s nest 2.33 0.69

M of item means 2.32

Stimulus situation: By mistake, Kay let the cat out of the bag when she revealed
the surprise. What does to let the cat out of the bag mean?
Participant: So she doesn’t really have a cat/
I think that means, uh, you put the cat in the bag/
and when you put the cat out of the bag, then the cat will be
excited/
And so I don’t know how to explain/
But it [the cat] gets very historical [hysterical], maybe/
So everybody around the cat can be troubled/

Two other idioms were troublesome for the majority of the partici-
pants: to have a chip on one’s shoulder and to be up the creek without a paddle.
Comments from the TA protocols revealed that the meanings of chip in
the first expression and paddle and creek in the second were the source of
difficulty in deciphering the meanings. This was so even though the
interviewer had given the meanings of these words to the participants. In
many cases, a participant who had gotten off on the wrong foot in
defining the idiom seemed to find it almost impossible to get back on
track, recover, and continue in the pursuit of the correct definition.
At the other end of the continuum, the two easiest expressions were to
have a big mouth and to be suffering from burnout. According to Irujo
(1986b), factors that might affect the level of difficulty of an idiom could

PROCESSING OF IDIOMS BY L2 LEARNERS OF ENGLISH 245

include salience, frequency of exposure, and ease of production. Most of
the participants indicated that they had heard these idioms often during
their stay in the U.S. Their U.S. interlocutors frequently used these
idioms, and the participants had heard them on TV and in movies. The
underlying metaphors of these two idioms are easy to understand and
relate to their figurative meanings, and the grammar of the expressions
is not so complex as to interfere with production.

Research Question 2: What Kinds of Strategies Did the

NNSs Employ to Comprehend the Idioms?

Strategies by Frequency of Use

Participants usually used several strategies in the process of compre-

hending an idiom (see Table 5). A rank ordering of strategy use,
reported in percentages in the bottom row of Table 5, gives the following
results: Guessing from context was the strategy used most frequently
(28% of the time), followed by discussing and analyzing the idiom
(24%), using the literal meaning (19%), requesting information (8%),
repeating or paraphrasing the idiom (7%), using background knowl-
edge (7%), referring to an L1 idiom (5%), and using other strategies
(2%).
Three of the strategies—guessing from context, discussing and analyz-
ing the idiom, and using the literal meaning of the idiom—were used
more frequently than the others (71% of the time) (see Figure 1). By
contrast, participants relied on the remaining five strategies—requesting
information, using background knowledge, repeating or paraphrasing
the idiom, referring to an L1 idiom, and other strategies—less often
(only 29% of the time). Below, I discuss the eight strategies individually
in their rank order based on their frequency of use.

Guessing from context (28%). In using the context, participants discussed

the situation in which the idiom was embedded and clearly made
reference to the situation to infer the meaning of the expression. In their
comments they often used the word so or because as a marker for inferring
or interpreting the meaning from the context. Below is an example of
this strategy.

Stimulus situation: People say that Jennifer can keep any plant alive with her
green thumb. What does green thumb mean?
Participant: I never heard this/
But I can understand the meaning from the context/
She’s good with plants/

246 TESOL QUARTERLY

 TABLE 5
Frequency of Strategies Used, by Idiom

Strategy
Discussing
Repeating or and Using
paraphrasing analyzing Requesting Guessing Using literal background Referring to Using other
Idiom idiom idiom information from context meaning knowledge L1 idiom strategies

To burn the candle at both ends 7 7 9 17 33 0 0 0

To pull the wool over someone’s eyes 7 26 15 26 15 1 0 0
To have a chip on one’s shoulders 4 12 9 13 19 8 0 0
To see eye to eye 10 25 7 23 14 10 7 3
To have a big mouth 2 7 4 21 7 8 14 0
To be suffering from burnout 4 8 3 13 28 19 4 0
To have something in the bag 4 10 2 18 15 9 0 0
What’s cooking? 4 5 0 22 7 12 1 0
To have a green thumb 7 8 7 22 8 6 0 0
To rob the cradle 1 28 4 21 11 2 0 0
To be up the creek without a paddle 3 23 7 19 13 1 0 0
To let the cat out of the bag 7 10 5 16 10 10 0 6

PROCESSING OF IDIOMS BY L2 LEARNERS OF ENGLISH

To get off the ground 6 2 0 21 17 2 6 0
To tighten one’s belt 7 7 6 19 7 2 8 2
To get sacked 2 10 1 20 10 2 0 0
To roll up one’s sleeves 5 12 6 16 2 2 1 1
To see something through rose-colored glasses 8 34 3 7 20 3 8 1
To be a little frog in a big pond 3 33 2 17 2 0 12 9
Something is chicken feed 2 21 2 17 9 0 2 0
To stir up a hornet’s nest 4 28 9 13 5 1 0 0
Total 97 316 101 361 252 98 63 22
% of all usesa 7% 24% 8% 28% 19% 7% 5% 2%
a

247
Total strategy uses on all items = 1,310.
 FIGURE 1
Frequency of Use of Idiom Comprehension Strategies

30 0

25 5
Strategy use (%)

20 0

15 5

10 0

0
RP DA RI GC LM BK L1 OS
Strategya
a
RP = repeating or paraphrasing the idiom; DA = discussing and analyzing the idiom; RI =
requesting information; GC = guessing from context; LM = using the literal meaning of the
idiom; BK = using background knowledge; L1 = referring to an L1 idiom; OS = using other
strategies.

And thumb is a finger/

So she’s good with plants like this/
This is what green thumb means/

Discussing and analyzing the idiom (24%). Participants often talked in

general about the idiom and the context before venturing an interpreta-
tion. In employing this strategy they exercised their skills of logical
thinking to solve the linguistic puzzle represented by the unknown L2
expression. Discussing and analyzing the idiom and situation may also
have given the participants a way of buying more time to clarify their
thoughts before having to come up with a meaning. In this regard,
discussion was an artefact of the TA method, for normally NNSs would
not verbalize their thinking upon encountering a new word or phrase.
An example follows.

Stimulus situation: If you procrastinate, you will find yourself up the creek
without a paddle. What does up the creek without a paddle mean?
Participant: I don’t know up the creek without paddle . . . Mh hmm/
Creek is a small river/
So . . . um . . . up the creek is very difficult/

248 TESOL QUARTERLY

 Down the, down the creek is very easy/
So we need, we must need a paddle/
We, we are, if we have no paddle, we can’t go up the creek
on the boat/
So it is a very difficult situation, and maybe impossible/

Using the literal meaning of the idiom (19%). The participants who
employed this strategy were aware of the metaphorical aspect of idioms,
and they concentrated on the literal meaning of the expressions as a key
to the figurative meaning. Here is an illustration of this strategy at work.

Stimulus situation: Mr. Carson works as a teacher all day and works in a factory
at night. His wife says he is burning the candle at both ends. What does
burning the candle at both ends mean?
Participant: I guess that he, I suppose what it means is he is exhausting his
resources/
He is working very . . . too hard/
Interviewer: How do you get this meaning?
Participant: I get the picture of what it would be/
The candle will have the two ends on/
And it’s burning/
They [the ends] are burning at the same time/
You turn one on/
And then you turn the other one on/
And the wax would be melting quicker/
So I know that he [Mr. Carson] is working . . . working too
much/

Requesting information (8%). The participants requested information

when they did not know the meaning of a vocabulary item in the idiom
or in the context. Some of the words that presented problems in
comprehension were chip in to have a chip on one’s shoulder (Idiom 3),
cradle in to rob the cradle (Idiom 10), paddle in to be up the creek without a
paddle (Idiom 11), and hornet in to stir up a hornet’s nest (Idiom 20). The
participants were given the meanings of these words if they asked for
them in order to facilitate their efforts to understand the idioms, for the
main research focus was on the thought processes that accompanied the
unraveling of the meanings of the idioms. Certain vocabulary items
seemed to have been difficult because they were low-frequency words
that an NNS would seldom encounter in everyday discourse. Requests for
information were often preceded by phrases denoting frustration, such
as “I have never heard this idiom before,” “I have no idea what this
expression means,” or “I don’t know!” After a few seconds, the partici-
pant would ask for the meaning of a specific word and then try to figure
out the meaning of the phrase.

PROCESSING OF IDIOMS BY L2 LEARNERS OF ENGLISH 249

Repeating or paraphrasing the idiom (7%). Many of the participants
employed the strategy of repeating or paraphrasing the idiom, appar-
ently to help anchor the expression in mind before they ventured a
definition. Repeating could also have been an artefact of the TA process;
because the participants were constantly urged to verbalize their thoughts,
repeating might have been a way to gain time before a possible inter-
pretation came to mind.

Using background knowledge (7%). This strategy refers to participants’

making use of prior knowledge and associations to explain and clarify
the idiom and its context. They remembered, for example, that they
learned the idiom in a language class either in the U.S. or in their home
countries. They indicated that they had heard the idiom for the first time
on TV or in a song or that they might have heard their friends and
acquaintances using the expression. Below are two interview excerpts
exemplifying this strategy at work.
Stimulus situation: Pam needed a vacation because she was suffering from
burnout. What does suffering from burnout mean?
Participant: I . . . I newly met this kind of idiom whenever I went [to] the
dining halls/
There are so many part-time students to work there/
And one day I said, “I want this one, this one, this one”/
And they said, “I’m burning out”/
So I asked them what does mean “burning out”?/
They explained: “I’m totally exhausted, I tired out, I don’t have
any power to work”/
In this case uh living in here help me to guess the meaning and
to and to understand this kind of idiom/

Stimulus situation: After dinner, John would go over to the mall to see what’s
cooking. What does What’s cooking? mean?
Participant: I think my boyfriend might be using this [expression] often/
Does this mean What’s going on?/
Interviewer: So you hear your boyfriend saying that?
Participant: Right, but I’ve never asked him/
But I learned the expression through hearing it all the time/

Referring to L1 idioms (5%). Sometimes the participants remembered

expressions in their native languages that are identical or similar enough
to the English idioms to aid in their interpretation. For example, the
following Portuguese expressions served as keys to the meaning of
several of the English idioms for the Portuguese native speaker.
• To see eye to eye (Idiom 4) equals olho no olho (eye to eye).
• Big mouth (Idiom 5) equals boca grande (big mouth).

250 TESOL QUARTERLY

• Through rose-colored glasses (Idiom 17) is similar to O mundo é um mar de
rosas (The world is a sea of roses) and to A vida não é um mar de rosas
(Life is not a sea of roses).
• To stir up a hornet’s nest (Idiom 20) is similar to Isto é como pôr a mão em
um ninho de abelhas (This is like putting your hand in a swarm of
bees).
The Spanish speakers indicated that the following phrases in their
native language helped them ascertain the meanings of the correspond-
ing English expressions.
• Big mouth (Idiom 5) is the same as una bocona.
• To tighten one’s belt (Idiom 14) corresponds to Tenemos que ajustarnos
los cinturones (We have to tighten our belts).
• A little frog in a big pond (Idiom 18) is the mirror expression to una
rana pequeña en un lago muy grande (a little frog in a very big lake).
The Japanese speakers found that the following Japanese phrases
helped them with the English idioms.
• To tighten one’s belt (Idiom 14) is similar to the transcribed Japanese
phrase saifu no himo o shimeru (to tighten the string of the [money]
purse).
• A little frog in a big pond (Idiom 18) is similar to I no naka no kawazu (a
frog in a well).
A Russian phrase helped the speaker of this language understand the
corresponding English idiom.
• To see the world through rose-colored glasses (Idiom 17) is similar to smatrét
na mír chérez rózovyie achtí (to look at the world through pink glasses).

Other strategies (2%). Two types of strategies came to light in this

category. One was the personalized discussion of the idiom and the
context in which it was found. In these instances the participant
imagined or remembered an actual situation in which the expression
could have been used appropriately. The second kind of strategy
consisted of a type of meta-analysis about the nature of idioms, the way
they function, and ways to unravel their meaning if recollection fails.
Examples from the interview transcriptions follow.

Stimulus situation: Mother wants to buy a new house in the country. Father sees
eye to eye with her. What does it mean to see eye to eye ?
Participant: Well, I think about me and Marco when we wanna buy
something/
Marco say, “I think it’s good”/
And I say, “I think it’s good, too”/
That mean eye to eye/

PROCESSING OF IDIOMS BY L2 LEARNERS OF ENGLISH 251

 Stimulus situation: After getting laid off from the pen factory, George had to
tighten his belt. What does tighten his belt mean?
Participant: After getting laid off . . . uh . . . I don’t know/
Six or seven years I study English/
And I think that English idiom has two meanings/
One is physical meaning/
The other is maybe mental meaning/
But whenever I guess just physical meaning, I almost, I wrong/
I try infer the, uh, mental, abstract meaning, or contrasting
meaning/
Then I guess the meaning and see context, too/

Successful Strategies

Thus far I have discussed the comprehension strategies used without

considering whether or not the participants correctly guessed the
meaning of the idiom. In this section I examine those strategies that led
the participants to successfully interpret the idioms. Of the 360 total
items (20 test items 3 18 participants), 200 were answered correctly (i.e.,
received a score of 3), representing a 56% success rate among the
participants. In rank order the strategies leading to correct interpreta-
tions were guessing from the context to figure out the meaning of the
expression (Strategy GC, leading to a correct answer 57% of the time),
using the literal meaning of the idiom (Strategy LM, 22%), using
background knowledge (Strategy BK, 12%), referring to an L1 idiom as
a key to the meaning of the English idiom (Strategy L1, 8%), and using
other strategies (Strategy OS, 1%) (see Table 6).
Although in many cases the participants used more than one strategy
to succeed, only the one that led directly to the correct response was
included in this count. The strategies of repeating or paraphrasing the
idiom (Strategy RP), discussing and analyzing the idiom (Strategy DA),
and requesting information about the idiom or its context (Strategy RI)
are not shown in Table 6 because they represent preparatory strategies
that allowed the participants to gain time, gather information, and clarify
their thoughts before guessing the meaning of the expression. These
three strategies are a way of marking time so that the respondent can sift
through the new linguistic material contained in an expression while
piecing together components that might lead to an interpretation.
An example of how Strategy DA can set up a correct guess is given
below.

Stimulus situation: Pam needed a vacation because she was suffering from
burnout. What does suffering from burnout mean?
Participant: Suffering from burnout mean/ [Strategy RP]

252 TESOL QUARTERLY

 TABLE 6
Comprehension Strategies Leading to Correct Answers, by Participant and Idiom

Participant
Idiom 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

To burn the candle at both ends GC LM LM LM LM GC LM LM GC

To pull the wool over someone’s eyes GC GC GC GC GC GC LM GC
To have a chip on one’s shoulders GC BK GC GC
To see eye to eye LM L1 GC BK OS GC GC GC BK LM
To have a big mouth L1 L1 BK BK BK L1 GC GC LM GC BK GC L1 GC BK
To be suffering from burnout BK LM L1 LM BK LM GC BK LM LM LM LM GC BK GC
To have something in the bag BK GC GC GC GC BK GC GC GC GC GC LM LM BK
What’s cooking? GC GC BK BK GC GC GC GC GC GC GC GC GC
To have a green thumb GC LM LM BK GC GC GC GC LM GC GC LM
To rob the cradle GC GC GC GC GC GC GC GC GC
To be up the creek without a paddle LM GC GC LM GC
To let the cat out of the bag GC BK GC GC BK LM BK
To get off the ground LM GC GC GC GC LM BK GC
To tighten one’s belt GC L1 GC GC GC L1 GC GC

PROCESSING OF IDIOMS BY L2 LEARNERS OF ENGLISH

To get sacked GC GC GC GC GC GC GC GC GC LM LM LM GC BK
To roll up one’s sleeves LM GC L1 LM L1 GC GC GC GC GC GC GC
To see something through
rose-colored glasses LM LM OS GC GC GC LM GC GC L1
To be a little frog in a big pond L1 L1 LM GC GC GC L1 L1 GC
Something is chicken feed LM GC LM LM GC GC GC L1 GC LM
To stir up a hornet’s nest LM GC LM LM LM GC GC GC
Note. Each code in the body of the table represents a strategy that led the participant to a correct response to an item on the Idiom Recognition Test.
GC = guessing from context, LM = using the literal meaning of the idiom, BK = using background knowledge, L1 = referring to an L1 idiom, OS = using

253
other strategies. Blank cells represent incorrect answers.
 I really don’t know/
But it sounds that Pam was really, really tired/
Sounds like you don’t have any energy/
You already spent everything you could/ [Strategy DA]
You are totally stressed and are to now burn out all your
energy/ [Strategy LM]
Sounds like Pam is stressed and needs vacation/ [Strategy GC]

When ranked by the frequency with which they led to correct answers,
the five successful strategies (Table 6) fall into the same order as they do
when ranked by frequency of strategy use in general (Table 5). Even
though the successful strategy is the one used to arrive at a correct
answer, participants often tried several approaches along the way before
they came up with the successful one.

Research Question 3: To What Extent Do the Theoretical

Models of L1 Comprehension of Idioms Apply to the
Comprehension of Idioms by L2 Speakers?

A native speaker of English reacts to an idiomatic expression in a split

second, rarely needing to stop and deliberate on its meaning. On the
other hand, L2 learners who encounter an unknown idiom are at a
distinct disadvantage because they do not possess the native speaker’s
degree of linguistic competence. The L2 learner must somehow screen a
series of possible meanings in order to arrive at a plausible interpreta-
tion; think through any number of possible significations; and take into
account the context, the literal meaning of the expression, and the
learner’s own experiences in the target culture. Because the thought
processes of the L2 learner are not instantaneous in recognizing an
idiom but are slower, more deliberate, and therefore more tractable than
those of the native speaker, the researcher can follow these thought
processes by using TA methodology in an effort to gain a better
understanding of how the L2 learner arrives at an interpretation of the
expression.
Upon encountering an unknown idiomatic phrase, L2 learners are
placed in a position of having to solve a comprehension problem by
experimenting and evaluating possible answers or solutions through trial
and error. That is to say, L2 learners must develop an interpretive
approach, a heuristic method, for solving the linguistic problem. The
term heuristic can denote both a procedure and a learning method
(Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1994, s.v. heuristic). As a procedure,
heuristic means that a problem is solved by discovery and experimenta-
tion in a trial-and-error, rule-of-thumb manner rather than according to

254 TESOL QUARTERLY

a planned route specified by an algorithmic approach. In teaching,
heuristic implies that learners are encouraged to learn, discover, under-
stand, or solve problems on their own by experimenting, by evaluating
possible answers or solutions, or through trial and error.
The results of the present study show that the participants employed a
heuristic approach in solving the linguistic problem of finding the
meaning of the idioms. They usually used a variety of strategies, and they
were not afraid to experiment and search for meaning through trial and
error. The heuristic model seems to capture best how L2 learners process
idioms. The models for L1 idiom comprehension—the idiom-list hy-
pothesis, the lexical representation hypothesis, the direct access model,
and the composition model—are each too limited in scope to account
for the wide variety of strategies employed by the participants in the
present study, although these models adequately describe several of the
specific strategies.
The idiom-list and the lexical representation hypotheses, which state
that a person considers the literal meaning of the idiom, describe
Strategy BK; the direct access model may account for the instances when
the participants were able to come up with the correct meaning
immediately without referring to any strategy that helped them; and the
compositional model may be a good description of Strategy DA, whereby
the participant discussed and analyzed the idiom and context before
giving an interpretation. Evidence for use of the other model or strategy
mentioned in previous research, using L1 idioms as a key to the L2
expressions (Irujo, 1986a), was apparent in the results of this study,
although the participants did not frequently employ this strategy (only
5% of the time). Kellerman (1983) suggests that learners have percep-
tions about what is transferable from their native language and attempt
to keep the L2 “reasonable” and “transparent” (p. 129). L1 structures
such as idioms work against the principle of what has core meaning in
the L1 and are not readily transferred to an L2. This may account for the
finding that reference to the participants’ L1 was not a major strategy in
the idiom comprehension process in the present study.
Overall, the strategies employed by the participants in this study can
be divided into two groups according to their frequency of use. The first
group consists of the three most frequently used strategies, which were
used 71% of the time (guessing from context, using the literal meaning
of the idiom to understand the figurative meaning, and discussing and
analyzing the idiom to gain knowledge of its figurative meaning). The
second group comprises the remaining five, less frequently used strate-
gies, which were employed 29% of the time (requesting information,
using background knowledge, referring to an L1 idiom, repeating or
paraphrasing the idiom, and using other strategies). Because the com-
prehension process is a dynamic not a set procedure, and because it

PROCESSING OF IDIOMS BY L2 LEARNERS OF ENGLISH 255

varies both from individual to individual and within the individual, one
or several strategies can be used at any time. The heuristic model allows
the analyst to account for the quality of variability inherent in the process
of understanding L2 idioms.

PEDAGOGICAL APPLICATIONS
Because they constitute a special language learning problem for
NNSs, idiomatic expressions may deserve special attention in classroom
instruction. Some commercial instructional materials focusing on teach-
ing idioms do exist (cf. Collis, 1994; Feare, 1997; Makkai et al., 1995);
however, language teachers frequently must create their own materials.
Articles by Cooper (1998) and Irujo (1986b) offer practical suggestions
for teaching idioms that are easy to incorporate in classroom instruc-
tion.1 Another way to approach the task of L2 idiom acquisition is to
offer learners a method for comprehending the unfamiliar idioms they
encounter. The TA data from the present study reveal how learners
tackle the problem of comprehending idioms, and this procedure—
thinking out loud as one solves a linguistic problem—can be adapted as
a teaching tool. Although the TA method and analysis system has been
suggested as a way of helping students improve their L2 reading skills
(Brown, 1996; Hosenfeld, Arnold, Kirchofer, Laciura, & Wilson, 1981), it
has not been applied to developing the skill of comprehending L2
idioms.
As Brown (1996) points out, the TA procedure can be adapted to an
instructional setting with either a single student or an entire class. In the
case of a single student, the instructor can have the student think aloud
about how he or she comes up with the meaning of idioms presented in
a context, such as those in Appendix A. At the same time, the instructor
can lead the student to the correct answer by giving hints about the
meaning of the idiom. As the student tries to come up with the idiom’s
meaning, the instructor can demonstrate that using a variety of compre-
hension strategies, such as those discussed here (e.g., using context clues
and thinking about the literal meaning of the expression), can lead to a
correct interpretation. Thus, under the guidance of the instructor, the
student can rehearse a heuristic approach to idiom comprehension. One
hopes that the skills developed during this type of rehearsal will transfer
to situations in which students have to navigate the process of idiom

1
A rich source for American English idioms, suggestions for teaching them, and references
is the Internet. MetaCrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com/) and Inference (http://www
.inference.com/) are good search engines for locating information on idioms. The search
terms to use are teaching idioms and American idioms.

256 TESOL QUARTERLY

interpretation by themselves. Below is an excerpt from one of the
interviews in this study that has been restructured slightly to show how
the TA method might be adapted for pedagogical use.

Stimulus situation: The salesman sold Mrs. Smith a broken dishwasher. He

pulled the wool over her eyes. What does to pull the wool over someone’s eyes
mean?
Yoshi: Oh, it’s very painful!
Instructor: What do you mean, Yoshi?
Yoshi: Because sometimes I get dust in my eyes, and I have a hard
time to get dust out of my eyes?
Instructor: How does this relate to the expression?
Yoshi: I think it is pretty much a similar situation; so if I pull the wool
over the eyes, is my eyes covered?
Instructor: Yes. That’s right. How does this relate to Mrs. Smith?
Yoshi: He, the salesman, disguise people.
Instructor: He disguises people.
Yoshi: Yes. Mrs. Smith sees cross-eyed; so we, she can’t see good. We
are easily cheat, cheated. Mrs. Smith is cheated.
Instructor: Great! So the idiom means to cheat someone?
Yoshi: Yes. I think.

In the present study, most of the participants were very interested in

participating in the TA protocols on idiom recognition and always
wanted to know the meanings of the expressions. They were poignantly
aware of the pitfalls inherent in understanding L2 idioms and wanted
more help in this area, especially a plan of attack for dealing with the
frustration caused by L2 idioms.

CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

This study investigated the on-line processing strategies used by a

sample of NNSs of English who were asked to interpret the meanings of
selected English idioms presented in a written context. From the data
elicited by the IRT, eight idiom-processing strategies were identified, of
which three—guessing from the context, using the literal meaning of the
idiom, and discussing and analyzing the idiom—were used the most
often, whereas the other five—referring to an L1 idiom, requesting
information about the idiom and context, repeating or paraphrasing the
idiom, using background knowledge, and using other strategies—were
in evidence less. The best model for explaining idiom comprehension
was not found among the known L1 idiom comprehension models but is
a heuristic model whereby the NNS, upon encountering an unknown

PROCESSING OF IDIOMS BY L2 LEARNERS OF ENGLISH 257

expression, employs a variety of strategies in a trial-and-error fashion to
interpret L2 idioms.
Further research might expand on the study described here in the
following ways.
1. Additional studies of the on-line processing of idioms should involve
a sample larger than the 18 participants included in this study.
2. The number of idioms tested—20—was relatively small. Other
studies might include a larger number of frequently used idioms to
see if those that cause NNSs particular problems in understanding
can be identified.
3. Other studies might explore the role of the context in which the
idioms are presented to the participants. The idioms were presented
in a rich context in this study, and one of the findings was that the
use of context was the major strategy employed by the participants to
arrive at the meaning of the expressions. Presenting the idioms in a
nonsupportive context to see which strategies would be most fre-
quently used might lend a different perspective on how NNSs deal
with figurative expressions.
4. The relationship between background or external factors and knowl-
edge of idioms is an area for further study. These factors could be
grouped into those dealing with the workplace, those dealing with
the family and neighbors, and those dealing with ties to the U.S.
External factors measure the degree of identity with the L2 society
and culture, which, in turn, may contribute significantly to knowl-
edge of the idioms in the target language.
Anyone who has tried to learn to speak an L2 sooner or later realizes
that idioms are a stumbling block. Learners are often at a loss to
understand conversations because comprehension may hinge on the
meaning of a key idiom, and when learners incorrectly use an idiomatic
phrase, native speakers often look amused or, worse, puzzled because
they do not understand. Avoiding the use of idioms gives language a
bookish, stilted, unimaginative tone. Learning to use idioms is therefore
extremely important for achieving command of authentic language. As a
consequence, to help learners gain mastery over this important aspect of
their L2, instructional materials and teaching techniques need to be
based on an understanding of how learners comprehend idioms.

THE AUTHOR
Thomas C. Cooper is an associate professor of foreign language education at The
University of Georgia. His research interests are in the areas of second language
acquisition and foreign language teaching methodology with an emphasis on

258 TESOL QUARTERLY

German and ESL. He has published in Modern Language Journal, Foreign Language
Annals, Journal of Educational Research, and Northeast Conference Reports.

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 APPENDIX A
Idiom Recognition Test
1. Mr. Carson works as a teacher all day and works in a factory at night. His wife says he is
burning the candle at both ends. What does it mean to be burning the candle at both ends?
[Answer: to be doing too many things at the same time]

2. The salesman sold Mrs. Smith a broken dishwasher. He pulled the wool over her eyes. What
does it mean to pull the wool over someone’s eyes?
[Answer: to try to trick someone]

3. Billy often gets into fights with other kids at school. His mother says he has a chip on his
shoulder. What does it mean to have a chip on one’s shoulder?
[Answer: to always have a bad attitude]

4. Mother wants to buy a new house in the country. Father sees eye to eye with her. What does
it mean to see eye to eye?
[Answer: to agree with someone about something]

5. Because Betsy cannot keep a secret, other people call her a big mouth. What does big mouth
mean?
[Answer: a person who talks too much]

6. Pam needed a vacation because she was suffering from burnout. What does suffering from
burnout mean?
[Answer: being exhausted]

7. After coming back from her interview, Stacey knew she had the job in the bag. What does
in the bag mean?
[Answer: assured of a successful outcome]

8. After dinner, John would go over to the mall to see what’s cooking. What does What’s
cooking? mean?
[Answer: What’s happening?]

9. People say that Jennifer can keep any plant alive with her green thumb. What does green
thumb mean?
[Answer: a way with plants]

10. Robert knew that he was robbing the cradle by dating a sixteen-year-old girl. What does
robbing the cradle mean?
[Answer: being romantically interested in someone who is too young]

11. If you procrastinate, you will find yourself up the creek without a paddle. What does up the
creek without a paddle mean?
[Answer: in serious trouble]

12. By mistake, Kay let the cat out of the bag when she revealed the surprise. What does to let
the cat out of the bag mean?
[Answer: to tell a secret]

13. Many small businesses can be successful once they get off the ground. What does get off the
ground mean?
[Answer: get a good start]

PROCESSING OF IDIOMS BY L2 LEARNERS OF ENGLISH 261

14. After getting laid off from the pen factory, George had to tighten his belt. What does tighten
his belt mean?
[Answer: live on less money than usual]

15. We decided that Molly was a bad worker and that she would have to get sacked. What does
to get sacked mean?
[Answer: to be fired]

16. The researcher had to roll up his sleeves to get the proposal in on time. What does to roll up
his sleeves mean?
[Answer: to prepare to work hard]

17. Depressed people should look at the world through rose-colored glasses. What does through
rose-colored glasses mean?
[Answer: as good and pleasant]

18. Looking up at the sky can make you feel like a little frog in a big pond. What does a little frog
in a big pond mean?
[Answer: an unimportant person in a large group]

19. To some people, a thousand dollars is chicken feed. What does chicken feed mean?
[Answer: an insignificant amount of money]

20. Mentioning the abortion issue just stirred up a hornet’s nest. What does to stir up a hornet’s
nest mean?
[Answer: to make many people angry]

APPENDIX B
Directions for Data Collection
In this experiment we are interested in recording on tape what you think about when you figure
out the meanings of 20 idioms in English. An idiom is an expression or phrase that doesn’t
mean what it says: For example, You hit the nail on the head is an idiom that means You got that
right. It doesn’t mean that you hit the nail with a hammer. I am going to give you 20 cards with
idioms on them, and I am going to ask you to THINK ALOUD as you figure out the meanings
of the idioms. What I mean by think aloud is that I want you to tell me EVERYTHING you are
thinking from the time you first see the idiom until you tell me what it means. Some questions
going through your mind after you see the idioms might be: How does the context explain the
meaning of the idiom? Is there a similar expression in my native language? Does the literal
meaning of the idiom relate to its figurative meaning? Does a certain word give away the
meaning of the idiom? Does the idiom remind you of something that you heard someone say
before? I would like you to talk aloud CONSTANTLY from the time I present each expression
on the card until you have given your final answer. Please don’t try to plan out what you say. Just
act as if you are alone in the room speaking to yourself. It is most important that you keep
talking. If you are silent for any long period of time, I will ask you to talk. Here is a practice run:
John always goes to bed at 9:30 each night because he remembers his mother saying, “The early
bird gets the worm.”
What does The early bird gets the worm mean to you? Tell me what thoughts go through your
mind as you figure out the meaning of this expression.

262 TESOL QUARTERLY

THE FORUM
The TESOL Quarterly invites commentary on current trends or practices in the
TESOL profession. It also welcomes responses or rebuttals to any articles or remarks
published here in The Forum or elsewhere in the Quarterly.

Comments on Liz Hamp-Lyons’ “Ethical Test

Preparation Practice: The Case of the TOEFL”

Polemic Gone Astray: A Corrective to Recent

Criticism of TOEFL Preparation
PAUL WADDEN and ROBERT HILKE
International Christian University

■ This article is a form of argumentative dialectic to Liz Hamp-Lyons’

Forum commentary (Vol. 32, No. 2), “Ethical Test Preparation Practice:
The Case of the TOEFL.” It is argumentative because, as coordinators of
a Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) preparation series and
writers of a wide variety of TOEFL preparation materials, we take a much
different position on the issue of the TOEFL and test preparation,
disagreeing strenuously with many of the assumptions and dichotomies
in Hamp-Lyons’ piece. It is dialectical because it springs into existence
only as a result of the vital questions that Hamp-Lyons has shown the care
and insight to raise, and we suspect that our own position as represented
here will likely evolve (rather than fossilize) in the ongoing debate.
To begin, Hamp-Lyons extrapolates most of her observations on
TOEFL preparation materials from a rather small and decidedly unrep-
resentative sample of five TOEFL texts “selected at random” in 1996
from “the market” (p. 331) (presumably English-only books on the
North American market, for the texts themselves remain uncited). Based
upon this haphazard sample, she draws sweeping conclusions about the
state of TOEFL preparation materials worldwide. In contrast to Hamp-
Lyons’ methods and findings, our recent study of TOEFL preparation
texts (Hilke & Wadden, 1997) focused on widely used TOEFL texts

TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 33, No. 2, Summer 1999 263

(based on estimated sales) in a particular region (Japan, the largest
foreign market for the TOEFL). It appears that the 10 texts examined at
length in our study (two English-Japanese editions and eight interna-
tional English-only editions) contrast markedly with those from which
Hamp-Lyons derives her generalizations. A much larger study of the
leading TOEFL preparation texts in five countries (Korea, Taiwan,
Thailand, Japan, and Vietnam) that we are now preparing further bears
out these differences. Regrettably, our extensive search of TOEFL
literature has (as of December 1998) failed to turn up any comparable
studies of TOEFL preparation materials, and we are therefore forced to
rely principally upon our own primary data in the following discussion.
Our 1997 study revealed that TOEFL preparation materials vary
dramatically in quality, as Hamp-Lyons points out, particularly in the
accuracy of their representation of the TOEFL. Here, however, much of
our agreement ceases. For instance, whereas Hamp-Lyons observes that
the volumes she randomly picked up offered exercises and practice tests
but “no preceding material to teach the point tested by each item” (p.
333), nearly all of the widely used texts in our study provided instruction,
examples, and explanations prior to exercises and tests. Whereas
Hamp-Lyons found that only one of the five books she examined had
“consistent explanations” for why each distractor in its practice tests was
“wrong” (p. 333), all of the books treated in our study provided focused
explanations for the correct answer, and more than half offered addi-
tional explanation for specific distractors when explanation of the
correct answer was insufficient to help users understand the point.
Whereas Hamp-Lyons concluded that only one of the books she ap-
praised included “any significant amount of helpful test-taking material”
(p. 333; referring to more global test-taking strategies), the majority of
TOEFL texts that we examined (and that TOEFL preparation students,
at least in East Asia, purchase and use) offered some such instruction.
Admittedly, the operative word here is helpful, and the operative ques-
tion, helpful to whom?
Hamp-Lyons concludes that the test-taking material in the books she
surveyed was “unlikely to be of much help on other kinds of tests, such as
essay tests or oral proficiency interviews” (p. 333). Yet why would the
discerning student-consumer purchase a TOEFL preparation text focus-
ing on strategies appropriate for oral proficiency or essay tests when such
exams are not typically part of the TOEFL? Hamp-Lyons goes on to
lambaste the preparation books, their authors, and their publishers
because the books are not helpful in providing a ready syllabus for
teachers of TOEFL courses. But is it possible that what is helpful to
students preparing to take a test (one that may, fairly or unfairly, decide
whether they have access to a university education in North America)
could in reality be quite different from that which is useful to classroom

264 TESOL QUARTERLY

teachers whose pedagogical goal is “instructed acquisition” (p. 336)?
Hamp-Lyons defines their sanctioned aim as instructed acquisition
rather than self-guided activation of lexical structures, vocabulary, and
language skills, which many students (especially those in Asia) have
already learned formally in long years of classroom English study.1
Like her methodology and inferences, several of Hamp-Lyons’ obser-
vations on the TOEFL itself appear to be far wide of the mark. She
observes, for instance, that “the test is not intended to reveal or reflect a
model of language in use” (p. 332). This assertion is simply not true—at
least as regards the reading and listening sections of the exam. As former
TOEFL developer and then–doctoral candidate Peirce explained in her
aptly titled article “Demystifying the TOEFL Reading Test” (1992),
passages chosen for the reading section are not written for the TOEFL
but drawn from “academic magazines, books, newspapers, and encyclo-
pedias.” The “rationale” for using these sources for materials and for
refraining from altering their organization and wording is, as Peirce put
it, to present TOEFL takers with “authentic language” and to expose
them to the original prose of “a variety of writers” (pp. 668–669). The
model of language such prose is intended to reflect, contrary to Hamp-
Lyons’ claim, is clearly identified in the information booklets distributed
to prospective test takers; namely, prose passages that are “similar in
topic and style to those that students are likely to encounter in North
American universities and colleges” (Educational Testing Service [ETS],
1997/1998, p. 11). Our 1997 analysis generally corroborates this claim in
identifying the common topic areas from which the passages are drawn
(natural science, natural history, North American history, and the social
sciences); these subjects—and the lexical density and vocabulary load of
the passage—do appear to reflect the types and topics of readings that
foreign students are likely to encounter at North American universities,
especially in the general education and introductory courses taken
during their first or second year of study. Of course, the passages in the
TOEFL are culled from longer texts, but this hardly renders them
inauthentic.
The talks, conversations, and minilectures of the TOEFL similarly
assume an actual model of language in use, though it may not be quite as
compelling or transparent as in the reading section. This model is the
use of standard, idiomatic, and communicative North American English
such as students are likely to encounter in daily life in and around their
future institutions. True enough, the conversations and talks in this
section are not genuine in the sense that they have been taped live and

1
See, for instance, Helgesen’s (1993) excellent discussion of the critical role that activation
of previously learned vocabulary, structures, and content should play in the language learning
of Japanese college students.

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then rebroadcast at their original length, but they nonetheless clearly
represent and even reveal (slang and profanity aside) the language of
the dormitories, classrooms, libraries, museums, banks, and offices
students will contend with in their desired place of study. To be sure, the
various regional dialects of American English in use (e.g., those of
Brooklyn, Boston, the deep South) are not represented, but this hardly
justifies characterizing both the exam itself and the currently available
preparation materials as embodying “discrete chunks of language rules
and vocabulary items without context and even much co-text” (p. 332).
This latter criticism may have held partly true for the pre-1995 vocabu-
lary section, in which discrete vocabulary items were tested with virtually
no regard for context; however, one badly needed change in the exam
that ETS (the company that produces the exam) had the foresight and
resolve to enact has been the outright elimination of discrete vocabulary
testing and the embedding of vocabulary questions within the current
reading section, where key words and phrases have substantial context
and co-text. Likewise, to conclude from Hamp-Lyons’ small sample that
preparation texts invariably fail to provide context and co-text is unfair;
nearly every recent volume we have examined features vocabulary that is
nested, as in the TOEFL, in textual passages, though authenticity and
accuracy again vary drastically among texts.
In claiming that the TOEFL and TOEFL preparation materials are
based on discrete chunks of language rules and frequently without co-
text or context, perhaps Hamp-Lyons mainly has in mind the Structure
and Written Expression section of the exam (the shortest of the three
sections). Here, her charge contains its largest grain of truth, and it is
this section of the exam that is most in need of revision. (In fact, in our
view the so-called Structure and Written Expression section should be
completely eliminated and replaced with an improved, more substantial
version of the Test of Written English). Yet even if one arbitrarily limits
Hamp-Lyons’ critique to this section, she appears to overextrapolate
from the TOEFL preparation texts she perused and sharply oversteps the
facts when she surmises that
the only strategy for deciding what language areas to focus on would seem to
be to work out the probable frequency of different types of items or probes
across multiple, actual TOEFL forms. But even this strategy leaves the teacher
with nothing more than a laundry list of grammatical or lexical points to be
covered. (p. 334)

Many preparation texts indeed inadequately treat this decontextualized

section of the exam, but this does not mean that the test presents a mere
“laundry list” of grammatical and lexical mistakes. Even this most
dubious subtest of the TOEFL focuses largely on commonly occurring
language errors that significantly impede fluency and accuracy (e.g.,

266 TESOL QUARTERLY

incomplete sentences, pronoun errors, subject-verb agreement) that are
distracting (if not unacceptable) to many academic readers, particularly
the North American professors who will read and grade the students’
future written work. Although L1 compositionists have long abandoned
error correction as their principal focus, cutting-edge contemporary
writing teachers nevertheless include in their pedagogical brief a com-
mitment to cultivating students’ awareness of the widely subscribed to
(and admittedly politicized) conventions of written English, if sometimes
only for the pragmatic reason that less enlightened faculty (and admin-
istrators) elsewhere in the university will not tolerate what they view as
work riddled with repeated and egregious violations of grammar and
usage. In any event, it is worth noting that this section of the exam is the
least formidable subtest to many TOEFL takers (especially those in Asia),
who already have impressive grammatical knowledge of English (often
more than their native-speaking ESOL instructors) but who need prac-
tice utilizing and focusing this knowledge within the rhetorical and
epistemological framework of the test, precisely the type of practice
potentially offered by well-designed and accurate TOEFL preparation
materials.
Among the most important and provocative questions that Hamp-Lyons
justly raises is concern about whether TOEFL preparation courses
“actually do improve scores” (p. 331). She cites an absence of empirical
evidence to support her skepticism and astutely points to an area in
which research is badly needed. Yet here, too, several cautionary points
are in order. First, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as Carl
Sagan used to intone against creationist views of evolution that tried to
shift the spotlight to missing parts of the fossil record. A great deal of
data exist around the world at schools and companies that offer TOEFL
preparation courses, but those data need to be gathered, screened for
bias, and carefully analyzed. Second, beyond abundant common sense
about the value of preparing for a test, ETS’s own research suggests
(albeit inconclusively) that practice improves performance, as the test
scores of examinees who simply retake the TOEFL, with or without the
use of TOEFL preparation materials, have consistently been found to
increase (see, e.g., Wilson, 1987). Third, our own data in a study we are
currently conducting at a liberal arts college in Japan suggest that a mere
20 hours of TOEFL preparation focusing on skill and language activa-
tion and select vocabulary acquisition can decisively raise scores; our
preliminary analysis indicates that 200 students who took such a course
showed an average score gain of 65 points.2 Hamp-Lyons caps her
observations on the current lack of evidence by laying the “burden of

2
We are at present replicating the preliminary study and working to factor out some of the
intervening experience variables in the experimental group.

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proof” (p. 331) for the efficacy of TOEFL preparation study squarely on
the doorstep of the publishers and writers of TOEFL preparation
materials. We agree that research is desperately needed, but not by the
textbook-publishing industry or the authors of TOEFL preparation
materials—those whom Hamp-Lyons excoriates—but rather by indepen-
dent-minded academic researchers.
Yet another shortcoming of Hamp-Lyons’ critique of TOEFL prepara-
tion is that it neglects to take into account the distinct contexts and
cultures of the students who take the TOEFL. Japan, for instance, like
several other East Asian countries, possesses a veritable culture of testing
with roots stretching back to the imperial examinations of 12th-century
China. Even today in Japan, results on a wide array of tests largely
determine the course of one’s life—success on tests smooths the way for
everything from entrance to the right kindergarten to lifetime employ-
ment in a prestigious corporation. The psychological dimension of these
pervasive cultural practices can scarcely be overestimated. Possessing the
proper qualification is not only essential for demonstrating one’s achieve-
ment and worth but indeed often a precursor to the self-confidence
needed to perform well. As peculiar as it may sound to someone from a
different culture, achieving a benchmark test score on the TOEFL
certifies the right of Japanese students to have confidence in their
English ability, and having this sense of confidence encourages students
to academically and communicatively use the language (e.g., by studying
abroad), setting up a positive spiral that leads to ever-greater improve-
ments in the students’ overall English competency. Although this type of
positive washback is particularly prominent in countries with strong
testing cultures and although TOEFL preparation classes and self-study
materials can play an important role in promoting it, critical debate on
testing issues often takes place in the abstract (or at least within the
confines of the quantitative paradigm) and tends to ignore culturally
specific factors such as these.
More troubling than Hamp-Lyons’ explicit claims and allegations are
the deep-seated assumptions and skewed dichotomies that lie behind her
argument. For instance, she doubts that a text that follows the TOEFL’s
format (i.e., is faithful to the form and content of the test) can be
“credible as a learning experience” and concludes that “all the textbooks
[she] surveyed were at the unethical/indefensible end of the scales” (p.
334) that she devised and drew on to evaluate them. She contends that at
present teaching time and student energy are “diverted from main-
stream, well-designed language classes . . . into unproductive test-
mimicking exercises” (p. 335) and posits a dichotomy between “the real
business of learning the language” versus the distraction of “mastering
item types for the test instead” (p. 329). These conclusions follow, of
course, from the faulty methods and questionable observations we have

268 TESOL QUARTERLY

critiqued above. If one wrongly posits that the TOEFL does not reflect or
represent a model of language in use, doubts that the activation of the
wide variety of language and skills needed to perform well on the exam
will increase a TOEFL score, and employs a small arbitrarily gathered
sample of textbooks to allege that TOEFL preparation materials present
a mere “laundry list” (p. 334) of grammatical and lexical points, then
one can arrive at what appears to be a predetermined destination. From
there it is but a short step to the moralistic binary of the good classroom
teacher who is ethical and the nefarious test preparation teacher whose
modus operandi is “boosting scores without mastery” and “coaching
merely for score gain” (p. 334) (itself a contradiction given Hamp-Lyons’
skepticism that scores can be boosted). One disturbing corollary of this
dualistic thinking is the patronizing attitude Hamp-Lyons appears to take
toward TOEFL preparation students (most of whom are adult learners)
when she assumes that they must be taught by a teacher in order to learn
and even to learn how to learn, as evidenced by her declaration that “few
learners” in the many countries where TOEFL preparation books are
sold have been “trained in the skills of autonomous learning” (p. 332).
Such a posture, it would seem, presupposes that college- and graduate
school–bound students in cultures all around the globe are incapable of
self-guided learning but need a properly certified language teaching
professional not only to help them acquire language but also to teach
them how to teach themselves.
Finally, the most dubious and perhaps best-hidden proposition of
Hamp-Lyons’ broadside against TOEFL preparation materials and mate-
rials writers is that it replaces a cause with an effect. Long one of ESL’s
more tenacious and perceptive critics, Hamp-Lyons uncharacteristically
shies away from direct criticism of ETS, the nonprofit megacorporation
that manufactures and markets the TOEFL (along with the Scholastic
Aptitude Test, the Graduate Record Examination, the Graduate Manage-
ment Admission Test, and other tests) and peddles its own preparation
materials for a test that it (like Hamp-Lyons) claims cannot be prepared
for. She further turns a blind eye to the thousands of North American
colleges and universities that indiscriminately and imprudently use the
TOEFL as their principal initial criterion for determining admission.
Indeed, it is here that the true washback takes place. Because of these
admission practices, students must study for and perform well on the
exam if they are to have access to higher education in North America.
Highly motivated and discerning students will pursue this goal in the
most effective way possible, and that is not likely to be in the
teacher-fronted classroom focusing on “instructed acquisition” of strictly
“communicative” English (p. 336). Given these conditions neither of the
students’ choosing nor of the material writers’ making, we question
whether the solution is to call in the TESOL regulators, mandate

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classroom instruction (or books designed for the classroom), and issue
teaching licenses to TOEFL preparation instructors. A better approach,
we suggest, may be to critically educate students as to which materials are
the most accurate, representative, and appropriate for their own inter-
ests and to encourage and empower them in achieving their own
educational goals.

REFERENCES
Educational Testing Service. (1997/1998). Bulletin of information for the TOEFL, TWE,
and TSE (International ed.). Princeton, NJ: Author.
Helgesen, M. (1993). Dismantling a wall of silence. In P. Wadden (Ed.) A handbook for
teaching English at Japanese colleges and universities (pp. 291–292). New York: Oxford
University Press.
Hilke, R., & Wadden, P. (1997). The TOEFL and its imitators: Analyzing the TOEFL
and evaluating TOEFL-prep texts. RELC Journal, 23, 28–53.
Peirce, B. N. (1992). Demystifying the TOEFL reading test. TESOL Quarterly, 26, 665–
689.
Wilson, K. (1987). Patterns of test taking and score change for examinees who repeat
the Test of English as a Foreign Language. TOEFL Research Reports, 22, 1–61.

The Author Responds . . .

LIZ HAMP-LYONS
Hong Kong Polytechnic University

■ I was delighted to read Paul Wadden and Robert Hilke’s response to

my Forum commentary and to have the opportunity to respond to it.
Their response is important, first, because it continues the airing of a
very important issue; second, because they provide citations to lead
interested readers to welcome evidence that not all Test of English as a
Foreign Language (TOEFL) textbooks are as problematic as those I
analyzed; and third, because it provides opportunities for me to clarify
several important points that were evidently not clear enough in my
commentary.
I first stress that the commentary was a drastically reduced version of
my original submission. The full article contains details of the five
textbooks I analyzed, all of which are from major (North American)
publishers and sell in huge numbers every year, not only in North
America but all over the world (including, in most cases, Japan). I agreed
with TESOL Quarterly’s editor that my purpose was not to single out any
individual authors and that the books should be unidentified. Length
restrictions required the removal of the detailed framework of descrip-

270 TESOL QUARTERLY

tors and the scores for each text as well as the criteria for ethicality in test
preparation materials, which I arrived at not by “devising them” myself
but by combining two similar sets of criteria from experts in the field of
educational measurement (Mehrens & Kaminsky, 1989; Popham, 1991;
both were displayed in my original paper at the Language Testing
Research Colloquium in 1996 and cited in my commentary). As a
consequence of these deletions, the article is inevitably less than com-
plete and satisfactory. But a more important clarification is that its
purpose was not to attack the TOEFL or the Educational Testing Service
(ETS). The purpose was, rather, to direct critical attention toward all
unethical test preparation materials, and only unethical ones. I have in
fact seen some excellent test preparation materials (sadly, none for the
TOEFL yet, but I have not seen Wadden and Hilke’s). However, I believe
there is a distinction between test preparation that enables test takers to
approach the test with a clear understanding of its structure, rules, and
response requirements (such as what type of pencil to use or whether
guessing penalties apply) and test preparation that comprises practice
on imitated forms or old copies of the test without teaching the language
in use. The former is both ethical and essential, as Wadden and Hilke
agree; the latter is educationally unsound, and the more closely the
material approximates to the actual test, the more reason there is to
question its ethicality.
I now attempt some clarification of Wadden and Hilke’s specific
points. First, Wadden and Hilke direct considerable attention to my
characterization of the TOEFL as not reflecting a model of language in
use; however, they misinterpret my use of the term model. I use the term
not to refer to examples of good language (as in a model text) but to refer
to an empirically derived, theory-based construct that explains how the
English language works—a model in the scientific sense; for example,
Canale and Swain’s (1980) model of communicative competence or
Bachman’s (1990) model of communicative language ability. I note that
in their work toward TOEFL 2000, ETS researchers and advisers are
putting considerable emphasis on developing a test that will enact a
viable model of language in use.
Second, Wadden and Hilke’s question, “Why would the discerning
student-consumer purchase a TOEFL preparation text focusing on
strategies appropriate for [other kinds of] tests . . . ?” is a wholly
reasonable one. But my criticism is not mainly about this question. To
the extent that it is, the reasons are related to the view that exam
preparation could—and should—be a rich opportunity for teaching the
language because the external motivation focuses learners’ attention
wonderfully. I would also argue that few people are discerning consum-
ers when it comes to high-stakes tests and success on them. Most people’s
decisions about which tests to take are based on the test’s surrender

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value—what barriers it buys the way through—rather than on its excel-
lence of design, appropriateness to the context the test taker seeks access
to, goodness-of-fit to the best knowledge in language in use, or even its
ability to predict success in the target context. This strategy can only be
called discerning if discernment is based on expedience and not
qualities such as excellence, appropriateness, and effectiveness. In my
own (admittedly very limited) survey of TOEFL preparation texts, none
of the above criteria for consumer decision making were addressed by
the authors or publishers. Stimulated by Wadden and Hilke’s critique, I
have looked at all the TOEFL preparation materials I could find in Hong
Kong and found only one textbook that could be said to address any of
them.
Looking again at TOEFL materials brought me to my third point: I am
reminded again of the assumptions made by TOEFL preparation texts
(and, apparently, by Wadden and Hilke) that TOEFL takers are capable
of self-guided learning in the context of a high-stakes test. Wadden and
Hilke accuse me of being “patronizing” and of assuming that (adult)
learners are not capable of self-guided learning. My comments were
based not on an assumption but on research (including good empirical
studies currently being carried out by my own doctoral students into the
effectiveness of self-access learning) supporting the value of having a
professional language teacher to support learning in classrooms and in
self-access contexts and on studies of the value of learning-to-learn
approaches in English language teaching.
The fourth point is perhaps the most serious one. In response to my
comment that the evidence that (TOEFL) test preparation materials
improve test scores does not exist, Wadden and Hilke offer two very
vague arguments: the comment that ETS research suggests that test
practice may improve scores (although whether test practice improves
performance is a different question from whether [any particular] test
preparation materials improve scores) and reference to their own work,
which I look forward to reading. Given the gigantic income of the test
preparation industry, it seems a sorry state of affairs that such forthright
proponents of test preparation materials and practices can offer so little
evidence of value for money. What portion of the profits of this industry
is being ploughed back into ensuring product excellence and efficacy?
The drug industry, for example, is held accountable to high standards
and commits a large proportion of its profits to research into the
effectiveness and safety of its own products and to the development of
improved products. Drug companies must prove that their products
improve medical conditions without causing an unacceptable level of
side effects; why shouldn’t companies that market test preparation
materials similarly be required to prove that their products improve
scores without causing detrimental effects such as curricular alignment

272 TESOL QUARTERLY

and raising scores beyond the student’s actual ability? I cannot accept
Wadden and Hilke’s argument that the burden of proof rests not with
the developers and profit makers but with “independent-minded aca-
demic researchers.” Where would these researchers get the money to
carry out the research? Why should public money be spent on this (even
assuming the money was available) when the authors and publishers are
making such large profits? I suggested that TESOL as the field’s
professional organization, and as one committed to protecting the
interests of language learners everywhere, should set standards for the
test preparation industry, partly because of the economic truth that only
a large professional body can afford to do so and partly because
accreditation by TESOL, should a test preparation text achieve it, would
be a strong (and marketable) affirmation of quality. TESOL accredits
language programs and teacher education programs; why not test
preparation materials? States and colleges license language teachers; why
not license test preparation teachers? Surely the authors of test prepara-
tion materials do not consider themselves above or outside the same
kinds of quality assurance expectations and mechanisms that the rest of
the education sector has accepted?
Another assumption that I did not explore in my article needs to be
questioned: that raised scores, should they occur after test preparation
or practice, are meaningful. I know of no research into this assumption,
but I have encountered case after case of college admissions advisors and
English language programs that treat TOEFL scores from different
countries differentially. Most common among these differences is the
tendency to take TOEFL scores from Japan and Korea with a very large
grain of salt. The folk wisdom holds that TOEFL scores from Japan tend
to be 20–30 points above the test taker’s actual language ability. This
seems to be about the amount that practice and preparation materials
can raise scores without boosting mastery of the language. Wadden and
Hilke rightly point out that this is because students have learned “lexical
structures, vocabulary, and language skills . . . in long years of classroom
English study.” Admissions officers may adjust these applicants’ scores
downward, because experience shows that they overestimate the appli-
cants’ ability to apply the passive knowledge of grammar and lexis to the
real-life needs of either the English language college classroom or
survival in an English-speaking society. The research to prove that
preparation materials boost scores does not exist, but even if it did,
further research would be needed to prove that the boosted scores were
valid.
I am surprised to find that even though Wadden and Hilke pay
considerable attention to arguing the goodness of the model (in their
meaning of the term) used by ETS for the TOEFL and reveal that they
are authors of TOEFL preparation materials, they are nevertheless

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critical of the “nonprofit megacorporation that manufactures and mar-
kets the TOEFL . . . and peddles its own preparation materials for a test
that it . . . claims cannot be prepared for.” They also attack North
American colleges and universities for the way they use TOEFL scores. I
agree with the latter view. One of the fundamental issues in discussions
about the nature and definition of washback (see Alderson & Hamp-Lyons,
1996; Alderson & Wall, 1993; Wall, 1997) is to what extent the influence
of a test should be viewed as a consequence of it. Should the improper
use of test scores be seen as the fault of the testing agency or of the test
itself, somehow without any human agent? Or should it be seen as the
fault of the score users themselves? I see no clear answer to this difficult
set of issues yet.
Again, my purpose was not to criticize ETS, the TOEFL, or any specific
test, testing agency, or test preparation materials. It was to raise an issue
of professional ethics for consideration by the profession. I am grateful
to Wadden and Hilke for their willingness to engage in dialogue in this
important arena, but to lay all the blame for bad testing practices at the
door of the testing agency, lay all the blame for bad score uses at the door
of colleges, yet lay none of the blame for bad test preparation materials
at the door of their authors and publishers seems a very self-interested
view of the issue. My commentary was polemical, as Wadden and Hilke
call it in their title, but I do not believe it went astray. I repeat that I hope
TESOL as an organization will target this issue as a significant ethical
question for the profession.

REFERENCES
Alderson, J. C., & Hamp-Lyons, L. (1996). TOEFL preparation courses: A study of
washback. Language Testing, 13, 280–297.
Alderson, J. C., & Wall, D. (1993). Does washback exist? Applied Linguistics, 14, 115–
129.
Bachman, L. F. (1990). Fundamental considerations in language testing. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Canale, M., & Swain, M. (1980). Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to
second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics, 1, 1–47.
Hamp-Lyons, L. (1996, July). Ethical test preparation practice: The case of the TOEFL.
Paper presented at the 18th Annual Language Testing Research Colloquium,
Tampere, Finland.
Mehrens, W. A., & Kaminsky, J. (1989). Methods for improving standardized test
scores: Fruitful, fruitless or fraudulent? Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice,
8(1), 14–22.
Popham, W. J. (1991). Appropriateness of teachers’ test-preparation practices.
Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 10(4), 12–15.
Wall, D. (1997). Impact and washback in language testing. In C. Clapham (Ed.), The
Kluwer encyclopedia of language in education: Vol. 7. Testing and assessment (pp. 291–
302). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer.

274 TESOL QUARTERLY

Comments on Graham Crookes and Al Lehner’s
“Aspects of Process in an ESL Critical Pedagogy
Teacher Education Course”
A Plea for Published Reports on the Application of a
Critical Pedagogy to “Language Study Proper”
JENNIFER D. EWALD
University of Minnesota

■ Graham Crookes and Al Lehner’s reflective and insightful account of

their application of a critical pedagogical orientation to an actual
teacher education classroom (Vol. 32, No. 2, Summer 1998) is indeed
promising. Fostering the development of a critical pedagogy in future
teachers is an inspiring and thought-provoking challenge, but it is
perhaps also misleading because of the lack of guidance on practical
issues associated with critical pedagogy.
Current work on alternative pedagogies addresses such topics as social
identity and voice (Peirce, 1995), power (Auerbach, 1993; Pennycook,
1989), the morality of teaching (Jackson, Boostrom, & Hansen, 1993;
Johnston, Juhsz, Marken, & Ruiz, 1998), (participatory) action research
(Auerbach, 1994; Crookes, 1993, 1998), and the development of a
critical pedagogical approach to research and teaching (see Crawford,
1978; Crawford-Lange, 1981; Pennycook, 1994). Because of the emphasis
on these areas and related issues, teachers, most often in vain, search the
literature for discussions of concrete pedagogical implications.
Crookes and Lehner’s candid and timely recognition that there are
“few accounts of the processes involved in implementing [critical peda-
gogy] in a S/FL [second or foreign language] teacher education
context” (p. 319) is well taken. Their reflective and detailed report of
experiences in a teacher education classroom contributes to the collec-
tive knowledge. However, just as in the teacher education context, there
are few actual accounts of the implementation of a critical pedagogical
orientation within the S/FL classroom. Despite the proliferation of
discussion regarding critical pedagogy and S/FL classrooms, few authors
have suggested what it might look like fleshed out in an actual classroom.
Several authors have attempted to develop processes and principles
that represent broad characterizations of the use of critical pedagogy
(see Crawford-Lange, 1981). Unfortunately, few reports discuss the
application of these principles to language teaching at the introductory
level. Students in perhaps their most impressionable, initial state are
socialized into the role of language learners through their early

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experiences primarily in introductory language courses. The learners do
not usually participate as actors on the process but rather are acted upon
while playing the role of an object. The students then fulfill their
perceived part in the educational process, which has evolved through
their experiences in the introductory language classroom. Therefore, at
this early state of language learners’ development, critical pedagogy and
its applied practice need to be fostered in the minds and methods of
students and teachers.
Crookes and Lehner point out that “critical pedagogy should be seen
as a social and educational process rather than just as a pedagogical
method” (p. 327). However, its implications for the “method” are what
are most urgently relevant to teachers on a day-to-day level in their lan-
guage classrooms. The use of broad terms such as “social and educa-
tional process” conceals the hard fact that the process takes place
primarily in actual classrooms. In these classrooms, language learners are
required to speak only in the target language, communicate at all costs
(even if it means that they must pretend to be someone else in a situation
that they will likely never be in), and discuss topics of little interest that
are neither chosen nor negotiated by learners and merely feign learner
centeredness. In developing applications of critical pedagogy to lan-
guage classrooms, supporting teacher education that is based on a
critical pedagogical orientation, as demonstrated by Crookes and Lehner,
is a practical beginning and an appropriate research step, but it is not
sufficient.
Issues such as “pessimism” about and “resistance” to critical pedagogy
(p. 324) are relevant not only to a teacher education context but also to
teachers in their programs, departments, and schools. Administrators
who are interested in teachers teaching language and learners learning
to communicate at certain proficiency levels for academic and personal
purposes are not usually open to theoretically driven, postmodern
pedagogies—especially not to those which new teachers desire to imple-
ment without sufficient evidence that the pedagogies succeed or meth-
odological details of how they work in actual instructional contexts. The
joint goals of critical pedagogy, the “simultaneous development of
English communicative abilities and the ability to apply them to develop-
ing a critical awareness of the world and the ability to act on it to improve
matters” (p. 320), are not what administrators perceive as the mission of
most S/FL programs.
The contradiction between furthering a critical pedagogy and its
related goals and fulfilling the traditional role of a language educator
may create a tension for teachers, requiring them to compromise their
own pedagogical and moral perspectives. Moreover, the lack of shared
experiences and published knowledge concerning the application of
critical pedagogy to actual language classrooms exacerbates this tension.

276 TESOL QUARTERLY

 Administrators may expect teachers to adopt a communicative ap-
proach through the exclusive use of the target language, so-called
authentic materials, and so-called meaningful interaction with the goal
of developing nativelike competency in the S/FL. The expectations may
frustrate the teacher who is equally interested in engaging in a
problem-posing pedagogy and providing opportunities for learners to
participate in problem-posing activities conducted in the target language
when appropriate.
Like administrators, learners are unlikely to be familiar with a critical
approach. As Auerbach and Wallerstein (1987) explained and Crookes
and Lehner emphasize, the implementation of critical pedagogy re-
quires an initial structure and an understanding of its assumptions and
goals. This structure and understanding are needed to convince admin-
istrators as well as to prepare learners for the benefits and practices of
critical pedagogy.
The “risky task” (Crawford, 1978, p. 171) of implementing a critical
pedagogy in a S/FL classroom is often thwarted not only by a lack of
knowledge of how to do it but also by the system’s constraints on what is
possible within the curriculum. Simply “training problem-posing teach-
ers” by “teach[ing] them by a problem-posing methodology and curricu-
lum” (Crawford, 1978, p. 172) does not offer sufficient guidance.
Teachers need to benefit from published reports and perspectives on
how to apply a critical orientation to language teaching and language
learning, following the model set forth by Crookes and Lehner.
Like others, I am interested in critical pedagogy and strongly desire to
see a critical pedagogical orientation promoted within higher education
and specifically in language teaching and learning. I find it dishearten-
ing, however, to be frequently reminded of the importance and even
necessity of such an orientation without being exposed to even a
minimal idea of how to address the concerns that teachers face every day.
The brief phrase “subject to administrative constraints” (p. 323) does not
refer to a minor issue. Furthermore, because language instruction in its
very essence is content free and differs in nature from concepts discussed
in contexts such as teacher education, Crookes and Lehner’s report does
not show how critical pedagogy in content courses informs teachers
about its use in classrooms where students need to learn nouns, verbs,
and adjectives.
For teachers who are truly convinced that “traditional education is
biased, discriminatory and perpetuates the status quo” (p. 325), further
research must focus on the application of principles such as Crawford’s
(1978) to methodology, curriculum design, language program develop-
ment, and language acquisition. “Thoughts for future practice” (p. 326)
in the areas of language teaching itself need to concentrate on the needs
of S/FL teachers in their classrooms as well as on their training and

THE FORUM 277

education. Specific ways in which a critical pedagogy affects materials
development, lesson planning, assessment procedures, and classroom
management need to be explored and developed. Principles that are
said to characterize critical pedagogy must be applied to the issues and
problems that teachers encounter daily in their language classrooms and
programs.
Pennycook (1994) emphasized the value of this orientation to a range
of concerns, including the “relationship between L2 education and race,
ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, minority languages, literacy,
cultural difference, and so on” (pp. 691–692). As crucial as these issues
are to language learning, the critical teacher also needs exposure to
issues dealing with what Crawford-Lange (1981) calls “language study
proper” (p. 261). Not wanting to fall headlong into the role of a teacher
pleading to have her empty pedagogical vessel filled by researchers in a
traditional framework, this teacher still seeks and solicits applicable
pedagogical implications. Most specifically, I seek published accounts by
language teachers who have applied a critical pedagogical orientation to
their classrooms. The exploration of critical pedagogy must move from
principles to materials, lesson plans, classroom activities, assessment
tools, and course designs.
Crawford-Lange’s (1981) 20 principles outline a framework and
approach that may be useful. She states, “This concern for critical
thinking is neither foreign nor objectionable to most educators. How-
ever, to truly make it the primary concern, some alterations must take
place in classroom approaches and activities” (pp. 259–260). In the same
vein, I hope that Crookes and Lehner’s application of critical pedagogy
to teacher education will inspire others to further these pursuits in
language classrooms, conduct participatory action research projects,
address issues raised within a critical pedagogical orientation, and report
their findings in ways that can be modeled in other language classroom
settings.

REFERENCES
Auerbach, E. (1993). Reexamining English only in the ESL classroom. TESOL
Quarterly, 27, 9–32.
Auerbach, E. (1994). Participatory action research. TESOL Quarterly, 28, 693–697.
Auerbach, E., & Wallerstein, N. (1987). ESL for action: Problem-posing at work
(Teacher’s book). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Crawford, L. M. (1978). Paulo Freire’s philosophy: Derivation of curricular principles and
their application to second language curriculum design. Unpublished doctoral disserta-
tion, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
Crawford-Lange, L. M. (1981). Redirecting foreign language curricula: Paulo Freire’s
contributions. Foreign Language Annals, 14, 257–273. (Reprinted in Readings in
TESOL (pp. 120–144), by M. H. Long & J. C. Richards, Eds., 1987, Rowley, MA:
Newbury House)

278 TESOL QUARTERLY

Crookes, G. (1993). Action research for second language teachers: Going beyond
teacher research. Applied Linguistics, 14, 130–144.
Crookes, G. (1998). On the relationship between second and foreign language
teachers and research. TESOL Journal, 7(3), 6–11.
Jackson, P. W., Boostrom, R. E., & Hansen, D. T. (1993). The moral life of schools. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Johnston, B., Juhsz, A., Marken, J., & Ruiz, B. R. (1998). The ESL teacher as moral
agent. Research in the Teaching of English, 32, 161–181.
Peirce, B. N. (1995). Social identity, investment, and language learning. TESOL
Quarterly, 29, 9–31.
Pennycook, A. (1989). The concept of method, interested knowledge, and the
politics of language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 23, 589–618.
Pennycook, A. (1994). Critical pedagogical approaches to research. TESOL Quarterly,
28, 690–693.

An Author Responds . . .
GRAHAM CROOKES
University of Hawai‘i

■ In responding to Jennifer Ewald, I primarily wish to second her

concerns, though perhaps I can ameliorate them slightly simply by
foreshadowing work shortly to be published in TESOL Quarterly as well as
pointing to other accounts not mentioned in the work commented on.
Like Ewald, I have indeed searched, and continue to search, the
critical-alternative-radical pedagogical literature for concrete suggestions
concerning classroom practice, and, like her, I would like to see more
accounts of practice. The task of searching the literature is getting more
difficult as this area is growing so quickly that the terminology itself is
expanding. Many pedagogies are built upon critiques of society or
critical social theories—not only Paulo Freire’s socialist (and Marxist and
Catholic) critique but other long-standing leftist critiques, such as the
anarchist critique that underlies many free schools (Mercogliano, 1998;
Shotton, 1993; Smith, 1983), the green critique (e.g., Randle, 1989), the
gender-based critiques that lead to feminist pedagogy (e.g., Sattler, 1997)
and queer theory (e.g., Pinar, 1998). In addition, the expansion of the
term pedagogy to mean curriculum theory as well as classroom practice
leads to a problem in searching the literature.
The relative absence of implications for or accounts of classroom
practice in writings in some of these areas that readers of this journal,
like Ewald or me, may encounter perhaps stems from the various specific
interests of the above groups as well as from our own ESL-specific
concerns. For example, quite a bit of the anarchist education and
free-school literature concerns itself more with structures for and prac-
tices in school governance and teacher-student interaction in general

THE FORUM 279

than with classroom instructional practices. The focus is on the setting
up of truly free institutions, perhaps in the belief that with right-minded
teachers and institutional structures that reflect the natural spirit of the
child, classroom interactions will fall into line and that, when they don’t,
the institutional structures will enable problems to work themselves out
(cf. Long, in press).
Alternatively, much of the literature on feminist pedagogy is written by
feminist teachers who are working in postsecondary education. Among
other topics, they concern themselves with matters of curriculum,
resistance, and ethical issues of how a feminist teacher can utilize a
position of authority over students while not reembodying patriarchal
values (see, e.g., the discussion in Ropers-Huilman, 1998). Descriptions
of classroom practices then follow, which, with some key differences
(notably the concern for feminist process; Wheeler & Chinn, 1991)
perhaps are similar to those espoused in much of the literature on
critical pedagogy (cf. Vandrick, 1994).
On the other hand, there is indeed a literature on classroom practices
under the critical pedagogy heading, admittedly one drawn from the
non-ESL classroom. Although I would join the chorus of complaints
about the very hard-to-read work of some left curriculum theorists in this
area (notably Henry Giroux and the later Peter McLaren), there exists a
counterstream, which includes the work of Shor. His book, Empowering
Education (1992), in particular can be mined for principles and practices.
It includes extended discussions of what exactly some term of Freire’s
might mean for the community college teacher and extended, jargon-free,
first-person accounts of how Shor tries to get his critical pedagogy to
work and be true to its principles in specific classroom contexts. His
account of the times when it did not work (Shor, 1996) is also illuminating.
Finally, again, a growing literature encompasses both classroom and
curricular practices that would apply to or at least could be drawn on by
L2 teachers working from any generally left-libertarian perspective (e.g.,
Auerbach, 1992; Auerbach et al., 1996). For the teacher beginning to
explore this domain of TESOL, it is particularly unfortunate that
Wallerstein’s (1983) extremely accessible and practical work is out of
print. I recognize, however, that these works may not address the
individual teacher in a mainstream school because of the freestanding,
community-based nature of the programs these two authors have been
involved in. And, with the exception of Auerbach et al.’s volume, these
works are manuals for practice rather than accounts of practice. Not to
be overlooked is the recent book by Wink (1997), who certainly was
working in mainstream school contexts. The upcoming special-topic
issue of TESOL Quarterly (Vol. 33, No. 3, Autumn 1999), too, may (one
hopes) address this need for practical reports.
I am sympathetic to Ewald’s point that our account offered few

280 TESOL QUARTERLY

suggestions concerning what to do in “classrooms in which students need
to learn nouns, verbs, and adjectives,” though one of the few points on
which I would disagree with her is in her statement that language
instruction “in its very essence is content free.” The last point has been
chewed over by many in the TESOL field who have no particular
connection to critical and alternative pedagogies. My interpretation of
the ideas of these authorities (e.g., Cook, 1983; Ellis, 1993; Snow, 1991)
would lead me to say that a language lesson is always about something.
The legitimacy of an exclusive focus on language as structure can be seen
itself as a position with political implications; why such a fuss about using
gender-inclusive pronouns but for the fact that things like nouns and
verbs are dangerous? Some feminist linguists might say “the personal
[pronoun] is political” (cf. Sunderland, 1992). That is why one of the
first and often easiest moves to make toward a critical pedagogy when
studying language could be curricular, via the work in critical language
awareness (Fairclough, 1992; cf. Menacker, 1998). Alternatively, if learn-
ers truly need to learn “nouns, verbs, and adjectives,” even a teacher who
is the students’ only nativelike informant could teach the material in a
dialogic manner, with a participatory approach to curriculum in which
the learners actively research the language whose structures they must
learn. Various individuals have advocated this approach (for a quick
sketch see van Lier, 1992; cf. Steinberg & Kincheloe, 1998, for general
discussion of students as researchers, not just of language). I would assert
that learning goals that refer to the structure of language could be a
starting point for a dialogical approach to learning that makes the
learners active investigators of and actors on their own (linguistic)
worlds.
Ewald raises another important point that I have seen considered in
passing in some mainstream literature but, I have to admit, I have not
seen worked on much in the TESOL field: what to do about unsympa-
thetic administrators. Of course, one could be a bit brusque and cynical
here: I am tempted to say (a) persuade them if possible, (b) pressure
them if not, and (c) hide one’s practice from them if neither (a) nor (b)
works or is an option. The last is actually discussed in the L2 literature in
an account of bilingual teachers in Texas using non-state-mandated
materials as a way to do culturally appropriate pedagogy in an unsupportive
administrative setting (Constantino & Faltis, 1998). In past work (Crookes,
1990), drawing on my classroom teaching experience, I briefly reviewed
the possibilities open to ESL/EFL teachers who wish to improve a
program they are working in and find no help or support from an
administration. I discussed various strategies and initiatives that suggested
themselves to me as a result of my own teaching experience in such
settings and worked up to discussing the matter of unionization and
direct action. Although I managed to get the piece published in my own

THE FORUM 281

departmental in-house journal, I gave up trying to publish it in main-
stream ESL journals after it had been turned down three times. Was
there a lesson there? Teacher preparation programs in the field may
focus too much on “disciplinary knowledge” and too little on the skills
that teachers need to keep their jobs or struggle against the exploitative
working conditions that characterize much of ESOL teaching (Crookes,
1997). If teaching is seen as a solitary rather than a collaborative practice,
the solidarity needed to persuade administrators will not be available.
On the other hand, in the business of TESOL, administration as a
domain is only just starting to get the attention it deserves. Not so long
ago, Staczek (1991) was able to recognize what we as ESOL teachers all
knew: that almost none of our administrators had any administrative
training. Until the publication of Impey and Underhill (1995) and
Christison and Stoller (1997), there were no book-length treatments of
administration in TESOL. What the field needs next are administrators
with emancipatory ideals. Fortunately, at least one MA program both
includes administrative training and appears to have such administrators
(see Rojas, 1995).
I absolutely agree with Ewald that learners, too, are quite unlikely to
be familiar with some (though not all) of the procedures implied by any
one of the possible critical or alternative pedagogies that might be used
by teachers committed to social change in the direction of greater
equality and justice for all. Learners also may be thoroughly unsympa-
thetic to the whole project. Accounts of how to address this issue and the
ethical implications are important and necessary (cf. Evans, Evans, &
Kennedy, 1987). The older critical pedagogy literature of Freire was
criticized, particularly by feminist pedagogy exponents, for ignoring this.
In TESOL, many EFL teachers will have experienced working with
exactly the opposite kind of student that Auerbach (1991) writes about.
For them (I include myself here), the student body is not the marginalized
and dispossessed but the elites of highly inequitable societies. The EFL
teacher’s search for “big bucks in Japan” (and other places) can also
involve working with the sons and daughters of those who hold “big
estancias in Brazil” (cf. Vandrick, 1995). These individuals may be less
receptive to the perspective of a radical or even a feminist teacher. At a
guess, I would have thought that many ESL teachers were feminists, so at
the risk of exposing my own ignorance, I add my voice to Ewald’s in
asking, where are the accounts of classroom practice in our field by
feminists (besides Vandrick, 1994)?1

1
I note that the 33rd Annual TESOL Convention included an academic session on critical
issues for women in adult ESOL (Goldstein et al., 1999). Perhaps there is about to be an
explosion of papers, accordingly.

282 TESOL QUARTERLY

 Ewald concludes (and this makes me optimistic) that she does not
want “to fall headlong into the role of being a teacher pleading to have
her empty pedagogical vessel filled” by me or any other researcher.
Besides pointing to some published literature that may address some of
her concerns, I would like to mention that her point brings up the whole
question of the nature and whereabouts of teachers’ knowledge. Some of
the questions she mentions, I believe, have been addressed to some
extent in unpublished writings by teachers. The ones I know best about
are the term papers and other writings done by student teachers in my
own department, but some of Ewald’s concerns have also been addressed
simply in the oral exchanges, sharing of stories, and advice giving that go
on between teachers. This is teacher lore —the evanescent form of teach-
ers’ personal practical knowledge reflected upon and transmitted, often
effectively, outside the channels sanctioned and sanctified by practicing
academics. Though things are beginning to change (perhaps), the only
sector of education that provides substantial rewards or encouragement
to practitioners to write and publish accounts of their teaching is the
postsecondary sector. However, the growing, increasingly popular and
influential teacher research movement provides ways and means for the
promotion and preservation of such alternative knowledges (Crookes,
1993). I think it is interesting that the more alternative the education
journal, the more likely it is to contain articles written by teachers for
teachers concerning classroom practices. Look, for example, at journals
like LibEd, Radical Teacher, Feminist Teacher, and Rethinking Schools. I also
would point out the fantastic growth in the use of e-mail discussion lists
for teachers, in which ongoing professional conversations are preserved
in cyberspace, with (thank goodness) little or no intervention by
academics. Had Lehner and I written our Forum commentary more
recently (it was mostly put together shortly after the course, which is to
say in 1995), we would have mentioned some World Wide Web sites (e.g.,
Feminist Pedagogy Homepage, 1998; Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 1998; Mintz,
1999; Networks: An On-Line Journal for Teacher Research, n.d.; Shaw, 1997) or
e-mail discussion lists. For now, I would mention the very active lists
XTAR (for action research), the regrettably much less active FEMPED-L
(for feminist pedagogy), CRITICALED-L (for critical pedagogy), and
ANOKED-L (for anarchist/radical pedagogy).
It would be worth posting the basic question that Ewald (and I) are
concerned with in these forums and seeing what comes back. In
concluding, I extend my thanks to Ewald. I hope that the conversation
started here will encourage other teachers, especially teacher-researchers,
to add their accounts of practice, whether electronic or print, to the
published record so that all of us searching, exploring teachers can
benefit.

THE FORUM 283

REFERENCES
Auerbach, E. R. (1991). Politics, pedagogy, and professionalism: Challenging
marginalization in ESL. College ESL, 1(1), 1–9.
Auerbach, E. R. (1992). Making meaning, making change: Participatory curriculum
development for adult ESL literacy. McHenry, IL: Delta Systems.
Auerbach, E. R., et al. (1996). Adult ESL/literacy from the community—to the community:
A guidebook for participatory literacy training. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Christison, M. A., & Stoller, F. L. (Eds.). (1997). A handbook for language program
administrators. Burlingame, CA: Alta Book Center.
Constantino, R., & Faltis, C. (1998). Teaching against the grain in bilingual
education: Resistance in the classroom underlife. In Y. Zou & H. Trueba (Eds.),
Ethnic identity and power: Cultural contexts of political action in schools and society (pp.
113–131). Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Cook, V. J. (1983). What should language teaching be about? ELT Journal, 37, 229–
234.
Crookes, G. (1990). Grassroots action to improve ESL programs. University of Hawai‘i
Working Papers in ESL, 8, 45–62.
Crookes, G. (1993). Action research for SL teachers—going beyond teacher re-
search. Applied Linguistics, 14, 130–144.
Crookes, G. (1997). What influences how and what second and foreign language
teachers teach? Modern Language Journal, 81, 67–79.
Ellis, R. (1993). The structural syllabus and second language acquisition. TESOL
Quarterly, 27, 91–114.
Evans, A. F., Evans, R. A., & Kennedy, W. B. (1987). Pedagogies for the non-poor.
Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
Fairclough, N. (Ed.). (1992). Critical language awareness. New York: Longman.
Feminist pedagogy homepage. (1998). Retrieved March 25, 1999, from the World Wide
Web: http://krypton.mankato.msus.edu/~cbury/web/Courses97-8/pedweb.html.
Goldstein, T., Horsman, J., Isserlis, J., Morrish, E., Norton, B., & Rivera, K. (1999,
March). Critical issues for women in adult ESOL. Paper presented at the 33rd Annual
TESOL Convention, New York, NY.
Impey, G., & Underhill, N. (1995). The ELT manager’s handbook. London: Heinemann.
Journal of critical pedagogy. (1998). Retrieved March 25, 1999, from the World Wide
Web: http://www.lib.wmc.edu/pub/jcp/jcp.html.
Long, M. H. (in press). Getting real about education [Review of the book Real
education: Varieties of freedom]. Libertarian Education, 24.
Menacker, T. (1998). Active critical language awareness: An innovative approach to
language pedagogy. University of Hawai‘i, Department of ESL. Retrieved April 6,
1999, from the World Wide Web: http://www.lll.hawaii.edu/esl/crookes/menacker
.html.
Mercogliano, C. (1998). Making it up as we go along: The story of the Albany Free School.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Mintz, J. (1999). AERO—the alternative education resource organization. Retrieved March
25, 1999, from the World Wide Web: http://edrev.org/.
Networks: An on-line journal for teacher research. (n.d.). Retrieved March 25, 1999, from
the World Wide Web: http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/~ctd/networks/.
Pinar, W. F. (1998). Queer theory in education. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Randle, D. (1989). Teaching green: A parent’s guide to education for life on earth. London:
Merlin Press.
Rojas, V. P. (1995). A higher education: Practicing what you preach in teacher
education. TESOL Journal, 4(5), 32–34.

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Ropers-Huilman, B. (1998). Feminist teaching in theory and practice: Situating power and
knowledge in poststructural classrooms. New York: Teachers College Press.
Sattler, C. L. (1997). Talking about a revolution: The politics and practice of feminist
teaching. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
Shaw, A. (1997). Possibilities—the critical pedagogy Web site. Retrieved March 25, 1999,
from the World Wide Web: http://wwwvms.utexas.edu/~possible/.
Shotton, J. (1993). No master high or low: Libertarian education and schooling in Britain
1890–1990. Bristol, England: Libertarian Education.
Shor, I. (1992). Empowering education: Critical teaching for social change. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Shor, I. (1996). When students have power: Negotiating authority in a critical pedagogy.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Smith, M. P. (1983). The libertarians and education. London: Allen & Unwin.
Snow, M. A. (1991). Teaching language through content. In M. Celce-Murcia (Ed.),
Teaching English as a second or foreign language (2nd ed., pp. 315–326). Boston:
Heinle & Heinle.
Staczek, J. J. (1991). Professional development and program administration. TESOL
Journal, 1(3), 21–22, 27–28.
Steinberg, S. R., & Kincheloe, J. L. (Eds.). (1998). Students as researchers: Creating
classrooms that matter. Philadelphia: Falmer Press.
Sunderland, J. (1992). Gender in the EFL classroom. ELT Journal, 46, 81–91.
Vandrick, S. (1994). Feminist pedagogy and ESL. College English, 4(2), 69–92.
Vandrick, S. (1995). Privileged ESL university students. TESOL Quarterly, 29, 375–
380.
van Lier, L. (1992). Educational linguistics: Field and project. In J. E. Alatis (Ed.),
Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics: Language, communi-
cation, and social meaning (pp. 199–209). Washington, DC: Georgetown University
Press.
Wallerstein, N. (1983). Language and culture in conflict: Problem-posing in the ESL
classroom. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Wheeler, C. E., & Chinn, P. L. (1991). Peace and power: A handbook of feminist process
(3rd ed.). New York: National League for Nursing.
Wink, J. (1997). Critical pedagogy: Notes from the real world. New York: Longman.

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RESEARCH ISSUES
TESOL Quarterly publishes brief commentaries on aspects of qualitative and quantita-
tive research. For this issue, we asked two researchers to discuss poststructural
approaches to L2 research and related cross-cultural research issues.

Edited by PATRICIA A. DUFF

University of British Columbia

Poststructural Approaches to L2 Research

Between Psychology and Poststructuralism:

Where Is L2 Learning Located?
CELIA GENISHI
Teachers College, Columbia University

■ Increasingly complex ways of looking at language suggest that no

single disciplinary approach suffices to explain all that contributes to the
child’s language learning processes. Whether children are learning one
language or multiple languages, they are continually individuals-in-context
(Graue & Walsh, 1998). As they learn how to be language users in
particular cultural contexts, they are at once psychological and social
beings. In this commentary I present brief sketches of contrasting
theoretical approaches to children as (language) learners in order to
highlight two early childhood classrooms in which multiple theories are
illustrated. The approaches have undergirded a variety of qualitative
methods of investigating children’s language.

CHILD AS ACTIVE LEARNER:

A PSYCHOLINGUISTIC CONSTRUCTION
Disciplinary constructions of children in education and psychology
have ranged from responder to stimuli or active thinker to resister or behavior
problem. From most points of view children are works in progress,
advancing toward particular mature endpoints or benchmarks set by
adults. The constructions stem from various psychological theories that
have shaped the field of early childhood education since the beginning

TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 33, No. 2, Summer 1999 287

of the 20th century. Despite the continuing commercial popularity of
some structured language programs (e.g., direct instruction system for
teaching and remediation [DISTAR] programs), which construct chil-
dren above all as responders, professional organizations have traditionally
rejected this construction. Thus the prevailing construction of children
in literature for practitioners and teacher educators has been that of
active thinkers and learners in the process of becoming fully developed
(Piaget & Inhelder, 1969). Moreover, linguists (Chomsky, 1968) and
psycholinguists (Brown, Cazden, & Bellugi, 1969) have built the argu-
ment that although children do respond to and imitate what adults
around them say, they also create some of their own linguistic forms
(e.g., overregularized forms: goed, holded, feets).
More recent studies by psycholinguists like Bloom (1993) and Nelson
(1996) have provided empirically and theoretically rich accounts of
children developing English in the preschool years. Bloom, for example,
has over time developed a theory of early communication that incorpo-
rates the very young child’s growing ability to express emotion. Thus
language is first a means for expressing private meanings and intentions
with attentive others. Nelson focuses on how the infant makes the
transition from infancy to childhood, by means of growing abilities to
represent mentally or internally the world and experiences in it and to
communicate in that world through language.
The portrait Nelson (1996) builds is one of the human being
developing cognitively, not just linguistically, within a sociocultural
context. She states that between the ages of about 2 to 6 years, “language
and the surrounding culture take over the human mind. It is during
these years that biology ‘hands over’ development to the social world” (p.
325). But even as she emphasizes the significance of culture, she
concludes that development is ultimately psychological, occurring within
the individual: “The individual and unique are always assumed to be the
level wherein developments take place” (p. 327).

THE CHILD AT THE MOMENT: SOCIOLOGICAL

AND POSTSTRUCTURAL CONSTRUCTIONS
It is hard to disagree with Nelson’s (1996) assertion as it relates to
language. Individuals each ultimately figure out language for themselves;
each is said by linguists to have an idiolect, a way of speaking unique to the
individual self. Yet researchers in various disciplines outside of psychol-
ogy (including sociolinguists and anthropologists) argue against the
assertion that the processes of becoming members of particular cultures
are ultimately either psychological or best described in terms of sequen-
tial developmental landmarks. The so-called new sociologists, for ex-
ample, claim that those who study and teach children have for too long

288 TESOL QUARTERLY

concerned themselves with the future, with endpoints of a developmen-
tal process. These sociologists (e.g., James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998) also
point out that developmental theories have the inadvertent effect of
pathologizing children whose patterns of development do not fit theo-
rists’ norms. From this sociological perspective, researchers should focus
on the knowledge and social meanings child learners construct at the
moment, often in their own highly social worlds, rather than on their
processes of becoming in a linear fashion, that is, developing normally
into mature and independent beings.
Poststructuralist theorists disagree fundamentally with developmen-
talists and structuralists in a range of ways. With respect to language,
instead of assuming, as structuralists do, a direct relation between the
signifier (word) and the signified (meaning), poststructuralists assert
that meanings are never stable because the words (signifiers) that make
up the text have no fixed relationship to the things and concepts they are
meant to signify (Tobin, 1995, p. 233). Meanings exist only in relation to
other meanings, and they are always socially and historically located.
Thus meanings conveyed by language are not fixed as social facts, and
poststructuralists assert that there are no essential Truths, only multiple
truths.
Intertwined with a belief in the fluidity of language and meaning is the
poststructuralist assumption that human subjectivity is symbolically pro-
duced by discourses. Just as there is no stable text, there is no stable
being, self, or human consciousness. As language, meaning, and subjec-
tivity are never fixed, poststructuralists assume that power, an underlying
factor in all social interaction, is not a commodity that some individuals
or social groups possess to control others. Drawing on the work of
Foucault, poststructuralists replace this static notion of power with a
strategic one in which power is conceptualized as circulating throughout
social relations so that individuals both enact and undergo the effects of
power (Foucault, 1978; Sarup, 1993).
Poststructural investigations of learning center on relations among
language, power, and subjectivity as they are played out in the talk and
action of specific classrooms. (For examples of studies in early childhood
settings, see Genishi, Ryan, & Ochsner, in press.) Few studies within a
poststructuralist framework of L2 learners exist, and it may seem unlikely
that poststructuralist theory could usefully intersect with theories of
language learning. Language learning, after all, is typically cast as a
sequential process in which knowledge usually resides within the teacher/
expert, who gradually enables the individual novice to learn a new
language.

RESEARCH ISSUES 289

LANGUAGE LEARNING IN CLASSROOMS:
RELATIONAL CONSTRUCTIONS
To illustrate how some principles of new sociologists and post-
structuralist theory may intersect with both L2 learning and developmen-
tal theory, I depart from the work of writers in academe and introduce
the work of two teachers in contrasting early childhood settings. Both
teach in prekindergarten classrooms in which almost all the children are
speakers of a language other than English. One, Donna Yung-Chan,
teaches in a public school classroom in which almost all children, like
their teacher, are of Chinese heritage and speak Cantonese. She is part
of an ongoing collaboration (Yung-Chan, Stires, & Genishi, 1999) to
study the ways in which children learn English vocabulary. Thus far, like
previous researchers, we are struck by the multiple ways in which the
children take up an L2 and concomitantly the diverse ways in which they
take up a culture of schooling that incorporates a growing community of
English speakers.
What is particularly striking about Yung-Chan is her ability to allow for
the fluidity of which poststructuralists write. She sets no firm rules about
which language children must speak, and children appear to shift
subjectivities, at times joining the discourse of schooling and at other
times enacting the discourse of their families and community. The
meanings of particular language forms shift depending on who uses the
forms and at what point in time. Power also shifts, although the teacher
and her aide appear to possess it most of the time. Children often hold
onto the power to choose to speak or not, to whom, and in which
language.
Ballenger (1999) tells of her experiences as a prekindergarten teacher
of children whose heritage is Haitian and who speak Haitian Creole. Her
story contrasts with Yung-Chan’s in that her own heritage is not that of
the children, although she is a Haitian Creole speaker. Ballenger
describes the complexities of acquiring language in ways that illustrate
well the vagaries of meaning when sociocultural experiences and knowl-
edge differ. As important, she provides examples of talk and interaction
that bring to life the notion of circulating power. Power and knowledge are
shared among teachers in the school, the children’s families, and the
children themselves. As in Yung-Chan’s classroom, however, the most
consistent feature of the processes of language learning in Ballenger’s
setting is its embeddedness in social relationships, the strength of which
circulates as noticeably as power.
This commentary only begins to suggest ways in which classrooms may
be provocative sites for the illustration and understanding of theories.
Teachers and learners are invaluable for their capacities to push re-
searchers to examine the meanings and power within theories. Language

290 TESOL QUARTERLY

learning in these two teachers’ classrooms is located in a complex nexus
somewhere between developmental theory, emphasizing the importance
of individual meanings and intentions and growth toward future goals,
and socially driven poststructuralist theory, foregrounding the relational
and the continually shifting present.

THE AUTHOR
Celia Genishi teaches in the early childhood education program in the Department
of Curriculum and Teaching, Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research
interests include childhood bilingualism and collaborative research in classrooms.

REFERENCES
Ballenger, C. (1999). Teaching other people’s children: Literacy and language learning in a
bilingual classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.
Bloom, L. (1993). The transition from infancy to language: Acquiring the power of
expression. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, R., Cazden, C., & Bellugi, U. (1969). The child’s grammar from I to III. In
J.␣ P. Hill (Ed.),Minnesota symposium on child psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 28–73).
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Chomsky, N. (1968). Language and mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World.
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books.
Genishi, C., Ryan, S., & Ochsner, M., with Yarnall, M. M. (in press). Teaching in early
childhood education: Understanding practices through research and theory. In
V. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (4th ed.). Washington, DC:
American Educational Research Association.
Graue, M. E., & Walsh, D. J. (1998). Studying children in context: Theories, methods, and
ethics. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
James, A., Jenks, C., & Prout, A. (1998). Theorizing childhood. New York: Teachers
College Press.
Nelson, K. (1996). Language in cognitive development: The emergence of the mediated mind.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1969). The psychology of the child. New York: Basic Books.
Sarup, M. (1990). An introductory guide to post-structuralism and postmodernism (2nd
ed.). Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Tobin, J. (1995). Post-structural research in early childhood education. In A. Hatch
(Ed.), Qualitative research in early childhood settings (pp. 223–243). Westport, CT:
Praeger.
Yung-Chan, D., Stires, S. E., & Genishi, C. (1999). Learning the words of our language:
Experience and expansion in prekindergarten. Manuscript in preparation, Spencer
Foundation Practitioner Research Communication and Mentoring Project.

RESEARCH ISSUES 291

Exploring Cross-Cultural Inscriptions and Difference:
The Effects of Researchers’ Positionalities
on Inquiry Practices
MARYLIN LOW
Canadian International College and University of British Columbia

■ In this commentary, I wrestle with the question, “How do English

language learners (ELLs) experience writing?” by probing the effects of
researcher positionalities1 on inquiry practices. I address positionality
through disruptions in my own work, disruptions that Miller (1997)
claims “constitute the lived practice of our research” wherein “no two
days in the classroom are the same and no one theory holds together the
disruptions” (p. 199). Risking those disruptions forcefully reminds me of
the ways I remain fixed in theoretical stances I claim to work against.
Such jarring disruptions leave my work open to unexpected discourses of
living practices.2
In what follows, I situate my work within a hermeneutic framework
and briefly explore notions of positionality through my experiences with
the discourse(s) of contrastive rhetoric as a practice of inquiry. Through
this exploration, I heed poststructural writers who alert their readers to
varied meanings of writing, language, and culture. I conclude with a call
for a repositioning of inquiry practices towards Caputo’s (1987) radical
hermeneutics, which has the potential to address the dynamic complex-
ity of difference both as broad universalising cultural categories and as
particular hybridising experiences of ELL writing.3

1
In turning away from assumptions of a fixed, commensurate discourse, I view positionality
as an interplay of dynamic, contested discursive relations that rejects the possibility of
consistently held systematised solutions or discursive univocality. I also acknowledge the
partiality of positionality and its dilemmatic conditions requiring deliberation and negotiation
(Billig et al., 1988). Disruptions, then, become incomplete and dilemmatic discourses of
enacted theoretical stances of researchers.
2
I lean heavily on Sumara and Carson’s (1997) notion of living practices as “focally real events
. . . holistic practices that acknowledge the coemergence of form and content . . . ones in which
process, producer and product are cospecified . . . —lived experiences that permit an openness
to the complexity of the relations among things and people” (p. xv). This researcher
positionality “does not mean to suggest that examining the product of holistic practices (like
writing) reveals the producer” but suggests that “writing reveals a writer who did not exist, in the
same form, before the act of writing.” Acknowledging that process, producer, and product can
be a focus of research “without knowledge of the other, a deeper interpretation occurs when
the relations among them are made available for interpretation” (p. xv).
3
Caputo (1987) offers radical hermeneutics “as an attempt to stick with the original
difficulty of life, and not to betray it with metaphysics” (p. 1).

292 TESOL QUARTERLY

DIFFICULTY AND DISRUPTIONS:
RESEARCHERS’ POSITIONALITIES AT WORK
I try to write like my teacher. I want her correct everything. But my Japanese
is big problem. I can’t get rid of it. (Yumiko)

I listened to Yumiko dwell in a space of difficulty—writing in-between

East and West—and, as her teacher, I struggled to make sense of her
“problem.” Yumiko, like other young adults studying in a 4-year aca-
demic program at the international Canadian college for Japanese
nationals in which I teach, is required to write compositions in subject-area
courses on globalisation, experiential learning, and a major area of study
in business, cultural studies, or interpretation and translation (English-
Japanese). As a regular activity in my classroom, Japanese learners
engage in writing content and are guided by well-intentioned pedagogi-
cal interventions aimed at “fixing” their ability to write in English what
they know—a pedagogical position based on unquestioned assumptions
of its possibility. My interest in Yumiko’s and other learners’ comments
on what it means to write content well comes from a larger inquiry on the
ways teachers judge the content writing of ELLs. Hence, my interest was
in exploring the notion of writing content well in English from the
perspectives of ELLs. Yumiko’s claim of her L1 being a “problem” that
could not be “gotten rid of” was an unexpected disruption; it went
against my tendency to view writing problems as things that could be
fixed. Yumiko continued,

Always I want say different than what is in my English only. Japanese not good
in English work, I know, but maybe I can’t help. I know how to cover my
Japanese with English little. But I can’t cover enough. You know, sometime I
want my Japanese heard. I get confusing.

The disruption alerted me to the problem of difference as it related to

writing in English for Japanese learners, and this became a focus of my
research. Turning to contrastive rhetoric as an established approach to
exploring L2 writing, I began structuring the problem as questions of
difference. What I did not question at the time was my own positionality.

DIFFERENCE AS/IN UNIVERSALISING CATEGORIES4

Perceiving ELL writing to be a complex experience, my questions
asked about difference: differences between the English and Japanese
languages and cultures, and the different assumptions Japanese writers

4
I use as/in as an invitation to dwell in the to-and-fro relational movements offered in the
solidus and consider the what (as) and where (in)—positionalities of difference.

RESEARCH ISSUES 293

make about writing in English. Contrastive rhetoric, which claims
interdisciplinary and multidimensional approaches and asserts that
language and writing are cultural phenomena (Connor, 1996), seemed
to offer promise as a method. Kaplan’s (1966) early work documented
comparative studies of writing styles and patterns that began with a
troubling, simplistic view of difference. Others (Liebman, 1992; Purves &
Hawisher, 1990) since have argued for a broader scope, recognising the
complexity of engaging in contrastive rhetoric studies. Here I comment
on a central positionality of contrastive rhetoric by exploring the notion
of difference within writing, language and culture. (For a review of
contrastive rhetoric, see Connor, 1996.)
My initial interest in difference was embedded in a constructivist
approach to contrastive rhetoric that “emphasises the different assump-
tions that writers from different groups and cultures bring with them”
(Connor, 1996, p. 79). In particular, Swales’ (1990) notion of discourse
community and his work in genre analysis was influential in addressing
difference through context and situation in various models of writing for
ELLs. More recently, Johns’ (1997) contribution to notions of academic
literacy highlighted the importance of text, role, and context in explora-
tions of difference. Whereas earlier studies of contrastive rhetoric seem
to have ignored content, more current work in academic settings has
begun to acknowledge a need to “control” content in inquiry practices
(Connor, 1996).5
My interest in ELLs’ perspectives on writing content well led me to
begin an action research project that involved case studies of five ELL
writers in my classroom. In the classroom, I posed questions to the
writers as we conversed about writing, language, and culture while
engaged in pedagogic activities of content-based writing. As I listened for
the “different assumptions that writers from different groups and cul-
tures bring with them” (Connor, 1996, p. 79), I began to map out
categories of cultural assumptions for Japanese and for English. My
position claimed at least two primary assumptions: (a) that cultures are
distinct and knowable and, once known, (b) that teaching or learning to
write well means reducing or erasing traces of the L1, in this case
Japanese, in learners’ writing. Determined to access the different as-
sumptions Japanese students bring to their English writing, I interpreted
the data haunted by Yumiko’s words. How would I categorise Yumiko’s
English writing if she claimed her Japanese was ever present? Is it
possible that her writing could no longer claim a space of either English

5
The notion that content could and needed to be controlled was a disruption that went
against my tendency to view language as constituting content (culture, world view)—another
example of the effects of researcher positionality.

294 TESOL QUARTERLY

or Japanese? How could her writing be understood as both Japanese and
English? In questioning my own stance, I realised I still remained
entrenched in a central, modernist position of contrastive rhetoric that
seemed to advocate universal categories of language and culture; full of
promise in its interdisciplinary and multidimensional approaches, it
seemed to remain limited within a Cartesian dualism of self and other,6
replete with deterministic and reductionist tendencies (Spack, 1997;
Zamel, 1997).7

DIFFERENCE AS/IN HYBRIDISING EXPERIENCES

Language, in Cartesian terms, assumes the possibility of a technical
purity that, according to Spack (1997), “assumes a standard that mea-
sures what is different against what is not different” (p. 766). Derrida
(1998), in Monolingualism of the Other, muses that

We only ever speak one language . . .

(yes, but)
We never speak only one language . . . . (p. 10)

Derrida considers the impurity of language, a position different from

one that views language as a tool that, if written well, can bring closure to
meaning. He suggests that learning “one” language may be a continual
process of being and becoming a language in translation. Postcolonial
writer Trinh’s (1992) work, long considered by publishers to be “not
good writing because it’s too impure” (p. 138), was so hybridised by
colonial invasion “that [it] would not fit.” She speaks of colonised acts
and imposed wor(l)ds wherein “dominated and marginalised people
have been socialised to see always more than one point of view” (p. 149).
She repositions language and culture so that they are not universal
categories of East or West but hybridisations of East and West—a

6
With the Cartesian orientation comes a preoccupation with methods of inquiry that
contribute to structuring a more accurate representation of the world (reality) and that, in a
desire to become more accurate, become more technical in their mechanistic ability to reduce,
control, and master objects (the other) of inquiry. Smith (1999), claiming to be “a person
formed by both Eastern and Western traditions” (p. 12), warns of “the snares and entrapments
of Self and Other thinking” (p. 25) in an East-West inquiry of identity within acts of pedagogy,
as do Leung, Harris, and Rampton (1997) in their work on “idealised native speakers, reified
ethnicities, and classroom realities” (p. 543).
7
The current debate surrounding Spack’s (1997) and Zamel’s (1997) critique of contrastive
rhetoric within the context of English teaching parallels questions raised in my own research
regarding positionality (see Carson, 1998; Nelson, 1998; Spack, 1998a, 1998b). Following
Spack’s and Zamel’s work, I argue that in research practices contrastive rhetoric fails to
acknowledge the embodiment of teachers’ and students’ live(d) experiences—a writing-as-living
in the two-folds of languages and cultures. Writing so repositioned becomes texts of the
planned and the living (the unplanned).

RESEARCH ISSUES 295

positionality wherein writing has the potential to inscribe meanings
beyond writers’ knowing (Felman, 1987) and a metonymic space of
difference that Aoki (1996) invokes in “In the Midst of Doubled
Imaginaries.” Could this stance be a space in which Zamel (1997) calls
for transcultural understandings of difference and that claims the neces-
sity of involving “students in the messiness and struggle of authentic work
that begins, values, and builds on their own ways with words” (p. 343)? A
possible repositioning of language, culture, and writing emerges in ELL
inscriptions in which “language disrupts, refuses to be contained within
boundaries. It speaks itself against [their] will” (hooks, 1994, p. 167).
Undoubtedly, ELL writers occupy a messy and difficult space of
difference. How researchers make sense of it is influenced by their
positionalities, which are themselves complex and incomplete. Claiming
that research is constituted in living practices, I view difference within
the potentiality of a generative space, alive with possibilities that “re-collect
the contours and textures of life we are already living” without
“render[ing] such a life our object” (Jardine, 1992, p. 116). Refraining
from inquiring into life as factual and objective, my work is positioned in
the midst of life, keeping “a watchful eye for the ruptures and the breaks
and the irregularities” (Caputo, 1987, p. 1). Resisting the call of scientific
discourse to cast ELLs’ content-based writing as a technical problem
requiring a technical fix,8 I now see difficulties within ELL writing
practices in a generative space of ambiguity in which there is “always
something left to say” (Jardine, 1992, p. 119) and where technical words
cannot fix all writing problems and bring them to an end. My view is one
of radical hermeneutics, “a restoring of life to its original difficulty”
(Caputo, 1987, p. 1) that makes it possible to understand the act of
writing as a tensioned hermeneutic activity wherein traces of technologi-
cal and other discourses both mediate and complicate writing, language,
and culture relations.

THE POSSIBILITY OF A RADICAL

HERMENEUTICS OF DIFFERENCE
My earlier experiences with the formal schooling of ELLs were
bounded by what Davis (1996) calls the ocular: “of seeing and observing,
of clarity and illumination, of distinct boundaries and solid objects” (p.
xxi). My positionality with regard to English language teaching and

8
Jardine (1992), heeding Caputo’s (1987) message, argues that “technical-scientific dis-
course offers itself up as a remedy to the difficulties of life” and then reminds us that “rather
than simply being a remedy to life’s difficulties, [technical-scientific discourse] has rather come
to recast the nature of life’s difficulties into precisely the sort of thing for which a technical
solution is appropriate; that is, life’s difficulties are technical problems requiring a ‘technical
fix’” (p. 117).

296 TESOL QUARTERLY

learning had become disembodied, univocal, and predominantly pre-
scriptive. Davis’s invocation to listen led me to reposition my inquiry
practices: Yumiko’s problem became a performative disruption within an
embodied, generative space. For me as a teacher-researcher, the effects
of the repositioning worked to renew ELL inscriptions to their “original
difficulty” and claimed ELL written content as “that [which] cannot be
mastered but only lived with well” (Jardine, 1992, p. 117). The positionality
taken by the researcher engaged in contrastive rhetoric is helpful in
constituting general cultural categories of writing difference. But that is
not enough. The repositioning of researchers toward a radical herme-
neutics of difference opens ELL inscriptions to the possibility of
performative movements between particular hybridisations of writing
and broad cultural categories—not as a movement from one to the
other, as the notion of mastery might suggest, but in a to-and-fro
movement that repositions difference so that it acknowledges the
interplay of multiple traces of positionalities at work.

CONCLUSION
I have briefly explored the premise that researchers’ positionalities
influence their inquiry practices. Positionality as a movement between
various stances resists the assumption that fixed standpoints of truth
exist. The way researchers ask what it means for ELLs to write should
reflect an examination of the what (as) and the where (in) that underlie
methods of inquiry and its interpretations. I believe we as researchers are
obligated to acknowledge our tendencies to particular ways of making
sense of our work and to reconsider their fragmented instabilities. A turn
to radical hermeneutics may help us enter the living practices of research
and dwell in spaces of difficulty and disruptions such as those found in
the complexity of ELL inscriptions and difference.

THE AUTHOR
Marylin Low teaches at Canadian International College and is a doctoral candidate at
the University of British Columbia. Her current research interests involve the living
practices of ELL inscriptions and their evaluation.

REFERENCES
Aoki, T. (1996). In the midst of doubled imaginaries: The Pacific community as
diversity and as difference. Pacific-Asian Education, 7(1 & 2), 1–7.
Billig, M., Condor, S., Edwards, D., Gane, M., Middleton, D., & Radley, A. (1988).
Ideological dilemmas. London: Sage.
Caputo, J. (1987). Radical hermeneutics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Carson, J. G. (1998). Comments on Ruth Spack’s “The Rhetorical Construction of

RESEARCH ISSUES 297

 Multilingual Students”: Categorizing, classifying, labeling: A fundamental cogni-
tive process. TESOL Quarterly, 32, 727–732.
Connor, U. (1996). Contrastive rhetoric. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Davis, B. (1996). Teaching mathematics. New York: Garland.
Derrida, J. (1998). Monolingualism of the other or the prosthesis of origin (P. Mensah,
Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Felman, S. (1987). Jacques Lacan and the adventure of insight: Psychoanalysis in
contemporary culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress. New York: Routledge.
Jardine, D. (1992). Reflections on education, hermeneutics, and ambiguity: Herme-
neutics as a restoring of life to its original difficulty. In W. Pinar & S. Reynolds
(Eds.), Understanding curriculum as phenomenological and deconstructed text (pp. 116–
127). New York: Teachers College Press.
Johns, A. (1997). Text, role, and context. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kaplan, R. (1966). Cultural thought patterns in intercultural education. Language
Learning, 16, 1–20.
Leung, C., Harris, R., & Rampton, B. (1997). The idealised native speaker, reified
ethnicities, and classroom realities. TESOL Quarterly, 31, 543–560.
Liebman, J. (1992). Toward a new contrastive rhetoric: Differences between Arabic
and Japanese rhetorical instruction. Journal of Second Language Writing, 1, 141–166.
Miller, J. (1997). Disruptions in the field: An academic’s lived practice with classroom
teachers. In T. Carson & D. Sumara (Eds.), Action research as a living practice (pp.
199–214). New York: Peter Lang.
Nelson, G. L. (1998). Comments on Ruth Spack’s “The Rhetorical Construction of
Multilingual Students”: Cultural backgrounds: What should we know about
multilingual students? TESOL Quarterly, 32, 735–740.
Purves, A., & Hawisher, G. (1990). Writers, judges, and text models. In R. Beach &
S.␣ Hynds (Eds.),Developing discourse practices in adolescence and adulthood (pp. 183–
199). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Smith, D. (1999). Pedagon. New York: Peter Lang.
Spack, R. (1997).The rhetorical construction of multilingual students. TESOL
Quarterly, 31, 765–779.
Spack, R. (1998a). Comments on Ruth Spack’s “The Rhetorical Construction of
Multilingual Students”: The author responds to Carson. TESOL Quarterly, 32, 740–
746.
Spack, R. (1998b). Comments on Ruth Spack’s “The Rhetorical Construction of
Multilingual Students”: The author responds to Nelson. TESOL Quarterly, 32, 732–
735.
Sumara, D. & Carson, T. (1997). Reconceptualizing action research as a living
practice. In T. Carson & D. Sumara (Eds.), Action research as a living practice (pp.
xiii–xxxv). New York: Peter Lang.
Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Trinh, M. (1992). Framer framed. New York: Routledge.
Zamel, V. (1997). Toward a model of transculturation. TESOL Quarterly, 31, 341–351.

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REVIEWS
TESOL Quarterly welcomes evaluative reviews of publications relevant to TESOL
professionals. In addition to textbooks and reference materials, these include
computer and video software, testing instruments, and other forms of nonprint
materials.

Edited by DAN DOUGLAS

Iowa State University

Conversations of the Mind: The Uses of

Journal Writing for Second-Language Writers.
Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1998.
Pp. xvi + 215.

■ This wonderful book is well grounded in theory and research, is

clearly written, and includes extended examples of the teacher’s and
students’ writing. It reports the results of a teacher-research study in
which Mlynarczyk observed and analyzed the journal writing of students
in her own two sections of a pre–freshman composition writing course
for ESL students at a large, urban public university. The writing itself,
and Mlynarczyk’s analysis, tell an important story about the meanings
and uses of journal writing between a teacher and five very different
students.
The 21 students in the class were encouraged to write at least five
times a week, for a total of at least five pages a week, during a 14-week
semester. Mlynarczyk collected the journals every 2 or 3 weeks and wrote
a letter of response, either to the individual student writers or (toward
the end of the semester) to the whole class. Students’ journals included
in-class free writing on prompts that she devised and out-of-class entries
about the assigned reading, A Place for Us (Gage, 1989), an autobio-
graphical account of a Greek immigrant’s assimilation into U.S. culture.
Students were to use their journals to write about themselves and their
reactions as readers and writers. The appendixes provide samples of the
students’ journal and in-class writing and Mlynarczyk’s responses.
For her study, Mlynarczyk selected five students with different linguis-
tic and cultural backgrounds and different experiences with journal
writing, ranging from those who wrote prolifically and reflectively to
those who struggled. Her data included the students’ journal entries, her
written responses, field notes on classroom interactions and writing

TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 33, No. 2, Summer 1999 299

conferences, transcriptions of audiotaped class segments and confer-
ences, and interviews with each of the five students.
This book will be useful to community college and university writing
teachers, writing researchers, and teachers in adult education programs,
including those preparing students to take the General Educational
Development Test. For teachers, Mlynarczyk’s intense critical reflection
on what she and her students were doing and feeling, and her frankness
and honesty about her struggles with the fact that some students’
journals opened the way to reflection and response whereas others
clearly didn’t, will provide hope and guidance. For researchers inter-
ested in journal and diary writing and in L2 writing in general, she
provides a comprehensive review of the literature in both of these fields
as well as of linguistic, cognitive, and educational theory. The surprise
element that makes this book most compelling, though, is her discussion
of the writing in light of the concept of connected knowing, presented in
Women’s Ways of Knowing (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986).
This discussion is particularly interesting because several of the students
whose journals most powerfully reflected connected knowing were male.
In his foreword, John Mayher, Mlynarczyk’s dissertation adviser, writes,
“In addition to meeting Rebecca, you’ll also get a chance to meet her
students and watch them learn and grow as speakers/writers of English,
and as people. . . . The portraits are so finely and engagingly drawn that
they also enable teacher/readers to compare them to our own” (p. ix). A
strength of this book is the vitality of the voices that come through in the
writing.

REFERENCES
Belenky, M., Clinchy, B., Goldberger, N., & Tarule, J. (1986). Women’s ways of knowing:
The development of self, voice, and mind. New York: Basic Books.
Gage, N. (1989). A place for us. New York: Simon & Schuster.

JOY KREEFT PEYTON

Center for Applied Linguistics

Immersion Education: International Perspectives.

Robert K. Johnson and Merrill Swain (Eds.). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xvi + 315.

■ Educators in bilingual education, ESL, and foreign language educa-

tion often find that crossing over into other areas of L2 education
produces some amazing insights into the complexity of the language

300 TESOL QUARTERLY

learning and schooling process. Johnson and Swain’s volume on immer-
sion education is a book that offers such an opportunity.
The goal of the work is to present the richness and variety of
immersion schooling as practiced in a number of world settings. Such
variety is reflected in the organization of the book into sections accord-
ing to the general relationship between the immersion language and the
language(s) and culture(s) in which the immersion language schooling
experience takes place. Section I discusses immersion in a foreign
language, in which the L2 is clearly removed from general daily life and
social use, as in most U.S. foreign language immersion programs and
French programs in Australia. Section II considers immersion for
majority-language students in a minority language, in which the L2 is
used by some of the national population, as in programs in Canada and
Finland. Section III reviews immersion for language revival, in which a
community offers immersion learning to reconnect itself to a heritage
language, as in the revival of the Hawaiian language. Section IV presents
immersion for language support, in which the L2 is more widely used in
the community and schools seek to support that use, as in Basque and
Catalan programs in Spain. Finally, Section V details immersion in a
language of power, as in English immersion programs in Hong Kong,
Singapore, and South Africa.
Chapter 1 pulls together seminal concepts, categories, and descrip-
tions—core and variable features—that now serve to define immersion
education. The chapter also presents a list of research and evaluation
issues for immersion learning that masterfully capture the complexity of
the educational phenomenon while pointing out the difficulties in
examining it. Subsequent chapters describe immersion programs in
various national settings in detail and allow the reader to explore the
development of each program within its historical and curricular con-
texts. For each program, the authors delineate instructional practices in
L1 and L2, the challenges facing the program, the issues raised by
teachers and parents, dilemmas involving instruction and assessment,
and research questions that have evolved as the program has progressed.
Two of the chapters focus on U.S. settings, with the final chapter (by
Maria Kowal and Merrill Swain) illuminating one of the critical issues in
immersion education: the delicate balance between content and lan-
guage and the ways in which immersion teachers can successfully work
with both.
The only drawback of the volume might be the absence of a
metaperspective that ties the analysis of immersion programs worldwide
into a cohesive exploration of the difficulties inherent in educating
bilingually. But the lessons to be learned are clearly portrayed in the
experiences of those educators who strongly believe in the efficacy of
immersion schooling.

REVIEWS 301
 Whether they are teaching German in high school, teaching ESL in
adult education in Ghana, or discussing whale migration in a French
immersion or Spanish bilingual third-grade classroom, L2 teachers will
find the book worthwhile reading.

CONSTANCE L. WALKER
University of Minnesota

Theory and Practice of Writing: An Applied Linguistic Perspective.

William Grabe and Robert Kaplan. New York: Longman, 1996.
Pp. xvi + 487.

■ L2 writing is a relatively new but fast-growing field of expertise. For this

reason, few specialized books have presented a systematic synthesis of
various research findings and linked theories of writing with instruc-
tional practice. To the satisfaction of L2 writing researchers, teachers,
and graduate students, 1996 saw the publication of Grabe and Kaplan’s
Theory and Practice of Writing. With the aim of presenting a broad
interdisciplinary perspective on the theory and practice of writing, this
book immediately attracted the attention of those who are researching,
teaching, and studying in the field of L2 writing.
The book’s 14 chapters can be divided into two parts. Dedicated to
theory, the first (chapters 1–8) provides a coherent overview of the
nature of writing, developing a model for text construction and a model
of writing. The second part (chapters 9–14) focuses on practice and
proposes 75 thematic techniques for writing instruction at the begin-
ning, intermediate, and advanced levels.
One of the strengths of this book is its innovative applied linguistic
approach to synthesizing research findings obtained from a variety of
disciplines. Through such an approach, L2 and L1 writing research can
be linked systematically rather than being treated as two separate and
different areas of expertise. Another impressive feature is the book’s
comprehensive overview of research findings related to a number of
different perspectives, which are combined to fashion models for text
construction and writing as communicative language use. This compre-
hensiveness is also evident in the authors’ description of the history of
writing and the nature of writing within broad social contexts, as well as
the 45-page bibliography, which is a very helpful reference guide.
Apart from these merits, some weaknesses are apparent. One is the
inaccuracy in some of the book’s descriptions, as when Hong Kong is
referred to as a “new nation” (p. 11) and a “country” (p. 29). Another
small weakness concerns the use of absolute statements such as “while

302 TESOL QUARTERLY

any programme would like to assume that all teachers are excellent, well
trained in writing instruction (and native speakers of English) . . .” (p.
252). The parenthetical statement could easily cause readers to infer that
nonnative-English-speaking instructors do not teach as well as native-
English-speaking instructors. A third weakness relates to the section on
practical application. The instructional themes the authors present are
overwhelmingly derived from L1 teaching, and they have made no effort
to collect illustrative samples from real L2 classrooms; hence, the value
of the themes in L2 instructional practice still remains unclear.
Nonetheless, the book’s minor weaknesses do not mar its beauty. It has
made a significant contribution to the field of L2 writing research by
providing some new models, documenting research findings, and at-
tempting to merge theory and practice. As a study with an innovative
approach, this book is a valuable resource for anyone who is seriously
engaged in L2 writing research and instruction.

YONG LANG
The Ohio State University

Revisualizing Boundaries: A Plurilingual Ethos.

Lachman N. Khubchandani. New Delhi, India: Sage, 1997.
Pp. iii + 255.

■ Khubchandani’s text, a collection of publications and papers pre-

sented at international conferences and seminars in India, Canada, the
U.S., and Europe, emphasizes the sociolinguistic facets of the Indian
experience, especially those of government policy and implementation.
What may at first appear to be simply an interesting discussion of
colonialism and its imposition of language and culture on India is in
reality a timely presentation of multiculturalism and plurilingualism that
ESOL teachers should explore.
Chapters 1–3, dealing with language phenomena, methodology, and
concepts, contrast the various literary traditions with the unifying forces
of modern media technology in India. Chapters 4–7 present the
sociolinguistic dimensions of these issues, including the ecology of
language, minority cultures in a multilingual environment, language
accreditation by the government intended to transform the country, the
tensions among the majority and minority groups within different
regions, and Charles Ferguson’s concept of diglossia as the “functional
compartmentalization by a society of its linguistic resources” (p. 81). The
later chapters scrutinize the use of the census as a political tool on
individual, state, and national levels. This discussion is especially relevant

REVIEWS 303
for residents of the U.S., where the issue of sampling is a controversial
political topic. These chapters also describe attempts to implement
standardization programs and their impact on the country’s sociolinguistic
realities. The author, however, saves his harshest criticism for those
experts who debate these issues in academic forums but do not address
the grassroots problems of plurilingual societies and oral cultures in an
anthropological sense.
Throughout the book, the author contrasts various approaches to the
Indian language experience. He discusses the early and continued
conflicts between proponents of a national, common medium and those
who argued for the use of local languages in daily life and education, for
the linking of nonstandard languages to the mainstream language as a
transitional measure, and for the use of a diversity of dialects or
languages in speaking with standard language skills used for writing. The
author’s conclusion is that ESL teachers need to view language diversity
both as an asset to society and as an issue to be dealt with pragmatically.
The book is difficult for readers in the sense that it assumes a certain
degree of knowledge about the Indian situation. Also, and in spite of a
valiant effort on the part of the editors, the topics presented are not
unified, which is a problem common to any compilation of work pre-
sented over a number of years in different venues to different audiences.
As I read, I found myself contemplating the ramifications for the U.S.
of having such a variety of competing belief systems with language as an
important marker. The U.S. is itself a multicultural and multilingual
society that can learn from the experience of other societies such as
India. I believe that this book can give teachers, educators, administra-
tors, and policy makers greater insight into both the challenges and
possibilities of the U.S. society of the future.

YVONNE GODOY-RAMOS
University of Missouri–Kansas City

Onna Rashiku (Like a Woman):

The Diary of a Language Learner in Japan.
Karen Ogulnick. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998. Pp. ix + 154.

■ Onna Rashiku (Like a Woman), a collection of snapshots of the author’s

learning of Japanese, is a much-needed addition to the list of autobio-
graphical narratives in second/foreign language research. A rare exami-
nation of a learner’s identity through the window of introspective and
heuristic analysis, Ogulnick’s diary entries intertwined with scholarly

304 TESOL QUARTERLY

analysis offer a glimpse into the process of language learning and reveals
its core: the learner herself, with her social and affective nature.
Employed for several years as an EFL teacher in Japan, Ogulnick
became involved in Japanese culture, society, and language. She paints a
picture of language and culture learning as an identity construction in its
complex gender, ethnic, religious, and societal dimensions. Ogulnick
shows the dynamics of building her fluency in Japanese as a recursive
pattern of identity shifts manifested in her interactions with various
Japanese in a number of culturally determined situations. Ogulnick’s
awareness of her female identity, among other aspects of her identity,
allows her to negotiate the power relationships in “a culture that
enforces codes of femininity . . . explicitly” (p. 138). She found that her
Japanese self had to include people’s expectations of her acting “like a
woman”—a single woman, a foreign woman, and a professional.
Ogulnick’s experiences led her to professionally and personally enrich-
ing reflections on her position in her own culture as she engaged in a
“dialogical and dialectical process of constructing an identity in relation
to another person or culture” (p. 139). All these reflections and identity
negotiations built up into complex nonlinear identity shifts and transfor-
mations, which she saw as an intrinsic part of successful language
acquisition.
The introduction is a moving piece with a great deal of personal
reflection on the effects of the author’s childhood, upbringing, and
family on her selfhood and womanhood. Ogulnick then reviews her first
experiences in Japan in 1985 (chapter 2) and Japanese perceptions of
Americans in the light of the history of U.S.-Japan relations (chapter 4).
Chapters 4–8 consist of diary entries, postentry analysis, and reflections.
Among various linguistic, social, and cultural issues, her diary entries
demonstrate the importance of learning sociolinguistic rules (including
those related to gender) and pragmatics; her writings emphasize the role
of power in communication and ways the language learner can benefit
from “more equal structure of . . . [the] relationship and the emphasis
placed on communicating, rather than language learning” (p. 91).
Chapter 9, “Arrival,” draws conclusions from this introspective study: the
necessity for the learner to be aware of social and gender identity in
communication, the learner’s place in social stratification embedded in
the language, and one’s reactions to “paradoxes of our multiple and
shifting identities” (p. 139).
These important awarenesses identified by Ogulnick raise a number
of issues relating to the language classroom, including student cultural
resistance, the atmosphere of mutuality and communication in the
classroom, and situations in which student identities are shifting. Onna
Rashiku will be an eye-opener for second/foreign language professionals,

REVIEWS 305
practitioners, and researchers alike, and a great help to graduate
students and teachers in training as an illustration of the complex
processes of language learning and of the theories and hypotheses posed
by scholarship.

NATASHA LVOVICH
Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York

Productive Instructional Practices for English-Language Learners:

Guiding Principles and Examples From Research-Based Practice.
Russell Gersten, Scott K. Baker, and Sussan Unok Marks. Reston, VA:
Council on Exceptional Children, 1999. Pp. 48.

■ The extensive expertise of Gersten, Baker, and Marks in bilingual

education research is reflected in Productive Instructional Practices for
English-Language Learners, a book designed to provide new ESL programs
with guidelines and information on how to better serve L2 students. The
book is particularly concerned with helping educators teach these
students even when they do not speak the students’ native language.
The text contains four sections on helping students from diverse
linguistic backgrounds learn content material while they acquire En-
glish. The first section examines instruction that allows L2 learners to
have access to the curriculum in meaningful ways. Section 2 delineates
principles aimed at enhancing the quality of instruction for English
language learners. Effective strategies for teaching these students are
outlined in the third and fourth sections. Section 4 describes what the
learning environment should comprise once the principles covered in
Section 2 are put into practice.
In Section 1, instruction using comprehensible input as a means to
provide L2 learners with meaningful access to the curriculum is illus-
trated both in terms of the most common problems districts face in the
implementation of comprehensible input and in terms of alternative
approaches that can overcome such problems. The section ends with a
discussion of the key concepts underlying the notions of cognitive
academic language proficiency and basic interpersonal communication
skills development in L2 education.
Seven principles, introduced in Section 2 and discussed broadly
throughout the rest of the text, are recommended as a basis for helping
English language learners access the curriculum. These principles are
(a) vocabulary instruction, (b) the use of the students’ native language,
(c) consistent language use, (d) opportunities to speak and use aca-
demic language, (e) visual aids, (f) ongoing assessment, and (g) the
building of home-school connections.

306 TESOL QUARTERLY

 The third section emphasizes such strategies as scaffolding and the
use of visuals for the teaching of vocabulary and other fundamental
concepts. To help students learn new terminology as they actively apply it
in their assignments, the authors recommend the presentation of new
vocabulary in visual display. Visual organizers (e.g., semantic maps, text
structures, and story maps) are suggested as a way to encourage learners
to link language and content learning.
Section 4 summarizes the application of the instructional principles
discussed in Sections 1–3 and covers additional points deemed crucial in
teaching limited-English-speaking immigrants, such as using think-alouds,
presenting concepts in context, approaching instruction with sensitivity,
integrating language with content instruction, and using peer and
cooperative learning techniques. A discussion of federal policy regarding
education issues pertaining to this student population concludes the
section.
New ESL programs will find this book especially useful. One of only
a few of its kind, it represents an invaluable resource for teachers
facing the challenge of educating ESL students from diverse linguistic
backgrounds.

FERNANDO POLITO
University of Missouri–Kansas City and Mid America Nazarene University

REVIEWS 307
BOOK NOTICES
TESOL Quarterly prints brief book notices of 100 words or less announcing books of
interest to readers. Book Notices are intended to inform readers about selected
books that publishers have sent to TESOL and are descriptive rather than evaluative.
They are solicited by the Book Review Editor.

Focus on Form in Second Language Acquisition.

Catherine Doughty and Jessica Williams (Eds).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. xiv + 301.

■ This volume presents original research and discussion by experts in

classroom second language acquisition on the benefits of connecting
grammatical form to meaning during primarily communicative tasks.
The authors of the articles in the book argue collectively for the need to
move beyond both traditional, grammar-only approaches and purely
communicative, experiential language teaching. Issues investigated in-
clude whether ever to focus on language form, which linguistic forms to
target, the optimal degree of explicitness of attention to form, appropri-
ate timing of focus on form, and the integration of a form focus into L2
curricula.

Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence.

Michael Byram. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters, 1997.
Pp. viii + 124.

■ The main purpose of this book is to define what intercultural

competence involves, what role foreign and second language teaching
has in learners’ acquisition of that competence, and how it can be
assessed. It suggests a detailed approach to the development of syllabi
and curricula. It defines appropriate modes of assessment of intercul-
tural competence, whether acquired inside or beyond the language
classroom. The book carries forward earlier work on the aims and
methods of cultural studies in foreign and L2 education. It is written for
teachers, curriculum developers, and assessment designers.

TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 33, No. 2, Summer 1999 309

The Crosscultural, Language, and
Academic Development Handbook.
Lynne T. Diaz-Rico and Kathryn Z. Weed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon,
1995. Pp. xviii + 334.

■ Diaz-Rico and Weed have written a comprehensive handbook that

brings together theories, ideas, and resources for promoting cross-cultural
awareness, language development, and academic progress. Written for
the regular classroom teacher, the guide details the effects of cultural
differences on learning and presents a treatment of cultural diversity and
learning styles. Features include a chapter on content area instruction, a
section on assessment that describes relevant state mandates, a chapter
on bilingual education that gives teachers a variety of ways to organize
models and deliver instruction, and a discussion on working with other
professionals and paraprofessionals.

Beyond Training: Perspectives on Language Teacher Education.

Jack Richards. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Pp. xvi + 208.

■ This book examines the nature of L2 teacher development and the

ways teachers’ practices are influenced by their beliefs and principles.
The book seeks to move discussion of language teacher development
beyond the level of training, which reflects a technical view of specific
teaching practices. Instead, it takes a more holistic approach to teacher
development built on the notion of the teacher as critical and reflective
thinker. The argument pursued throughout the book is that teacher
education needs to engage teachers not merely in the mastery of
techniques but in an exploration of the knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes
that underlie their teaching practices.

Psychology for Language Teachers:

A Social Constructivist Approach.
Marion Williams and Robert L. Burden. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997. Pp. ix + 240.

■ This important book brings together some of the most recent develop-
ments and thinking in the field of educational psychology with issues of
concern to many language teachers. It considers various ways in which a

310 TESOL QUARTERLY

deeper understanding of the discipline of educational psychology can
help language teachers. The first part of the book presents an overview
of educational psychology and discusses how different approaches to
psychology have influenced language teaching methodology. Following
this, four themes are identified: the learner, the teacher, the task, and the
learning context. Recent psychological developments in each of these
domains are discussed, and implications are drawn for language teaching.

Second Language Learning Theories.

Rosamond Mitchell and Florence Myles. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 228.

■ This introduction to the field of L2 learning focuses on major current

schools in L2 learning theory, offering outlines of different theoretical
perspectives with an element of evaluation of the area explored. Starting
with an overview of key concepts and issues in L2 learning and of how
research in the area has developed over time, the book then deals with
current concerns in universal grammar and cognitive approaches, the
input and interaction hypotheses, and functionalist, sociocultural, and
sociolinguistic perspectives. The authors end by looking toward the
future of L2 learning research.

Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom.

Richard R. Day and Julian Bamford. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998. Pp. xv + 238.

■ This examination of extensive reading shows how reading large

quantities of books and other materials can provide students with
essential practice in learning to read as well as help them develop a
positive attitude towards reading. The authors first examine the cogni-
tive and affective nature of reading and the nature of good reading
material, which they term language learner literature. They then offer
practical advice for implementing extensive reading with L2 learners.
Suggestions are provided for integrating extensive reading into the
curriculum, establishing a library, writing and selecting reading material,
keeping records for purposes of evaluation, and supplementing individu-
alized silent reading with a variety of classroom activities.

BOOK NOTICES 311

Errors in Language Learning and Use.
Carl James. White Plains, NY: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998.
Pp. xiv + 304.

■ This book is an introduction and guide to current approaches to the

study of errors in language as well as a critical survey of previous work.
Relevant questions addressed include whether native speakers make
errors and whether “good English” for the native speaker is also good for
the foreign learner. The reader is led from the definition of error and
related concepts to explanations of types of linguistic deviance, error
gravities, the utility of teacher correction, and the writing of learner
profiles. Throughout, the book is guided by considerable practical
experience in language education in a range of classroom contexts
worldwide.

312 TESOL QUARTERLY

INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS
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INFORMATION
TESOL QUARTERLYFOR CONTRIBUTORS
Vol. 33, No. 2, Summer 1999 313
 Carol A. Chapelle
Department of English
203 Ross Hall
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011-1201 USA
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314 TESOL QUARTERLY

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INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS 315

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8. The Editor of TESOL Quarterly reserves the right to make editorial
changes in any manuscript accepted for publication to enhance clarity
or style. The author will be consulted only if the editing has been
substantial.
9. The views expressed by contributors to TESOL Quarterly do not necessar-
ily reflect those of the Editor, the Editorial Advisory Board, or TESOL.
Material published in the Quarterly should not be construed to have the
endorsement of TESOL.

Informed Consent Guidelines

TESOL Quarterly expects authors to adhere to ethical and legal standards for
work with human subjects. Although we are aware that such standards vary
among institutions and countries, we require authors and contributors to

316 TESOL QUARTERLY

meet, as a minimum, the conditions detailed below before submitting a
manuscript for review. TESOL recognizes that some institutions may require
research proposals to satisfy additional requirements. If you wish to discuss
whether or how your study met these guidelines, you may e-mail the
managing editor of TESOL publications at [email protected] or call 703-535-7852.
As an author, you will be asked to sign a statement indicating that you have
complied with Option A or Option B before TESOL will publish your work.
A. You have followed the human subjects review procedure established by
your institution.
B. If you are not bound by an institutional review process, or if it does not
meet the requirements outlined below, you have complied with the
following conditions.
Participation in the Research
1. You have informed participants in your study, sample, class, group, or
program that you will be conducting research in which they will be the
participants or that you would like to write about them for publication.
2. You have given each participant a clear statement of the purpose of your
research or the basic outline of what you would like to explore in
writing, making it clear that research and writing are dynamic activities
that may shift in focus as they occur.
3. You have explained the procedure you will follow in the research project
or the types of information you will be collecting for your writing.
4. You have explained that participation is voluntary, that there is no
penalty for refusing to participate, and that the participants may
withdraw at any time without penalty.
5. You have explained to participants if and how their confidentiality will
be protected.
6. You have given participants sufficient contact information that they can
reach you for answers to questions regarding the research.
7. You have explained to participants any foreseeable risks and discomforts
involved in agreeing to cooperate (e.g., seeing work with errors in
print).
8. You have explained to participants any possible direct benefits of
participating (e.g., receiving a copy of the article or chapter).
9. You have obtained from each participant (or from the participant’s
parent or guardian) a signed consent form that sets out the terms of
your agreement with the participants and have kept these forms on file
(TESOL will not ask to see them).
Consent to Publish Student Work
10. If you will be collecting samples of student work with the intention of
publishing them, either anonymously or with attribution, you have
made that clear to the participants in writing.

INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS 317

11. If the sample of student work (e.g., a signed drawing or signed piece of
writing) will be published with the student’s real name visible, you have
obtained a signed consent form and will include that form when you
submit your manuscript for review and editing.
12. If your research or writing involves minors (persons under age 18), you
have supplied and obtained signed separate informed consent forms
from the parent or guardian and from the minor, if he or she is old
enough to read, understand, and sign the form.
13. If you are working with participants who do not speak English well or are
intellectually disabled, you have written the consent forms in a language
that the participant or the participant’s guardian can understand.

Statistical Guidelines
Because of the educational role the Quarterly plays modeling research in the
field, it is of particular concern that published research articles meet high
statistical standards. In order to support this goal, the following guidelines
are provided.
Reporting the study. Studies submitted to the Quarterly should be explained
clearly and in enough detail that it would be possible to replicate the design
of the study on the basis of the information provided in the article. Likewise,
the study should include sufficient information to allow readers to evaluate
the claims made by the author. In order to accommodate both of these
requirements, authors of statistical studies should present the following.
1. a clear statement of the research questions and the hypotheses that are
being examined;
2. descriptive statistics, including the means, standard deviations, and
sample sizes, necessary for the reader to correctly interpret and evaluate
any inferential statistics;
3. appropriate types of reliability and validity of any tests, ratings, ques-
tionnaires, and so on;
4. graphs and charts that help explain the results;
5. clear and careful descriptions of the instruments used and the types of
intervention employed in the study;
6. explicit identifications of dependent, independent, moderator, inter-
vening, and control variables;
7. complete source tables for statistical tests;
8. discussions of how the assumptions underlying the research design were
met, assumptions such as random selection and assignment of subjects
and sufficiently large sample sizes so that the results are stable;
9. tests of the assumptions of any statistical tests, when appropriate; and
10. realistic interpretations of the statistical significance of the results
keeping in mind that the meaningfulness of the results is a separate and
important issue, especially for correlation.

318 TESOL QUARTERLY

Conducting the analyses. Quantitative studies submitted to TESOL Quarterly
should reflect a concern for controlling Type I and Type II error. Thus,
studies should avoid multiple t tests, multiple ANOVAs, and so on. However,
in the very few instances in which multiple tests might be employed, the
author should explain the effects of such use on the probability values in the
results. In reporting the statistical analyses, authors should choose one
significance level (usually .05) and report all results in terms of that level.
Likewise, studies should report effect size through such strength of associa-
tion measures as omega-squared or eta-squared along with beta (the
possibility of Type II error) whenever this may be important to interpreting
the significance of the results.
Interpreting the results. The results should be explained clearly and the
implications discussed such that readers without extensive training in the
use of statistics can understand them. Care should be taken in making causal
inferences from statistical results, and these should be avoided with correla-
tional studies. Results of the study should not be overinterpreted or
overgeneralized. Finally, alternative explanations of the results should be
discussed.

Qualitative Research Guidelines

To ensure that Quarterly articles model rigorous qualitative research, the
following guidelines are provided.
Conducting the study. Studies submitted to the Quarterly should exhibit an
in-depth understanding of the philosophical perspectives and research
methodologies inherent in conducting qualitative research. Utilizing these
perspectives and methods in the course of conducting research helps to
ensure that studies are credible, valid, and dependable rather than impres-
sionistic and superficial. Reports of qualitative research should meet the
following criteria.
1. Data collection (as well as analyses and reporting) is aimed at uncovering
an emic perspective. In other words, the study focuses on research
participants’ perspectives and interpretations of behavior, events, and
situations rather than etic (outsider-imposed) categories, models, and
viewpoints.
2. Data collection strategies include prolonged engagement, persistent
observation, and triangulation. Researchers should conduct ongoing
observations over a sufficient period of time so as to build trust with
respondents, learn the culture (e.g., classroom, school, or community),
and check for misinformation introduced by both the researcher and
the researched. Triangulation involves the use of multiple methods and
sources such as participant-observation, informal and formal interviewing,
and collection of relevant or available documents.
Analyzing the data. Data analysis is also guided by the philosophy and
methods underlying qualitative research studies. The researcher should
engage in comprehensive data treatment in which data from all relevant

INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS 319

sources are analyzed. In addition, many qualitative studies demand an
analytic inductive approach involving a cyclical process of data collection,
analysis (taking an emic perspective and utilizing the descriptive language
the respondents themselves use), creation of hypotheses, and testing of
hypotheses in further data collection.
Reporting the data. The researcher should generally provide “thick descrip-
tion” with sufficient detail to allow the reader to determine whether transfer
to other situations can be considered. Reports also should include the
following.
1. a description of the theoretical or conceptual framework that guides
research questions and interpretations;
2. a clear statement of the research questions;
3. a description of the research site, participants, procedures for ensuring
participant anonymity, and data collection strategies, and a description
of the roles of the researcher(s);
4. a description of a clear and salient organization of patterns found
through data analysis—reports of patterns should include representative
examples, not anecdotal information;
5. interpretations that exhibit a holistic perspective in which the author
traces the meaning of patterns across all the theoretically salient or
descriptively relevant micro- and macrocontexts in which they are
embedded;
6. interpretations and conclusions that provide evidence of grounded
theory and discussion of how this theory relates to current research/
theory in the field, including relevant citations—in other words, the
article should focus on the issues or behaviors that are salient to
participants and that not only reveal an in-depth understanding of the
situation studied but also suggest how it connects to current related
theories.

320 TESOL QUARTERLY

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED
Publishers are invited to send copies of their new materials to the TESOL Quarterly
Review Editor, Dan Douglas, Iowa State University, at the address listed in the
Information for Contributors section. Packages should be labeled REVIEW COPIES.
TESOL Quarterly readers are invited to contribute review articles and evaluative or
comparative reviews for consideration for publication in the Review section of the
Quarterly. These should be sent to the TESOL Quarterly Review Editor, Dan Douglas,
Iowa State University, at the address listed in the Information for Contributors
section.
TESOL gratefully acknowledges receipt of the following publications.

Benson, M. (1998). Standard English– minority population. Lanham, MD:

Serbo Croatian, Serbo Croatian–English Scarecrow Press.
dictionary. Cambridge: Cambridge Corson, D. (Ed.). (1998). Encyclopedia
University Press. of language and education. Dordrecht,
Blue’s ABC Time Activities [Computer Netherlands: Kluwer Academic.
software]. (1998). Woodinville, WA: Donahue, R. T., & Prosser, M. H.
Humongous Entertainment. (1996). Diplomatic discourse: Interna-
Blue’s Birthday Adventure [Computer tional conflict at the United Nations—
software]. (1998). Woodinville, WA: Addresses and analysis. Greenwich,
Humongous Entertainment. CT: Ablex.
Braidi, S. (1999). The acquisition of Du Vivier, M., Hopkins, A., & Potter, J.
second language syntax. London, (1998). More work in progress (Course
England: Arnold. book, teacher’s resource book,
Brito, M. (1998). Universidad de la workbook). Harlow, England:
Laguna: Revista canaria de estudios Addison Wesley Longman.
ingleses, 35. Canary Islands, Spain: Eignor, D., Taylor, C., Kirsch, I., &
Servicio de Publicaciones. Jamieson, J. (1998). Development of a
Brito, M. (1998). Universidad de la scale for assessing the level of computer
Laguna: Revista canaria de estudios familiarity of TOEFL examinees.
ingleses, 36. Canary Islands, Spain: Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing
Servicio de Publicaciones. Service.
Broukal, M. (1999). All about the USA: Evans, D. (1998). Powerhouse: An
A cultural reader. White Plains, NY: intermediate business English course
Addison Wesley Longman. (Course book, teacher’s book).
Coelho, E. (1998). Teaching and Harlow, England: Addison Wesley
learning in multicultural schools. Longman.
Clevedon, England: Multilingual Fletcher, R., & Portalupi, J. (1998).
Matters. Craft lessons: Teaching writing K–8.
Common Space Pack [Computer York Harbor, ME: Stenhouse.
software]. (1997). Boston: Folse, K. S. (1998). Clear grammar 2:
Houghton Mifflin. Activities for spoken and written
Constantino, R. (1998). Literacy, access, communication. Ann Arbor: The
and libraries among the language University of Michigan Press.

PUBLICATIONS
TESOL QUARTERLYRECEIVED
Vol. 33, No. 2, Summer 1999 321
Freeman, Y. S., & Freeman, D. E. team research. Ann Arbor: The
(1998). ESL/EFL principles for success. University of Michigan Press.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Papajohn, D. (1998). Toward speaking
Hamano, S. (1998). The sound symbolic excellence: The Michigan guide to
system of Japanese. Stanford, CA: maximizing your performance on the
CSLI. TSE test and SPEAK test. Ann Arbor:
Harmer, J. (1998). How to teach English. The University of Michigan Press.
Harlow, England: Addison Wesley Parasnis, I. (1998). Cultural and
Longman. language diversity and the deaf
Hayes, J. (1998). Tell me a cuento/ experience. New York: Cambridge
cuentame un story. El Paso, TX: University Press.
Cinco Puntos Press. Parziale, G. (1998). The ISS directory of
James, C. (1998). Errors in language overseas schools 1998–1999. Prince-
learning and use. Harlow, England: ton, NJ: International Schools
Longman. Services.
Joyce, H. (1998). Words for living. Sears, C. (1998). Second language
Sydney, Australia: National Centre students in mainstream classrooms: A
for English Language Teaching and handbook for teachers in international
Research. schools. Clevedon, England: Multilin-
Kaufmann, F. (1998). Ideas plus: Book gual Matters.
sixteen. Urbana, IL: National Stafford-Yilmaz, L. (1998). A to zany
Council of Teachers of English. community activities for students of
Kirsch, I., Jamieson, J., Taylor, C., & English. Ann Arbor: The University
Eignor, D. (1998). Computer of Michigan Press.
familiarity among TOEFL examinees. Stein, R. C. (1998). Benjamin Franklin:
Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Inventor, statesman, and patriot.
Service. Boston: Cheng & Tsui.
Myers, J. (1998). Resurrection of Doctor Stevick, E. W. (1996). Humanism in
Buzz. New York: Vantage Press. language teaching. Oxford: Oxford
Nye, D. (1997). Colorado river land- University Press.
scapes. Canary Islands, Spain: RECI. Strutt, P. (1998). Powerhouse: An
Ogulnick, K. (1998). Onna rashiku (like intermediate business English course
a woman): The diary of a language (Study book). Harlow, England:
learner in Japan. Albany, NY: SUNY Addison Wesley Longman.
Press. Westfall, M. (1998). Greetings! Culture
Osburne, A. G., & Mulling, S. S. and speaking skills for intermediate
(1998). Anthology for writing together. students of English. Ann Arbor: The
Ann Arbor: The University of University of Michigan Press.
Michigan Press.
Osburne, A. G., & Mulling, S. S.
(1998). Writing together: A project for

322 TESOL QUARTERLY