Handbook of Research in

Second Language Teaching

and Learning

i
ii
 Handbook of Research in
Second Language Teaching
and Learning

Edited by

Eli Hinkel
Seattle University

iii
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning / edited by Eli Hinkel.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 0-8058-4180-6 (casebound: acid-free paper)—ISBN 0-8058-4181-4 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
1. Second language acquisition. 2. Language and languages—Study and teaching.
3. English language—Study and teaching—Foreign speakers. I. Hinkel, Eli.
P118.2.H359 2005
418—dc22 2004023636

iv
 This book is dedicated to the memory of
David Ellsworth Eskey
May 22, 1933, to October 19, 2002
David’s contribution to the study and teaching of language and second
language has played an important role in expanding the knowledge of
thousands of teachers and graduate students, who read and benefited from
his work. David was an excellent scholar and teacher, whose dedication to
his students and the cause of reading remained unfailing, heartfelt, and
sincere. Among applied linguists and reading researchers, David con-
tinually advanced that scarce variety of intellectual thought known as
common sense. He will be greatly missed.

v
vi
Contents

Introduction xvii

PART I: IMPORTANT SOCIAL CONTEXTS IN RESEARCH ON

SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING 1

Introduction 3

1 Bilingual Education 7
Marı́a Estela Brisk

2 ESL in Elementary Education 25

Margaret R. Hawkins

3 ESL in Secondary Schools: Programs, Problematics, and Possibilities 45

Patricia A. Duff

4 ESL in Adult Education 65

Denise E. Murray

5 English for Academic Purposes 85

Susan Carkin

6 Research in English for Specific Purposes 99

Peter Master

7 English in the Workplace 117

Celia Roberts

8 English as a Foreign Language: Matching Procedures to the Context

of Learning 137
Brian Tomlinson

9 Teaching and Learning of World Englishes 155

Yamuna Kachru

PART II: METHODS IN SECOND LANGUAGE RESEARCH 175

Introduction 177

10 Ethnography and Ethnographic Research on Second Language

Teaching and Learning 179
Linda Harklau
vii
viii CONTENTS

11 Case Study 195

Leo van Lier

12 Quantitative Research Methods 209

Anne Lazaraton

13 Classroom Research 225

David Nunan

14 Action Research 241

Anne Burns

PART III: APPLIED LINGUISTICS AND SECOND

LANGUAGE RESEARCH 257

Introduction 259

15 Second Language Acquisition Research and Applied Linguistics 263

Teresa Pica

16 Sociolinguistics and Second Language Learning 281

Sandra Lee McKay

17 Language Socialization and Second Language Learning 301

Jane Zuengler and KimMarie Cole

18 Pragmatics in Second Language Learning 317

Gabriele Kasper and Carsten Roever

19 Sociocultural and Second Language Learning Research: An Exegesis 335

James P. Lantolf

20 Conversation Analysis for Second Language Acquisition 355

Numa Markee

21 Contrastive Rhetoric 375

Robert B. Kaplan

22 Corpus Linguistics and L2 Teaching 393

Susan Conrad

PART IV: SECOND LANGUAGE PROCESSES AND

DEVELOPMENT 411

Introduction 413

23 Age in Second Language Development 419

Georgette Ioup

24 Cognitive Considerations in L2 Learning 437

Robert DeKeyser and Alan Juffs
 CONTENTS ix

25 Fossilization in L2 Learners 455

ZhaoHong Han and Larry Selinker

26 The Output Hypothesis: Theory and Research 471

Merrill Swain

27 Speaking in a Second Language 485

Elaine Tarone

28 L2 Listening 503
Michael Rost

29 Second Language Literacy and Biliteracy 529

Terrence G. Wiley

30 Instructed Grammar 545

Patricia Byrd

31 Reading in a Second Language 563

David E. Eskey

32 Teaching and Learning Vocabulary 581

I.S.P. Nation

33 Taking Stock of Research and Pedagogy in L2 Writing 597

John S. Hedgcock

34 Analyses of Second Language Text and What Can Be Learned

From Them 615
Eli Hinkel

PART V: METHODS AND CURRICULA IN SECOND

LANGUAGE TEACHING 629

Introduction 631

35 Communicative Language Teaching: Strategies and Goals 635

Sandra J. Savignon

36 Traditional and Grammar Translation Methods for Second Language

Teaching 653
Sandra Fotos

37 Form-Focused Instruction 671

Jessica Williams

38 A Model of Academic Literacy for Integrated Language and Content

Instruction 693
Marguerite Ann Snow

39 Instructed Language Learning and Task-Based Teaching 713

Rod Ellis
x CONTENTS

40 Discourse-Based Approaches: A New Framework for Second Language

Teaching and Learning 729
Marianne Celce-Murcia and Elite Olshtain

41 Computer-Assisted Language Learning 743

Carol A. Chapelle

42 L2 Learning Strategies 757

Neil J. Anderson

PART VI: SECOND LANGUAGE TESTING AND ASSESSMENT 773

Guest Editors: Tim McNamara, Annie Brown, Lis Grove, Kathryn Hill, and
Noriko Iwashita

Introduction 775
Tim McNamara

43 Language Assessment From a Wider Context 779

Antony John Kunnan

44 Validity and Validation in Language Testing 795

Alan Davies and Catherine Elder

45 A Look Back at and Forward to What Language Testers Measure 815

Micheline Chalhoub-Deville and Craig Deville

46 Research Methods in Language Testing 833

Tom Lumley and Annie Brown

47 Testing Languages for Specific Purposes 857

Dan Douglas

48 Classroom Teacher Assessment of Second Language Development:

Construct as Practice 869
Constant Leung

PART VII: IDENTITY, CULTURE, AND CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN SECOND

LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING 889

Introduction 891

49 Considerations of Identity in L2 Learning 895

Thomas Ricento

50 Teaching and Researching Intercultural Competence 911

Michael Byram and Anwei Feng

51 Critical Pedagogy in L2 Learning and Teaching 931

Suresh Canagarajah
 CONTENTS xi

PART VIII: LANGUAGE PLANNING AND POLICY AND

LANGUAGE RIGHTS 951
Guest Editor: Richard B. Baldauf, Jr.

Introduction 953
Richard B. Baldauf, Jr.

52 Language Planning and Policy Research: An Overview 957

Richard B. Baldauf, Jr.

53 Status Planning for Learning and Teaching 971

Theo van Els

54 Corpus Planning: Syllabus and Materials Development 993

Anthony J. Liddicoat

55 Language-in-Education Policy and Planning 1013

Richard B. Baldauf, Jr. and Robert B. Kaplan

56 Prestige and Image Planning 1035

Dennis E. Ager

57 Language Policy and Minority Language Rights 1055

Stephen May

Author Index 1075

Subject Index 1113
xii
List of Contributors

Dennis E. Ager KimMarie Cole

Aston University State University of New York
Fredonia
Neil J. Anderson
Brigham Young University Susan Conrad
Portland State University
Marı́a Estela Brisk
Boston College Alan Davies
University of Edinburgh
Richard B. Baldauf, Jr.
University of Queensland Robert DeKeyser
University of Pittsburgh
Annie Brown
University of Melbourne Craig Deville
The University of Iowa
Anne Burns
Macquarie University Dan Douglas
Iowa State University
Michael Byram
University of Durham Patricia A. Duff
University of British Columbia
Patricia Byrd
Georgia State University Catherine Elder
Monash University
Suresh Canagarajah
Baruch College Rod Ellis
City University of New York University of Auckland

Susan Carkin David E. Eskey

Lane Community College University of Southern
California
Marianne Celce-Murcia
University of California Anwei Feng
Los Angeles University of Durham

Micheline Chalhoub-Deville Sandra Fotos

The University of Iowa Senshu University

Carol A. Chapelle Lis Grove

Iowa State University University of Melbourne

xiii
xiv LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

ZhaoHong Han Anthony J. Liddicoat

Teachers College Griffith University
Columbia University
Tom Lumley
Linda Harklau University of Melbourne
University of Georgia

Margaret R. Hawkins Numa Markee

University of Wisconsin–Madison University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
John S. Hedgcock
Monterey Institute of Peter Master
International Studies San Jose State University

Kathryn Hill Stephen May

University of Melbourne University of Waikato
Eli Hinkel
Seattle University Sandra Lee McKay
San Francisco State
Georgette Ioup University
University of New Orleans
Tim McNamara
Noriko Iwashita University of Melbourne
University of Melbourne
Denise E. Murray
Alan Juffs
Macquarie University
University of Pittsburgh

Yamuna Kachru I.S.P. Nation

University of Illinois Victoria University of Wellington

Robert B. Kaplan David Nunan

University of Southern California University of Hong Kong
(Emeritus)
Elite Olshtain
Gabriele Kasper Tel Aviv University
University of Hawaii, Manoa
Teresa Pica
Antony John Kunnan University of Pennsylvania
California State University
Los Angeles
Thomas Ricento
James P. Lantolf University of Texas
Pennsylvania State University San Antonio

Anne Lazaraton Celia Roberts

University of Minnesota King’s College
University of London
Constant Leung
King’s College Carsten Roever
University of London University of Melbourne
 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xv

Michael Rost Brian Tomlinson

University of California Berkeley Leeds Metropolitan University

Sandra J. Savignon Theo van Els

Pennsylvania State University Radboud University Nijmegen
Larry Selinker
New York University Leo van Lier
Monterey Institute of
Marguerite Ann Snow International Studies
California State University
Los Angeles Terrence G. Wiley
Arizona State University
Merrill Swain
The Ontario Institute for Studies
Jessica Williams
in Education
University of Illinois at Chicago
The University of Toronto

Elaine Tarone Jane Zuengler

University of Minnesota University of Wisconsin–Madison
xvi
Introduction

You taught me language, and my profit on’t

Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!
Shakespeare, Caliban, in The Tempest,
act 1, sc. 2, l.

A great deal of research on second language (L2) learning has been carried out since the
end of World War II. Over time, as researchers have come to recognize the enormous
complexity of L2 learning and its many facets, investigations into this domain of
knowledge have become a great deal more diverse and sophisticated. Whereas, for
example, in the 1940s and 1950s, learning L2 was seen as a “habit” that learners were
expected to develop and maintain, today, L2 studies undertake to gain insight into
social, political, cultural, psychological, cognitive, and interactional processes entailed
in learning a L2.
With the expanding influence of English as lingua franca and more recently with
the emerging ubiquity of technology, the number of L2 English learners has been
continuing to grow dramatically worldwide. However, the rising numbers of English
language learners do not merely result in teaching second or foreign languages (FL)
to more people. The evolving complexities of human societies, political structures,
and the ever-increasing pace of globalization have also led to the emergence of new
types of learners and learning needs, adding new dimensions to recent research and
heightening the need for new knowledge in and about L2 teaching and learning.
This Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning brings together
a broad-based, state-of-the-art overview of current knowledge and research into the
following domains of second language teaching and learning: social contexts of L2
learning; research methodologies in L2 learning, acquisition, and teaching; contribu-
tions of applied linguistics to the teaching and learning of discrete and inextricably
intertwined L2 skills; L2 processes and development; and teaching methods and cur-
ricula; second or foreign language testing and assessment; and language planning
and policies.
The Handbook is intended for the diverse range of professionals that populate the
L2 universe: researchers, graduate students, and faculty in teacher education and
applied linguistics programs, teachers, teacher trainers, teacher trainees, curriculum
and materials developers, or others who are curious about the field.
The learning of another language inevitably brings forth the intricate issues that are
bound up in language and its use, such as learners’ first and second culture, identity,

xvii
xviii INTRODUCTION

and varied perspectives on the very activity of L2 and FL teaching. Other crucial
factors in L2 teaching, learning, and their institutional functions concern assessment
and testing, as well as research into language policies and language rights—as they
have direct implications for social structures, schooling, teacher training, and prestige
planning.
To illustrate the exponential growth of the English teaching enterprise, it may be
interesting to note that at present, the number and geographic reach of professional
associations in the field and their growing memberships. For example: the Australian
Association for the Teaching of English includes 8 territorial branches, the Interna-
tional Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language is comprised of 13
Special Interest Groups and maintains close ties with approximately 30 Associate or-
ganizations in various countries, and the TESOL membership consists of 20 Interest
Sections and 6 Caucuses, with nearly 90 affiliate organizations on all habitable con-
tinents. Worldwide, the rate of regularly scheduled professional meetings, such as
conventions, conferences, symposia, colloquia, and the like, is higher than six per
month (i.e., one every 5 days year round).
The sheer number of the professional organizations and meetings evinces the need
for the development and promulgation of knowledge about L2 teaching and learning.
A great deal of work in L2 research and pedagogy is published annually in hundreds of
journals and books, as the body of the disciplinary knowledge expands and deepens.
Another important reason to mention the diversity of interests among L2 profes-
sionals is that in practically any compendium of articles it would be very difficult (if
at all possible) to cover the research on all the factors that directly or indirectly affect
L2 teaching and learning, regardless of how long a particular book is or how many
volumes a set of such books may include. Thus, a collection such as this of overviews
of what is known, important, useful, relevant, influential, productive, or controversial
and conflicting in L2 teaching and learning fills an important need by including most
or many (but certainly not all) research areas.
The selection of the topics and areas of research for inclusion in a handbook of any
kind is a difficult and sometimes precarious business. In a discipline as enormously
diverse as the teaching and learning of English or other types of second languages
around the world, it would be difficult to identify common characteristics that without
exception apply to all types of humans that populate the L2 universe.
Speaking broadly, to determine how the profession of L2 researchers and practi-
tioners defines itself and how L2 professionals of all types and in many world regions
identify the areas of importance and usefulness, it was necessary to take a look at
the topics of research and interest among the professional associations and research
organizations around the world.
Thus, a three-pronged approach was adopted:

1. As a point of departure, the divisions, affiliates, special interest groups, and

content and topic areas in various professional associations and organizations
in dozens of countries and across continents were compiled to ensure the breadth
of research topics, content areas, and values.
2. To focus on currency and relevance, the themes highlighted at research and
professional conferences, meetings, gatherings, academies, presentations, and
in-progress workshops were similarly collected.
3. Most important, a thorough and extensive review of the L2 research published
in the past two decades played a central role.

As a result of this substantial examination, possible themes for the Handbook be-
gan to emerge and were subsequently narrowed down to eight main research areas
reflected in the book. The book chapters set out to highlight the major findings and
 INTRODUCTION xix

the advancements of knowledge that have taken place in the past several decades
and across regions, political borders, and continents. This tome includes eight parts,
each divided into 5 to 13 chapters, depending on its topics and contents. For exam-
ple, it seems necessary to take stock of the research on classic L2 skills and processes
involved in learning to speak, listen, read, and write in another language. Similarly,
an overview of other L2 facets account for more narrowly focused domains of re-
search that play a crucial role in much of what takes place in the world of L2 teaching,
learning, and the learner.
In general terms, an inclusion or exclusion of a particular theme or topic in this
already huge compendium of overviews reflects its prominence in L2 research lit-
erature, as well as the importance of the topic to the profession. This post hoc ap-
proach seems rather fitting because the Handbook has the goal of reviewing the current
L2 research as it exists today. The task of identifying new research venues is best left
to the researchers with active research programs. It is important to note, however, that
the research areas of interest and value may vary greatly across geographic locations
and the human contexts in which L2 is taught, learned, and researched.
A Caveat Emptor: In any single book, no matter how large, it is not possible to
include chapters on all L2 topics or issues that are important to all (or even most)
individuals or cohorts of individuals. Furthermore, it does not seem to be likely that
every reader would benefit from reading or can be expected to read the vast amount
of material covered in this book. A more reasonable expectation is that interested
readers will simply select the chapters that are of greater relevance to them and their
specific contexts.
After much deliberation, and many discussions, debates, and consultations with
prominent L2 researchers, the following research areas are not covered in this Hand-
book, not because they are not important but for the reasons noted above:
r The political, economic, and attitudinal issues that accompany the hiring and
employment of non-native ESL/EFL teachers.
r The legal, governmental, and political issues associated with the status of refugees.
r The special concerns and the many complexities in L2 learning by the deaf.
r The many important local, governmental, economic, and funding considerations
entailed in teacher training, preparation, and education in various regions and
countries around the world. However, from a broad perspective, the entire Hand-
book represents a contribution to teacher education and professional preparation.
r The research on L2 learning and motivation/attitudes is covered in the specific
chapters to which it is directly relevant (e.g., see chapters 7, 31, 42, and 49), rather
than in a separate chapter, for example, in the case of many new immigrants,
motivation usually comes from the need to eat and earn a living.

To be sure, some of the topics of the chapters included in this book may not be im-
mediately and directly tied to the research on L2 teaching and learning. For example,
none of the prevalent L2 research methods were specifically developed for investigat-
ing L2 teaching, learning, or acquisition, and all were created and perfected in other
disciplines, such as anthropology, education, psychology, or sociology. Nonetheless,
research methods directly impact why, how, and when L2 research is conducted.
Thus, it seems that a respectable handbook on research has to include overviews of
the research methods by means of which the profession attains new knowledge of
L2 teaching, learning, and acquisition because how something is investigated directly
affects the nature, types, usability, and applicability of the findings.
Systematic research into language teaching and learning is a relatively new en-
terprise, but for thousands of years, in the actual practice of L2 teaching and learn-
ing, development and refinement of the methods has been carried out experientially,
xx INTRODUCTION

experimentally, and intuitively. In this regard, language teaching can be compared to

cooking. Due to the advances of science, much has been learned about the nutritional
content of various food substances, and nutritious meals certainly take into account
the beneficial qualities of their ingredients. However, delicious meals are not neces-
sarily nutritious and vice versa. A scientifically sound approach to L2 teaching and
learning does not necessarily make for the most enjoyable language course, and in
many cases, the teaching that is to be both beneficial and enjoyable has to supply both
elements to make L2 learning nutritious and delicious at the same time. All this is to
say that, in many cases of the practice of L2 teaching and learning carried out by real
people in real life, clearly delineating the boundary between research and practice
may not be possible in all cases, nor does it seem to be always necessary. However,
in cooking and eating, as in L2 teaching and learning, one does have to be mindful
of the delicious empty calories, as well as highly nutritious but barely edible foods.
The knotty issues associated with clear-cut distinctions between research and practice
may not be resolved in the foreseeable future, although many may disagree.

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

The book is organized into eight thematic parts, and an introduction is included in
each. In all, the book contains 57 chapters.
The people, for example, L2 learners and users, who populate the L2 universe are
at the heart of the research on L2 teaching and learning. Much L2 research is geared
toward finding out as much as possible about the societal matrices in which second and
foreign languages are taught and learned. Hence, Part I, Important Social Contexts
in Research on Second Language Teaching and Learning, begins with the research
about many different types of L2 learners that have different language learning needs
and goals within the social contexts of their lives. The nine chapters in this section of the
book focus on the people who set out to learn a second and foreign language in various
locations, institutions, and political and educational systems with an immediate goal
of attaining different types of L2/FL proficiencies in order to achieve their educational,
vocational, academic, professional, career, and communicative objectives.
The methods for research in how second languages are taught and learned represent
the second theme. These are discussed in Part II, Methods in Second Language
Research. In L2 research, each research method has its strengths and weaknesses,
and each of the five methods presented in the chapters discuss markedly different
approaches to gathering and analyzing data. What specifically can be learned through
research crucially depends on the method of collecting data and making conclusions
from the analysis.
The many contributions of applied linguistics to research on L2 teaching and learn-
ing represent the focus of Part III, Applied Linguistics and Second Language Re-
search. The eight chapters included in this part cover such divergent domains of study
as Second Language Acquisition (SLA), sociolinguistics, language socialization, prag-
matics, sociocultural research and theory, conversation analysis, contrastive rhetoric,
and corpus studies. In this regard, the findings of applied linguistics research can
shed a great deal of light on various L2 phenomena, such as the processes of language
learning and use.
The 12 chapters in Part IV, Research in Second Language Processes and Devel-
opment, represent an extension of the theme of applied linguistics research in Part
III. The findings of the research into the connections between age, cognition, fossiliza-
tion, and output and L2 learning are directly tied into key areas of applied linguistics
research. Similarly, the development of essential L2 skills, such as speaking, listen-
ing, literacy, grammar, reading, vocabulary, and writing is bound up with mental and
 INTRODUCTION xxi

physiological processes of learning and maturation. To a large extent, the division of

the 20 chapters in Parts III and IV has the goal of easing the reader’s path along the
book’s contents.
It would be no exaggeration to say that in the practice of L2 teaching, there are as
many methods as one would like to name and count. For this reason, the eight chapters
in Part V, Methods and Curricula in Second Language Teaching, attempt to deal only
with a few prominent exemplars widely adopted in various geographic locations and
social contexts around the world. For example, the preeminence of the communicative
method in many countries can be compared only to the undaunted popularity of
traditional grammar-based methods. The chapter on L2 learning strategies highlights
the applications of strategies for language learning across all methods and approaches.
It is important to note, however, that in all likelihood, Part V excludes at least as many
methods as it includes, and the importance of the “beyond methods” movement is
not to be underestimated.
The six chapters in Part VI, Second Language Testing and Assessment, are prob-
ably insufficient to discuss in any depth the many important human and institutional
issues entailed in measuring L2 proficiency. However, the goal of the chapters in
Part VI is to underscore the vexing complexity of language testing and assessment,
as it is closely tied to L2 learning, learning processes, and inferential measurements
of L2 competence, proficiency, and skill. Thus, the chapters in Part VI present brief
overviews of the sociopolitical contexts of language assessment, considerations of
validity and the history of testing, research methods, testing of language for specific
purposes, and classroom-centered language assessment.
The theme of Identity, Culture, and Critical Pedagogy in Second Language Teach-
ing and Learning is taken up in Part VII. Research into the direct connections between
language learning and the social identity, culture, and the ways in which second or
foreign languages are taught demonstrates that these constructs combine to impact
the social group and the individual within the fabric of the society and its political
and educational systems. The study of how learners’ identities can be bound up with
culture and language pedagogy relies in a wide range of macro- and microanalytic
approaches, discussed in Part VII.
The six chapters in Part VIII, Language Planning and Policy and Language Rights
present an overview of the important directions in the research of language policy
and planning, and the impact of these on minority language rights. The introductory
chapter outlines a number of key issues and terms and a general framework for the
types of activities that define the field. The next five chapters discuss the classic activity
types and focus on the important recent research specifically geared toward language
teaching and learning.

THE STRUCTURE OF CHAPTERS

In this Handbook, as in any other large book that consists of dozens of chapters written
by five or six dozen authors and co-authors, the contributions are not likely to be very
similar in character. To a large extent, the chapters reflect the diversity of the research
into second and foreign language teaching and learning, the contexts in which it
is taught and learned, and the individuals who teach and learn. In this regard, the
chapters can be seen as a somewhat idiosyncratic microcosm of L2 research.
As has been mentioned, systematic research into L2 teaching and learning draws
on research findings and methods in a conglomeration of other disciplines. Some of
the L2 research venues place high value on dense information content, innovative re-
search directions, full surveys of the field, and thorough examinations of seminal pub-
lications. Other researchers attribute great importance to discursive interpretations,
xxii INTRODUCTION

historical developments, or narrowly focused theoretical perspectives. To add to the

mix, some chapters deal with concrete and well-defined topics or argue for the valid-
ity of particular research findings, teaching methods, or language learning theories,
and others cover abstract research areas or seek to balance disparate research under-
takings.
Nonetheless, despite the great diversity of the field, the research, and the disci-
plinary perspectives, every effort has been made to make the chapters consistent in
style, tone, and the depth of material coverage. For this purpose, all contributors were
requested to construct their chapters along a similar outline:
r An explanation of how the topic discussed in the chapter fits into a larger picture
of the domain of L2 research.
r Important developments, trends, and traditions in the discipline, as well as cur-
rent controversies and the reasons that they have arisen.
r A detailed examination of the current research findings presented in the chapter.
r A section on conclusions and/or future research directions.
r A substantial list of references that can assist interested readers in backtracking
seminal and relevant works.

Each chapter represents a stand-alone examination of research in a specific L2 sub-

domain, yet, the book as a whole seeks to reflect the major trends in the current
investigations into the people and the contexts where and how second and foreign
languages are taught and learned.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe a debt of gratitude to my colleagues whose wisdom, guidance, and advice

were vital. I am sincerely and deeply grateful to my friends of many years for giving
generously of their knowledge, experience, and assistance (in alphabetical order):

Susan Carkin, Lane Community College

Marianne Celce-Murcia, University of California, Los Angeles
Rod Ellis, University of Auckland
David Eskey, University of Southern California
Sandra Fotos, Senshu University
Linda Harklau, University of Georgia
Robert B. Kaplan, University of Southern California

Naomi Silverman, Senior Editor at Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, has been a in-
sightful, supportive, and patient friend. The Handbook was Naomi’s idea, and this
tome owes her its very existence.
Paul Bruthiaux, Texas A&M University, Peter Lowenberg, San Jose State University,
and more than a dozen additional reviewers who chose to remain anonymous helped
shape the contents of individual chapters. My heartfelt thanks to them: The book
could not have proceeded without their knowledge and expertise.
My devoted comrade and sole member of the in-house IT department, Rodney Hill,
created and maintained logistics software employed in making this book a reality. His
pain and suffering will be amply rewarded in another life.
 Handbook of Research in
Second Language Teaching
and Learning

xxiii
xxiv
I

Important Social Contexts

in Research on Second
Language Teaching
and Learning

1
2
Introduction

During the decades of the formalization of English teaching and the growth of research
into how second and foreign languages are learned, language professionals have come
to recognize that among other crucial factors:

r Learners in different locations and contexts have different needs and different
language learning abilities.
r Different learners have different levels of education and literacy.
r Individual learners or groups of learners can be distinct in terms of their ages,
socioeconomic backgrounds, and sociolinguistic variables.

In addition, research into second and foreign language teaching and learning has
come to recognize that:

r Educational and schooling systems differ widely around the world.

r Some educational bodies are centralized and others are relatively independent.
r Teaching materials and curricula can be prescribed or developed locally.
r In some systems teachers are better trained than in others.
r Some learners undertake language study as a hobby and others need to learn the
language to earn their livelihoods.
r Teaching can be carried out more intensively over long periods of time or less
intensively in short-term courses.
r Second language research, teaching, and learning can be as diverse as the multi-
tudes of human life paths, living environments, living conditions, societies, and
cultures, as well as the economic, geographic, political, legal, and power-based
circumstances.

In short, today the science and practice of second or foreign language (L2/FL) teaching
and learning has come to recognize that learners and the contexts of language learning
are myriad.
A Caveat Emptor. For the purposes of this Handbook or any other single book for
that matter, it is clear that no thorough description of all the types of humans that
carry out L2/FL learning is possible. Thus, it is necessary to limit the discussion of
learning contexts to those that are likely to represent the largest populations involved
in L2/FL learning. The word “likely” is necessary here because no one knows with
any degree of certainty or even with a degree of approximation how many types of
learners or individual learners study L2 or FL within any given context.
The topics of chapters included in Part I are based not on the actual sizes of pop-
ulations involved in learning L2/FL, but rather on the body of research and other
scholarly work published about a particular cohort of learners. However, as the title
3
4 PART I: SOCIAL CONTEXTS IN RESEARCH

of Part I indicates, this measure of the importance of a particular language learning

context in effect says little about its importance to any one person or group of persons.
The title “Important Contexts of Research on Second Language Teaching and Learn-
ing” simply speaks to the quantity of publications and research studies carried out
within particular contexts in which L2s and/or FLs are learned, with an implication
that a larger or smaller number of researchers consider it to be of interest.
The prominent areas of L2/FL research include, for example:

r School-age children in bilingual education systems and schools in many countries

around the world.
r Elementary and high school students who are immigrants or children of immi-
grants or other types of populations who change languages, communities, and
countries in search of work or safe places to live.
r Immigrants, who can include skilled and unskilled workers, trained and edu-
cated professionals, as well as employees in multinational companies.
r Adult learners in adult education, vocational, and junior college programs.
r Learners who learn another language for the sake of learning it or those who
aspire to entering universities or those who pursue academic degree studies in
countries other than their home countries.
r College/university students who study English as a Foreign Language (EFL)
primarily (and sometimes exclusively) in the classroom.
r Residents of multilingual countries, regions, and communities, all of whom use
English as a lingua franca in the course of their daily interactions.

Among these people, different types of second language learners and users have
different reasons for learning and using another language. Their learning goals in-
variably influence the development of their L2 skills. For instance, the L2 learning
processes and aims of adult immigrants who need to secure employment and re-
build their social networks are clearly distinct from those of school-age children
attending school, or international students enrolled in colleges and universities in
English-speaking countries. In effect, it is the goals for which a second or foreign
language is used that determine where and how it is learned. Thus, the focus on the
contexts for language use and language learning attempts to encompass the many
types of people that inhabit the L2/FL universe regardless of specific geographic
locations.
Chapter 1, by Maria Estela Brisk, takes a broad perspective on the implementation
of multilingual and bilingual education programs in various parts of the world. The
chapter highlights the fact that bilingual education is extraordinarily widespread and
that it can take many different forms. Brisk emphasizes that not all students who
attend bilingual education programs are bilingual when they start nor are they all from
language minorities. Brisk also explains that ideology accounts for popular beliefs that
surround bilingual education. Bilingual programs, in fact, largely share one important
characteristic of using two or more languages for instruction but the extent of their
uses may vary, as do their educational foci.
Chapter 2, by Margaret Hawkins, focuses on research on second language teaching
and learning in elementary schools. The discussion promotes the view that language
learning and schooling are social processes situated in the social worlds of the learn-
ers and the institutions, and include a vast range of connections among students’
languages, learning, cultures, and identities. The chapter also examines second lan-
guage teaching and learning as a construct within the power relations that shape
the learning and interactions in language and schooling. These power relations, al-
though played out through local and situated interactions, are formed through larger
discourses at play in institutions and societies.
 PART I: SOCIAL CONTEXTS IN RESEARCH 5

Chapter 3, by Patricia Duff, is devoted to many models and program designs for
English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction at the secondary school level. One
overall finding of much research reviewed in the chapter is that the challenges facing
secondary school students and their teachers are quite enormous and that they range
from basic socialization and settlement to oral language development and the devel-
opment of academic literacies. In addition, these students often experience extreme
social isolation and disappointment at their academic and linguistic development, of-
ten because their own expectations or those of their family and school were very high.
According to Duff, however, many recent resources provide helpful venues for the
support that can be given to these students during their initial and ongoing language
and literacy development.
Chapter 4, by Denise Murray, explores the many difficult issues that have been
identified in adult and vocational education of immigrant populations in various
countries. Murray reviews the educational delivery systems that differ consider-
ably across English-speaking countries, resulting in different perceptions of the adult
learner, as well as different foci in research agendas for adult ESL education. A review
of extant literature also indicates that, in many cases, the adult ESL learner is invisible
in national policies and almost invisible on the agenda of academic researchers.
Chapter 5, by Susan Carkin, examines the findings of research in English for aca-
demic purposes (EAP), generally housed in formal academic contexts. EAP status
within L2/FL teaching and learning includes English language use by students, pro-
fessionals, and nonprofessional workers in vocational contexts. EAP is taught across
multiple disciplines and includes learning and study skills components of broadly rel-
evant academic skills. Overall, EAP concerns itself with the development of and the
transition from pedagogic genres (e.g., essay exams and term papers) to increasingly
authentic genres associated with various disciplines. This focus on learning academic
language through academic tasks, texts, and content is the basis for claims that EAP
instruction represents a highly pragmatic approach to learning, encompassing needs
analyses, evaluation, academic skills, disciplinary content, and tasks in support of
student learning in tertiary educational contexts.
Chapter 6, by Peter Master, reviews a great deal of work published in English
for Specific Purposes (ESP). The chapter reviews the current research and data-based
studies in ESP, as well as descriptions of ESP programs and contexts. The largest
representative of an international movement known as Languages for Specific Pur-
poses (LSP) is also briefly examined to highlight the current research trends in the LSP
movement. Research in ESP thus occurs within the overlapping domains of English
language education for specific purposes and discourse/genre analysis.
Chapter 7, by Celia Roberts, describes second language teaching and learning
in the workplace. In the context of employment, the workplace represents the cur-
riculum for L2/FL teaching and learning. For learners, the stakes in learning are high
because the central goal of instruction is not just an improvement in workers’ language
skills, but the possibility of changing the communicative patterns and assumptions of
staff at all levels. Research in L2/FL in the workplace necessitates an examination of
organizational talk and writing and language practices that can become potential dis-
advantages in a multilingual workplace. Roberts points out that when the workplace
is the curriculum, then language education may grow in range and scope to include
issues from new technologies to competency standards.
Chapter 8, by Brian Tomlinson, provides a broad overview of English as a Foreign
Language (EFL) contexts. EFL is learned by people who already use at least one other
language outside the learning environments and who live in a community in which
English is not used in the course of people’s daily lives. Thus, the social, cultural,
and linguistic norms of the community in which EFL is learned invariably influence
the teachers’ and learners’ expectations of the language learning processes and their
6 PART I: SOCIAL CONTEXTS IN RESEARCH

outcomes. Based on his overview, Tomlinson concludes that no particular pedagogical

procedure can be used effectively without some modification from context to context,
but a procedure that proves effective in one context of learning can be potentially
effective in other contexts of learning, as well.
Chapter 9, by Yamuna Kachru, outlines explicitly the perspective of researchers
studying varieties of English around the world. Kachru emphasizes the fact that
English has acquired a range and a depth unparalleled in human history. However,
vigorous debate has accompanied the status of Outer and Extended Circle varieties
and the characterization of what is meant by “standard” in relation to varieties used in
all the Circles. The concept of Standard English and its relevance for World Englishes
(WEs) is also addressed in the chapter. In the summation of her outline of issues that
have surrounded WEs for several decades, Kachru underscores that the WE research
community is anticipating a paradigm shift in the teaching and learning of English
in the Inner, Outer, and Expanding Circles and that the change in perspectives on the
teaching and learning of English will bridge the gap between sociolinguistic reality
and prevailing myths about English. Kachru emphasizes the need for inclusiveness
of the global fellowship of the English-speaking populations.
1

Bilingual Education
Marı́a Estela Brisk
Boston College

The terms “bilingual students” and “bilingual education” are often confused. Students
are bilingual because they know and use at least two languages even if their fluency
and use of the languages vary. Some are fluent in both, others are stronger in one,
yet others are literate in only one of their languages. Bilinguals use both languages to
different degrees. Some converse, read, and write both daily; others find occasional
use for one of their languages. Angélica was raised speaking Spanish and English.
She was fluent in both languages when she entered an English-medium school. Soon
she switched to function only in English, retaining adequate listening and reading
ability in Spanish. She studied French in high school. In college, a special course on
writing Spanish and extensive reading of Spanish materials in preparing a thesis on
Latin American films helped her regain fluency and strengthened her abilities to read
and write in Spanish. As an adult, she uses English with her husband and English and
Spanish with her children and at work. Occasionally she uses French. Every bilingual
presents a different pattern of proficiency and use over their lifetime (Grosjean, 1989;
Mackey, 1968; Romaine, 1995).
This chapter explores how multilingual and bilingual education programs are im-
plemented throughout the world. Examples illuminate not only how widespread
but also how varied such education is. Several encyclopedias explore such programs
(C. Baker & Prys Jones, 1998; Cummins & Corson, 1997). Bilingual students are found
in both “bilingual” and “monolingual” schools. Similarly, some bilingual students at-
tend bilingual education programs whereas others maintain language skills outside
the classroom. Not all students who attend bilingual education programs are bilingual
when they start nor are they all from language minorities.
In this chapter, the term “native language” refers to the language used in raising
a child and “second language” as the one learned at a later stage, often in their first
excursions from the home environment, through media, in schools, and with peers.
“Heritage languages” are those used by students’ ethnic group, whereas “societal
language” is the predominant language for communication in the students’ nation.
This chapter starts with definitions followed by models and purposes of dual lan-
guage and multilingual programs. The third section surveys bilingual education pro-
grams around the world. The chapter concludes with an analysis of concerns and
practices related to implementation.

7
8 BRISK

DEFINITIONS

Bilingual education, broadly defined, is the use of two languages as media of instruc-
tion. This simple definition is not what most people have in mind when they think
of bilingual education. Ideology accounts for common beliefs that bilingual educa-
tion involves just one language or requires absolutely equal use of both languages
for instruction. For example, critics of bilingual education often attack a “straw man”
by assuming that bilingual education is, simply, “instruction in the native language
most of the school day for several years” (Porter, 1994, p. 44). Some proponents of
bilingual education maintain, on the other hand, that only “dual language programs”
consisting “of instruction in two languages equally distributed across the school day”
are acceptable (Casanova & Arias, 1993, p. 17). The reality is that bilingual education
comes in many forms, influenced by particular circumstances, student needs, and
resources. They all use two or more languages for instruction but their use may vary
proportionately and may also focus on different purposes over the course of students’
education. Some prefer the label bilingual/bicultural education because culture1 is an
important component of bilingual programs, “based on the premise that the language
and culture children bring to school are [both] assets that must be used in their edu-
cation” (Nieto, 2000, p. 200).
Migration patterns and the need for mastery of regional or international languages
gave rise to programs that use more than two languages for instruction. Multilingual
education programs “aim for communicative proficiency in more than two languages”
(Cenoz & Genesee, 1998, p. viii).
Some language programs are mislabeled bilingual education because students
achieve a certain degree of bilingualism. In these programs only one language is
the medium of instruction and the other is taught as a subject. Such programs are
designed to develop fluency in either an international language, the language of a
prominent ethnic group in the country, the heritage language of guest workers or
immigrants, or the societal language in schools where the minority is the language of
instruction. For example, schools in European countries with two dominant groups
offer instruction in one of the major languages and teach the other as a subject matter.
In the Flemish region of Belgium, Dutch is the language of instruction and French
is offered as a subject after fifth grade. The pattern is reversed in French-speaking
regions of Belgium, whereas parents in Brussels choose between Dutch and French
schools (Glenn & De Jong, 1996).

MODELS AND PURPOSE

Dual models differ according to their goals, type of students served, and how lan-
guages are used in the curriculum. They can be implemented as a program within a
school or apply to an entire school. Some programs have as a major goal fluency in two
languages whereas others strive for fluency in a second language, usually the societal
language. These programs serve either minority or majority populations. Only two-
way and integrated programs include both groups. Programs differ in the way lan-
guages are used in the curriculum for literacy and content area instruction. Some mod-
els introduce both languages simultaneously, others gradually, yet others switch after
a certain number of grades. Some continue teaching both languages through the length
of the program. Others teach in the first language for a short period of time. Table 1.1
include the various dual language models specifying goals, target populations, lan-
guages used, and sources where detailed descriptions of such programs can be found.
National education programs, school districts, and individual institutions pro-
vide bilingual education programs for a variety of purposes such as enrichment,
 1. BILINGUAL EDUCATION 9

TABLE 1.1
Dual Language Models

Model Goal Target Population Language Sources

Two-way Bilingualism Majority and L1 and L2 Lindholm-Leary,

minority 2001; Center
for Applied
Linguistics, 2002
Maintenance Bilingualism Minority L1 and L2 McCarty, 2002
Mainstream Bilingualism Majority; L1 and 2 Mackey, 1972
bilingual international
education
Bilingual Bilingualism Majority L2 then L1 Lambert & Tucker,
immersion added 1972; Johnson &
Swain, 1997
Bilingual Bilingualism Deaf students Sign Gibson et al., 1997
programs for Language
the deaf and L2
Sequential Bilingualism Majority (speaks L1 and Obondo, 1997
bilingual a language Official
education other than the language
official)
Transitional L2 learning Minority L1 and then Ovando & Collier,
bilingual L2 1998
education
(TBE)
Pull-out TBE L2 learning Minority L2 with some Brisk, 1998
L1 support
Integrated TBE L2 learning Minority with L2 and L1 for Glenn & De Jong,
majority a limited 1996
amount of
time
Bilingual L2 learning Minority L2 with Gersten et al., 1998
structured limited L1
immersion support

Gersten, Baker, & Keating, 1998; Lindholm-Leary, 2001; Mackey, 1972; McCarty, 2002; and Ovando &
Collier, 1998.

maintenance, educational assistance for language diverse populations, language re-

vitalization, education of the deaf, serving transient populations, and serving bilingual
communities or countries.
A bilingual program is said to have enrichment as a goal when the students do not
learn the language because of need but because parents want them to be fluent in
a second language. In Hungary, bilingual education programs were created to de-
velop fluency in English, German, Russian, Italian, or Spanish. History, mathematics,
physics, biology, and geography are subjects often taught in the foreign language for at
least three academic periods. The goal is to master the content area in both Hungarian
and a foreign language (Duff, 1997).
Bilingual programs are created when political unity achieved under a dominant
language leaves minority languages in a precarious situation. In the United States,
Australia, and many other countries such programs are usually created either to
maintain the heritage language of such groups or to assist the speakers of these lan-
guages while they acquire the societal language. In Slovenia, Italian and Hungarian
10 BRISK

minorities have the right to bilingual education in Slovenian and either Italian or
Hungarian to maintain fluency in the heritage language (Novak Lukanovic, 1995). A
variety of dual language models exist to help minority populations acquire fluency in
the societal language. Transitional bilingual education (TBE), pull-out TBE, integrated
TBE, and bilingual structured immersion programs temporarily use the heritage lan-
guage while the students learn the societal language. Such programs are common in
Australia (Gibbons, 1997), Africa (Bunyi, 1997), and the Americas (Faltis, 1997).
Bilingual programs are created to revitalize languages that are close to disappear-
ing. Such efforts are springing up around the world with varying degrees of success
(Christian & Genesee, 2001; Cummins & Corson, 1997; Johnson & Swain, 1997). Bilin-
gual immersion programs in Catalonia serve Catalan and Spanish-speaking students.
Catalan is the medium of instruction from kindergarten to third grade in all schools.
Beginning in third grade, one and then two content area courses are offered in Spanish
(Artigal, 1997).
Bilingual programs for the deaf employ both signing and the written form of the
societal language. The purpose of these programs is to educate deaf learners in the
language that is most natural to them (i.e., a sign language) while they also gain access
to material written in the societal language. These programs promote the culture of
the deaf as well as the larger societal culture (Gibson, Small, & Mason, 1997). A two-
way preschool bilingual program was established in Southern California to help deaf,
hard of hearing, and hearing children with deaf family members learn in both ASL
and English (Allen, 2002).
Bilingual international schools serve transient populations the world over often us-
ing English and the national language for instruction. Nationals often enroll children
in these programs to encourage their bilingualism. L’Ecole Bilingue in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, attracts both European speakers of French and native English-speaking
Americans. Preschool and kindergarten are taught completely in French with 1 hour of
English a day. From first through sixth grade teaching-time is equally divided between
English and French. (The French-American International School of Boston, 2002). In
India, a country of over 1,000 languages, children of transient government employees
are educated in Hindi and English. Usually Hindi is used for the humanities and
English for the sciences and mathematics (Sridhar, 1991).
Bilingual communities create programs to promote fluency in the languages they
use and need. In much of Africa where multiple languages are used, schools often
implement sequential bilingual programs. Tribal languages are used for the very early
years and then the language of education switches to the official language (Obondo,
1997). Hong Kong has a similar system. Chinese is used in elementary education
and English at the secondary level except for Chinese and Chinese history (Johnson,
1997).
Multilingual programs have as a goal fluency in more than two languages. They
serve the population in communities that for historical reasons use several languages
or transient populations of varied nationalities. The international value of English
has increased the emergence of multilingual programs among those communities
that already promote dual language education.
In a number of countries or regions, all students participate in multilingual pro-
grams (see Table 1.2). The heritage language is often used during the early years
whereas the others are introduced later. Second or third languages are usually taught
as a subject before becoming a language of instruction. Such systems are established to
respond to the multilingual nature of countries. In Luxemburg the goal is to develop
trilingual citizens in Luxemburgish, French, and German. Schools teach in Luxem-
burgish, the native language of all citizens, in preschool and first grade; in German,
the language of the media and church, during the rest of elementary school; and in
French, the government language, in high school (Hoffman, 1998).
 1. BILINGUAL EDUCATION 11

TABLE 1.2
Multilingual Models

Model Goal Target Population Language Sources

Multilingual Multilingualism Whole country L1, L2, and L3 Hoffman, 1998

educational
systems
European Multilingualism European Union L1, L2, and L3 Hoffman, 1998;
schools officials’ children (L4 optional) Housen, 2002
Double Multilingualism Religious/cultural French, English, Genesee, 1998
immersion group Hebrew
Dual language Multilingualism Minority and L1, L2, and Cenoz, 1998
+ English majority English

The European School model serves the children of European Union officials. As they
move within the union, they continue their education without disruptions. Students’
heritage language, the medium of instruction at least until Grade 8, continues as a
subject until Grade 12. Foreign language (French, English, or German) learning starts
in the first year of primary school. This language becomes a primary language of
instruction in secondary school. A third language is introduced in Grades 8 to 10.
Students can choose a fourth language in the final 2 years of schooling (Housen,
2002).
Parents and educators in dual-language programs often want children to develop
fluency in English, the international language of the moment. Such programs are
found in Europe, Israel, and other countries with national languages other than En-
glish. The Lauro Ikastola school, in the Basque region in Spain, houses a trilingual
program. Students include both Spanish-speakers and Basque-speakers. The goals
are competency in Basque and Spanish as well as oral and written proficiency in
English beyond survival skills (Cenoz, 1998).
A unique trilingual model for the purpose of introducing a language related to the
heritage, although not the first language of the students, is double immersion educa-
tion. Following the bilingual immersion model, private schools in Montreal catering
to upper- and middle-class English-speaking Jewish children implement different
versions of this model. The goal is to develop trilingualism in Hebrew, French, and
English (Genesee, 1998).

BILINGUAL EDUCATION IN THE WORLD

Bilingual education is an educational practice with an ancient history and worldwide

application. Most countries in the world offer bilingual programs in either public
or private schools and often in both. Typically the national or official language is
used for instruction, whereas the other language can be indigenous (aboriginal lan-
guages in Australia), another official language (Quechua in Peru), regional (Catalan
in Spain), the language of immigrants (Ukranian in Canada), the language of guest
workers (Turkish in Denmark), an international language (English in Indonesia), or
the language of sojourners (Japanese in the United States).
Bilingual education dates from 3000 B.C. when scribes in Mesopotamia were taught
in both Sumerian and Akkadian (Lewis, 1977). The specific languages used in bilingual
programs have changed over time in different countries but the rationale for bilingual
education has not changed much. Bilingual education is employed to meet two objec-
tives: educational goals and sociopolitical concerns. Educational systems and families
12 BRISK

often create bilingual education programs to promote fluency in a second language

that enjoys prestige or economical importance. Multilingual nations, mass migrations,
colonization, official status of languages, and concerns for language minorities also
call for bilingual education.

Elite Bilingual Education

Elites the world over have fostered prestigious languages. Romans promoted the
learning of Greek until Latin was considered “the sole safeguard of man’s store of
culture, science and faith” (Lewis, 1977, p. 27). French dominated the European high
culture for several centuries. From England to Russia, poets and authors used French
as their preferred language (Lewis, 1977). The growth of science in Germany during the
19th and early 20th centuries spurred teaching of German among budding scientists
in Europe and North America.
English is the language of prestige of the moment. It is one of the main or official
languages in more than 60 countries. About 400 million people speak English as a
first language, whereas 350 million speak it as a second language. It is currently the
preferred foreign language of study in the world. English is considered a key to global
communication in many fields such as science, technology, medicine, mass media,
the World Wide Web, research, and transnational business (Baker & Prys Jones, 1998;
Brutt-Griffler, 2002).
Elites recognize that limited teaching of a language, as in foreign language pro-
grams, seldom results in high levels of fluency. In many countries bilingual education
programs that include the national language and a language of prestige are common
in schools, especially in private schools frequented by children from affluent homes
(Baker & Prys Jones, 1998).
The present trend toward globalization sparks interest for bilingual abilities. Iron-
ically, at a time that bilingual education is under fire in the United States, educated
middle-class parents increasingly pressure public school systems to offer two-way
and second language immersion programs. At least 260 two-way bilingual programs
have developed in the United States mostly in the past 10 years. In these programs,
English speakers and speakers of another language learn side-by-side in both lan-
guages. The majority is in Spanish at the elementary level. Other languages used are
French, Chinese, Korean, and Navajo. A few expand to the high school level (Center
for Applied Linguistics, 2002).
During the mid-60s, English-speaking parents in St. Lambert, Quebec, realizing that
economic survival in Quebec would require proficiency in French, supported changes
in the way schools taught French. As a result, a new model of bilingual education,
French immersion, appeared. French immersion programs, which started as a pilot ex-
periment, are presently an educational option throughout Canada. Adaptations of this
model have spread worldwide as a way to educate middle- and upper-class non-native
speakers in a language that has prestige or economic value (Swain & Johnson, 1997).

An Educational Option for Language Diverse Groups

Political entities have always included speakers of different languages. In a world
of about 200 countries and 6,000 languages, multilingual nations are the rule not the
exception. Colonization, wars, and migration changed the linguistic landscape. In the
19th century, universal education turned schools into a tool to impose and spread
the use of the languages (and language varieties) of those with power.
Language education policies in multilingual nations are complex and vulnerable
to ideological changes. Those who speak a high-status language and want to main-
tain power, promote use of their language in education. They claim that speakers of
 1. BILINGUAL EDUCATION 13

languages or language varieties with low-social status are best educated in their (high
status) language. They feel that this knowledge will give them a fair chance to com-
pete in society (Porter, 1996; Rodriguez, 1982). Others argue that different linguistic
communities have a right to education in their language (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1988)
or that initiating instruction in home language accelerates literacy in all languages
(Cummins, 1984; Modiano, 1968).
For many years nations tended to require education in a language based on national
needs. Accordingly, the official language or the language of power in a nation is often
viewed as the natural vehicle for instruction. The result was that many children were
educated in their second language. A pioneering study conducted by the United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) revealed that
children educated in their second language experienced difficulties in school and that
the home language is critical because it is the vehicle through “which a child absorbs
the cultural environment” (UNESCO, 1953, p. 47). As a result of this report, the second
half of the 20th century witnessed a resurgence of interest in using students’ mother
tongue for instruction.
Colonization spread the power of the European languages around the world as
they became fundamental for government and education. Upon gaining indepen-
dence, countries where the colonizers became the majority (the Americas, Australia,
and New Zealand) through massive migration, brutal conquest, and imported dis-
eases, colonial languages became societal languages. As a result, indigenous popula-
tions now represent only a small percentage of such countries’ population. Economic
and political immigration of the past two centuries complicated the linguistic and
demographic composition of these countries.
Educational policies in these countries belatedly considered indigenous popula-
tions; however, non-indigenous populations were overlooked or merely offered tem-
porary educational assistance. The United States and Canada are exceptions. In these
two countries large populations of native speakers of Spanish or French exerted pres-
sure to establish bilingual education. Their work inspired and supported bilingual
education for other non-indigenous groups. Bilingual programs for indigenous pop-
ulations exist in these two countries, but their numbers are small when compared to
services for immigrant populations (Begay et al., 1995; Heimbecker, 1997; Jacobs &
Cross, 2001).
In New Zealand and Latin America, after years of imposing colonial languages in
education and government, new appreciation for the languages of indigenous pop-
ulations sparked some policy reversals. In New Zealand, Maori, the sole indigenous
language, was endangered when, in 1970, Maori-medium schools opened. By 1997,
19.3% of the Maori students were enrolled in Maori–English bilingual programs and
18.1% were learning Maori as a subject (Benton, 2001; Durie, 1997). Similarly in Bolivia,
a country where 63% of the population are native speakers of indigenous languages
(primarily Aymara and Quechua), bilingual education programs emerged, also in the
1970s. Bolivia’s education reform plan of 1994 requires public schools to use indige-
nous languages as the medium of instruction or at least offer it as a language class in
addition to Spanish (Hornberger & Lopez, 1998).
Bilingual education for both immigrants and indigenous populations exists in
Australia whose federal government more readily supports programs for the aborig-
ine than for the immigrant (Gibbons, 1997). An interesting feature of the Australian
situation is that many aborigine children do not speak their ancestral languages used
in the bilingual programs. Instead their native language is either aborigine English or
Kriol, languages that have low status even among the aborigine elders who oppose
their use in education (Harris & Devlin, 1997).
The colonial legacies in Africa and Asia are, of course, quite different because Euro-
pean migration was not nearly as massive and the indigenous populations survived,
14 BRISK

almost intact. The European population, which constitutes a small minority in Africa
and Asia, nevertheless successfully imposed their languages on government and busi-
ness elites. In the process of decolonization, many independent countries replaced the
artificially imposed European languages with traditional languages as the official lan-
guage. Others, for commercial or other reasons, actually continued the metropolitan
practice of advancing European languages over local ones. Bilingual education has
been used in both settings, that is, where local languages dominate as well as where
colonial languages retain their place.
In Kenya, Kiswahili—an African language widely used in West Africa—was added
as a main language of instruction. Both Kiswahili and English are taught from first
grade. Tribal languages are also used for instruction where there is a substantial con-
centration of speakers. Beginning in Grade 4, English becomes the sole language of
instruction (Bunyi, 1997). Although 22 out of 34 African countries reported using in-
digenous languages in education, “practices in many African countries show a trend
toward the increasing use of colonial languages as media of instruction” (Obondo,
1997, p. 26).
Shifts in language policies appeared also in Asia. Upon formation of the federation
of Malaysia in 1957, schools taught in either Malay, Tamil, Chinese, or English at
the elementary level and Malay and English at the secondary level. The increase in
power of indigenous populations promoted Malay as the predominant language of
instruction. Whereas relatively few schools use Tamil or Mandarin as a medium of
instruction, English has been relegated to the status of a foreign language.
India faces the greatest linguistic challenge with hundreds of local languages, 15 re-
gional official languages, a national official language (Hindi), and English, which re-
mains widely used. “One aim of Indian education is for children to become competent
in their native language plus Hindi and English” (Baker & Prys Jones, 1998, p. 464). In
reality, students are educated in their native or regional language in the early grades.
In Hindi-speaking regions, this language is favored, whereas in non-Hindi regions
English is preferred (Schiffman, 1999; Sridhar, 1991).
China, the one remaining empire in the world, includes Tibetan, Mongolian, Kazak,
and Korean speakers among many others. China eluded European colonization, ex-
cept in Macao and Hong Kong. Its educational policies toward language minorities
have fluctuated between pluralism to monolingualism aimed at imposing Mandarin.
The current stance, once again, embraces both Mandarin and another language as
media of instruction. Some schools use only one as the medium of instruction and the
other language taught as a subject. Use of a writing system and extending bilingual ed-
ucation to the university level, among other topics, are still being debated (Zhou, 2001).
Shifts in boundaries between countries, economic conditions, and political changes
complicate the linguistic composition in European countries. Different linguistic
groups survive within countries. Bilingual education emerged to satisfy the edu-
cational and identity needs of these groups. Ancient groups like the Frisians in the
Northern Netherlands preserved their language as either a medium of instruction or
taught as a language in all schools of the region so that teacher preparation in regional
programs at the university level must offer Frisian (Gorter, 1997). Bilingual programs
for majority students develop language proficiency in the languages of important
minority groups. In Finland, Finnish/Swedish immersion programs serve Finnish
speakers and an increasing number of bilingual families resulting from mixed mar-
riages (Bjorklund, 1997). Other programs aim at revitalizing languages on the brink
of extinction as in the case of Wales. About one fifth of all elementary and secondary
schools in Wales are now bilingual. In other schools, Welsh is taught as either a first
or second language (Baker, 1997).
The influx of guest workers and immigrants during the past century present new
challenges, especially in Europe. Europeans, used to dealing with language policy
 1. BILINGUAL EDUCATION 15

and education with respect to their own populations, assumed responsibilities for
children of foreign laborers. Some countries created mother tongue language pro-
grams presuming, sometimes hoping, that the families would return to their place of
origin and children would need to function in their own countries. Other countries
created transitional programs where students’ heritage language is used temporarily.
In the Netherlands students spend a year in the program where the native language is
used for instruction and orientation to the new school system. Other schools created
“consolidated” programs integrating immigrant students with nationals (Glenn & De
Jong, 1996).
Political changes alter the status of languages in a society and their use in edu-
cation. The end of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain featured recognition of the major
languages, including Catalan, Basque, Valencian, and Galician. Both Catalunia and
the Basque provinces have since experimented with schools using Spanish and their
regional language. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the retreat of colonial
powers in Asia and Africa necessitated changes in language policy. In 1992, Estonia’s
newly independent Ministry of Education established Estonian as the language of
instruction for all levels of education. Under the Soviet regime, Russian had been the
main language of instruction.

PRESENT TRENDS IN BILINGUAL EDUCATION

In the 21st century language policies in education are influenced by two contradictory
policies: promotion of bilingual education for the majority students and rejection of
bilingual education for minority students. Economic and political connections across
the planet influence language policies. To prepare their citizens to participate in global
affairs, schools support bilingual programs to develop high levels of proficiency in
foreign languages.
Increasing immigration to developed nations often produces xenophobic responses
including rejection of bilingual instruction for those who are not native speakers of
the national language. Bilingualism and maintenance of the heritage language is con-
sidered subversive and unpatriotic, whereas proficiency in the national language is
imperative. What is problematic is that “such unitary linguistic philosophy is taken as
the most natural state of affairs” (Lewis, 1977, p. 25) rather than as a more recent histor-
ical development. The rise of middle classes, industrialization, and the development
of the European nation–state established the importance of local national languages.
The move to universal education further encouraged imposition of the language of
those in power on the masses. Those who oppose bilingual education because, they
claim, it subverts political unity do not seem to be aware that there is no evidence that
a “uniformist language policy does safeguard the integrity of a linguistically diverse
state” (Lewis, 1977, p. 25).
Such opposition to bilingual education for language minorities is reflected in the
English-only movement that has been sweeping the United States since the 1980s. This
movement promoted English as the official language. Although legislation at the fed-
eral level has not succeeded, 23 states have passed such legislation (Crawford, 2000).2
Recently attacks have been directed to bilingual education proper. Since 1998 Califor-
nia, Arizona, and Massachusetts voters approved a referendum requiring replacement
of bilingual education by 1 year of English immersion followed by immediate inte-
gration into mainstream classrooms (Crawford, 2002b). Little public understanding
of bilingual education contributed to the passage of such measures. Opponents of
bilingual education are presently moving their efforts to other states.
Although at the federal level, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 supports bilin-
gual programs, it also places great emphasis on assessment in English language
16 BRISK

proficiency and content areas. Schools feel increasing pressure to focus on English
at the expense of heritage languages. Notably, the term “bilingual education” disap-
peared from the language of the legislation and offices supporting its implementation.
The new term “English language acquisition,” reflects the sentiment toward promo-
tion of English only.
Throughout the world bilingual programs serving non-indigenous people are in
jeopardy. Attacks are less often directed at programs that serve indigenous people.
For example, Proposition 203 in Arizona does not affect American Indian students
within or even outside reservations. In Australia bilingual programs for Aborigine
receive more support than programs for immigrant populations. In many countries
in Europe, controversies over bilingual education for guest workers contrast with
the emergence of bilingual programs for indigenous minorities, such as the Welsh,
Frisians, Basques, and others.
The implementation of bilingual education over time throughout the world has
varied in form and support. When it was implemented as an enriching educational
program, it received much support. Families cherish these schools because of their
high quality. But proposals to implement bilingual education for minorities change
depending on the ideology of those in power. These changes make programs unstable
with negative consequences on students’ educational success (Gibbons, 1997).

IMPLEMENTING BILINGUAL PROGRAMS

The actual implementation of bilingual programs involves a number of complex de-

cisions with respect to personnel, status of the program within the school, specific
language, literacy, and content area curriculum, instructional practices, and assess-
ment measures. To coordinate all these components takes time. Consistent support
during development and availability of resources affect ultimate implementation.
The process of implementation of programs has differed widely with noticeable
effects on their success. Programs established after research and planning carried
out by coalitions of administration, staff, families, and experts have a better chance
to succeed from the very beginning. Coral Way in Dade County, Florida, a pioneer
program in the United States, was initiated after research, planning, and curricula and
staff development (Mackey & Beebe, 1977).
Once established, these programs monitor students’ progress to test the soundness
of their practices. From the first year of implementation, a team of linguists assessed
language and academic skills as well as cognitive achievement of students enrolled in
the French immersion program in St. Lambert school in Montreal (Lambert & Tucker,
1972). The Amigos program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, enlisted some of these
same researchers to follow the progress of their students (Cazabon, Lambert, & Hall,
1993).
Programs responding to legislated mandates are typically developed in a rush
without much time for planning, recruitment, and preparation of staff, development
of curriculum, or acquisition of materials. The progress of students often goes un-
monitored or, if it is assessed by district-mandated measures, the performance of
students in bilingual programs is frequently not disaggregated. Such results are of
little use to teachers or administrators seeking to gage the effectiveness of the pro-
gram (Torres-Guzman, Abbate, Brisk, & Minaya-Rowe, 2002). It usually takes years
of strong leadership for these programs to succeed. Only 12% of the students in the
Rachel Carson School in Chicago were scoring at the state average when Kathleen
Mayer became principal. Seven years later more than half of the students had reached
or surpassed state standards. Yearly awards prove the continuous progress made by
this school (Portraits of Success, 2002).
 1. BILINGUAL EDUCATION 17

Shared Features of Successful Programs

Choosing an appropriate model does not ensure success.

Programs that work almost invariably have a small set of very well-specified goals . . . a
clear set of procedures and materials linked to those goals, and frequent assessments that
indicate whether or not students are reaching the goals. Effective programs leave little to
chance. They incorporate many elements, such as research-based curricula, instructional
methods, classroom management methods, assessments, and means of helping students
who are struggling, all of which are tied in a coordinated fashion to the instructional
goals. (Fashola, Slavin, Calderón, & Durán, 2001, p. 49)

Research on bilingual education demonstrates that successful programs share a num-

ber of features with respect to the school climate, curriculum, instruction, and assess-
ment.
Successful bilingual programs exist in school environments that promote respect
for the students and their families. Their languages and cultures are valued and in-
corporated in the curriculum. Students are well known by the staff, they are expected
to achieve, and are supported in this effort. Families are welcome in the school and
are considered partners in the education of the students. These schools embrace the
bilingual program and consider it an important component of their educational mis-
sion. Three major characteristics support the quality and stability of good programs:
strong and knowledgeable leadership, clear goals for the program, and quality per-
sonnel willing to help students succeed (Brisk, 1998; Carter & Chatfield, 1986; Lucas,
Henze, & Donato, 1990).
Models, to a degree, determine the uses of the languages for instruction. Successful
programs develop both languages and use them to promote academic achievement
and sociocultural integration. Regardless of the language policy adopted, consistency
of language use and cross-grade articulation help students’ development. (Christian,
Montone, Lindholm, & Carranza, 1997). Cultural considerations are essential in im-
plementing sound curricula, choosing materials, interacting with and disciplining
students, and understanding different ways to demonstrate knowledge. Quality bilin-
gual programs offer a full range of curricular options and expanded possibilities for
equal participation in extracurricular activities and other educational offerings in the
school. Successful bilingual programs keep up to date with the research on curriculum
and instruction. They seek to implement research-based practices (Fashola et al., 2001).
Good programs continually monitor their students’ progress in both languages
using multiple measures. For bilingual students assessment needs to include language
and content. Evaluation of language proficiency and content knowledge need to be
separated when carried out in the second language.

Controversial and Unresolved Practices

Despite general agreement on optimal practices, many implementation choices are
still controversial or unresolved. Among them are:

r Language goals.
r Measuring academic achievement.
r Promoting sociocultural integration.
r Uses of language in the curriculum including a) language of literacy introduc-
tion, b) teaching language through content area, c) separation of languages in
instruction.
r Incorporating culture.
18 BRISK
r Grouping students by ability within grade level and by L2 proficiency across
grade levels.
r Educating students with interrupted schooling.
r High-stakes testing.
r Segregating versus not segregating students.
r Native and instructional language of teachers.
r Parent involvement.
To be truly successful, bilingual programs must meet three basic goals for their
students: Develop language and literacy, encourage academic achievement, and pro-
mote sociocultural integration (Brisk, 1998). Agreement, in theory, on these goals often
obscures controversies regarding priorities and implementation.
The language goals of bilingual programs are an obvious source of controversy.
“Bilingual instruction generally aims for [competing] goals: to transition students
from a language they know to another language, or to add a language or languages
so that students become bi- or multilingual” (Christian & Genesee, p. 1).
Emphasis on transition can result in what Lambert (1977) calls “subtractive bilin-
gualism,” students learn a second language at the cost of losing their first language.
He believes bilingual programs should have “additive bilingualism” as a goal. To
be successful, programs should promote the acquisition and development of both
languages. In the United States all legislation supporting bilingual education gives a
priority to the acquisition of English. Title III of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001
states as its purpose “to help ensure that children who are limited English proficient,
including immigrant children and youth, attain English proficiency, develop high
levels of academic attainment in English” (The National Clearinghouse for Bilingual
Education, 2001, p. 1).
Although there is no disagreement as to the need to promote academic achievement,
educators and policymakers often disagree on how to measure it. The accountability
movement sweeping the United States narrows the definition of academic success to
passing standardized tests usually in English. Many educators believe that academic
achievement should be demonstrated in a variety of ways, including performance in
long-term projects that reflect skills required in real life situations (Sizer, 1992, 1995).
Issues of cultural identity have often been addressed in research on bilingual indi-
viduals (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2002). Bilingual
programs have been less purposeful in their goal of helping individuals define their
cultural affiliation. Few programs explicitly address the goal of sociocultural integra-
tion, that is, adjustment to the new cultural environment while able to function in the
heritage culture (Cazabon et al., 1993; De Jong, 2002).
There are still different approaches to the use of the languages and many unresolved
or controversial issues such as the choice of language for initial literacy, use of content
area for language instruction, and separation of languages for instruction. Bilingual
programs often initiate students to literacy in their native language. Canadian im-
mersion programs, however, do it in the students’ second language, whereas other
programs introduce literacy in both at the same time. All claim success in spite of
their different approaches. When students’ native language is a major language, such
as Japanese in Japan, methods that introduce literacy in the second language work
(Lambert & Tucker, 1972). When the native language is vulnerable, achieving literacy
first in that language is essential (Cummins, 1984; Garcia, 2000). Despite research sup-
porting the value of native language instruction, especially for literacy initiation, some
parents and educators question its usefulness. In communities in Africa and Asia,
European languages are essential to communicate globally. There is much resistance
to introducing literacy in the local languages. A minority of parents and educators
support initial education in the native languages as they are concerned by students’
 1. BILINGUAL EDUCATION 19

failure when educated in a foreign language, particularly in rural areas where the
European languages have little use (Baker, 2002).
Some educators maintain that teaching content through a second language fa-
cilitates acquisition of a second language. Others point out that explicit language
objectives must be included in the content lessons if language learning is to occur
(Freeman & Freeman, 1998). Some programs strictly separate languages as a require-
ment for second language development. Other researchers emphasize the value of
using both languages in literacy and content area teaching (Jacobson, 1990). Literacy
development in the second language is often supported by the use of students’ native
language. Use of two languages helps develop skills writing, reading comprehension,
and clarifying vocabulary (Lucas & Katz, 1994).
How culture is defined differs. Some schools believe that culture is introducing his-
torical facts, highlighting traditions, and exhibiting artifacts (Nieto, 2000). In a deeper
sense, culture influences many aspects of education such as curriculum content, as-
sumptions about background knowledge, teaching approaches, classroom interaction
and management, school routines, and parental participation. Schools that embrace
this broader definition of culture have successfully educated children of diverse cul-
tural backgrounds (Saravia-Shore & Arvizu, 1992).
Grouping students for instruction triggers controversy. Bilingual students vary
among themselves in language proficiency and cognitive abilities, making grouping
very complex. There are valid arguments for heterogeneous as well as homoge-
neous grouping. Heterogeneous grouping challenges students, whereas homoge-
neous grouping helps address specific needs (Radencich et al., 1995). Some programs
group bilingual students for second language instruction by English ability across
grade level. This type of grouping impedes integration of language with content in-
struction (Met, 1994).
An increasing educational problem faced by bilingual programs serving immigrant
and refugee populations is students with limited schooling. Economic and political prob-
lems often interrupt schooling. Children leave school to help their families or they find
themselves for months in refugee camps where little instruction takes place. Upon
moving, if they are enrolled in school according to their age, they may be unable to
cope with the curriculum. At issue is the language of instruction. Some question the
wisdom of instructing them in their native language when they have so much to catch
up and they need the language of school to further their education. Others maintain
that, as with younger learners, the native language is an important tool for literacy
and academic learning (Mace-Matluck, Alexander-Kasparik, & Queen, 1998).
Assessment of bilinguals is particularly controversial. In many countries, the high-
stakes nature of tests creates barriers for language minority students in their progress
through school. Often these students are retained, placed in special education classes,
or drop out of school (Haney, 2002). In the United States, to cope with this predica-
ment, schools have experimented with accommodations or have exempted bilingual
learners from tests. Policies of accommodations (such as extended length of testing
time, breaking up the tests, assessing in the native language or in both, providing
dictionaries, reading items aloud, and others) are promoted by some but opposed by
others (August & Hakuta, 1997; Rivera, Stansfield, Scialdone, & Sharkey, 2000). Of
greater concern is the practice of exempting students. Although it sounds fair, the
motivation is not to help students but to help raise the districts’ total scores (Suárez-
Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2002). Failing to monitor such students’ performance can,
in the long run, jeopardize their academic development.
Bilingual programs struggle with the dilemma of segregation and integration. Bilin-
gual students have needs that require specialized attention requiring some level of
segregation. Yet integration of language minorities with mainstream populations is
essential for their education and social acceptance and enhances the education of
20 BRISK

majority students (Brisk, 1991; De Jong, 1996; Glenn & De Jong, 1996). Two-way pro-
grams have been questioned as to whether they serve minority students. Some believe
that higher status of majority students is still reflected in these programs (Freeman,
1998). Some claim that language and academic needs of the majority students take
priority in programmatic decisions (Valdez, 1997). The Barbieri two-way program in
Framingham, Massachusetts, through assessment of students and changes in curricu-
lum and language of instruction, addresses such concerns (De Jong, 2002).
Successful bilingual teachers need to be both academically prepared and able to
function as advocates for bilingual students. The criterion for language fluency still
stirs controversy. Some believe teachers should only teach in their native language.
Yet, non-native speakers of either language can make significant contributions. In
Australia, the bilingual programs for aborigenes assigned teachers to instruction
strictly along native language lines. Over time, aborigene teachers acquired fluency in
English and began taking over the instruction in English. The strategy led to strength-
ening the control of the programs by aborigene people (Harris & Devlin, 1997). On the
other hand, having majority culture teachers as bilingual teachers often helps bridge
the gap with school administrators (Brisk, 1991).
Parent participation in education is a cornerstone of student success. For many years
most researchers assumed that this participation must include attending school meet-
ings and other traditional mainstream ways of participation. Research among families
of various cultures challenges these assumptions, demonstrating that participation in
education can take different forms with comparable success. The problem lies in the
misunderstandings between schools and home as to what constitutes parental partic-
ipation in education (Trumball, Rothstein-Fisch, Greenfield, & Quiroz, 2001).

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Bilingual education programs have in common the use of two or more languages for
instruction, but that is where the similarities end. The reasons for developing programs
are varied, the models are multiple, and the specific ways of implementing each
component pit researchers against each other. Programs are mostly developed either
to enhance the education of students or to support a language policy. Programs created
to educate students and provide them with the advantage of bilingualism usually
require combined efforts of communities and educators, sometimes supported by the
local education system. Most common are programs established to develop language
skills of students in entire regions or countries. The need for such programs emerges
from the multilingual nature of countries, the establishment of an official language or
languages, the need to develop a common language for broader communication, and
the affirmation of ethnic groups.
Programs developed by edict to educate students in particular languages osten-
sibly have an educational goal but, in reality, follow a political agenda to impose
or support a particular language, with much less attention to the needs of individ-
ual students. Such is the case of transitional programs that aim at imposing lan-
guages of power in a nation, programs for guest workers in the language of their
country regardless of the native language of the students, and revitalization pro-
grams in a language that children never spoke. The creation of such programs often
has a credible rationale. Nations want their citizens to share a language, whereas
communities are concerned with the rapid extinction of their heritage languages.
Proponents should never lose sight that the goal of education is to develop chil-
dren and not to defend languages. Such programs require strong leaders and car-
ing teachers who never forget that their main charge are the students. Monitoring
students’ academic and linguistic development, as well as patterns of sociocultural
 1. BILINGUAL EDUCATION 21

affiliation, are better measures of success than whether a particular language domi-
nates the curriculum.
Controversies surrounding bilingual education are often reflected in contradictory
research promoted to defend various stances. Unfortunately, research is too often
manipulated to support particular ideologies. Moreover, educational policy sadly
disregards research in bilingual education and imposes the governmental ideology of
the moment. Neither bilingual education programs nor the controversy about them
will ever go away. Great variation in models, changes in policies, and disagreements
about specific implementation practices illustrate the variability and changing nature
of bilingual education implementation. The quest for the perfect model is unrealistic
and misguided. Children are best served with research that looks at specific practices
leading to educating families and teachers on ways that children develop and learn
in different languages. To best serve a defined group of students research must be
contextual and implementation should bring together families, schools, and policy-
makers.

NOTES

1. As defined by Nieto (2000) “consists of the values, traditions, social and political relationships, and
worldview created, shared, and transformed by a group of people bound together by a common history,
geographic location, language, social class and/or religion.” (p. 139).
2. For frequent updates check Crawford, 2002a.

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2

ESL in Elementary Education

Margaret R. Hawkins
University of Wisconsin–Madison

INTRODUCTION

This chapter focuses on research on second language acquisition (SLA) in elementary

schools. Although the discussion centers primarily on English language acquisition as
it relates to schools and classrooms, it also promotes a view of language learning and
schooling as situated social processes. In order to fully understand how languages
are acquired in schools, we must explore the social worlds of the learners and the
institutions and uncover the vast range of connections between students’ languages,
learning, cultures, and identities.
Within the field of second language acquisition, there has been a gradual shift
in perspectives. Early research, beginning in the 1970s, focused on psycholinguis-
tic views of language learning, placing the locus of learning inside the individual
learner, and focusing on formal features of language. Typical topics addressed in such
research were the order of morpheme acquisition, pronunciation, optimal age of acqui-
sition, and interlanguage development1 (Krashen & Terrell, 1983; Long, 1990). As the
field began to embrace sociolinguistic perspectives, researchers began to look more at
language as a communicative tool, with language use a way to negotiate meaning be-
tween interactants in social encounters. Thus, language use is seen as always situated
in particular and specific contexts, occurring between interlocuters who bring to the
interaction (and represent) their own meanings and understandings. Interaction itself
thus becomes the locus of meaning and learning, with researchers focusing on un-
derstanding what shapes interactions in situated encounters, and what effects they in
turn produce. This has given rise to research looking at topics such as cultural norms in
and for communication (and mismatches between cultural groups), differing linguis-
tic codes as appropriate to and used within specific social contexts, and relationships
between learners’ cultures, identities, and language use. Most recently, there has been
a move toward critical applied linguistics, which overtly claims that language cannot
be understood outside of the power relations that shape the interactions within which
it occurs. These power relations, although played out through local and situated in-
teractions, are formed through larger discourses at play in institutions and societies.
Commensurate with shifts within the field of SLA, new understandings have been
emerging within the larger fields of education as to how we define learning, teaching,

25
26 HAWKINS

literacies, and classrooms. Learning, once looked at primarily as the transference of

knowledge from the knower to the learner, is being reframed as social apprenticeship,
where the learner comes to appropriate new forms of knowledge (and language and
literacies) through social activities in specific local environments. Lev Vygotsky, a Rus-
sian psychologist whose work is currently being taken up broadly in education, has
called this the “zone of proximal development” (ZPD), wherein learners come to new
understandings and practices through apprenticeship to more knowledgeable oth-
ers (Vygotsky, 1986). Forms of language and literacy practices in schools are viewed
as specific situated discourses, as are modes of teaching and learning. Different cul-
tures value and privilege different practices and modes, thus rendering schools as
sites where multiple and often conflicting cultural models of language use, teaching
practices, and forms of literacy are enacted.
This calls for a shift in our perceptions as to what SLA research might look like in
classrooms and schools and calls into question what we are researching and how. It
reinforces the need for a comprehensive and coherent framework—a view of class-
rooms as sites of learning that defines what language and literacy mean to the local
participants and how acquisition occurs. This chapter provides an articulation of this
paradigm shift, the impact on research agendas into the schooling of young second
language learners, and an overview of the research areas and findings to date.

TERMINOLOGY

Within the field of English language teaching and learning there are a number of
acronyms and terms that call for explanation. The field itself has been referred to as
ESL, TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), ESOL (English as
a Second or Other Language), and TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language).
Criticisms of these terms range from feelings of false assumptions (that English is a
student’s second language, whereas in many instances it may be their third, fourth,
etc.) to the bulkiness of the terms themselves. More recently proffered are the acronyms
EAL (English as an Additional Language) and ELT (English Language Teaching),
which, although preferable, have not thus far been widely taken up.
Students who come from language backgrounds other than English and are in the
process of learning English have been referred to as LES (Limited English Speaking),
LEP (Limited English Proficient), and NNES (Non-Native English Speakers). Criti-
cisms of these stem from perceptions of indications of deficiency (that students are
lacking something, as opposed to being advantaged by knowing multiple languages).
Alternatives are, again, using bulky phrases such as “students from diverse linguistic
and cultural backgrounds,” or the more recent ELLs (English Language Learners).
This chapter will use EAL to refer to the field, and ELLs to refer to the students, as
these terms are the most inclusive of the current options.

A FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING CLASSROOMS

The previous discussion begins to explicate a shift in the way classrooms and learning
are viewed and understood. One major goal of this chapter is to closely articulate
this emerging perspective and why it is important, then to situate current research
within this new paradigm. I have elsewhere identified seven key constructs, which
taken together form a cohesive framework for understanding language and literacy
development in classrooms (Hawkins, 2004). In brief, these are:
r Communities of Learners/Communities of Practice
A view of classrooms as environments that promote “scaffolded interaction,”
where “communities of learners” engage in cultural practices, with participants
 2. ESL IN ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 27

taking on various and different (“asymmetrical”) roles over time. Knowledge is

distributed across the community, not in the possession of any one individual
member, thus available to all through activity-based interactions. (Brown, 1994;
Lave, 1996; Rogoff, 1994)
r Zone of Proximal Development/Apprenticeship
Learning as a process of “apprenticeship” where apprentices collaborate in (me-
diated) social practices with teachers and more expert peers, thus affording scaf-
folding, or support, in the process of acquiring/constructing new forms of inter-
action, language, and thinking. (Vygotsky, 1978, 1986; Wertsch, 1998)
r Identities/Positioning
The socially situated identities participants in social interaction take on at any
given time are a complex integration of their diverse sociocultural experiences,
the sociocultural experiences of others in the interaction, the structure and flow of
language, participation and negotiation in the interaction, and the larger cultural
and institutional settings within which the interactions take place. (Bernstein,
1990; Edwards & Potter, 1992; Fairclough, 1992; Hanks, 1996; Schegloff, Ochs, &
Thompson, 1996)
r Power/Status
Meaning and social relationships are interdependent. Social interactions are sit-
uated in specific local contexts, which are always part and parcel of larger social,
institutional, and community contexts. Embedded are ideologies, beliefs, and
values, which are carried out and reproduced through the unfolding social in-
teractions. (Foucault, 1980; Lemke, 1995)
r Multiple (Social) Languages
No language exists as a general thing. Rather, each language is comprised of many
different “social languages,” that is, different styles of language that communicate
different socially situated identities (who is acting) and socially situated activities
(what is being done). Every social language communicates in use, as it creates and
reflects specific social contexts, socially situated identities integrally connected
to social groups, cultures, and historical formations. (Bakhtin, 1981; Gee, 1996)
r Multiple Literacies
Literacies are defined as the requisite knowledge and skills to send and interpret
messages through multiple media and modes in (rapidly changing) local and
global contexts—and to align meanings within situated social practices. (Cope &
Kalantzis, 1999; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001)
r Classroom-as-Ecology
Classrooms viewed as ecological systems—the co-dependence of factors that
together construct and define the nature of the learning that takes place.

These constructs taken together provide a view of classrooms as complex ecolog-

ical systems. Learning is no longer seen as merely a matter of transmitting context-
independent knowledge. Traditional notions of “knowledge,” “language,” “literacy,”
and “learning” are challenged and complexified. Learning occurs as people engage
in (socially situated) activities with others, and knowledge is distributed among all
participants (with the value of what counts as “knowledge” being contextually de-
termined). The activities themselves carry social meanings largely through the forms
of language and literacies used to negotiate the interactions. What counts as “knowl-
edge” and which forms of language and literacy practices are privileged are in large
part determined by the larger societal and institutional contexts within which the site
of learning is situated, but also susceptible to being in part shaped by the local inter-
actions themselves (see Hawkins, 2000). Thus, in order to understand how language
and literacy learning works in schools, it is not enough to delineate and explore dis-
crete categories such as “curriculum,” “materials,” “methods,” “learning styles,” or
28 HAWKINS

FIG. 2.1. Interrelationships between the classroom’s ecological systems.

“vocabulary” to research as independent variables, we must now look at how mean-

ings (and ideologies) are represented through and carried by these media, and the
negotiations that occur around them within the specific site.
Figure 2.1 attempts to represent the interrelationships between these complex dy-
namics. Each participant in the classroom (with students represented by “s” and the
teacher by “t”) embodies and represents larger discourses into which they have been
socialized. These are represented by the circles labeled “families,” “communities,”
and “cultures.” Interactions in classrooms are a dance in which the diverse beliefs,
values, and practices from each are constantly being negotiated by the learner and
among learners (around specific school-based activities). But this is not happening in
a space devoid of its own ideologies and practices. It is happening in a classroom,
which itself is situated in larger institutional, cultural, and societal contexts. These
are represented by the rings around the classroom. And the culturally valued ways
of knowing, learning, and communicating are filtered through the system and bear
significant weight on classroom interactions and practices too.
Figure 2.1 accounts for factors at play in classroom ecologies. What is not repre-
sented, however, is the fluidity and movement of change. The diagram is static, rep-
resenting factors and interactions as fixed. But an ecological system is a living thing—
constantly shifting, with forces aligning and realigning to shape new landscapes.
 2. ESL IN ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 29

Thus, just as learner forms of language are not fixed but shift and develop through
time, so do all other components within the ecology, constantly redesigning the inter-
relations between them and the meanings assigned to them. What this means, then,
is that we cannot account for, say, a participant’s “culture,” or “identity,” without
acknowledging that at best we are describing interpretations at a particular moment
in time.2
Thus, research into English language learning in classrooms must account for not
only discrete variables and components of language and language learning, but for
ways in which these “pieces” come together to form a whole—an ecology within
which it is the dynamics between and among variables that accounts for the learning
that takes place.

LEARNING ENGLISH IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS

Thus far, our conversation about languages and learning has been general and ap-
plicable to learners of any age in almost any formal setting. This chapter, however, is
specifically dedicated to looking at young learners. How does (and should) research
differ when learners’ ages are taken into account?
In U.S. schools, the practice of teaching English to young learners is becoming
increasingly complex. The number of newcomers is growing rapidly. Data from the
United States Department of Education show that the number of students with “lim-
ited English skills” in U.S. schools has doubled in the last decade, with the current
count at 5 million. In the 1999–2000 census, 1 out of every 12 students was identified
as Limited English Proficient (Crawford, 2000). The backgrounds of the students are
becoming increasingly diverse, and the politics around “best programs” and “best
practices” are shifting. Teachers are serving new populations with little guidance as
to how best to do so. In other countries language policies are changing as well, and
many are implementing English classes at earlier grade levels in schools. Since 1999,
for example, Taiwan has extended the teaching of English to the elementary level as
standard curriculum, and the government is now working on a bilingual policy and
law to make both the Mandarin dialect of Chinese and English the official languages
in 2010. What such policies mean is that curriculum will have to be developed and
teachers trained in pedagogy and methods for young children. Thus, we need to know
what is particular about young learners, and what we need to know to support their
acquisition of English.
Young children are at the nexus of multiple social worlds and realities and are
in the formative stages of developing schemata about them. They are apprenticing
to the social worlds and practices of school as well as to those of their homes and
communities. For children whose home languages and cultures differ significantly
from those of the school, they must learn to negotiate very different social worlds,
with differing norms, rules, expectations, and value systems. This means not only
acquiring a linguistic system that they may not have access to at home, but also the
sociocultural competence to successfully negotiate an identity as a “learner” in school.
A number of early studies have shown that children come to school embedded
in culturally specific language and literacy practices (Cazden, 1988; Heath, 1983; Lee,
1993; Michaels, 1981). They have different understandings of how and when to partic-
ipate in group interactions, exposure to different forms of texts, and differing ways of
interacting with text and print. One implication of this is that in early grades in school,
although many of the children have emergent literacy skills, the resources, strategies,
and experiences that mainstream children bring may resonate more closely with those
represented and valued in the school setting, thus enabling them to more readily ac-
cess and engage with school-based forms of language and literacy.
30 HAWKINS

REVIEW OF RESEARCH

We now turn to research that has been conducted on English language learning and
teaching in elementary schools. We do so, however, with two caveats. The first is
that there has been much written about language learners in elementary schools and
best practices that does not represent original empirical research. Although these
publications may be helpful to further awareness of issues, they will not be reviewed
here. The second is that there have been relatively few empirical studies, to date,
carried out on English language learning in elementary classrooms, particularly in
the very early years of schooling. Diane August and Kenji Hakuta edited a review
of research on the education of language minority students in 1998. They summarize
what has been learned, but also point to many issues not yet adequately addressed.
They claim:

Research is needed . . . to examine effective educational practice for special populations:

(1) the effects of instructional interventions and social environments on the linguistic,
social, and cognitive development of young children. (p. 85)

In addition to a sparse number of studies, many existing studies focus on a specific

issue within narrow limited boundaries. Although there is certainly a need for greater
information into the discrete components of language use and learning, this is per-
haps a necessary but not sufficient condition for understanding language learning
and teaching dynamics. Within the context of the framework previously explicated,
we need not only to identify the individual components but also the complex ways in
which they interact within the ecology of the classroom to support language devel-
opment. August and Hakuta claim:

An important contribution to understanding variability in second-language acquisition

would be an enhanced understanding of the components of English proficiency and how
these components interact. Also important is the question of how proficiencies in the two
languages of bilinguals are interrelated and how language and other domains of human
functioning interact. (p. 19)

Thus, in the ensuing discussion we will address and describe the existing research,
keeping in mind that we must not only understand the discrete points being made,
but also the connections between the areas of inquiry.

Effective Instruction
As our understandings of language learning in and for classrooms has evolved, the is-
sues surrounding instruction have become ever more complex. In 1986 Jim Cummins
presented a theoretical model in which he distinguished between Basic Interpersonal
Communication Skills (BICS) and Cognitive Academic Learning Skills (CALPS). The
significance of this distinction is that there is a difference in the language needed
to communicate interpersonally on an informal basis and that needed to success-
fully participate in school-based learning. This aligns with our earlier discussion of
languages being not unitary entities, but having multiple forms. Successful language
users must recruit the appropriate form for the specific interaction/discourse in which
they are attempting to participate. Cummins’ and subsequent research has shown that
it takes 1 to 3 years for learners to acquire BICS, and 3 to 7 to acquire CALPS (Collier,
1987; Cummins, 1986; Thomas & Collier, 1997). Thus, with the underlying assumption
that the role of teachers is to support children to be successful in school, researchers
have looked into the specific forms of language required for participation and how to
scaffold acquisition for students. In an early study Lily Wong Fillmore analyzed talk
 2. ESL IN ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 31

in third and fifth grade classrooms across subject areas to identify language functions
used in instructional activities. She says:

Students who are able to participate in lessons with self-initiated informative sequences . . .
and to provide explanations, descriptions, and narrations, appear to get more out of in-
structional activities . . . They also need to provide a variety of request forms- in order
to get the teacher’s attention or to get a turn, to ask for help, permission, information,
clarification, or individual attention or help. (Wong Fillmore, 1982, p. 154)

She claims that the ability to produce such structures as relational statements, defini-
tions, summaries, and exemplifications serve two purposes: they provide access for
the student to the instruction and content matter; and they construct the teacher’s
perception as to whether the student is participating successfully, both of which are
necessary conditions for school success.
More recently, Wong Fillmore (2001) has addressed the area of academic English,
claiming, “what all students, including ELLs must have to deal with the new ex-
pectations (curriculum and assessment reforms, benchmark testing, etc.) is a mature
understanding of the English used in texts and in academic settings” (p. 2). She claims
that academic English “tends to be more precise and specific in reference than every-
day English, be more complex syntactically, and be more dependent on ‘text’ than on
‘context’ for interpretation” (p. 2). Thus, effective instruction means teaching that fo-
cuses not on development of decontextualized vocabulary and grammatical features,
but that supports students’ abilities to engage with the multiple forms of language,
literacies, and texts represented and valued in schools.

Content Area Learning

Currently researchers both within and outside the field of EAL are focusing on content-
specific forms of knowledge and the language necessary to represent and claim that
knowledge. This work has been done primarily in the areas of math, science, and social
studies, which in addition to English/language arts are considered the “core” areas
that students must master to be successful in school. Questions being asked are: How
is it that scientists (or mathematicians or historians) talk, think, and act in order to
successfully participate in the discourse community of the discipline? And how do
we socialize students to talk, think, and act like scientists (or mathematicians or his-
torians)? This aligns with the shift to conceptualizing classrooms as communities of
learners apprenticing to new discourse communities and to the attendant forms of
language. Within EAL, researchers have explored ways of using language specific to
math, science, and social studies to identify the specific forms of language attendant
to these areas and where they may present difficulties to ELLs. Although much of
this research has been conducted at upper grade levels, researchers have identified
disciplinary-specific properties and language structures that bear on early instruction
as well. For example, in the area of math, there are:

r Explanations without concrete references.

r Narrow context, few cues or referents, little redundancy.
r Terms with specialized meanings (e.g., table, altogether).
r Combination and complex strings of words with specialized meaings (e.g., square
root, least common denominator).
r Word problems (combinations of language comprehension and computation).
r Differences (from students’ native cultures) in math symbols.
r Writing verbal input in numerical and symbolic code.

(Derived from Chamot & O’Malley, 1994; Secada & Carey, 1990.)
32 HAWKINS

For social studies, potential difficulties arise from:

r Explanations without concrete referents.
r High literacy level required.
r Requirement of conceptual understanding of time, chronology, distance, and
differing ways of life.
r Specialized vocabulary, often with words representing complex set of ideas (e.g.,
democracy, representation).
r Long sentences, multiple embedded clauses.
r Tense forms and markings relative to the period being studied, using complex
structures such as “had had,” or “supposed to have had.”
r Cause-and-effect statements common and often inverted (sentences begin with
“Because. . . ”).

(Derived from Chamot & O’Malley, 1994; Eschevarria, Vogt, & Short, 2000; McKeown
& Beck, 1994.)

In the area of science, there has perhaps been more attention paid by researchers to
young learners than in the areas of math or social studies. Difficulties can be caused
by:
r Expository discourse.
r Expectation of ability to make inferences from given facts.
r Developing hypotheses.
r Structuring experiments.
r Classification systems.
r Noting and describing (experiments).
r Multiple-step directions.
r Complex grammatical forms (passive voice, multiple embeddings, long noun
phrases, if–then constructions).

(Derived from Chamot & O’Malley, 1994; Eschevarria, Vogt, & Short, 2000.)

Identifying specific forms of language used in individual content areas highlights

differences between home- and school-based language, which, as discussed earlier,
is more divergent for children from nonmainstream backgrounds. It informs us as to
the importance of differentiating between “social” and “academic” language; of the
teacher’s responsibility to address and incorporate specific language forms, features,
and functions into instruction; and of the necessity of socializing children into content-
specific language practices beginning in the early years of schooling. To amplify this
discussion, we will turn to current research and conversations in the area of science.
There is a small but growing body of work on science exploration in elementary
schools specifically as it relates to diverse learners. Researchers are exploring the rela-
tionships between “everyday language” and science processes (Michaels & Sohmer,
2000, Warren et al., 2000; Warren & Rosebery, 2000), focusing on identifying ways in
which the child’s first language can be recruited as an “intellectual resource.” Much of
this work looks at the disparity between culturally embedded communicative styles
and those valued in schools and explores instructional approaches designed to maxi-
mize and validate home- and community-based speech and interaction styles (Fradd
& Lee, 1999) in service of science inquiry. Fradd and Lee’s (1999) study of fourth-
grade science students points to teachers’ tacit assumptions about students’ prior
knowledge. They claim, “By the time students arrive in fourth grade, many skills are
assumed and therefore not taught” (p. 19). Yet some students had never seen basic
measurement instruments (such as thermometers, rulers, and scales). They had no
 2. ESL IN ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 33

experience with measuring and recording information, with tables and charts, nor
with “accurate descriptions” or explanations of occurrences. These are all gatekeep-
ers and even by fourth grade are indicators of school success versus failure. Although
prior knowledge and experience must be recruited to scaffold comprehension of new
concepts (and language), students also need knowledge and skills in using the forms
of language and literacy specific to the study of science in school, which utilizes
concepts, vocabulary, tools and processes not necessarily represented in home- or
community-based discourses. Thus, more attention must be paid to exploring pro-
cesses of “bridging” what students bring with what they are required to do to claim
academic competence in school.

Reading and Writing

The areas of reading and writing together are often referred to as “literacy.” For the sake
of clarity this chapter will not use that term in this way because the term “literacies”
has already been used to signify a broader range of skills and knowledge needed
to communicate through multiple media and technologies.3 In addition, reading and
writing have been historically separated in the research of young ELLs in schools, with
reading being perhaps the most researched single area of focus (and less having been
done in the area of writing), though August & Hakuta claim, “With regard to reading
instruction in second language, there is remarkably little direct relevant research”
(1998, p. 20). In the following discussion of the teaching and learning of reading
and writing in schools, a foundational assumption will be that the ideal outcome of
schooling for ELLs is full bilingualism and biliteracy; that is, the ability to function
fluently (across all skill areas) in both languages.
One of the most heated debates internationally in the education of young children
who are being schooled in a language other than their mother tongue centers on the
language of instruction. Nowhere is this more evident than in discussions on reading
instruction. Reading is often viewed as the foundation for all other areas of schooling.
Reading instruction should be guided by solid information as to the relationships
between language proficiency and the acquisition of reading skills, and guidance as to
how best to manage the two languages in instruction. Geva & Verhoeven (2001) state:

In deciding on the best approach to teaching bilingual children to read, three main ed-
ucational approaches can be distinguished. Children can be totally immersed in an L2
literacy curriculum, they can initially be instructed in the native language (in which case
the transition to the L2 is made after a period of time), or they can be given bilingual
literacy instruction from the onset. (p. 2)

There are two major modes of research into this issue. One compares achievement
of children’s reading ability as “products” of the different approaches by comparing
achievement of specific discrete reading skills and strategies. The other explores the
effects on children’s reading ability of factors relating to their home, cultural, and
linguistic knowledge and skill base.
The first type tends to divide reading into discrete (measurable) components. The
primary subsets of skill areas involved in reading have been identified as phonemic
awareness, phonics, vocabulary development, reading fluency (including oral read-
ing skills), and reading comprehension strategies (Antunez, 2002). Examples of this
type of research are international studies looking at children’s acquisition of French
plural morpheme markers (English/French; Cormier & Kelson, 2001), word decoding
efficiency (Dutch/English; Verhoeven, 2001), and phonemic and phonological aware-
ness and word recognition (English/Hebrew; Spanish/English; Durgunoglu, Nagy
& Hancin-Bhatt, 1993; Wade-Woolley & Geva, 2001). One major focus of this type of
research is transfer—that is, the degree to which discrete skills in reading in the first
34 HAWKINS

language transfer to the second language. These skills are not examined as relational
to other factors, such as the literacy practices engaged in at home or prior schooling
experiences. These studies have a relatively consistent finding that can inform deci-
sion making as to language of instruction: Young English learners at the same grade
level and from the same language background who are instructed in reading in their
first language have roughly equivalent reading skills (as measured by acquisition of
discrete components) in reading in English as those who are given reading instruc-
tion in English. Those who receive reading instruction in English do have slightly
more advanced skills in listening and speaking in English. But those instructed in
the first language have more advanced reading and comprehension skills in the first
language. There is ample evidence that reading skills do transfer across languages.
The children’s reading comprehension in English is affected by their proficiency in
English and by the levels of literacy in their first language, but not by the language
of instruction. (August, Calderon, & Carlo, 2000; Carlisle, & Beeman, 2000; Kendall,
LaJeunesse, Chmilar, Shapson, & Shapson, 1987).
The second approach tends to contextualize the subsets of skills and strategies
attributed to reading proficiency. This limited body of research looks at the prior
knowledge students bring to school and to reading tasks, familiarity with the format
of literacy activities and tests, instructional design, strategies students use to access
texts, and attitudes toward reading. A key shift is that these studies do not locate the
acquisition of reading skills within the learner—that is, a child’s success in learning to
read in English may not be (solely) a product of his or her innate linguistic and cogni-
tive skills and abilities. Consistent with the metaphor of an ecology, it is the interaction
of a multitude of factors that constitute the learning/acquisition of reading skills.
Jimenez, Garcia, and Pearson (1995) state that “additional research needs to focus
on understanding how the reading of bilingual students of varied reading proficien-
cies, languages, and ages differs from that of their monolingual counterparts” (p. 93).
In two studies (1995, 1996) they examined factors contributing to the reading profi-
ciency (in English) of Latino children. They investigated learners’ strategies, text in-
teractions, transfer of skills across languages, and attitudes. In comparisons between
successful and less successful readers, they found that more successful (Anglo and
Latino) readers “could access well-developed networks of relevant prior knowledge”
(1996, p. 91) and encountered fewer unfamiliar vocabulary words and concepts, thus
enabling them to attend more to comprehension. They also found that learners who
could explicitly recruit language and reading strategies fared better, leading them to
recommend a more explicit focus in instruction on awareness of language features
and learning strategies. They conclude that “students may possess untapped poten-
tial that is limited by models of reading based entirely on the thinking and behavior
of monolingual Anglo readers” (1996, p. 93). These themes of what learners bring and
the strategies they use resonate with the work of Garcia (1991). His study focused on
the reading test performance of Hispanic children, also at the fifth and sixth grade
levels. He noted that:

their test performance was adversely affected by their limited prior knowledge of certain
test topics, their poor performance on the scriptally implicit questions (which required
use of background knowledge), their unfamiliarity with vocabulary terms used in the
test questions and answer choices. (p. 371)

There have been several studies of the development of reading and writing skills
in young children, all of which look at the histories and cultural practices children
bring to school. Edelsky (1986) conducted an early study of children’s writing in a
Spanish–English bilingual program in the United States that took into account fea-
tures of their writing (code-switching, spelling, punctuation, etc.) but also contextual
 2. ESL IN ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 35

factors relating to the classroom, home, and communities of the children. A more
recent study by Masny & Ghahremani-Ghajar (1999) examined “literacy events” in
the classroom and the homes of Somalian children in Canada, noting that the iden-
tities and voices children brought to school were not validated in school practices of
reading and writing. Both studies call for pedagogical practices that incorporate the
histories, knowledge, and voices of the children. Similarly, a recent study by Pransky
and Bailey (2002) looks at the “mismatches” between classroom and home language
and communication practices of the students, calling for teachers to take on investiga-
tory roles in assessing classroom literacy events. In a study of instructional practices
in reading for ELLS conducted at the second-grade level, Leu (1997) showed how
the design of reading instruction (e.g., ability grouping, methods of instruction based
on mainstream students’ acquisition of reading, inappropriate materials, low teacher
expectations) negatively impacted students’ progress.
What these studies indicate is a serious mismatch for ELLs between the knowledge
and experiences children bring to school and those represented in curriculum and
texts; the negative impact of being expected to engage through text with vocabulary
and concepts not yet acquired in the target language; and lack of familiarity (for ELLs)
with the scripts and genres of school reading practices. These are similar to the issues
identified in the earlier discussion of content learning.
The research illuminates how far we have yet to go in understanding how best to
scaffold English language learners in acquiring reading skills. Both research and the-
ory must explore connections between learners’ backgrounds and cultural knowledge
and the discourses and practices of schooling, how these play out in classroom inter-
actions and literacy events, and how they are aligned within larger societal discourses.
One useful way of conceptualizing this has been proffered by Gutierrez, Baquedano-
Lopez, & Tejada (1999) and taken up further by Manyak (2001; 2002). They use the
term “hybrid” when referring to the intermingling of cultural and linguistic codes
in classroom and literacy practices. Manyak (2002) defines hybrid as a construct “to
conceptualize new cultural forms, practices, spaces, and identities created from a
synthesis of diverse elements” (p. 423). The research of Gutierrez, Baquedano-Lopez,
Alvarez, & Chiu (1999) demonstrates how embracing hybridity led to the construction
of a “culture of collaboration” in the classroom, and a reassignation of meaning and
value to the discourses. Manyak looks at code-switching, language used as scaffold-
ing (Spanish to scaffold English), and indices to home cultures and communities as
resources for comprehension and engagement. In both sets of studies the researchers
begin to conceptualize the complex nature of literacy learning in classrooms, the ways
in which the dynamics between various factors (such as forms of languages, forms of
literacies, school practices, and social and cultural resources) shape interactions and
the ways in which the interactions shape and define the learning.

Use of Two Languages

In addition to discussions of language choice in the field of reading, there has been
some inquiry into the distribution of languages in the broader classroom setting. Re-
verting to the earlier discussion of classrooms as situated social spaces, the choice of
language use (when to use which language for what purpose) is in part determined by
policies and beliefs in the larger institutional and societal contexts in which the class-
room is situated. In many countries there are national policies about language use,
designating a specific language as the language of schooling. In the United States there
is a growing trend, and in some states legislation, toward limiting the use of another
language in instruction. Yet many states still have statutes mandating bilingual in-
struction. Distribution of language use in schools is often, perhaps usually, dependent
on the program model the school (or district) adopts. (For a full discussion of program
36 HAWKINS

models, see Brisk, this volume.) Even when teachers have choices, and have the ability
to communicate in the primary language of schooling and the home language/s of
the students, the choices of language use are not always consciously made.
There are few studies looking specifically at the language distribution in bilingual
classes for young learners. Nonetheless, those that exist present relatively consistent
and compelling findings. Ernst-Slavin’s (1997) account of first-grade children of Mexi-
can descent in the United States uncovers exclusion of the children’s variety of Spanish
in the bilingual classroom and discusses the impact of linguistic and cultural exclu-
sion. Irujo’s (1998) year-long ethnographic study of an elementary bilingual second
grade classroom (Spanish/English in the United States) points to a lack of conscious
choice in the determination of language use by the teacher, though there were consis-
tent patterns of and triggers for code-switching. English was accorded higher status
in the classroom community, as evidenced by practices such as new arrivals being
rewarded for using English. The study documents the students’ differential percep-
tions of the two languages and their appropriation of attitudes that place higher value
on English. Shannon’s (1990) exploration of a fourth grade classroom mirrors these
findings. She found that instruction was almost solely delivered in English, but the
children spoke Spanish almost exclusively when interacting around academic tasks
or socially with each other. Further, she identified less rigorous instructional stan-
dards and lower expectations for the children who received more Spanish reading
and language arts instruction because they had less English proficiency. She claims:

English is the “high” language of instruction, and Spanish is the “low” language, the lan-
guage of informal peer interaction. Furthermore, I have demonstrated that when Spanish
is used as an instructional language, its status is clearly lowered. (p. 45)

Shannon also indicates divisive social relations between the children who primarily
interact in Spanish and those who utilize more English.
These studies demonstrate how, in a classroom ecology, the ways in which lan-
guages are allocated and used contribute to the shaping of social relations, the culture
of the classroom, and opportunities for and access to academic achievement. They
unanimously identify inequitable language practices that lead to differential statuses
being conferred on the forms of language represented in the classroom (with the
home language of the ELLs in each case relegated to lower status) and social divi-
sions based on language use that result in differential statuses being conferred on
the children themselves. This raises deep concerns about the messages being sent to
children about their languages, heritages, and thus their identities in schools. It also
brings into question issues about engagement with learning. If children are not receiv-
ing academic content in a language that is accessible to them and cannot participate
equally in academic activities because of language and social barriers, what are they
“learning” in school?
In a later study Shannon (1995a) explores another fourth grade bilingual classroom
in which she claims, “the hegemony of English is recognized, challenged, and re-
sisted” (p. 185). She analyzes classroom practices to discover the processes by which
this happens. She points primarily to the teacher’s explicit attempts to confer high
status to Spanish by ensuring that the two languages were equally represented in
the communicative practices and material resources in the classroom, by explicitly
drawing students’ attention to issues of dual language use, and by the hybrid nature
of language practices in the classroom. This represents an important step toward re-
search that identifies ways in which languages can best be utilized in classrooms to
scaffold positive social relations and learning and to result in full participation in the
classroom community for all students.
 2. ESL IN ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 37

Home/School Connections
There has been a consistent theme throughout this chapter of the mismatches between
the communicative and cultural practices of ELLs’ homes and communities and those
of school. As mentioned earlier, these have been well documented in early work on
cross-cultural communication patterns and the impact on children’s learning in school
(Au, 1980; Collier, 1987; Heath, 1983; Michaels, 1981; Phillips, 1983). This is consistent
with a conceptualization of classrooms as spaces where multiple and diverse beliefs,
practices, and discourses come into contact, and through moment-by-moment negoti-
ations and interactions shape the classroom ecology, including the roles and identities
of the participants. The few studies of home/school connections with young English
language learners as subjects that exist can be categorized as two distinct (but inter-
related) strands of research exploring ways to foster positive connections between
families and schools and to bridge the linguistic and cultural divide. One of these fo-
cuses on documenting the language and literacy practices of the home and exploring
differences from those of school; the other focuses on the direct inclusion of families
and family literacies in the classroom.
Notable and influential in the first category is the work of Luis Moll and his asso-
ciates (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992; Moll & Greenberg, 1990), in which they
explore the “funds of knowledge” that students bring to school. These he describes as,
“historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills
essential for household or individual functioning and well-being” (Moll et al., 1992,
p. 31). He further conceptualizes and identifies:

how families develop social networks that interconnect them with their social environ-
ments (most importantly with other households), and how these social relationships
facilitate the development and exchange of resources, including knowledge, skills and
labor, that enhance the household’s ability to survive or thrive. (Moll et al., 1992, p. 31)

This conceptualization assists in understanding that family and community net-

works of knowledge and resources can differ substantially, and that those assumed
in teachers’ expectations about what children bring to school and what the family’s
role is in supporting their children’s educations, may not have a universally uni-
fied meaning or be shared. This is well supported by other studies of Mexican origin
elementary-age children and their families (Carlisle & Beeman, 2000; Delgado-Gaitan,
1990; Schecter & Bayley, 1997; Valdes, 1996). All three of these studies document exten-
sively the families’ home language and literacy practices, their views about education
and schooling, and their engagement with their children’s schooling. They suggest
that the language and literacy practices and funds of knowledge from students’ homes
need to be represented and validated in the school curriculum and pedagogical prac-
tices. This accounts for a necessary, but one-way, flow of information—that is, it calls
for teachers and schools to better understand, represent, and speak to the everyday
lives of students. Although it calls for negotiation of culture, language, and identities
within the classroom environment between the students and school staff, it does not
actively recruit the participation of parents.
In a body of research that contributes significantly not only to our understandings
of home–school relations, but of possible ways in which to respond pedagogically to
the challenges this work presents, a trio of educators have worked together to foster
school–home collaborations and research their impact (Willett, Solsken, & Wilson-
Keenan, 1998; Wilson-Keenan, Willett, & Solsken, 1993). Their initiatives include home
visits and also multiple ways to bring parents into the classroom and involve them in
the school lives of the children, thus creating “a classroom where hybridity was in-
vited and valued” in an effort to “re-imagine both instructional and research practices
38 HAWKINS

that strive to transform existing relations of power and privilege” (Willett et al., 1998,
p. 167). They claim their work “can help us to find creative ways to open up hybrid
spaces for negotiating across differences and to include different voices in the class-
room and in research” (p. 207). Thus, they have created research and pedagogical
designs that not only include parents’ voices and views, but that create hybrid spaces
in which home and school discourses and practices are both represented, and in which
negotiations of voices and identities can occur.

VOICES IN RESEARCH

An issue that has historically plagued research is that of the research–practice divide.
This is, in essence, an argument that those conducting the research are not the class-
room practitioners; thus, do not have the local understandings of the practitioners; nor
are they producing findings and representing them in ways useful to practitioners.
One of the key design features of the research by Willett, Solsken, and Wilson-Keenan
(1998) is that the research site is Wilson-Keenan’s classroom, and she is a full partici-
pant in all phases of the research process (see also Hawkins & Legler, 2002). Her voice
is fully represented and explored.
There are, as well, other accounts of teacher research. These are written by class-
room teachers and articulate the reflections and perceptions (and often the struggles)
of teachers. For the teacher, they provide a medium for close observation and ex-
ploration of their students and classroom practices and an opportunity to reflect on
how that information shapes and integrates with their curriculum design and ped-
agogy. For the reader, they provide a close-up view from an insider’s perspective
(a fully participating member of the classroom community), and often include de-
tails of instruction and classroom events and how these are connected to particular
philosophies and beliefs, which are not otherwise available.

Cynthia Ballenger, a teacher of young Haitian children, articulates this: in many ways this
book is an exploration . . . [of] the tension between honoring the child’s home discourse
as a rich source of knowledge and learning itself, and yet wishing to put that discourse
into meaningful contact with school-based and discipline-based ways of talking, acting,
and knowing. . . . they helped me to see the assumptions I brought to my work together
as well as those that they did. This is a book about what counts as knowledge in the
classroom and my own attempts to evaluate this in light of daily encounters. (Ballenger,
1999, p. 6)

In other examples, Gonzalez et al. (1993) take up the notion of “funds of knowl-
edge” and conduct visits to their students’ homes, then explore how their changed
understandings of their students’ funds of knowledge impacted their curriculum.
Urdinavia-English (2001) explores her practices teaching social studies to ELLs, iden-
tifying points of difficulty for access, and ways to connect curriculum and instructional
approaches to the students’ lives. These initiatives are especially significant in that the
researchers, in their roles as teachers, are in a position to directly and immediately
utilize the discoveries the research yields to re-design practice. Thus, the research
itself becomes part of the classroom ecology, affecting subsequent interactions.
Another under-represented voice in educational research on young children is that
of the children. Although, in one sense, their voices are certainly represented—that
is, the adult researcher often focuses much of the analysis on the actual speech of the
children—the children are not asked about their understandings and interpretations
of events and relationships. Their understandings, in fact, are most often interpreted
by others and assigned to them. Thus, one component missing from analyses of
social interactions in classrooms is the self-articulated perspectives of the children.
 2. ESL IN ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 39

Researchers, as outside observers or at best peripheral participants, can offer valu-

able interpretations. But, to parallel the previously discussed argument, only through
strengthening understandings of local “insider” perspectives can we hope to map out
the ecologies of classrooms.

PULLING IT ALL TOGETHER

This chapter promotes a view of classrooms as ecologies, wherein the dynamics be-
tween all constituent parts construct the whole, as the whole influences the dynamics
between the constituent parts (and thus the meanings and values assigned to and
claimed by the individual parts). One pervasive notion has been that of “hybrid-
ity,” used in various contexts to denote the evolving nature of cultures and prac-
tices (including but not limited to language practices) as they come into contact
and interact with each other. This notion is helpful for conceptualizing these con-
tacts not as binaries—that is, an oppositional either/or relationship where one set
of practices/beliefs must take precedence—but as ongoing processes in which prac-
tices/beliefs continually shift and are redefined through the negotiations.
In closing, then, we point to some studies of language and learning in classrooms
that conceptualize classroom and school practices, social relations, and identity con-
struction as co-determinous and as central to the learning and schooling process.
These studies investigate the practices and routines of classrooms and the discourses
of schools, demonstrate how they ultimately construct identities and positions for
ELLs, and show how identity positions afford or constrain access to classroom prac-
tices.
Willett (1995) conceives of the classroom as a community of learners and explores
ways in which L2 learners’ interactions around the routines and practices of the class-
room helped shape the construction of their identities as learners, while being in turn
shaped by the “micropolitics” of the classroom, thus demonstrating the reciprocity of
these relationships. Shannon (1995b) also utilizes a community of learners perspective
and focuses on how the classroom culture socializes ELLs to be engaged, participate,
and assume identities as ELLs. Hruska (2000) identifies discourses around bilingual-
ism, gender, and friendship across formal and informal school events. She considers
contributing factors, thus situating school practices in larger institutional and soci-
etal discourses and power dynamics. She ultimately connects these discourses to the
school identities constructed by bilingual children in a kindergarten classroom and
shows how they affected their self-esteem and motivation and their investment in
school. Shannon’s focus is primarily on the teacher’s construction of the learning
environment and Hruska’s on the way in which school discourses shape learners’
identities, engagements, and investments, whereas Willett investigates links between
the environment and interactions, and ascribes agency to the children. She claims, in
fact, that the learners she observed purposely manipulated language and practices in
bids for identities, that they “strategically enacted and elaborated culturally shaped
interaction routines to construct their social, linguistic, and academic competence (as
locally defined)” (Willett, 1995, p. 499). Thus, she shows interrelationships between
these facets, presenting them not as distinct, but as dynamic. These three studies place
centrality on incorporating a focus on social relations in understanding how language
development and learning occur in classrooms.
In a more elaborate study that is inclusive of all of the components of the frame-
work presented in this chapter, Kelleen Toohey (2000) claims, “Classrooms . . . organize
particular ways for children and teachers to talk, read, write and listen, which differ
from discursive practices in other communities.” (p. 125). Her longitudinal study of
young children in Canada (1996; 1998; 2000), framed by a “community of learners”
40 HAWKINS

perspective, explored discursive practices in kindergarten through second grade and

how they shaped the identities and participation of six second language learners. She
looked at the languages, literacies, practices, and “resources” of the classroom, and
the children’s social interactions, exploring ways in which the children’s identities
and positions were formed (with the concomitant social status), and the effects of
these formations. She claims “that children had most opportunities for appropriating
classroom language in situations when they could speak from desirable and powerful
identity positions” (Toohey, 2000, p. 125).
All four of these studies represent an emergent focus in the field of second lan-
guage acquisition and demonstrate a shift in perspective about language learning
and schooling as it pertains to young children. Who children are, the languages they
speak, and the cultures they embody are interdependent and intertwined. How and
what they learn in school is a complex negotiation between what resources they bring
to the learning situation; what belief systems, values, and practices are represented in
the learning site; and who they can be and how they can communicate in the situated
interactions there. If the goal of educational research is to inform us as to how to best
design and manage learning environments and instruction to support children’s so-
cial, linguistic, and academic development, it must help us to understand the ecology
of the classroom—to identify the components, map the complex interactions between
them, and provide frameworks for understanding the ways in which they shape the
lifeworlds of the inhabitants. This calls for further exploration of these environments,
especially with an explicit inclusion of all the diverse voices represented therein, and
a close accounting of the role of language in the reciprocal relationship between the
social dynamics and learning.

NOTES

1. Interlanguage was originally defined by Selinker (1972) as “a separate linguistic system based on the
observable output which results from a learner’s attempted projection of a TL (target language) norm”
(p. 214, parenthetical clarification mine). Ellis (1997) elucidates further by saying, “. . . the systematic
knowledge of an L2 that is independent of both the target language and the learner’s L1” (p. 140).
2. My thanks to Suban Keowkanya, Jina Lee, Sara Michael Luna, Mattanee Palungtepin, Joao Rosa, Amy
Sharpe, and Chung Pei Tsai for bringing this point to my attention.
3. There has, in fact, been an argument made that the sorts of “literacy” taught in schools has not kept
up with the rapidly changing forms of literacies existent in the larger social environment and may
not adequately prepare children to participate in the new global economies (DiSessa, 2000; Gee, 1999;
Hawkins, in press; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001).

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44
3

ESL in Secondary Schools:

Programs, Problematics,
and Possibilities1
Patricia A. Duff
University of British Columbia

INTRODUCTION: THE IMPACT OF RECENT IMMIGRATION ON

ESL IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS

The demographics in English-speaking countries such as Canada, the United States,

Australia, and England have changed dramatically in recent years, primarily as a re-
sult of immigration. Canada, for example, admits on average 200,000 to 225,000 immi-
grants each year, the majority of whom are not native speakers of either of Canada’s of-
ficial languages, English and French. Proficiency in either—or both—English or French
has not, until very recently, been a crucial factor in the acceptance of either immigrant
or government-assisted refugees in Canada, and as a result, many of those admitted
have only limited knowledge of either language.2 With the steady influx of newcomers
arriving over the past 2 decades, unprecedented numbers of English language learn-
ers (ELLs)3 have been entering elementary and secondary schools, to the point where
in many cities, not only in Canada but in the United States, the United Kingdom, and
Australia as well, ELLs now constitute the majority, not minority of students.
In the United States between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, there was a nearly 70%
increase in the number of school-age children and youth whose home language was
not English (TESOL, 1997). TESOL (1997) reported that in 1993 there were more than
2.5 million ELLs in U.S. public schools, and it was expected that “ by the year 2000
the majority of the school-age population in 50 or more major U.S. cities [would]
be from language minority backgrounds” (p. 1).4 Lindholm-Leary’s (2001) estimates
are even larger; she reports nearly 10 million of 45 million school-age children (of
whom 6 million are Hispanic) come from homes in which languages other than En-
glish are spoken, based on 1996 U.S. Census Bureau population statistics. California
alone had an estimated 2.2 million language-minority students in 19995 (half of all stu-
dents), followed by Texas (1.4 million), New York (nearly 1 million), Florida, Illinois,
New Jersey, Arizona, and Pennsylvania (at least a quarter million language-minority

45
46 DUFF

students each) according to research reported by Lindholm-Leary (2001, p. 11). It is

difficult to get accurate statistics about numbers because of the various reporting sys-
tems that are used, which also may just reflect enrollments on one particular day of the
year; there are also differences in reporting systems across states. The largest Anglo-
Canadian cities (Toronto and Vancouver) have comparable proportions of English
language learners across elementary and secondary schools, on average 50% of total
enrollments, although in general the number of Hispanic students is much smaller in
Canada.
Similar changes are also happening in areas traditionally less populated either by
new immigrants or by bilingual native-born Americans. According to a recent New
York Times article entitled “Wave of Pupils Lacking English Strains Schools” (Zhao,
2002), the number of ELLs in school districts in the American South, Midwest, and
Northwest (e.g., Idaho, Nebraska, Wisconsin, South Carolina, and Georgia) has at least
tripled since 1993, with a five-fold increase in North Carolina alone, whose farms and
factories have attracted especially large numbers of Latino immigrants.
Newcomers and their families face many challenges upon settlement. For school-
age children, learning the target language of the community and becoming integrated
into mainstream programs at school is a primary concern. For their parents and older
siblings, gaining access to social networks, education, employment, and other activ-
ities and services in the wider community may be paramount. Learning the official
local language, generally English, is often a crucial aspect of families’ social integration
into the wider English-speaking community in these contexts (Toohey, 2000).
Students entering secondary school specifically—comprising Grades 7 to 12, 8 to
12, or 9 to 12, depending on the country, state/province, and school district—must
adapt to the linguistic, sociocultural, discursive, and academic norms and practices in
content areas, and school personnel must find ways to effectively meet the minority
students’ linguistic, academic, and cultural needs, and to communicate effectively
with students’ families.6 Whereas the pressures and challenges for domestic native-
English-speaking (NES) adolescent students at the secondary school level are often
considerable, for non-native English speakers (NNESs) the challenges are often insur-
mountable.
In this chapter, I review research that has been done in connection with ESL students
at the secondary level. The themes to be examined here are:

r Previous research on ESL learners in secondary school.

r English program types and requirements, and language and content integration.
r ESL and secondary school content areas—the case of social studies.
r Standards movements, initiatives, and guidelines.
r Assessment issues at the secondary level.
r Second language socialization in secondary school.
r ESL versus mainstream learning contexts—cultural and affective issues.
r ESL students at risk—secondary school drop-out or “push-out.”
r Secondary school-to-college transitions.

More research on English teaching and learning in secondary EFL contexts is badly
needed as well as on ESL, especially as new policies are implemented internationally
to introduce English earlier in national language curricula, often without clear articu-
lation between elementary and secondary curricula, goals, and assessment measures.
The stakes to learn English are becoming higher than ever. However, EFL educational
settings and issues are beyond the scope of this chapter.
 3. ESL IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS 47

PREVIOUS RESEARCH ON ESL LEARNERS IN SECONDARY

SCHOOL: ENDURING ISSUES

Until the mid-1990s, there was little published research on secondary-level immigrant
or minority-L1 bilingual students in mainstream school curricula in the United States
or Canada, despite the growth in this population and the numerous challenges they
encounter in the school system (Faltis, 1999). Because of the urgency of providing
a robust and equitable education for immigrant children and youth, new research
has begun to examine their experiences in ESL classes, in mainstream classes, in
their successful or unsuccessful completion of high school requirements, and their
subsequent transition to postsecondary education.
It has long been acknowledged that it takes English language learners many years
to attain the academic language proficiency required to succeed in such content ar-
eas as social studies, English literature, mathematics, biology, and chemistry (Collier,
1989, 1995; Cummins, 1981, 2000; Hakuta, Butler, & Witt, 2000; Srole, 1997), with esti-
mates ranging from 4 to as many as 10 years to reach English-peer norms. Added to
the linguistic pressures of complex, and often abstract, decontextualized vocabulary,
syntax, and other features of oral language, the academic content itself is comprehen-
sive and often difficult, and the literacy requirements and genres can also be extremely
demanding. Furthermore, general and discipline-related cultural knowledge, such as
intertextual allusions to other texts (biblical, literary, historical, pop-culture) or events
in English literature or in social studies discourse is crucial but is often not part of
new immigrant ELLs’ cultural or textual schemata (Duff, 2001). Furthermore, students
must often negotiate complex family, peer-group, and other social pressures that typ-
ically face adolescents, whether ELLs or not (Eckert, 1989; Phelan, Davidson, & Yu,
1998). Their academic program choices, extracurricular activities, social alliances, and
identities—which may or may not converge with the preferences of their parents—
may have a significant impact on students’ subsequent prospects and trajectories for
higher education and for their careers. For immigrant ELLs who may have experi-
enced years of interrupted education, trauma, culture shock, and so on, succeeding
academically in English contexts requires systematic and sustained intervention and
such success is by no means assured. On top of their academic load, students may
need to serve as language and cultural brokers for their extended family and take
on other extracurricular roles as well. However, refugee-status or low-income immi-
grants and students who arrive from other countries during their teenage years with
relatively low levels of English language proficiency may face the greatest obstacles
of all (Gunderson, 2000).
It is often assumed that students who immigrate as young children are assured a
much higher rate of success with mainstreaming and succeeding on a par with their
local peers. However, ESL learners who arrive in the early grades of elementary school
and are quickly mainstreamed also apparently face major disadvantages relative to
their Canadian-born L1-English-speaking peers on standardized exams many years
later, such as on provincial or state Grade 12 English examinations, despite their
English fluency and their ability to obtain passing grades in their secondary school
courses (Roessingh & Kover, 2002). Even in otherwise ideal educational and social
circumstances, as in the program context outlined by Collier (1995), ESL students
with excellent previous education in their L1 and 6 years of American education in
English “had not yet reached the 50th percentile in English language arts, reading,
science, and social studies by the time of graduation” (p. 10). The process of becoming
fully integrated is therefore arduous for many ELLs, regardless of the level at which
they enter school.
48 DUFF

ESL PROGRAM TYPES AND REQUIREMENTS: LANGUAGE AND

CONTENT INTEGRATION

Educational programs designed to assist English language learners with their aca-
demic language needs typically provide intensive language instruction in the early
stages of their schooling, often with subsequent sheltered or content-based language
instruction (CBLI), prior to the transition to mainstream coursework (Davison, 2001).
The actual number of years for which students are eligible for ESL support and the
form(s) that support takes is usually determined by state or provincial governments
and is therefore quite variable from one region, year, and governing political party—
and whim—to the next; that is, it is often determined more by political expedience than
educational wisdom. In many regions of England, Australia, and Canada currently,
ESL students are being mainstreamed more quickly than before and ESL teachers
are losing their jobs (a growing trend in Western Canada, for example, as govern-
ment policies and economic exigencies force the closure of some ESL programs by
reducing provincial support for ESL students); alternatively, in more positive situa-
tions, the role of ESL teachers is being refashioned so that they work more closely
with content teachers in mainstream courses (e.g., in England and the state of Victo-
ria in Australia; Clegg, 1996a; Davison, 2001; Leung & Franson, 2001). The focus in
such programs is the role of language in education or language-across-the-curriculum,
and not just decontextualized language education. The goal is to help all learners
and teachers gain a greater understanding of how language and literacy practices,
including lexical-grammatical structures and different types of discourse markers
and text types function within particular content areas to convey particular types of
meanings.
There are many models and program designs for ESL instruction at the secondary
school level. Carrasquillo and Rodriguez (2002) describe four such program types in
the United States, which have counterparts in other countries.

r Free-standing ESL programs, with students from many different L1s who have
immediate communication needs and little English proficiency; sheltered con-
tent instruction may be provided as well as language instruction but not at the
beginning levels.
r Intensive remedial ESL programs, particularly at the high school level, with an
emphasis on vocabulary, idiomatic expression, and basic reading and writing
skills for students with virtually no English.
r “Pull-out” ESL programs, with 45- to 60-minute lessons during language arts
classes, for example; these classes occur in separate ESL classrooms comprised of
students from different grades and programs and with designated ESL teachers,
who may travel throughout a school district to provide this support.
r ESL/bilingual education programs, with content gradually introduced in En-
glish as students become more proficient. There are other variants on this theme,
however, including: transitional bilingual education, maintenance bilingual ed-
ucation, immersion education, structured English immersion, two-way (or dual-
language) immersion, and newcomer programs (see Christian, 1996; Lindholm-
Leary, 2001; Peregoy & Boyle, 1997).

Other alternatives to these four program types exist, such as programs that address
the language and content needs of ESL students in mainstream classes by having
appropriately trained content teachers make necessary accommodations for ESL stu-
dents during regular lessons; or by means of adjuncted ESL classes specifically linked
to content courses, giving students credit for both dealing with the language and
 3. ESL IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS 49

content of the subject area (Snow & Brinton, 1988). In some school districts, students
are allowed to attend high school only up to a certain age (e.g., age 18 or 19) and then
must leave high school, they are “pushed out.” If they have not completed gradu-
ation requirements by that time, they must seek graduation equivalency courses at
community colleges or through other programs.
As an example of an adjunct program in Canada, Roessingh (1999) describes an
ESL course that was successfully adjuncted to a sheltered Grade 10 English Literature
course at a high school in a city in Alberta. The 23 Grade 10 students in the courses
came from Pacific Rim regions and had typically immigrated around the age of 16.
Their English reading was assessed to be at the 4.5 grade equivalent (GE) when they
arrived but after their year of adjuncted instruction, they were reportedly reading
at the 6 to 7 GE, as determined by the Gates MacGinitie reading test (MacGinitie &
MacGinitie, 1992); Roessingh suggests a minimum threshold level of 7 GE should pre-
cede placement into an unsheltered, unadjuncted Grade 10 academic English course.
All 23 students reportedly passed both courses and the English exam taken by all
Grade 10 students at the end of the year and many continued to do well in their
subsequent Grade 11 academic English course.
Many approaches have been developed for the integration of ESL students in spe-
cific content areas in the United States, Australia, England, and Canada, and for suc-
cessfully combining language and content instruction (e.g., Chamot & O’Malley, 1994;
Christie, 1992; Crandall, 1987; Martin, 1993; Mohan, 1986; Short, 1994; see also, Davison
& Williams, 2001; Ovando & Collier, 1998; Stoller & Grabe, 1997). These approaches
highlight the syntactic, lexical, and rhetorical structures and genres associated with
academic disciplines and with particular types of texts; they also stress the importance
of providing corresponding graphic support, cultural connections, and study skills
and strategies. At the secondary level, students need to have a sophisticated command
of English grammar and vocabulary, and must have control over a range of different
written genres and registers and the discourse features associated with them. Read-
ing and listening comprehension requirements are considerable, exacerbated by the
amount of background knowledge or cultural schemata needed to access certain sub-
jects. ESL students might have a vocabulary of 5,000 to 7,000 words, a reading speed
(narratives) of approximately 100 wpm, and reading grade equivalent of Grade 6 or 7
in comparison with NESs in Grade 10 or higher, who are likely to have a 40,000-word
vocabulary and a reading speed of approximately 300 wpm (Roessingh, 1999). Oral
presentations, written reports and projects related to academic content, and quizzes
and tests are common at this level, in addition to reading assignments and the need
to comprehend teachers’ lectures and explanations as well as classmates’ discourse in
class (Duff, 2001).
Much successful language and content (L&C) integration takes place in theme-
based ESL or “sheltered” social studies, mathematics, or science courses designed to
cover academic content but normally reserved for ESL students (e.g., Evans, 1996;
Filson, 1996; McKean, 1996). Explicitly combined L&C instruction is less frequently
found in mainstream content courses unless major reforms initiated by ESL specialists
have been successfully implemented, often because of a lack of coordination between
ESL and content specialists, little or no applied linguistics training among the latter,
and the (misguided) notion that ESL students’ needs are not the responsibility of
content specialists, even though they may constitute more than half the students in
a course. Nevertheless, some content teachers are finding ways of effectively accom-
modating the needs of their ESL students (e.g., Clegg, 1996a, 1996b; Mohan, Leung,
& Davison, 2001; Snow & Brinton, 1997), usually with input from language teachers.
Several sources document approaches to facilitating L&C integration and instruction
in social studies, mathematics, and/or science (e.g., Carrasquillo & Rodriguez, 2002;
Chamot, 1995; Crandall, 1987).
50 DUFF

For notoriously difficult courses such as English literature with a high “linguis-
tic threshold” that may be required for both high school graduation and university
entrance, Roessingh and Field (2000) discuss the importance of the timing and se-
quencing of coursework in the academic mainstream, based on a consideration of
students’ “readiness,” their L1 academic background (which was relatively high in
their study), and the availability of adjuncted ESL support for students for English
literature courses. Thus, they recommended that newcomers should first concentrate
on subject areas in which they have strength, such as mathematics and chemistry be-
fore attempting to take social studies and English literature courses. The authors and
several research participants in the study also recommended that courses like social
studies be taken during summer school as a way of reducing the intensity of academic
coursework during the regular academic year.

ESL AND SECONDARY SCHOOL CONTENT AREAS—THE CASE

OF SOCIAL STUDIES

Rather than review ESL research in all secondary-level academic domains, here I
provide a summary of research conducted in the content area I am most familiar
with, social studies. Deborah Short and her colleagues have produced excellent sam-
ple curriculum guides, materials, and professional development feedback forms for
middle-school teachers of ELLs learning social studies, often in sheltered ESL courses
(Echevarria, Vogt, & Short, 2000; Short, 1994, 1997, 1999), based on their experiences
as teachers, curriculum and materials developers, teacher educators, and researchers.
They stress vocabulary, terms, concepts, and tasks specifically associated with social
studies, as well as more general language functions, such as being able to define terms,
retell events in sequence, and compare outcomes of events, and then perform various
kinds of assignments, oral and written. With respect to reading comprehension, Short
(1997) found that social studies textbooks, often the basis for lectures, were difficult:
texts had various cohesion and coherence problems, limited explanations about key
vocabulary (e.g., 10 or fewer words explained per chapter), and confusing displays,
headings, and sidebars. Beck and McKeown’s (1991) earlier analysis of social studies
texts at lower grade levels also revealed that they were problematic because, among
other things, they assume levels of background knowledge that students often lack
(see also Carrasquillo & Rodriguez, 2002). Duff (2001) reviews some other research
that has been conducted on L&C integration in social studies.
In my qualitative research on ELLs in mainstream high school social studies courses
(Duff, 2001, 2002a, 2002b), I also found that students often lacked the linguistic, cul-
tural, and geographical knowledge to interpret both oral and written texts, and the
content with which they did have expertise, familiarity, or personal experience, such
as Chinese history, was missing from the local curriculum. The courses in my re-
search were at the Grade 10 level, at which the primary focus is Canadian history,
economics, and society. The curriculum also expected students to interpret historical
events and texts in a more critical, personal, and narrative way than had generally
been required of them in other countries. Besides occasional essay writing or multiple
choice tests, students had to take part in debates and role plays and produce in-class
oral presentations, tasks that they were often uncomfortable with or ill-equipped for.
The curriculum followed a multimodal approach that is currently promoted in social
studies (Case, 1997; Seixas, 1997a, 1997 b; Short, 1997; Singer & Hofstra Social Studies
Educators, 1997). In many secondary mainstream classes, as in those I observed over a
2-year period, ESL students actually produced very little oral or written English, either
during teacher-fronted instruction and discussions or on assignments. Assignments
might include writing postcards home, from the perspective of a Canadian settler, or
 3. ESL IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS 51

doing a poster representing the front page of a newspaper from a particular historical
era. Working in small groups, ESL students often used their L1 and worked with class-
mates from similar linguistic backgrounds. This observation is not a critique of such
L1 practices, however it does suggest that opportunities for L2 use may be reduced
in contexts both inside and outside of school where large numbers of students share
the same L1. Furthermore, both ESL students and local students said it was difficult
for them to understand one another’s English speech in class, which added to ESL
students’ reticence to participate actively in class—they couldn’t respond to or build
on one another’s utterances in discussions because they couldn’t hear or compre-
hend one another. This problem did not seem to impede local students, however. In
addition, references to contemporary local issues, events, pop culture items, role mod-
els, and personal interests were commonplace. On the one hand, this practice made
the classroom discourse potentially more interesting to the (local) students if not the
whole class; on the other hand, it made it that much more difficult for newcomers to
comprehend and contribute to.
Although integrated L&C instruction emphasizes the role of language in learning
and the genres and syntactic structures used to convey particular types of meaning
(e.g., Echevarria et al., 2000), social studies classes in my research contained very little
explicit attention to text structures and vocabulary that students read, heard, or were
asked to produce, or other kinds of scaffolding that scholars claim is beneficial for
both ESL and local students (see e.g., Mohan, 2001). Similarly, graphic organizers and
other visual aids and even use of the blackboard to write down important phrases or to
illustrate the relationship among pieces of information (e.g., cause–effect, sequence,
evaluation, classification) were used relatively infrequently. Similar findings were
reported for social studies classes observed by Harklau (1994, 1999a) in California,
although in the school where she did her research, there were fewer than 100 ESL
students out of a student body of 1,600. In both our research contexts, ELLs’ overt
participation in mainstream classroom discourse was therefore impeded by a variety
of social, educational, and discursive factors. Finally, as previously mentioned briefly,
students were expected to produce relatively little extended expository writing, such
as essays more than just a few paragraphs in length. As a result, students had relatively
little practice and experience producing the kinds of essays or term papers that would
be required in certain fields of higher education.

STANDARDS MOVEMENT, INITIATIVES, AND GUIDELINES

Prepared by leading scholars and other professionals in TESOL, ESL Standards for Pre-
K–12 Students (TESOL, 1997) aims to describe the needs of ELLs across grade levels
in the United States and provides a set of graduated goals and standards for students
at beginning, intermediate, or advanced levels of English proficiency, or those who
have limited previous formal schooling and have special needs as a result (e.g., lit-
eracy, understanding the culture and organization of schooling). Regardless of grade
or proficiency level, the Standards document provides a set of three goals related to
students’ use of English for general communication, for communication connected to
their academic content areas, and for pragmatically or sociolinguistically appropriate
language use, both oral and written. For the first goal, to use English to communicate
in social settings, Grades 9 to 12 standards emphasize that students are expected to
participate in social interactions using English; use both oral and written English for
personal enjoyment; and use various learning strategies to improve their communica-
tion skills. For the second goal, to use English to achieve academically in all content ar-
eas, students are expected to use English for classroom interaction, and to convey and
construct both oral and written subject matter; and use learning strategies in relation
52 DUFF

to academic knowledge. Finally, for the third goal, to use English in socially and cul-
turally appropriate ways (i.e., sociolinguistic and pragmatic aspects of language use),
students are expected to use English and nonverbal communication appropriately
according to the expected genre, register, and so on. Throughout the Standards doc-
ument, students are encouraged to negotiate meanings with teachers and classmates
cooperatively and effectively using various strategies, including the use of their L1.
Sample progress indicators linked to the various goals and standards for Grades 9 to
12 students are shown in Table 3.1. Standards 1 to 3 do not appear to be sequenced in
such a way that addressing Standard 2, for example, implies that Standard 1 has been
mastered. Rather, the standards focus on different aspects of language use: the use
of English in social interaction generally (Standard 1); the specific kind of communi-
cation and information involved in various tasks (Standard 2); and relevant learning
strategies (Standard 3). Similarly, the three goals deal with different aspects of lan-
guage use (basic interpersonal communication, academic language, and pragmatics).
Although Goal 2 may indeed be more complex than Goal 1, it does not seem to imply
prior mastery of the earlier goal, and it is not necessarily less complex than Goal 3.
Table 3.2 provides an example of how a task could be modified for different pro-
ficiency levels in secondary school. Here the task is for students to research the de-
velopment of a (hypothetical) neighborhood toxic waste dump and the position they
will take on the issue.
The goals and standards reflect the need for students to develop what Cummins
(1979) refers to as oral and written basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS)
and cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP; see Cummins, 2000, for a history
of the BICS/CALP distinction and critiques of it); also stressed is the importance of
sociolinguistic and discursive factors such as the social context in which language is to
be used and the discourse registers and genres required. This model is consistent with
Canale and Swain’s (1980) description of communicative competence, which in their
model comprised linguistic (code) competence, discourse competence, sociolinguistic
competence, and strategic competence although it did not explicitly refer to academic
proficiency.
In addition to Standards statements and initiatives such as these, many helpful
resources for teachers and teacher educators dealing with secondary ESL students
have been published over the past decade that provide both theoretical foundations,
case studies, and highly practical model lessons, assessment tools, and lists of other
resources (e.g., Cloud, Genesee, & Hamayan, 2000; Coelho, 1998; Hernandez, 1997;
Scarcella, 1990). Several emphasize the importance of affirming students’ cultural
backgrounds and building on their existing knowledge. Other shorter guidelines have
also been published to promote immigrant students’ access to and engagement in
secondary schools. Walqui (2000), for example, provides “ten principles of effective
instruction for immigrant students,” (pp. 1–2) including the following:

1. The culture of the classroom fosters the development of a community of learners,

and all students are part of that community.
2. Good language teaching involves conceptual and academic development.
3. Students’ experiential backgrounds provide a point of departure and an anchor
in the exploration of new ideas.
4. Teaching and learning focus on substantive ideas that are organized cyclically.
5. New ideas and tasks are contextualized.
6. Academic strategies, sociocultural expectations, and academic norms are taught
explicitly.
7. Tasks are relevant, meaningful, engaging and varied.
8. Complex and flexible forms of collaboration maximize learners’ opportunities
to interact while making sense of language and content.
 3. ESL IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS 53

TABLE 3.1
TESOL Goals, Standards, and Selected Sample Progress Indicators

Description of Standards
for Each Goal Sample Progress Indicators

Goal 1, Standard 1 Make an appointment, write personal essays, describe

Use English to interact in feelings and emotions after watching a movie . . . (p. 109)
the classroom.
Goal 1 Standard 2 Discuss preferences for types of music, book genres, and
Interact in, through, and computer programs; recommend a game, book, or
with spoken and written computer program; listen to, read, watch, and respond to
English for personal plays, films, stories, books, songs, poems, computer
expression and enjoyment. programs, and magazines . . . (p. 113)
Goal 1, Standard 3 Make notes in preparation for a meeting or interview; ask
Use learning strategies to someone the meaning of a word; tell someone in the
extend their communicative native language that a direction given in English was not
competence. understood; practice recently learned words by teaching a
peer . . . (p. 117)
Goal 2, Standard 1 Ask a teacher or peer to confirm one’s understanding of
Use English to interact in directions to complete an assignment; negotiate
the classroom. cooperative roles and task assignments; use polite forms
to negotiate and reach consensus; ask for assistance with a
task . . . (p. 121)
Goal 2, Standard 2 Compare and classify information using technical
Use English to obtain, vocabulary; write a summary of a book, article, movie, or
process, construct, and lecture; research information on academic topics from
provide subject matter multiple sources . . . (p. 127)
information in spoken and
written form.
Goal 2, Standard 3 Practice an oral report with peer prior to presenting in class;
Use appropriate learning skim chapter headings, and bold print to determine the
strategies to construct and key points of a text; verbalize relationships between new
apply academic knowledge. information and information previously learned in
another setting . . . (p. 135)
Goal 3, Standard 1 Select topics appropriate to discuss in a job interview;
Use the appropriate interpret and explain a political cartoon, situation comedy,
language variety, register, or a joke; recognize irony, sarcasm, and humor in a variety
and genre according to of contexts; write business and personal letters; make
audience, purpose, and polite requests . . . (p. 139)
setting.
Goal 3, Standard 2 Compare gestures and body language acceptable in formal
Use nonverbal and informal settings; maintain appropriate level of eye
communication contact with audience while giving an oral presentation;
appropriate to audience, use appropriate volume of voice in different settings . . .
purpose, and setting. (p. 145)
Goal 3, Standard 3 Evaluate different types of communication for effectiveness
Use appropriate learning in making one’s point; rehearse different ways of speaking
strategies to extend their according to the formality of the setting . . . (p. 149)
sociolinguistic and
sociocultural competence.

Note. Adapted from ESL Standards for Pre-k–12 Students by TESOL, 1997, Alexandria, VA: TESOL.
54 DUFF

TABLE 3.2
Sample Vignette: Goal 2 (Academic English)

Limited Formal
Goal 2, Standard 2 Beginning Intermediate Advanced Schooling

Goal 2: To use Survey Illustrate in a Using a Create a photo

English to neighbors to chart the computer essay or
achieve learn if they advantages model, magazine
academically are for or and disad- generate a picture
in all content against a vantages of graph on the collage to
areas. potential various decomposition reflect the
Standard 2: To dump site waste man- of different pros and cons
use English to and agement waste material of a dump
obtain, represent options. over time and site and write
process, results in a summarize. captions.
construct, and graph.
provide subject
matter
information in
spoken and
written form.

Note. Adapted from ESL Standards for Pre-k–12 Students by TESOL, 1997, Alexandria, VA: TESOL.

9. Students are given multiple opportunities to extend their understandings and

apply their knowledge.
10. Authentic assessment is an integral part of teaching and learning.

ASSESSMENT ISSUES AT THE SECONDARY LEVEL

The tenth principle concerns assessment, a ubiquitous and very political topic in ed-
ucation. Assessment of English language learners’ L2 ability and/or their content
knowledge at the secondary level covers the usual range of approaches, from locally
developed content-based assignments or tests, to portfolios and performance-based
assessment and a variety of other “in-house” English language assessment measures.
Scholars recommend multiple sources of information about ELL students’ abilities
(Carrasquillo & Rodriguez, 2002), including teacher-made tests, teachers’ observa-
tions, students’ works (e.g., lab reports), collective group work, questionnaires or
home surveys, standardized tests, portfolios of students’ work, and students’ self-
assessments. The assessment may be for diagnostic, formative, summative, or other
purposes, such as for program evaluation or for funding agencies, such as govern-
ments. According to Carrasquillo & Rodriguez (2002), who cite U.S. Department of
Education statistics, oral English proficiency tests and home language surveys are the
most common approaches used by school districts to assess students’ language pro-
ficiency. However, they also note that many such measures of proficiency fail to take
into account students’ academic language proficiency, and many use a multiple-choice
format.
Criterion-referenced assessment, as opposed to standardized, norm-referenced test-
ing, needs to be contextualized meaningfully within the curriculum. Leung (2001)
describes criterion-referenced task-based approaches to assessment and evaluation
for secondary students. Tasks are closely related to the curriculum and to teaching and
learning objectives, and language items are examined for their functionality within
their immediate discourse context.
 3. ESL IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS 55

Another approach previously alluded to involves the use of nationally standard-

ized curricula and tests, such as those associated with the English (subject) National
Curriculum in England, described by Leung and Franson (2001). Students’ perfor-
mance is evaluated on an 8-level scale (designed originally for English speakers ages
5–14). However, as Leung and Franson point out, problems exist with using standard-
ized tests for purposes they were not intended for, including those normed on and
developed for English-L1 learners or for younger or older populations.
In a renewed neo-conservative political culture stressing educational accountabil-
ity, students and teachers may be required to achieve certain scores on statewide
examinations to proceed to the next grade level or continue on to college or university
(no matter how well- or ill-conceived these examinations and measures might be or
their suitability and thus validity for diverse populations). For example, since 1997 all
students in New York State, including ELLs, must pass the Regents Comprehensive
Examination in English to obtain a high school diploma (Carrasquillo & Rodriguez,
2002).
One of the ongoing difficulties in assessing ELL students’ writing in content areas is
the difficulty of conducting an integrated assessment of language and content (Mohan
& Low, 1995; Short, 1993). Many content-area instructors seem to focus on content
primarily and tend not to provide feedback on linguistic aspects, perhaps because of
the enormity of the task, their lack of training in doing this, and uncertainty about
whether providing such feedback makes any difference in students’ development of
ESL literacy. However, without some kind of systematic feedback on linguistic aspects
of their performance, students may have reduced opportunities to focus on formal
aspects of their language development that may otherwise remain underdeveloped
and may continue to plague them at higher levels of education (e.g., Harklau et al.,
1999). Mohan and Low discuss some of the benefits of collaborative teacher assessment
of ESL writers, for which teachers agree on the criteria to be used in assessment.
In California, according to Hakuta et al. (2000), the IPT or IDEA Proficiency Test
is used to distinguish English learners from those who are Fluent-English Proficient;
sample oral skills for each follow:
r Identify content area vocabulary; use superlatives and past tense; understand
and name opposites; ask past tense questions; discriminate differences in closely
paired words; describe and organize the main properties of common objects
(limited English-speaking EL, IPT level E).
r Use conditional tense verbs; discriminate fine differences in closely paired words;
comprehend and predict the outcome of a story; recall and retell the main facts
of a story; share meaningful personal experiences (fluent-English-speaking, IPT
level F). (Hakuta et al., 2000, p. 20)

In contrast to the local, highly contextual, discourse-bound approach to assessment

is standardized testing that is not linked to any particular curriculum contexts. Few
international standardized ESL tests are specifically designed to test secondary level
ELLs. One exception is the Secondary Level English Proficiency (SLEP) Test developed
by the Educational Testing Service in New Jersey, which targets this age group. The
test is normed on American English-speaking secondary students and some of the
listening comprehension items include scripted conversations among American high
school students. The test is often used to test ELLs in international English-medium
schools (e.g., Duff, 1991). The SLEP Test includes listening and reading comprehension
components only, with 75 multiple choice items in each, arranged according to their
difficulty level. The test was envisioned as a precursor to the Test of English as a
Foreign Language (TOEFL), in terms of its level of difficulty and intended population
of test-takers, and ETS has published correlations between the SLEP Test and TOEFL
(SLEP Test Manual, 1987).7
56 DUFF

SECOND LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION IN SECONDARY SCHOOL

One research approach for examining the experiences and needs of language-minority
students at the secondary level is framed in terms of language socialization, discourse
socialization, or academic literacies (see review in Zuengler & Cole, this volume),
although there is relatively little research that examines adolescent learners’ experi-
ences specifically. Socialization, L&C, and language/literacy acquisition research have
much in common; however, language socialization tends to focus less on micro skills,
vocabulary, grammar, learning strategies, and elements of best practice in teaching
and more on cultural practices and group membership, rituals and verbal routines,
and changes in newcomers’ degree of participation in local communities of learning
over time and the social factors that support or scaffold increased participation (Lave
& Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). The difference in focus stems mainly from the origins
of research on language socialization in linguistic anthropology rather than in edu-
cation (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). More applied linguists and sociolinguists working
in educational contexts are now applying language socialization perspectives to their
ethnographic and discourse analytic work in secondary schools as well, in a vari-
ety of ways, and examining different issues (e.g., Bayley & Schecter, 2003; Duff, 1995,
1996, 2002a; Freeman, 1998). Topics examined include variable levels of affiliation with
L1 and L2 communities of practice and their sociolinguistic behaviors and issues of
social/academic integration, often but not always contextualized within a larger so-
ciopolitical setting. Some current second language socialization research, such as my
own (e.g., Duff, 2002a), examines how teachers and students co-construct classroom
discourse that positions classroom members in certain ways—as cultural insiders or
outsiders, as experts or novices, as full-fledged, competent participants or citizens in a
given learning community, or as only peripheral or marginal members. Other research
examines how from early on in their education, students are inducted into the prac-
tices associated with particular disciplines, such as science (Cole & Zuengler, 2003).
L2 socialization research on adolescents has also focused on non-overt participation
or silence on the part of some ESL students and how nonverbal and verbal behaviors
are connected variably with different learner identities, aspirations, and possibilities
(e.g., Pon, Goldstein, & Schecter, 2003; see also Morita, 2002, for similar work with
university students).

ESL VERSUS MAINSTREAM LEARNING CONTEXTS—CULTURAL

AND AFFECTIVE ISSUES

Several recent studies have examined differences in learning environments for

secondary-level immigrant students in ESL classes versus mainstream courses (e.g.,
Duff, 2001; Harklau, 1994; Miller, 2000). The research usually involves interviews
with students about their experiences at school as well as researchers’ ethnographic
observations of classroom contexts. Harklau (1994, 1999a, 1999b, 2000) conducted
a multi-year ethnographic study in a northern Californian community that tracked
four “newcomer” high school students of ethnic Chinese backgrounds in their tran-
sition from ESL to mainstream courses; she later examined their school-to-college
transitions. In an Australian study with a similar population of ethnic Chinese im-
migrant students, Miller (2000), like Harklau, found that ESL speakers typically had
“more real opportunities to use English [in an ESL reception program] than in their
mainstream high schools” and “[in the mainstream] they found they were neither
heard nor understood” (p. 96). Harklau’s (1994) study reported that the tracking sys-
tem used in schools further increased the differences between ESL and mainstream
environments, particularly for ELLs placed in low-track mainstream programs.
 3. ESL IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS 57

Canadian studies of secondary-level ESL students (e.g., Duff, 2001, 2002a, 2002b;
Gunderson, 2000; Kanno & Applebaum, 1995; Liang, 1998; Roessingh & Kover, 2002)
reveal a commonly reported tension: ELLs and their parents often seek expedited
mainstreaming and thus removal from physically and socially isolated groups of
ESL students—and then experience frustration and disappointment with lower-than-
expected grades and/or with social alienation once they are mainstreamed. Social,
linguistic, and academic support is typically inadequate after students enter the main-
stream. Parents who have the financial means often rely on after-school classes staffed
by private tutors who use students’ L1 and/or L2 to help ensure their success. Seek-
ing additional coaching after school or on weekends is also a cultural practice in
many countries with highly competitive education systems. Some students meet with
private tutors for several hours each week to help them with their most troubling
academic subjects and assignments. Unfortunately, students whose families lack the
financial resources, access to qualified tutors, or the ability to provide academic sup-
port themselves have fewer options and may be at a considerable disadvantage.
ESL courses, beyond providing students with necessary training and practice in
the L2 and in L2-content integration, also provide students with crucial social net-
works that they may find difficult to establish in the mainstream with local students
(Duff, 2002a). In addition, the ESL classes often provide opportunities for students
to express themselves orally and in writing, revealing aspects of their interests, his-
tories, identities, aspirations, and personalities that may be completely masked in
mainstream courses. The validation and recognition they receive from such opportu-
nities can be invaluable and may be unavailable to them in the mainstream. However,
to the extent that ESL classes are perceived merely as “fun-and-games” and as per-
sonal revelation, they become viewed as irrelevant to the academic goals of students
(and their parents). Finally, as McKay & Wong (1996) demonstrate in their study of
ethnically Chinese secondary students in California, students may be simultaneously
negotiating multiple “Discourses,” often including multiple sets of expectations, cul-
tures, desires, and social positionings by themselves and by others. Thus, the con-
trast between ESL and mainstream cultures is just one cultural divide that students
must cross on a regular basis. Harklau (1999b, 2000) and Valdés (1998) have written
about issues of multiple and sometimes contradictory forms of representation of ELLs
that they must then negotiate or endure during and beyond secondary school and
some of the affective consequences of students’ complex and evolving identities and
ways of being positioned.

ESL STUDENTS AND HIGH SCHOOL DROP-OUT RATES

The linguistic and academic difficulty of secondary school coursework—especially in

the senior years—and feelings of frustration and marginalization in mainstream en-
vironments contribute to high rates of dropout or attrition among minority-language
students. There may also be important economic and social considerations for their
attrition, such as the need for teens to enter the job market relatively early to earn
money for the family, to take care of family members, and so on. Several recent studies
(e.g., Derwing, Decorby, Ichikawa, & Jamieson, 1999; Roessingh & Kover, 2002; Watt
& Roessingh, 2001) have documented patterns of dropout among ESL students in
Canada; some American states also keep statistics on annual dropout rates across eth-
nic groups (e.g., California; see http://www.cde.ca.gov). Watt and Roessingh (2001)
described a longitudinal study of 540 ESL students at an urban high school in Western
Canada from 1988 to 1997, and budget cuts in the early 1990s that affected levels of
provincial ESL support. They reported that dropout rates for ESL students remained
quite consistent over the years, at 74%, but that “accelerated integration into academic
58 DUFF

mainstream courses has had a detrimental impact on the educational success of in-
termediate level ESL students” (p. 203). More of the students who completed high
school were opting for vocational tracks than academic tracks because they lacked
the linguistic support and foundation for academic matriculation. The authors stated
that, in contrast to the ESL rate, the general high school dropout rate was about 30 to
35%, based on federal, provincial, and municipal government sources. Derwing et al.
(1999), conducting research in a different city in the same relatively affluent province,
also found a low level of completion among students: 54% among 486 ESL students, of
whom only 40% completed all high school graduation requirements; the rest dropped
out, completed 100 credits toward graduation but did not receive a diploma, or were
“pushed out” because of their age. (Others could not be tracked because they had
moved from their school district.)

SCHOOL-TO-COLLEGE TRANSITIONS FOR

SECONDARY STUDENTS

Finally, successful completion of high school, for those ELLs who attain that mile-
stone, does not ensure their seamless admission into university or college and their
successful graduation several years later. In fact, a generation of immigrants at least
partly schooled in English-speaking countries now entering college or university are
often dismayed to find themselves still being placed in postsecondary ESL compo-
sition courses once in college, rather than in freshman English composition courses.
Their instructors, moreover, are at a loss of how best to respond to the unique linguistic
needs of this group, now commonly dubbed “Generation 1.5 students” (Harklau et al.,
1999). Placement in remedial ESL courses is seen to be a particularly discouraging out-
come for those ELLs previously viewed as “model” students in high school who may
paradoxically find themselves stigmatized or struggling in courses at university be-
cause of their undeveloped English essay writing skills (Harklau, 2000; Harklau et al.,
1999). Therefore, a number of recent studies have examined the writing instruction
received by ELLs in secondary school and the degree to which it prepares them for
higher education and other literacy purposes, such as community, workplace, and per-
sonal purposes (e.g., Lay, Carro, Tien, Niemann, & Leong, 1999). Hartman and Tarone
(1999) reported that writing instruction for secondary ESL students in the Minnesota
contexts they researched tended to focus on sentence- to paragraph-level grammar
and mechanics, with an emphasis on grammatical accuracy. There was little or no
prewriting activity such as concept mapping and brainstorming, little drafting and
freewriting of the type encouraged in process writing approaches, and little emphasis
on content. For higher-level ESL writing, modeling was considered important by one
teacher, and she emphasized the correct suppliance of words found in readings, verb
tenses, and other grammatical usage.
In contrast, in mainstream English classes at the same grade levels, a process ap-
proach to writing was used that included prewriting activities, such as freewriting,
journaling, and brainstorming, in order to elicit or activate students’ background
knowledge about topics. Weekly assignments in the latter context might include
book reviews, literary criticism, character studies, and so on, in which students were
expected to take a position of some sort and provide arguments in support of it. Gram-
mar and mechanics were relatively minor concerns. One Grade 12 college preparatory
English teacher, lamenting the lack of academic literacy preparation on the part of
mainstreamed ESL students, of the sort required on test essays, said: “For crying out
loud, spend some time tutoring them before you throw them to the wolves, as it were.
I can’t slow up!” (Adger & Peyton, 1999, p. 107). Content teachers in other areas (e.g.,
history, social studies, economics), for their part, reported that short-answer questions
 3. ESL IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS 59

and essays were required in their courses, but they did not provide explicit instruction
on writing; their primary concern was students’ knowledge of subject matter, criti-
cal thinking, and the communication of ideas. Teachers reported on problems with
the ESL students’ logic and idea development in their writing and their paragraph
development. It is natural that the ESL classes and mainstream English or other con-
tent classes would have somewhat different emphases and, thus, should be seen as
complementary, because they have historically dealt with different populations and
different priorities. That is, newcomers need to understand the basics of English be-
fore being asked to produce creative or complex works in their undeveloped second
language. However, some conclusions drawn by Hartman and Tarone were that: (a)
ESL students need to spend more time engaged in appropriate literacy instruction
before being mainstreamed; (b) ESL students need to focus more on organization and
content in their ESL writing instruction and not primarily on grammar and vocabu-
lary (which may or may not transfer when doing more open-ended writing tasks); (c)
inclusion on more process writing in ESL classes would not only better prepare ESL
students for mainstream writing requirements in high school and beyond but would
also help them develop and learn to communicate their ideas in English before at-
tempting to write about them; (d) more emphasis should be placed on content and on
a wider range of text types and genres; and (e) individual tutoring in writing would
be beneficial for many students.
In a case study of three Latino middle school students’ experiences with writing
instruction across ESL and mainstream contexts, Valdés (1999) also points out that in
ESL classes teachers approached writing instruction in various ways: (a) through a
controlled composition approach (or guided composition) with a narrow emphasis
on sentence-level grammatical accuracy and little room for creative expression on the
part of students; (b) a more creative, generative process approach that for low-level
students yielded pieces not easily understood by readers; (c) process writing and direct
instruction, which had students work on longer pieces of writing, with multiple drafts,
conferencing, instruction about organization, and a focus on students’ own lives. Thus,
students being mainstreamed and then proceeding to higher education may have had
highly variable experiences with early L2 (and L1) literacy instruction, experiences
that may years later continue to either help or haunt them. Across several studies in
the Harklau et al. (1999) volume, ELLs were very surprised by the rigorous demands
at the university level, for which high school simply left them unprepared. Therefore,
the development of appropriate academic writing skills must remain a priority for
both research and intervention with secondary-level ELLs.

CONCLUSION

This chapter reviewed some of the burgeoning research on ESL students at the sec-
ondary level from a number of perspectives: demographic, political, educational,
social, and cultural. I have also attempted to balance descriptive, prescriptive, and re-
search approaches to schooling at this level. One overall finding is that the challenges
facing these students and their teachers are quite enormous, ranging from basic so-
cialization and settlement, to oral language development and the development of
academic literacies appropriate not only for secondary and higher education, but also
for new standardized tests being imposed on many school districts. Students often ex-
perience extreme social isolation and disappointment at their academic and linguistic
development, often because their own expectations or those of their family and school
are overly ambitious. Another common theme is that many secondary level programs
do not provide adequate content-based language and literacy instruction for students,
resulting in difficulties for them once they are mainstreamed. However, despite these
60 DUFF

many challenges, many sources cited in this chapter provide suggestions about how
students can be supported through their initial and ongoing language/literacy de-
velopment in secondary school and how their academic interests and needs can be
met in a deliberate, integrated fashion. More longitudinal research now needs to
be conducted on the students’ transitions from school to work or higher education.
Rather than view secondary ESL students and their learning in isolation, they must be
viewed in the context of their prior and subsequent learning, both inside and outside
of English-medium schooling in order to understand more fully the effectiveness of
their education and possibilities for the future.

NOTES

1. This research and preparation of this paper were supported by standard research grants from the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
2. Canada’s immigration policies and priorities and, in particular, the point system used to determine
immigrants’ eligibility were revised in 2002, placing new emphasis on proficiency in both languages.
3. I refer to English learners in schools, interchangeably, as ESL students, English language learners, new-
comer students, and non-native English speakers. However, I recognize that these terms (and others, like
limited English proficient students, minority-language students) may be problematic, potentially stigmatiz-
ing students because of their deficits in English rather than focussing on their L1 resources, repertoires,
and emergent bilingualism. Interestingly, the California Dept. of Education has just changed its way
of classifying students into English Learners (ELs) or EL students, and Fluent-English-Proficient (FEP)
(http://www.data1.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/). Naturally, such terms do not adequately reflect the vast
differences among students in either category, their years of residence in the English-dominant country,
or their other characteristics.
4. The same is true in many British and Australian cities. Furthermore, many other non-English-dominant
countries in Europe and elsewhere have similarly large numbers of new immigrants, often from a
different range of source countries and needing to learn target languages other than English in their new
host country.
5. There were over 1.5 million English learners in California public schools alone in Spring 2001, of whom
83.4% were Spanish-L1, with 1-3% of the remainder falling into the following major L1 groups, in de-
scending order: Vietnamese, Hmong, Cantonese, Pilipino/Tagalog, Korean, and Khmer/Cambodian (ac-
cording to 2001 statistics reported in http://www.cde.ca.gov). In comparison, there were about 188,000
fewer English learners just 5 years earlier. Among the 844,387 “Fluent-English-Proficient” in Califor-
nia public schools in Spring 2001, 65% were also from Spanish backgrounds, followed by those from
Pilipino/Tagalog, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Korean, Mandarin, Khmer, Farsi, and Armenian backgrounds,
representing in total 23% of the remainder.
6. Secondary school is contrasted with elementary school, but some school districts divide secondary school
into middle or junior high school (e.g., grades 7–9) and senior high school (e.g., grades 10–12).
7. The SLEP Test is also commonly used in program contexts and with populations vastly different from
those it was designed for, which is obviously problematic for reasons of test validity. In British Columbia,
for instance, it is used for ELL adults in some healthcare programs and in other kinds of ESL/vocational
programs with adults.

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4

ESL in Adult Education

Denise E. Murray
Macquarie University

That the title of this chapter is ESL in adult education and not one of the possible
alternatives such as teaching English to adults or ESL for adults is significant in two
ways. The title situates the chapter within the contested dichotomy of ESL versus EFL.
Further, it frames this ESL instruction within adult education, that is, those systems
established in English-dominant countries such as Australia, Canada, Great Britain,
New Zealand, and the United States to provide high school subjects to adults who
did not graduate from high school or to provide general interest subjects such as
conversational Spanish or computer literacy. In other words, this framing differen-
tiates between non-immigrant adults learning English (such an in intensive English
programs) and immigrant/refugee adults learning English. Therefore, the focus of
this chapter is on the teaching of English to adult immigrants and refugees. How-
ever, the chapter focuses on issues of particular interest to this population—issues of
curriculum, program evaluation, particular learner characteristics, and assessment of
learning. Although many other topics, such as reading strategies, learner identity, and
task-based learning, are topics relevant to ESL in adult education, these topics will
be dealt with in other chapters of this Handbook. The choices have been made based
on providing readers with an overarching framework of ESL in adult education in
English-dominant countries.
The delivery systems differ considerably across these countries, resulting in differ-
ent perceptions of the adult ESL learner and instructional delivery as well as different
research foci on what an agenda for research into ESL in adult education might entail.
Consequently, there is no coherent body of research literature on adult ESL education;
rather we have fragmentary, context-specific research, often with findings that are not
generalizable. Even demographic research is scattered and inconsistent. A review of
extant literature indicates that in most countries, the adult ESL learner is invisible
on the national policy agenda and consequently program delivery and research are
mostly nonfunded or underfunded. Thus, the adult ESL learner is almost invisible
on the agenda of academic researchers—because of the lack of funding. The excep-
tions have been the long-term program and research funding in Australia and the
recent alignment of ESL with literacy through the National Centre for ESL Literacy
Education (NCLE) in the United States.

65
66 MURRAY

GLOBAL CONTEXTS FOR ESL IN ADULT EDUCATION

Although adult ESL learners across these countries may share similar backgrounds,
experiences, and immigration or refugee status, because the context for their learning
of English varies as a result of differences in program delivery systems, the adult
education context for each country needs to be explained.

Australia
Australia has a more than 50-year history of encouraging English language learning as
part of the settlement process of immigrants and refugees (Martin, 1999). Australian
policies focus on the provision of language training and interpreter and translation
services, along with coordination of welfare, labor market, health, and other social ser-
vices to ensure immigrants’ access to services. These services are coordinated through
the National Integrated Settlement Strategy, a planning framework that fosters coop-
eration between all levels of government. English language provision is administered
by the Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) within the Department of Immigra-
tion and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs.1 Immigrants and refugees for whom
English is not a first language and who have been assessed as not having functional
English language skills are entitled to 510 hours of English language instruction.
Provision within the AMEP is via state and territory organizations that are funded
by the Commonwealth Government through a competitive tendering process every
5 years. In addition to formal face-to-face courses, a variety of other delivery modes
are funded: distance learning, home tutoring, and self-paced learning through Inde-
pendent Learning Centres (usually within the organizations that provide classes). For
those learners not eligible for the AMEP or who have reached their 510 hour limit,
courses are available through Institutes of Technical and Further Education, commu-
nity groups, private language schools and other Commonwealth-funded programs
linked to literacy and/or vocational training, some of which are fee-for-service and
some offered free.
Because the AMEP is a nationally conducted program, the program has features
unique to Australia: a national curriculum framework that meets the settlement needs
of learners, a national research centre to coordinate and conduct research across the
program, a collaborative approach between the Commonwealth and providers, and
the professionalism of AMEP teachers. During the 53 years of the AMEP, instructional
practice has changed as a result of research into best practice and into language learn-
ing and as a result of government policy. In the 1980s, as a result of research conducted
in Australia and also a general direction toward learner-centeredness in TESOL, the
AMEP “adopted a highly decentralised, learner-centred and needs-based curriculum
planning philosophy” (Burns, 1995, p. 11). To operate such a bottom-up planning
process that expected teacher autonomy, required teachers to become curriculum de-
velopers and researchers. During this period, a culture of professionalization and
collaborative research developed, especially of action research. However, the action
research models were collaborative and institutionally grounded (see, for example
Brindley, 1990). In the early 1990s the program underwent major curriculum and pol-
icy changes, changes that are still in place today. These included the development
of a national curriculum framework that is text-based and the certification of learner
progress through the assessment of competencies.

Canada
Canada also has a nationally funded language program, Language Instruction for
Newcomers to Canada (LINC), which provides free basic instruction in English and
 4. ESL IN ADULT EDUCATION 67

French to facilitate adult immigrant and refugee integration into Canadian society.
This comprehensive, uniform national program, however, was not instituted until
1992. Prior to that, language delivery to immigrants, although funded federally, was
characterized by localized programs across a range of sectors, with variable curric-
ula, teacher qualifications, and expected learner outcomes. The national nature of
this funding does, however, reflect the Canadian acceptance that language instruc-
tion is part of immigrant and refugee settlement2 and is a federal responsibility. As
in Australia, LINC is managed through the federal department responsible for immi-
gration, currently Citizenship and Immigration Canada, established in 1994 to “link
immigration services with citizenship registration, to promote the unique ideals all
Canadians share and to help build a stronger Canada” (Citizenship and Immigration
Canada, 2002). However, unlike Australia, although the curriculum and assessment
framework is national, program delivery is more devolved, funded annually through
grants, and there is no national center to coordinate research, professional develop-
ment, and resources.

Great Britain
Until 2002, the United Kingdom had not considered the learning of the national lan-
guage for adult immigrants and refugees to be the responsibility of government.
Indeed, even the conferring of citizenship for immigrants does not require demon-
stration of proficiency in English, Welsh, or Scottish Gaelic if the immigrant or refugee
is married to a British citizen. However, two recent initiatives are changing the face of
adult ESL in the United Kingdom. In 2002, the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, (2002)
published a White Paper, “Secure Borders, Safe Haven: Integration with Diversity in
Modern Britain,” which proposes that language skills (along with knowledge about
British society) become a requirement of citizenship. Meanwhile, the Department For
Education and Skills included ESOL in its list of core skills that required curricu-
lum development; Consequently, in 2001, the new Adult ESOL Core Curriculum was
published, a core curriculum aligned with the national standards for adult literacy.

New Zealand
New Zealand, like the United Kingdom, is reconsidering how it addresses the needs
of immigrants and refugees.

Historically, the combination of high employment levels and a focus on English-speaking

migrants meant the need for specific settlement services was low. The only large wave of
non-English speaking background migrants in the period from 1945 to 1991 was that of
Pacific Islands peoples in the 1960s and 1970s. This group was encouraged to migrate to
fill semi-skilled job vacancies. Language proficiency was not considered a high priority
in such employment (Fletcher, 1999).

Thus, New Zealand has no national curriculum framework for English (or Maori)
language instruction for adults. More recently, New Zealand has focused on business
migration, while still admitting family and humanitarian (refugee) migrants, the latter
not being provided with language training after arrival. Immigrants and refugees
can, however, enroll in private language schools and institutions on a fee-for-service
basis.

United States
In contrast to Australian and Canada, ESL provision in the United States is a frag-
mented, locally delivered enterprise. Crandall (1993) vividly captures the minority
68 MURRAY

status of adult ESL provision in the United States as follows:

Large multilevel classes, limited resources, substandard facilities, intermittent funding,

limited contracts with few benefits: This is the context in which ESL literacy practitioners
work. Adult education is a stepchild of K–12 education and an afterthought in U.S.
educational policy. That fact is made obvious each time a public school which is no
longer needed is reassigned to adult education (often with the same small, children’s
desks inside) or when adult education classes are conducted in inappropriate facilities
that during the day have other functions as elementary or secondary classrooms (p. 497).

In 1917, an immigration literacy test was introduced, primarily with the intention
of restricting immigrants, especially from southeastern Europe. Later court decisions
overturned much of this legislation, but sustained English literacy as a requirement for
naturalization, a situation still in force today. The first Federal Act for teaching adult
immigrants English was enacted in 1964. But this and later acts did not institutionalize
a coherent policy for delivering English language instruction to immigrants, resulting
in provision that is fragmented, financially unstable, marginalized, and spread across
a number of sectors—adult literacy, cultural diversity, vocational education, commu-
nity colleges, and community-based organizations. Federal funding comes through
adult education, job-related federal grants, and block grants to the states. The only
period in U.S. history when delivery of adult English language was tied to settlement
was after the influx of Southeast Asian refugees. As there was no existing commu-
nity to receive these immigrants and because of the United States’ involvement in the
Vietnam War, a comprehensive program was established for these refugees, involv-
ing the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and State. Yet the
education of refugees has always been with the goal of their becoming self-sufficient,
which really means that they no longer need social services, even if the wages they
bring in are minimum and barely subsistence level. With this goal in mind, programs
are designed to move learners into the workforce as quickly as possible, leading to
curricula that focus on “survival.”

IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENTS/TRENDS/TRADITIONS
IN THE DISCIPLINE

Curricular Frameworks
In the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, recent approaches to adult
education at the policy level have focused on adult literacy. In this policy context,
ESL practitioners have had to argue for how ESL differs from adult literacy (see, for
example, Moore, 1995; Davison, 1996) and/or include literacy (and sometimes even
numeracy) as a language teaching focus in order to secure recognition and funding.
In the United States, the establishment of the National Center for ESL Literacy
Education (NCLE) reflected a more national approach to the language education of
immigrants, but with the focus on literacy. Although this innovation has led to more
coordinated research and resource dissemination, the lack of a generally accepted
definition of literacy gives programs freedom to develop their own views of and
goals for literacy education (Wrigley & Guth, 1992), a freedom that results in a number
of different approaches to adult ESL instruction. According to Crandall and Peyton
(1993) adult ESL educators describe five different approaches used in the United
States: Freirean, whole language, language experience approach, learner writing and
publishing, and competency-based education.
The Freirean approach, sometimes called a participatory approach, is based on the
political view that literacy is of value only if it helps people liberate themselves from
 4. ESL IN ADULT EDUCATION 69

the social conditions of oppression. Thus, the goal is social change. To achieve this,
teachers act as facilitators and co-learners. Learners identify their own problems and
develop solutions, producing texts that describe their problems, and seek to change
their situations (see, for example, Ullman, 1999). In programs that use a whole lan-
guage approach, written language is not broken apart, nor are rules or conventions
discussed. Learners interact with texts they and others have written in a community
of learners. The language experience approach, which can be used in a whole lan-
guage program, is a technique in which learners dictate their own experiences, the
experiences are transcribed, and then the transcriptions are used as reading material.
The teacher’s role is transcriber until learners can do it themselves. Teachers do not
correct student errors, although students may do so themselves. Learner writing and
publishing may actually be used in any of the other approaches, but programs with
this focus value learners’ own experiences and authentic audiences for writing. As
students write for a real audience (their peers), they can reflect on what constitutes
good writing. Competency-based ESL curricula often stress job-related tasks and in-
clude topics such as filling out forms, calling in sick, or developing listening skills to
identify procedures to follow, but not the language needed for managerial or super-
visory functions or for developing critical literacy for examining their roles and for
reading texts in a variety of ways. Or, they may focus on personal survival competen-
cies such as using public transportation or buying stamps at the post office. The goal
is to help students to function in their new society.
The underlying philosophies of these different approaches are quite similar at the
highest level—all seek to empower learners through literacy—yet, what we teach
and how we teach it sends powerful and very different messages to learners. For
example, competency-based education can lead learners to view literacy as only work-
related and that their roles in the United States are as workers, not as critical thinkers.
The other approaches can lead learners to believe that form doesn’t matter. Only the
Freirean approach recognizes explicitly the ideological nature of literacy. After the
National Literacy Act of 1991, adult ESL programs and much of the ESL literature on
adult ESL began to use “literacy” almost as synonymous with “ESL.” Most recently,
with federal legislation advocating welfare to work through initiatives such as the
Workforce Investment Act of 1998, adult ESL providers are adopting a competency-
based, vocational skills model in order to secure funding.
In Australia, in contrast to the United States, a national curriculum framework, the
Certificates in Spoken and Written English (1998), at four levels (CSWE I, II, III, and
IV) is mandated by the Commonwealth Government. In addition to the four levels,
learners are placed in one of three bands, based on their learning pace; Band A being
for learners with limited formal learning experiences, with low levels of literacy in
their L1 and often with an L1 using a non-Roman script, whereas Band C is for students
literate in their L1 and with some post-secondary education or technical skills training.
The curriculum also offers different learning foci such as vocational English, further
study, and community access. The framework is based on a text-based approach to
curriculum design and a competency-based approach to assessment of outcomes. In a
text-based approach (see, for example, Feetz, 1998), language is seen as a resource for
making meaning through whole texts3 , and language learning involves learning how
to choose among the different meaning making linguistic systems to communicate
effectively in different contexts (see, for example, Certificates in Spoken and Written
English, 1998; Feetz, 1998; Halliday, 1985). The curriculum includes literacy as a key
competency, in response to both learner needs in a highly literate society, and in
response to government policies and debates in the 1990s concerning the literacy crisis
in Australia (see the following). The curriculum document itself consistently refers to
“English language and literacy” as the curriculum’s goal. In response to research into
learner needs (e.g., McPherson, 1997), modules on numeracy training are included in
70 MURRAY

the curriculum. The Certificates in Spoken and Written English (CSWE) curriculum
was adopted in 1992, in response to a 1985 review of the AMEP in Australia (Campbell,
1986), a review that recommended a national key centre and a curriculum that had
clearly defined learner pathways (see below for details of this review). From 1977, the
AMEP had been generously funded to provide a variety of English language programs
to meet the needs of different learners, which included programs in the workplace
for professionals, using home tutoring, offered through, distance learning, for newly
arrived immigrants and refugees and for long-term residents. During this period, the
AMEP had adopted learner-centered approaches, in which learner needs were the
starting point for syllabus design, the syllabus was negotiated with the learner, and
the teacher was seen as curriculum developer (see Nunan, 1988).
Within the CSWE curricular framework, however, language providers and teachers
have flexibility in the syllabus and instructional approach they use. However, common
across the system is a focus on texts, both written and oral, and the explicit teaching of
their structure (see, for example Feetz, 1998). Most AMEP teachers use the five-stage
teaching-learning cycle developed through extensive research into language teaching
in Australia, especially in disadvantaged K–12 schools (see, for example, Callaghan
& Rothery, 1988). The diagram below summarizes this approach:

2. Modelling and
deconstructing the
text
3. Joint
construction
of the text
1. Building
the context
4.
Independent
construction
5. Linking of the text
related texts

FIG. 4.1. Source: Feetz, 1998, p. 28.

In the United Kingdom, the new Adult ESOL Core Curriculum is based on the core
curriculum for adult literacy, a focus required by the Qualifications and Curriculum
Authority that developed the 2000 national standards for adult literacy. The national
curriculum was developed as part of a national strategy on literacy and numeracy,
in response to the findings of a 1999 government-sponsored report (Department for
Education and Employment, 1999), a report that defined literacy and numeracy as
“the ability to read, write and speak in English and to use mathematics at a level
necessary to function at work and in society in general” (p. 7). For ESOL, literacy has
been defined as the ability to speak, listen and respond, read and comprehend, and
write to communicate (The Adult ESOL Core Curriculum, 2001). The Adult ESOL
Core Curriculum offers a framework for English language learning, defines the skills,
knowledge, and understanding that ESOL learners need to demonstrate their achieve-
ment of the national standards, and provides a reference tool for ESOL teachers in a
variety of different settings (The Adult ESOL Core Curriculum, 2001).
 4. ESL IN ADULT EDUCATION 71

The curriculum covers three levels across the four skills of listening, speaking, read-
ing, and writing, but advocates an integrated approach. The overarching framework
for the teaching of reading and writing comes from the National Literacy Strategy
and includes:
r Text level addresses overall meaning of the text, the ability to read critically and
flexibly, and write in different styles and forms.
r Sentence level deals with grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation.
r Word level looks at the individual words themselves, their structures, spelling
and meaning (The Adult ESOL Core Curriculum, 2001, p. 11).

The curriculum suggests that although teachers might draw learners’ attention to
discrete parts of texts, the goal is understanding whole texts. However, no particular
linguistic or pedagogic model is suggested as the basis for the curriculum framework.
However, in describing how to use the curriculum, the writers indicate that teachers
might want to begin with context that has been negotiated with learners (e.g., job
search skills) and build tasks around the content that include required functions,
grammar, and vocabulary; yet, in later sections it recommends starting syllabus de-
velopment with a set of functions, topics, skill, or grammatical items (p. 21). It seems
then, to be recommending a mixed syllabus (see Feetz, 1998).
In Canada, the benchmarks, firmly established within the disciplines of ESL, have
been developed independently of adult literacy curricula. The national English-
language benchmarks were developed through a working group of ESOL learn-
ers, teachers, administrators, immigrant service providers, and government officials
(Pierce & Stewart, 1997). The benchmarks provide a descriptive scale of ESOL profi-
ciency; they are not a syllabus. However, curriculum developers can use the bench-
marks as a guide in syllabus design.

Program Evaluation
In 1994, the U.S. Department of Education completed a national evaluation of federally
supported adult education programs to determine program effectiveness toward im-
proving literacy, English language proficiency, and high school completion. Although
this evaluation was of all adult programs, it provides useful data on ESL provision,
in which 50% of all adult learners are enrolled (Office of Vocational and Adult Edu-
cation, 1999).4 ESL has been identified as the fastest growing area in federally funded
adult programs (National Center for Educational Statistics, 1997), with 38% of na-
tional adult education enrollment being in ESL. This national evaluation found that
the majority of clients in ESL classes were Hispanic (69%) and Asian (19%), lived in
major metropolitan areas in the western region of the United States, were literate in
their home language (92%), but spoke little English (87%). Almost half were employed
while attending ESL adult classes. Class size was larger for ESL classes (median of 20)
than for other adult programs (for example, Adult Basic Education had a class size
median of 12) and ESL learners stayed in classes three to four times as long as did
adults in other literacy/basic education programs. Retention (persistence) was found
to be greater for learners who used support services such as counseling, attended day
classes, and who engaged in independent study and/or computer-assisted learning.
In other words, clients who used support services, attended during the day (rather
than at night), and who engaged in independent and/or computer-assisted learn-
ing were more able to sustain their participation. In a telephone follow-up survey,
the evaluation found that the majority of clients who left the program for reasons
other than having completed the program or having achieved their goals, left because
72 MURRAY

of change in work or because of family responsibilities. Interestingly, client cost per

hour was not a predictor of persistence, but was a predictor of learning gains (Young,
Fitzgerald, & Morgan, 1994).
Sixty percent of learners indicated that adult ESL had helped them improve their
English skills, a finding supported by results on the standardized assessment (CASAS).5
After 120 hours of instruction, adult ESL learners achieved an average gain of 5 scale
points on the CASAS reading test;6 increasing amounts of ESL instruction and in-
creasing financial investment in ESL programs contributed directly to literacy gains
in English. Additionally, learner employability improved—both initial employment
and obtaining a better position. The report also notes that “the current adult edu-
cation system is unable to keep up with the high demand for ESL services in spite
of the important results being achieved by ESL literacy education” (Fitzgerald, 1995,
p. 3).
In Australia, the AMEP has undergone a series of program evaluations, usually in
response to external political pressures and/or changes of government. A 1978 report
from a government-initiated review (Galbally, 1978) called for:

r The establishment of a wide range of post-arrival services for adult immigrants,

including unlimited entitlements to free educational and settlement services.
Provision of tuition to English language instruction was seen as an essential
aspect of nation building.
r Stable triennial funding through state/territory organizations (AMES7 ).
r Increased job security for teachers through state education departments provid-
ing permanent AMES teaching positions.

These measures led to the rapid expansion of AMEP programs, including for newly
arrived, long-term residents, home tutor, workplace, academic and professional, and
distance learning programs. The stable and expanding environment for ESL teaching
led to the professionalization of the field through a greater availability of graduate
certificate, diploma, and masters programs. Unlike in the United States where such
programs primarily lead to overseas positions, in Australia, the professionalization
of the field was through the adult ESL sector.
In 1985, the Commonwealth Government commissioned an extensive review of
the AMEP (Campbell, 1986), in particular focusing on the appropriateness of the
curriculum model, which, at that time, was a learner-centered, learner-negotiated
model. The review found that, although teachers supported the principles behind
such a curriculum, in practice they found it placed tremendous demands on their
time and expertise. In addition, the review found that there was a perceived lack of
continuity in the program (Nunan, 1987). A key recommendation, therefore, was
to develop curriculum guidelines or frameworks with clear learner pathways; in
other words, to reduce the reliance on teachers as curriculum developers and pro-
vide a less negotiated syllabus. These frameworks were taken up at state level, where
groups of teachers, working with colleagues assigned the role of curriculum coordi-
nators, developed curricula for local use. Eventually, one such state (NSW AMES8 )
developed an integrated curriculum document, tested it with their own teachers
and learners, had it accredited within the Australian vocational education system,
and eventually had it adopted as the curriculum framework for the entire AMEP.
This framework is the Certificates in Spoken and Written English (CSWE) referred to
earlier.
Since tendering, the AMEP in Australia is measured on three criteria—reach, re-
tention, and results. In 2000, research was conducted into both reach and retention of
adult immigrants eligible for AMEP classes. This research, based on 1996–1998 data,
 4. ESL IN ADULT EDUCATION 73

found that 28% of clients left the program for one term or more without completing
510 hours or achieving functional English. The largest withdrawal rates were for
Family Migration clients in general, young women in specific Vietnamese and Ara-
bic communities, older adults in the Chinese groups, young adults in the former
Yugoslavia groups, and young adult men in the Arabic group. Reasons clients cited
for withdrawal included gaining employment, family or childcare responsibilities,
fast pace of class, discouragement at slow progress, wanting a single-sex class, and
lack of understanding of their entitlement (Noy, 2001a). A complementary study on
why eligible clients did not begin English language classes found that the princi-
ple reason for not registering was that the client gave priority to meeting other
needs such as finding employment. Other reasons included misunderstanding the
regulations regarding registration and entitlement, not having access to culturally
appropriate childcare, and lack of confidence in their ability to cope with formal
learning because of their limited educational background (de Riva O’Phelan & Mawer,
2002).
In 2000, a National Client Satisfaction Survey was conducted through interviews
with 3,203 clients, representing 87% of AMEP students contacted. This high partici-
pation rate was attributed to the survey methodology: Initial contact letters and the
survey itself were conducted in 16 home languages, and service providers had dis-
cussed the upcoming survey in classes in advance. Overall, students were satisfied
with the services provided, with dissatisfaction on individual survey items being
less than 10% of clients. Survey questions covered a broad range of issues, includ-
ing whether staff at their language center made them feel welcome, whether their
English classes were enjoyable, how useful English was to them in their day-to-day
life, and their initial assessment and placement. Seventy-nine percent of clients found
the AMEP to be very helpful or helpful in assisting them to feel more confident
about living in Australia, whereas 17% found it a little helpful. Clients from some
backgrounds (Somalis, Turks, and Persians) were less comfortable in mixed classes;
students were less happy with their outcomes in writing English than in speaking,
reading, and understanding English.
Although there is no comparable national program in New Zealand and there-
fore no comparable governmental impetus for program evaluation, a recent study
(Watts, White, & Trlin, 2002) examined learners’ English language learning experi-
ences, both formal and informal, and also the service providers’ perceptions of learner
needs. This study found that more than half (61.7%) of the participants had joined En-
glish classes in their first year in New Zealand. However, learners also indicated that
they wanted greater levels of English language support from their own community,
from government, and from the wider Kiwi community. Whereas they wanted classes
from the first two groups, they wanted “opportunities to take part in and learn from
conversational interaction” (Watts, White, & Trlin, 2002, p. 89). However, they also
recognized that immigrants and refugees must take responsibility for their own learn-
ing of the host language. Among providers, “the strongly expressed view was that
immigrants and refugees have diverse cultural, educational and linguistic needs and
require flexible learning arrangements to meet their individual circumstances” (p. 90).
They, like in Australia, found a number of factors that prevented some immigrants
and refugees from participating, mostly lack of confidence, family attitudes, and reli-
gious belief. Providers also felt that government should play a larger role, especially
in providing resources for (free) ESL provision. This report calls for the New Zealand
government “to establish a national policy to coordinate the present fragmented sys-
tem” (p. 96), citing the coordinated mechanisms of both Australia and Canada as
models.
Like New Zealand, because there is no central government oversight of adult
ESL, no government-sponsored program evaluations have been conducted. However,
74 MURRAY

research was carried out in 1989 in 13 adult education ESOL centers around the United
Kingdom, with the goal of providing:

a detailed profile of the ESOL learners’ socioeconomic, linguistic, and cultural back-
ground. As well as analysing the migrants’ attitudes and motivation towards English
and their desire to maintain their mother tongues or heritage languages, the book de-
scribes how the ESOL teachers and supervisors design their curriculum, produce teaching
materials and evolve the tools and procedures to evaluate the progress made by learners
(Khanna, Verma, Agnihotri, & Sinha, 1998, p. vii).

Their informants were fairly representative of the migrant groups in the United King-
dom, except for underrepresentation of African and Middle Eastern groups. They
found that the majority of learners were female; between the ages of 16 and 45;
attended classes in church halls, schools, clinics, or community centers; and were
in classes held twice a week and of 2 hours duration. They further found that the
Pakistanis, though sharing positive social and linguistic stereotypes with Indians,
had much higher levels of proficiency because their age at arrival in the United King-
dom was half that of the Indians. A majority of teachers are part time or voluntary
White teachers with brief training of 10 hours spread over 5 to 6 weeks. Among their
recommendations were the use of bilingual classes, female teachers for South Asian
women, a non-assimilationist approach to ESOL, more professionalism among teach-
ing staff, an ESOL program sensitive to the socioeconomic, cultural, and linguistic
backgrounds of the ESOL learners, and “a national strategy for ESOL teaching which
recognises the sociolinguistic and pedagogic value of the development of skills in
both mother tongue and English” (Khanna et al., 1998, p. 103).

Learner Needs
Learner needs have been researched both in the microcosm of the learner and in the
broader context of the effect of language proficiency on immigrant and refugee set-
tlement and integration. The former research issue has been of interest primarily to
teachers and program administrators as they attempt to develop programs that meet
the needs of the learners in their classes. The latter research issue is the concern of re-
ceiving governments who use such research to determine immigration policy. Because
these two strands of research are usually conducted by different researchers coming
from different research paradigms, the fact that what learners need and governments
want are in conflict is usually not addressed.
Research in a number of countries shows that host country language proficiency of
immigrants and refugees has a large positive effect on their earnings and labor mar-
ket/occupational status. In the United States and Canada, those proficient in English
have earnings 17% and 12% higher respectively than those not proficient in English
(Chiswick & Miller, 1992), whereas in Australia the reduction in earnings is around
10% (Stromback, 1988). Similarly, immigrants with higher levels of host country lan-
guage proficiency have higher participation rates in the labor force and therefore lower
unemployment rates; language proficiency level is particularly important for immi-
grants in highly skilled occupations (see, for example, Wooden, 1994 for Australia;
Boyd, DeVries, & Simkin, 1994 for Canada; and Chiswick, Cohen, & Zach, 1997 for
the United States). Whereas oral language proficiency in English is required for initial
employment, literacy in English is needed for promotion and more advanced levels of
work (National Institute for Literacy, 2000). Less research has been conducted on the
effects of language proficiency on integration, and most of the researchers have used
interview or qualitative survey data. The studies that have been conducted identify
language/communication difficulties as being a serious issue for social interaction,
 4. ESL IN ADULT EDUCATION 75

accessing services, and confidence in interacting in the wider community (see, for
example, Ip, Wu, & Inglis, 1998 for Australia; Lidgard, Ho, Chen, Goodwin, & Bed-
ford, 1998 for New Zealand).

Learner Characteristics
Learners With Special Needs. Although each population of ESL learners will in-
clude learners with special needs, this issue has been addressed less in the adult
sector. McPherson (1997) found that teachers and learners identified the groups that
have special learning needs as aged learners, learners with low levels of literacy in
L1, learners with no formal education background, students from non-Roman script
backgrounds, and survivors of torture and trauma. Some studies have been conducted
on survivors of torture and trauma (e.g., McPherson, 1997; Welaratna, 1985), learners
with limited schooling and/or limited or no L1 literacy (e.g., Er, 1986; Hood & Kightley,
1991; McPherson, 1997; Weinstein, 1998), different learning styles (Willing, 1988), and
older learners (Er, 1986, McPherson, 1997; Scott, 1994).
McPherson (1997) found that “classes formed on the basis of a range of characteris-
tics which indicate a slow pace of learning will often result in such a disparate group
that their very different language and literacy needs will not be effectively met” (p. 42).
McPherson found further, that learners in Band A (that is, those with limited formal ed-
ucation and usually low levels of literacy in their L1) needed courses characterised by:
r Assessment and referral schemes that can identify special needs at entry into the
program.
r Bilingual assistance for course information, goal clarification, language, learning.
r Lower intensity courses.
r A teaching methodology that has as explicit goals the development of language
learning strategies and spoken and written language for community access.
r Teachers trained to identify special needs and develop appropriate strategies to
meet them.
r Recognition within the certificates in Spoken and Written English (CSWE) for
achievement of language goals related to settlement needs, and the need for
further education and training. (p. 43)

For survivors of torture and trauma, McPherson’s research identified the need for
a uniquely designed learning context to accommodate their physical, psychological,
and social needs, a finding supported by other research on such learners. Herman
(1992) and the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture (2000) note that such learners
are often overwhelmed by their past experiences and feel a lack of control over their
lives, a lack of connection and lack of meaning, and often have memory loss and poor
concentration. Yet, language learning requires connection, control, concentration, and
meaning-making. Research in this area has recommended that the language learning
environment be flexible by providing opportunities for learners to share their expe-
riences (but only if they so wish) and to choose their level of participation in classes.
They also recommend that teachers focus on learners’ strengths, including using L1,
and help learners access community resources (see, for example, Canadian Centre for
Victims of Torture, 2000; Florez, 2000; Isserlis, 1996, 2000; Rivera, 1999). Other adult
ESL publications refer to the variety of language learners and strategies for teaching
learners with particular needs (see, for example, The Adult ESOL Core Curriculum,
2001; Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture, 2000), but are based on experience and
intuition, rather than on research or at least research reported in the publication.
In Australia, as a result of McPherson’s recommendations, Department of Immi-
gration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs agreed to provide an additional
76 MURRAY

100 hours of instruction for refugee clients, recognizing their special circumstances—
often victims of torture and trauma, facing psychological and other barriers in their
initial year of settlement. This program, called the Special Preparatory Program (SPP;
Noy, 2001b):

r Provides a bridge from initial settlement and learning difficulties linked with
past trauma to formal AMEP learning by establishing routine, structure and
social networks.
r Allows extra time in a formal AMEP program to settle in and learn to begin to
learn.
r Provides a supportive, nonthreatening environment (an additional support sys-
tem) through relevant personal contact.
r Provides connections/information about support and settlement services (links
and referral processes).

The SPP was evaluated in 2000 (Noy, 2001b), an evaluation that found that the vast
majority (87.5%) of SPP clients made a successful transition to regular AMEP classes
and that their initial progress in these classes compared favorably with that of other
clients, demonstrating that the SPP assisted them to adapt to the learning environment
and to learn successfully. SPP students generally withdrew from the AMEP for similar
reasons to other students, although slightly more SPP than other students withdrew
because of health and family reasons. Both this research and the original investigation
into learners with special needs noted that learners with special needs require more
than 510 hours to achieve functional English, in particular, written competencies.
Willing’s 1988 study was the first and only major investigation of learning styles
and strategies among the adult ESL population. The study involved interviews with
teachers and learners and a questionnaire to which 517 learners responded. The ques-
tionnaire consisted of 30 items in the form of statements with which the respondent
could answer “no,” “a little,” “good,” and “best.” In this study he found that:

The learner’s sense of satisfaction, his [sic] perceived achievement in a learning arrange-
ment, and his perseverance in remaining in that learning arrangement, have been shown
to be correlated with his perception of a compatibility between his own basic learning
style and the teaching methods used. This suggests that the cognitive (and personality)
tendencies of the individual should be prime factors in deciding teaching methodology
in a given instance, rather than the teaching method, and choice of materials, being based
on an a priori commitment of any kind. (p. 162)

The learners in his study exhibited styles along a continuum from analytical, structure-
seeking (often authority oriented) to a concrete, communication orientation. To ac-
commodate such a variety of styles, he suggested professional development of teach-
ers, assessment of student learning styles, student awareness of learning styles, and
teachers’ willingness to change their own strongly held beliefs about effective lan-
guage learning. Students, for example, frequently stated (Bako, Gazy, Gunn, Luchich,
& Tongan, 2002; Willing, 1988) that they wanted a textbook with a clear progression in
course structure, rather than lots of apparently unrelated “bits of paper” (handouts).

Assessment
Assessment issues have become of increasing concern as educational institutions have
come under pressure from legislators to be more accountable. This accountability
is often defined as measuring outcomes and demonstrating cost-effectiveness. Al-
though there have been legislative requirements for such accountability systems in
 4. ESL IN ADULT EDUCATION 77

many countries (for example, the National Reporting System for Adult Education as
required by the Workforce Investment Act in the United States), assessment reform
needs to begin with clear, researched content standards, standards that articulate what
adult ESL learners need to know and be able to do. In Australia, Canada, and more
recently, the United Kingdom, such standards are articulated through the curriculum
frameworks. In both Australia and Canada, outcomes-based assessment is an integral
part of the curriculum—in Australia, measured through attainment of competencies
required for the four certificate levels; in Canada, measured through 36 benchmarks
that describe the competencies learners should demonstrate at that benchmark. In
both cases, outcomes are measured by learners performing tasks. The tasks them-
selves are not mandated, but the situations and language required for the task are
specified. The Canadian Benchmarks underwent a vigorous field testing before their
implementation. Because the Australian CSWE is accredited by the NSW Vocational
Education and Training Accreditation Board, it is subjected to revision when the Cer-
tificates are submitted for re-accreditation every 5 years. This revision includes input
from the field through surveys and through ongoing moderation conducted by the
organization that holds the copyright to the curriculum framework. In contrast, in the
United Kingdom, assessment of student learning has been informal (Khanna, Verma,
Agnihotri, & Sinha, 1998); however, now that there is a curriculum framework in
place, assessment frameworks may follow.
However, in Australia, there has also been an ongoing research program into the va-
lidity, reliability, and feasibility of the tasks teachers use to assess their learners, which
has, in turn, assisted in the revisions of the framework. This program has included
investigating task comparability and difficulty (Brindley, 2000; Brindley & Slatyer,
2000; Wigglesworth, 2000), rater consistency (Brindley, 2001; Smith, 2000), washback
(Burrows, 2001), and task moderation (Claire, 2001). This program of research has
identified several issues of concern in teacher assessment of learner competencies:
“moderation practices and rating patterns are shown to vary across teachers and lo-
cations;” “teachers’ concerns about the increased workload involved in designing and
administering their own assessment tasks” (Burrows, 2001, p. 8). As a result of these
findings, the AMEP Research Centre engages teachers in professional development
in task design and, through this process, has developed an online bank of assessment
tasks and procedures that have been rigorously field tested.9
In the United States, as a result of a survey that identified the lack of skills among job
seekers for the jobs they were applying for, the U.S. Department of Labor convened a
group of business and education leaders to determine what schools could do to better
prepare students for the workforce (Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary
Skills, 1991).10 The National Reporting System for Adult Education (2001) lists five
core measurable outcomes: educational gain, employment, employment retention,
placement in postsecondary education or training, and receipt of a secondary school
diploma or equivalent. For ESL, educational gain is described in terms of competen-
cies at six levels. Programs assess learners at intake and then after instruction, using
the descriptors for each competency. Assessments can be either competency-based
standardized tests such as CASAS Life Skills Test or performance assessments; how-
ever, the procedure must be the same for all programs in the state. Although research
has been conducted on adult ESL assessment in the United States, most has centered
around comparing ESL-specific tests with general adult basic education tests (see,
for example, Adult Learning Resource Center, 1991). Because the assessment focus
in the United States has been on external, standardized tests, there has not been the
same sort of research program into the relation between outcomes assessment and
the curriculum, the professional development of teachers, or the need for the devel-
opment of tasks. The focus has been on the reliability and validity of the standard-
ized tests. This is not surprising, given that in contrast to Australia, development of
78 MURRAY

adult ESL content standards and therefore clearly defined learner outcomes has, until
recently, been devolved to the state level (see, for example, California Department
of Education, 1992). Recently, TESOL, the international professional ESL association,
developed standards for adult ESL programs, but because the standards cover all
aspects of programs, content standards are skeletal (Program Standards for Adult
ESOL Programs, 2000). Thus, there is no agreement on what skills and proficiencies
should be taught and then assessed and for what purposes.
Because of this lack of coherence among learner outcomes, syllabus design, and
assessment, ESL experts have asserted that assessment instruments are inadequate.
In Adult ESL Language and Literacy Instruction: A Vision and Action Agenda for the 21st
Century (2000), adult ESL experts conclude that:

Many states are having difficulty implementing assessments that meet the federal ac-
countability requirements of the National Reporting System. Some standardized tests
in use do not adequately measure gains by beginning English language learners with
minimal literacy proficiency, or those made by English language learners at more ad-
vanced proficiency levels. Some tests in use do not measure gains in the acquisition and
use of oral communication skills (the primary goal of many learners) and progress in
nonlinguistic understandings and skills necessary to make these gains. (p. 9)

In Canada, the Canadian Language Benchmarks (1996) provide a useful document

for creating assessment tasks. These benchmarks, a descriptive scale of ESOL levels,
identify 12 benchmarks across three levels of proficiency in the three skills areas of
listening/speaking, reading, and writing. Benchmarks are written in performance
language, describing what a learner can do and under what conditions. The docu-
ment includes sample tasks that could be used for assessment. Complementing the
benchmarks document is the Canadian Language Benchmarks Assessment, designed
to assist in placement and assessment of learners. There are three instruments, one
for each of the skills areas of the benchmarks: the listening/speaking is an interview
that takes 10 to 30 minutes to administer; the reading and writing instruments can
be administered to individuals or groups and take a further 1 to 2 hours to adminis-
ter. Development is still underway and the assessment is not considered high stakes
because it does not determine future jobs or study (Pierce & Stewart, 1997).

CURRENT CONTROVERSIES AND THE REASONS THAT

THEY HAVE ARISEN

One could list many controversies, ones that range from classroom practice to govern-
ment policy. However, I have chosen to discuss only four controversies, ones that have
the potential for major impact on learners’ lives: ideology, literacy or ESL?, provision,
and assessment.

Ideologies in English Language Delivery

As both Tollefson (1991) and Auerbach (1985) have argued, ESL curricula often reflect
deeply held ideologies such as that work leads to economic success, that welfare
dependence results from being lazy, English binds the nation, and education creates
equality of opportunity. Thus, inequity, either social or economic, must be the result
of individual’s language and literacy problems, all of which can be remedied through
education and hard work on the part of the immigrant. These ideologies play out in a
society in which the dominant group and culture has imposed its values and beliefs
through language (and literacy) requirements, but often as guises for race, color or
religion according to Leibowitz, 1971. This has been even more evident in the K–12
sector.
 4. ESL IN ADULT EDUCATION 79

Therefore, we see that adult ESL programs’ goals are often at odds with those of
their learners—learners want to learn English literacy in order to get a better job; the
program, on the other hand, may be measured by the rate of job placement so that
their goal becomes any job. This latter focus of funding and consequently programs,
guarantees a workforce suitable for menial labor, despite the previous job history
or skills of the immigrant. Thus, doctors work as janitors, teachers work as hotel
maids, engineers work as busboys. Learners’ identities and status are defined by
their competency in the English language. There is a not-so-subtle irony in the fact
that while on the one hand the ideology underlying policy formation in the United
States views hard work as leading to economic success, on the other hand, despite
immigrants’ hard work in their jobs, economic success is usually not assured until
linguistic competency is achieved. Even then, economic and social success may be
unachievable because of race, color or religion.

ESL/Literacy
The title of McKay’s 1993 book says, “Agendas for Second Language Literacy.” All
the stakeholders have different agendas in teaching English to new adult immigrants.
This is exacerbated by competing agendas, both political and theoretical, between
ESL and adult. In Australia, the 1991 policy document that established the Australian
Language and Literacy Policy (Department of Employment Education and Training,
1991) defined literacy in such a way that it became equated with English, language,
or even oracy (see Davison, 1996, for an extensive discussion). Traditionally, adult
ESL teachers had considered themselves to be language teachers and that literacy
was a part of the language they were teaching. But, they also recognized important
distinctions between first and second language acquisition, a distinction lost in the
Australian Language and Literacy Policy definition and subsequent provision. This
conflation of terms has led to many organizations describing themselves as language
and literacy providers—which may be true in terms of provision; they provide both
literacy instruction to native English speakers and ESL to learners with a mother
tongue other than English. In reality, however, it blurs the distinction in the minds of
the public and of politicians. A similar positioning has occurred in both the United
Kingdom and the United States. Although the United Kingdom curriculum does
include speaking and listening, its being framed within the national literacy strategy
demonstrates how literacy and ESL have been conflated in the United Kingdom, just
as was attempted in Australia and is often assumed in the United States. In the United
States, adult ESL language and literacy is the current terminology. Although the ESL
field may have made pragmatic decisions by adopting literacy as part of the ESL
agenda—to secure funding, to ensure more than the spoken language is taught, to
describe multiprogram organizations—definitions are vital in any field as they help
define that field. Although we may want to insist on including literacy as part of
ESL provision, if ESL or language is considered synonymous with literacy, the very
distinctions between first and second language acquisition are lost. Becoming literate
in ones’ first language is not the same as becoming literate in a second or third.

Provision
A controversy peculiar to Australia, but with important ramifications elsewhere, is
the length of provision of ESL classes. In Australia, newly arrived immigrants and
refugees without functional English are entitled to 510 hours of free classes in the
AMEP, after which they may continue their study through community programs or
the regular Technical and Further Education sector. The number of hours was arrived
at by looking at the average number of hours learners stayed in programs. This limit
of free tuition is hotly contested in Australia, with teachers and providers recognizing
80 MURRAY

that learners take varying paths and times to acquire English. Most recently govern-
ment, too, has recognized the need of some learners for additional hours (see previous
SPP discussion). That a program that was once freely available to learners of varying
proficiency in English and with varying focuses of instruction (see previous discussion
on Galbally report), indicates that the adult ESL field must be eternally vigilant on be-
half of our learners. When we consider the lack of coordinated provision in the United
States, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, we see that the field of adult ESL is
de-professionalized, despite the number of immigrants entering these countries.

Assessment
Assessment remains a controversial issue in adult ESL. As Van Duzer and Berdan
(1999) note:

Learners want to know how well they are progressing in learning English. Teachers want
feedback on the effectiveness of their instruction. Program administrators want to know
how well they are meeting program goals and how they can improve their services. Those
funding the programs as well as the general public want to know whether funds spent
are yielding results. Policymakers want to know what specific practices are successful so
they can establish guidelines for allocating future funds. A single approach to assessment
may not provide enough useful information to satisfy each of these demands. (p. 201)

Although teachers and learners want assessments to determine their progress, they
are resistant to high-stakes assessments that will determine their futures—either in
the workforce or in further education. Whereas many current measures are not suffi-
ciently valid or reliable to be used for such determinations, this situation can actually
act to the disadvantage of learners. For example, the Australian Certificates, although
accredited within the vocational education sector, are not aligned with other voca-
tional education programs or instruments so that holding a CSWE Certificate does
not guarantee the learner access to jobs or further education. Similarly, in the United
States, the lack of a coherent system means learners do not have a coherent pathway
through ESL programs to vocational or academic programs. In Canada, developers
are resisting using their assessments for such high-stakes purposes.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR RESEARCH

In 1998, NCLE published its research agenda for adult ESL (in the United States), an
initiative designed to focus the attention of policymakers, funders, and researchers on
improving the effectiveness of adult ESL programs and thereby the lives of learners.
The research areas identified by learners, instructors, program administrators, policy-
makers, and researchers suggest five general areas around which research questions
in the field of adult ESL cluster:
r The learners themselves.
r Program design and instructional content and practices.
r Teacher preparation and staff development.
r Learner assessment and outcomes.
r Policy.
Priority issues are:
r Assessment of adult ESL learner progress and achievement.
r Measurement of the impact of participation in adult ESL programs on the lives
of participants. (Van Duzer, Peyton, & Comings, 1998)
 4. ESL IN ADULT EDUCATION 81

In 1990, Brindley articulated a research agenda for TESOL in Australian adult ESL
that identifies research approaches, examples of research questions, and procedures
for conducting research. The framework focuses on collaborative research as the most
appropriate approach that would allow “investigation of research questions from the
perspective of teachers, policy makers, administrators and of learners themselves”
(p. 7).
The research questions and issues raised in both these agendas are as relevant now
as when they were originally published. From the overview presented in this chapter,
it can be seen that although research has been conducted over the intervening period,
it has often been tied so closely to institutions or in response to particular policies (e.g.,
literacy subsuming ESL) that the goals of improving programs and thereby improving
learners’ lives have not been met. Even in Australia, with an almost 2-decade history
of comprehensive research into adult ESL, much of the research is not generalizable.
Although the action research projects provided important professional development
and insights for the teachers involved in the projects and quite often important feed-
back to organizations about program delivery, the voice of learners, policymakers,
and administrators is either eclipsed or seen through the voice of teachers. Addition-
ally, as will all self-reported research methodologies, the lack of triangulation means
that the perspective of the observer is also not heard. It seems then, that Brindley’s call
for collaborative research using a variety of research tools and techniques is required
so that the research would serve the needs of the different stakeholders: learners,
teachers, administrators, and policymakers.

A greater emphasis on research of the collaborative kind would have a number of advan-
tages. Apart from the most obvious benefit of improving our collective understanding
of second language teaching and learning and the contexts in which they take place, it
would enable problems to be investigated from multiple perspectives, thus increasing
the likelihood of systematic follow-up of research results (Brindley, 1990, p. 25) and so
improve the lives of learners.

NOTES

1. This is the current name for the department. Over the past 50 years the department has had a va-
riety of different names, but English language provision has always been the responsibility of the
AMEP section within the department responsible for immigration and settlement. Traditionally im-
migrants to Australia have been referred to as migrants; hence, the name Adult Migrant Education
Program.
2. The 1976 Canadian Immigration Act created a separate class for refugees to distinguish them from
immigrants, and established Canada’s first refugee determination system. The June 2002 Immigration
and Refugee Protection Act replaced this act.
3. This curriculum model is based on Systemic Functional Grammar, where text refers to a stretch of
language, whether spoken or written, that coheres through meaning and is embedded in the social
contexts in which it is used.
4. In 1992, when the National Evaluation of Adult Education Programs was conducted, 51% of participants
in adult programs were in ESL programs, a 268% increase over the 12 years since the previous 1980
national survey (Fitzgerald, 1995).
5. CASAS, the Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment System, “is the only adult assessment system
of its kind to be approved and validated by the U.S. Department of Education in the area of adult lit-
eracy” according to the CASAS website (http://www.casas.org). The system uses a competency-based
approach to assessing language, literacy, and numeracy in real-life domains and is used extensively
throughout the United States in ESL programs to assess learners’ competency at the beginning, during,
and at the end of instruction.
6. CASAS scores range from 150 to 260. CASAS suggests four levels of literacy: Beginning Literacy (below
200); Basic Literacy (200–214); Intermediate Literacy (215–224); High School Literacy (225 and above).
7. AMES or Adult Migrant Education Services were the state organizations that provided the English
language instruction for the national AMEP.
8. The organization offering adult ESL in the state of New South Wales.
82 MURRAY

9. To ensure security of the test items, the task bank is only accessible to teachers in the AMEP and is
password protected.
10. This commission identified specific skills needed by the workforce, the set of skills becoming known
as SCANS (Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills).

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report: Learner outcomes and program results. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.
5

English for Academic Purposes

Susan Carkin
Lane Community College

INTRODUCTION

English for academic purposes (EAP), a subdomain of English for specific purposes
(ESP), is generally housed in formal academic contexts. EAP shares subdomain sta-
tus with English for occupational purposes (EOP), which includes English language
use by both professionals (e.g., in medicine, business, law) and by nonprofessional
workers (in vocational contexts). EAP itself is further subdivided into two emphases:
EGAP, English for general academic purposes, and ESAP, English for specific aca-
demic purposes, a distinction first articulated by Blue (1988; cited in Dudley-Evans
& St. John, 1998). The principal difference between these two subdivisions of EAP is
one of scope. EGAP emphasizes “common core” skills and activities where English
is taught for general academic purposes, across multiple disciplines, and includes
learning and study skills components of broadly relevant academic skills. Thus, the
general purpose approach is largely associated with lower-level EAP courses in which
students are preparing for later work in disciplinary contexts. In contrast, ESAP em-
phasizes higher order skills, student development, and authentic texts and features
while working within specific epistemological traditions associated with different dis-
ciplines. Overall, whether the emphasis is ESAP or EGAP, EAP concerns itself with
the development of English for academic purposes and the transition from “peda-
gogic genres” (e.g., essay exams and term papers; see Johns, 1997) to increasingly
authentic genres associated with various disciplines. This focus on learning academic
language through academic tasks, texts, and content is the basis for claims that EAP
instruction represents a highly pragmatic approach to learning, encompassing needs
analyses, evaluation, academic skills, disciplinary content, and tasks in support of
student learning in tertiary educational contexts.
This chapter begins with an overview of the range of contexts in which EAP is
taught. It includes needs assessment, critical EAP, and a review of literate skills, com-
petencies, and principal genres associated with EAP.

85
86 CARKIN

THE DOMAIN AND RANGE OF EAP: A BRIEF HISTORY

In his intellectual history of EAP, one of its most prominent scholars, John Swales
(2001), fixes the date of its appearance in the 1960s. At that time, language for academic
purposes appeared quite distinct from the more prominent literary uses of language.
Swales notes that early EAP studies differed from traditional literary studies in their
descriptive (as opposed to stylistic) goals, their representation of “normal” scientific
genres, and their synchronic focus, among other differences (p. 44). A seminal book by
Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens (1964) is often cited as providing the basic rationale
underlying EAP, namely, descriptions of language, particularly vocabulary and syn-
tax, “as used in specific target situations” (Flowerdew & Peacock, 2001, p. 11), that is,
disciplines and occupations, and analyzed through statistical comparisons. Studies of
language variation have grown increasingly refined over the years. Where early stud-
ies worked with relatively broad academic language categories, including English for
Science and Technology (EST, e.g., Lackstrom, Selinker, & Trimble, 1970, 1973), later
studies became more focused on limited sets of features in highly particular registers,
examining, for example, the uses of the passive in two astrophysics articles (Tarone,
Dwyer, Gillette, & Icke, 1981). As more disciplines and texts were studied, the domain
of EAP broadened. Swales (2001) characterizes the change in focus and increased em-
phasis on context and situation as “multi-modal . . . [with] relationships between texts
and contexts. . . much richer and more complex” (p. 49). He further notes that as dis-
coursal studies, genre and register analyses, cultural influences, contrastive rhetoric,
and social-construction theories influenced EAP, there have been substantial gains in
our understanding of academic discourse. (For other perspectives on the history of
EAP, see Benesch, 2001; Bhatia, 2002; Hyland and Hamp-Lyons, 2002; Jordan, 1997;
Swales, 2000).
The implementation of an EAP program involves needs assessment, evaluation,
analysis of student goals and skills, and a determination of the particular language
features, vocabulary, organizational structures, discoursal patterns, and genres as-
sociated with the varieties of English found in university texts and classrooms. In
the United States and other English-dominant countries, EAP largely resides in pre-
university and “bridge” programs. Such programs are associated with intensive and
semi-intensive formats, and with particular language classes linked to content courses
in which disciplinary faculty collaborate with ESL instructors (Brinton, Snow, &
Wesche, 1989; Johns, 1992, 1995, 1997; Snow, 1997; Snow & Brinton, 1992). Where
non-native speakers (NNSs) possess the requisite language proficiency to enter a uni-
versity directly, EAP instruction is often limited to a composition course or sequence.
Such writing courses assist second language (L2) students in acquiring the writing
skills needed for successful work in higher education.
EAP is also taught in a variety of international settings to students who have var-
ious reasons for studying academic English and where English itself has different
functional ranges. Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998) identify four types of EAP “sit-
uations” in tertiary levels of study. First, EAP is taught in higher education settings
in English-speaking countries, like the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and
Australia. The students in this setting are primarily international students coming for
graduate and undergraduate degrees as well as for short-term campus- or field-based
programs. Second, EAP is taught in countries where there may be several native lan-
guages, but English has official recognition as the language of education throughout
the schools, as in Zimbabwe and Singapore. Students in these settings may have a
long history of English study in school but use their native language for ordinary
communication and transactions. Third, EAP is taught in countries where specialty
subjects are tied to English, such as medicine, technology, engineering, and science,
while a national language is used for other subjects for which there are adequate texts
 5. ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES 87

in the native language, as in Jordan, where some majors are studied in Arabic and
others in English. Finally, EAP exists in countries in which all tertiary education is
taught in the L1 with English recognized as an auxiliary language, benefiting some
students who may need to read cutting edge studies found only in English, as in many
South American countries. Students studying within these four different situations
can be expected to have different levels of proficiency in English, different EAP needs,
distinct uses for EAP, and different interfaces between English and their major fields
of study. Such variety in English preparation and purpose in tertiary settings is one
reason for EAP’s strong emphasis on needs assessment tied to particular contexts and
populations prior to developing materials and setting goals.

NEEDS ANALYSIS AND ASSESSMENT IN EAP

Even though EAP is associated with tertiary educational settings, its international
range, as well as graduate and undergraduate levels, make needs assessment a “cor-
nerstone,” critical for “the process of establishing the what and how of a course”
(Dudley-Evans & St. John, 1998, p. 121). EAP students can be expected to vary by coun-
try, culture, institution, and academic goals, as well as by ethnic background, level of
academic literacy in their L1s, English language development, rhetorical styles, and
even their attitudes toward knowledge (Ballard & Clanchy, 1991). Needs assessment
of the diverse learners in EAP underlies syllabus design, materials development, text
selection, learning goals and tasks, and, ultimately, evaluation of students and course
or program success.
The needs of EAP students in educational contexts have been investigated in a
number of ways. Studies in the 1980s and 1990s largely surveyed and interviewed uni-
versity professors, compiling their responses to catalogue and analyze skills (writing,
reading, listening, speaking, vocabulary, strategies, etc.) and task demands (course
reading and writing assignments, test formats, group work, etc.) of various disci-
plinary classrooms (cf. Braine, 1989; Bridgeman & Carlson, 1984; Ferris & Tagg, 1996a,
1996b; Horowitz, 1986; Johns, 1981, 1988; Santos, 1988; Waters, 1996; West, 1994). Such
studies have investigated a range of skills and tasks across different disciplines as
well as across undergraduate and graduate levels. These studies have highlighted the
wide range of variability surrounding task demands, that is, differences by task type,
by level, and by discipline. Classroom and learning tasks for engineers and business
majors are very different, as are tasks typical of humanities and social sciences. Other
studies have surveyed college instructors to determine their tolerance of student er-
rors (e.g., Johns, 1981; Santos, 1988; Vann, Meyer, & Lorenz, 1984), information that
can inform EAP curricula.
A common criticism of faculty surveys is that they rely narrowly on faculty and
their perceptions of ESL student problems, leaving the students, their experience, and
their perceptions out of the investigation (Nunan, 1988). A second criticism has to
do with the predetermined categories into which responding faculty must place their
answers, thus, disallowing potentially useful responses outside the domain of the
survey.
Other studies examine the academic texts that students must be able to process,
in particular, academic lectures and written texts. These studies focus on the use and
distribution of discourse characteristics and linguistic features (e.g., Biber, Conrad,
Reppen, Byrd, & Helt, 2002; Carkin, 2001; Chaudron & Richards, 1986; Flowerdew &
Tauroza, 1995).
A study of writing tasks by Educational Testing Services in 1996 (Hale, Taylor,
Bridgeman, Carson, Kroll, & Kantor) collected as data actual classroom materials and
assignments given to undergraduate and graduate students in eight North American
88 CARKIN

universities across five disciplines. Among the findings from the ETS project was the
favoring of short tasks (less than one half page of writing) by the physical sciences
group and preference for longer tasks (more than one page) by the social sciences
group.
In contrast with needs analyses that look largely to faculty evaluation of ESL student
performance, a few studies have put students under the investigative lens. Leki and
Carson (1994) survey students for their perceptions of writing needs, whereas Leki
(1995) interviews five students on a weekly basis for her analysis of the successful
repertoire of coping strategies used in completing writing assignments during their
first term of university work. Complementing Leki and Carson’s work with ESL
students is Silva’s (1993) stance on the ethical treatment of ESL writers. Silva’s position
on respect for ESL writers, their texts, and their differences is aimed at those who judge
student writing, ostensibly content area faculty who have responded to surveys of
error gravity and found ESL lacking over the years.

CRITICAL EAP

The primacy and narrowness of faculty perceptions surrounding ESL student perfor-
mance along with the unequal power relations created by English’s hegemony as a
world language are elements of the movement led by Fairclough (cf. 1989, 1995) that
has given rise to critical EAP (Benesch, 1996, 2001; Pennycook, 1994, 1997, 1999). Criti-
cal EAP scholars look beyond issues of preparing students for academic success in lan-
guage and disciplinary settings; rather, they focus on a participatory approach that is
also transformative, allowing power to be shared in the curriculum, in the negotiation
of topics and syllabi, in the teaching and mastery of the genres of power, and through
the EAP curriculum to “offer the prospect of change” (Pennycook, 1999, p. 346).
Benesch (2001) is also critical of EAP’s long-standing pragmatic focus on meth-
ods and materials to the exclusion of students’ participation in curricular decisions
and their use of language to transform their study and lives. Benesch argues for crit-
ical needs and rights analysis (1999, 2001) in which students’ responses (e.g., their
objections or suggestions) to assignments are taken into account in ongoing needs
analyses.
Overall, the benefit that critical EAP brings to ESL students and their classrooms
is that of helping students understand academic power relations, question how de-
cisions are made that affect their education, and encourage them to address issues
and ideas that can contribute to the improvement of their own academic lives and
classrooms (Benesch, 1999; Canagarajah, 2002).

ACADEMIC LITERACIES AND ACADEMIC COMPETENCIES

In her 1997 book, subtitled “Developing Academic Literacies,” Johns defines literacy
as a plural concept which involves:

an understanding that [reading and writing] skills are influenced by each other as well
as by speaking and listening . . . ways of knowing content, languages, and practices . . .
strategies for understanding, discussing, organizing, and producing texts . . . the social
context in which a discourse is produced and the roles and communities of text readers
and writers . . . learning processes as well as products. (p. 2)

Johns argues for the plural term, academic literacies, because of the wide range and di-
verse purposes associated with literacy in different academic traditions (e.g., human-
ities versus sciences), with the ongoing changes that occur in the literate orientation
 5. ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES 89

of individuals, and with the variety of theories about literacy possessed by students
and teachers in classrooms.
Others conceive of academic literacy more traditionally, as the reading and writing
demands of the university (e.g., Chase, Carson, & Gibson, 1991). Spack (1997) ad-
dresses the concept of literate practice in reading, writing, and listening to university
texts, suggesting that it is achieved over several years for NNSs. Based on her longitu-
dinal case study, Spack concludes that academic literacy is acquired not only through
the formal study of language, but also when “language (or literacy) is viewed as a
vehicle to understand and construct knowledge” (p. 49), an opportunity that requires
involvement in a variety of courses over several semesters.
Academic literacy embraces the particular skills, abilities, varying levels of ex-
pertise, and strategies held by student learners and known as academic competen-
cies. These competencies include proficiencies in the traditional four skills, including
lexicogrammatical knowledge and discourse competence. The variety of strategies
students employ to comprehend texts and lectures, as well as those used to produce
academic texts, are associated with academic success in general. Studies of compe-
tency generally investigate NNS performance against that of competent native speak-
ers (NSs), inferring degrees of competence (or lack thereof) in the measured difference
from NS norms (e.g., Hinkel’s 1995 study on modal verbs). Academic competency fig-
ures prominently into EAP needs analysis, including placement testing, in which the
learning needs of students with varying levels of expertise are taken into account for
program and course development.
The concern with academic literacy and learner competencies has given rise to
numerous studies of the skills associated with academic success in EAP contexts. The
next section of the chapter examines writing, listening, speaking, and reading and
vocabulary development in EAP contexts.

ACADEMIC LANGUAGE AND ACADEMIC SKILLS

School-based language has been broadly characterized as increasingly decontextual-

ized, that is, disembedded from immediate “here-and-now” contexts associated with
informal conversation, as students advance through an educational system. A second
broadly acknowledged characteristic of academic language is its explicitness relative
to language used at home, in social settings, and in face-to-face conversation. A large
number of EAP studies revolve around the nature of academic language and students’
interface with it, seeking to clarify elements of this complex set of relations. The literate
skills of reading and writing can draw on findings from numerous L1 studies of aca-
demic literacy, including reading processes and development, sociocultural contexts,
and a large field of composition research, all having varying degrees of relevance to
L2 and EAP contexts. L2 listening and speaking, however, as relatively developed
skills in L1 students, lack the strong research background of developmental L1studies
of literate skills and dispositions.

EAP WRITING

The composing processes and products of university students have received a great
deal of attention in L1 research. In particular, the process-oriented approach to writ-
ing in L2 is a reflection of L1 composition research. The process approach emphasizes
personal and expressive writing at the expense of skills and attitudes needed by
academically bound ESL students with limited lexical and linguistic repertoires, as
well as limited exposure to the kinds of writing required in various university class-
rooms (cf. Hinkel, 2002; Horowitz, 1986; Reid, 1984a, 1984b; Zamel, 1984). Overall, the
90 CARKIN

process approach has not advantaged EAP students, and it calls into larger question
the uncritical application of L1 studies to L2 learners in EAP and other contexts.
Early studies of the reading and writing demands encountered by university stu-
dents were often surveys that focused on the identification and analysis of tasks associ-
ated with courses that enrolled relatively high numbers of L2 students. Thus, surveys
of writing assignments in university departments provided information about topics
and genres across a variety of disciplines (often science versus humanities contrasts)
and levels, that is, first year through graduate school (e.g., Braine, 1995; Bridgeman
& Carlson, 1983; Horowitz, 1986; Johns, 1981, 1990; Rose, 1983). These studies were
clear improvements on teacher intuition, unexamined textbooks, and stereotypical as-
signments accomplished by providing useful information about actual writing tasks
and academic expectations. Such information assists EAP writers with a more clearly
delineated target and EAP professionals with a basis for curricular decisions.

EAP LISTENING: ACADEMIC LECTURES

One of the most frequently studied features of academic lectures is the discourse sig-
naling class of features known as macromarkers, a category of words, phrases, and
clauses that signal relationships within the discourses and assist students in setting
expectations and confirming or disconfirming predictions as they listen. Such words
as however, moreover, nevertheless, so, now, because and phrases like in addition, my point
is that, and let’s turn to are examples of macromarkers studied by a number of re-
searchers (e.g., Chaudron & Richards, 1986; DeCarrico & Nattinger, 1988; Dunkel &
Davis, 1994; Flowerdew & Tauroza, 1995) who used different categorizations of the
feature as well as different sources (e.g., naturalistic vs. actual lectures), thus mak-
ing cross-study comparisons and conclusions problematic. Other important areas of
lecture discourse have been investigated. Flowerdew (1992), for example, examines
definitions in lectures to EFL undergraduate science students. He found simple defi-
nitions (single sentences) to be a pervasive speech act in his set of academic lectures,
occurring on average of one definition every 1 minute and 55 seconds. Strodt-Lopez
(1991) analyzes asides in lecture discourse, determining that they contribute to overall
lecture coherence.
Studies of academic lectures employ a variety of treatments, variables, categories,
definitions, texts, topics, contexts, and methods (e.g., Dudley-Evans, 1994; Olson &
Huckin, 1990; Tauroza & Allison, 1994), with results often impossible to generalize
beyond the texts studied. These studies do not yet form a coherent picture of lec-
ture discourse. Our understanding of academic lectures is relatively fragmentary—a
patchwork of interesting if discrete findings that cannot be integrated and from which
it is largely impossible to generalize. Studies of single linguistic features or categories
of features provide bits of useful descriptive information, but generally are limited to
a description of a particular variable along a single parameter of variation No single
parameter, however, can adequately describe the complex or multidimensional nature
of communication in lecture (or human) discourse (cf. Biber, 1988).

EAP READING AND VOCABULARY

Reading and word knowledge cannot be separated in the context of fluent reading. It
is estimated that in order to read fluently, a reader must know a minimum of about
95% of the words on a page (Grabe & Stoller, 2002; Nation, 2001), an unlikely quota for
most L2 students. In addition to vocabulary needs, EAP readers need knowledge of the
academic texts they will read. Academic texts vary by level, such as survey textbooks
that typically introduce a discipline and simultaneously fulfill a general education
 5. ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES 91

goal (Carkin, 2001). Academic texts also vary by discipline, for example, including
such elements as case studies for business, applications and technical reports for
engineering, classification schemes based on structure and function for biology, charts
and graphs for description and prediction in economics, and so on (cf. Hyland, 1999a).
A significant contribution to the study of academic vocabulary has been made over
the years by Nation and his students and colleagues as they produced increasingly
refined and topical vocabulary lists through corpus-based analyses (Nation, 1990,
2001; Nation & Hwang, 1995; Xue & Nation, 1984). Working in this research tradition,
Coxhead (2000) has contributed the Academic Word List (AWL), a corpus-based study
that yielded a list of 570 head words found in university texts in four major knowledge
divisions and 28 specified subfields. Coxhead notes that over “82% of the words in
the AWL are of Greek or Latin origin” (pp. 228–9). Their distribution over the 28
subject areas (94% of the words occur in at least 20 of the 28 subfields) as well as their
low occurrence in nonacademic texts attests to their representation across academic
texts. The AWL is an important resource for EAP students and teachers; knowledge of
AWL words can facilitate academic reading. (See also work on vocabulary by Coady
& Huckin, 1997; Schmitt, 2000; Schmitt & McCarthy, 1997).
Reading also facilitates vocabulary acquisition, as studies of extensive reading have
shown (e.g., Elley, 1991). Benefits of extensive reading develop over time, however,
whereas university students in EAP contexts change classes and texts after a term, sug-
gesting that extensive reading is probably best cultivated as a strategic and individual
skill.
EAP students are challenged not only by limited vocabulary when compared to
their L1 classmates, but also by reading speed. In university classes undergraduates
are typically assigned 25 to 60 pages of weekly reading in many academic subjects
(Carkin, 2001). Graduate students read considerably more pages of more difficult
texts. Managing the reading workload can be assisted by EAP instruction that is con-
tent based, attends to academic genres, integrates reading and writing, and helps
students develop relevant academic vocabulary used across a range of disciplines
(cf. Coxhead, 2000).

EAP SPEAKING IN EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTS

The study of speaking in EAP contexts has not been directly studied, having taken
a back seat to the comprehension-based research on reading and listing as primary
ways of obtaining information in academic settings. However, the national promi-
nence of the “foreign TA problem” (Bailey, 1982, 1984) associated with International
Teaching Assistants (ITAs) in the early 1980s motivated a number of studies of how
professors and TAs announced topics and transitions, made explanations and exam-
ples, elaborated on student comments, asked questions, and created solidarity in the
classroom (cf. volumes by Bailey, Pialorsi, & Zukowski/Faust, 1984; Pica, Barnes, &
Finger, 1990; see also Rounds, 1987).
Although ITA studies helped those ESL students who received graduate assis-
tantships, they were not directly applicable to the speaking needs of international
students in undergraduate and graduate classrooms. In their 1996 studies, Ferris &
Tagg surveyed faculty across multiple disciplines in four universities, determining
that faculty were “most concerned with ESL students’ ability to express themselves
fluently in class discussions and to give clear, coherent answers” (1996b, p. 311). The
faculty also expressed concern with NNS’ ability to interact with peers in classrooms.
Interestingly, and despite the plethora of pronunciation texts, the faculty in Ferris and
Tagg’s study did not find much problematical with their students’ pronunciation in
classroom discourse.
92 CARKIN

Speaking demands in academic classrooms receive short investigative shrift in part

because of the many large lectures that students face in their first 2 years of college.
In lecture halls of 200 and more students, bolder students speak up, question the
professor, or offer comments. Rarely are such students NNSs. The opportunities for
interactive talk—between professor and students or among students—on academic
issues seems a characteristic closely aligned to class size and to level of study. Thus,
studies that examine forms of talk in relation to class size and type, opportunities for
interaction, level of study, and discipline are needed to refine our understanding of the
academic demands on NNS speaking. Recognizing the ongoing need for description
of spoken academic language, Biber, Conrad et al. (2002), working under the aegis
of the Educational Testing Service (TOEFL 2000), have collected spoken data from
a variety of academic and social settings in four regional universities. The ongoing
analysis of this corpus holds promise for more refined descriptions and analyses of
the spoken language used in academic contexts.

ACADEMIC GENRES

Genres are conventionalized communication events that share some set of commu-
nicative purposes “recognized by expert members in the parent discourse commu-
nity” (Swales, 1990, p. 58), and are thereby shaped in terms of style, structure, content,
and intended audience, that is, the members of the discourse community to which the
text is addressed (Marco, 2000). Bhatia (2002) elaborates on the concept of genres, not-
ing that they are associated with “relatively stable structural forms and . . . constrain
the use of lexico-grammatical resources” that are “not static” (p. 23). Genres are impor-
tant for EAP because knowledge of genre provides what Johns (1997) calls “a shortcut
for the initiated into the processing and production of . . . texts” (p. 21). Additionally,
research has shown that in higher education settings, the goals of advanced literacy are
tied to academic success generally and to disciplines and their diverse ways of making
meaning specifically. Academic success depends in large measure on NNSs’ negoti-
ation of three primary genres—lectures, textbooks, and research articles—which are
used in undergraduate and graduate levels and found across virtually all disciplines
(cf. Johns, 1997, 2002). The next section of the chapter summarizes some of the promi-
nent language characteristics of genres critical to EAP, touching on academic lectures
while focusing on textbooks and research articles. Collectively, these three types of
texts are ubiquitous as sources of academic content to students in universities and
display a modest record of investigation by EAP/ESP researchers. The research done
on these academic genres is addressed by selected studies that examine variation by
genre, discipline, discourse, and lexico-grammar.

Academic Lectures
Lectures are a time-honored method of information transmission from experts to
learners, what Benson (1994) calls higher education’s “central ritual” (p. 181) and a
primary informational genre for EAP study. Research on lecture discourse includes
studies that examine a wide range of particular lexical and grammatical structures, cat-
egories of structures (e.g., interpersonal pronouns, hedges, discourse-signaling cues),
collocations, and speech acts (e.g., topic announcements, definitions, asides), as well
as organizational patterns and argumentation structure (e.g., problem-solving, point-
driven). In his edited volume on academic lectures, Flowerdew (1994) surveys research
on academic lectures and concludes that “the majority of the work raises more ques-
tions than it answers” (p. 25), calling, not unexpectedly, for more research specific to
 5. ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES 93

lectures. Among the reasons for Flowerdew’s assertion are the wide range of lec-
ture variables that have been studied, including categories of features, disciplines,
content, levels (beginning through advanced undergraduate, graduate), and so on.
Also important is the issue raised by Flowerdew and Tauroza (1995) regarding the
findings from a number of studies of lecture comprehension based on nonauthentic
(i.e., controlled or manipulated) discourse.

Academic Textbooks
Textbooks, like lectures, are primary informational genres found in virtually all formal
educational contexts. In tertiary settings, textbooks are used in both undergraduate
and graduate levels, becoming increasingly specialized as they represent more of the
core issues of a discipline. Introductory textbooks, those used in general education
courses during the first year or two of university study, are typically broad survey
texts designed for students with little or no background in the field. Especially in
introductory general education classes, textbooks are often the only source of read-
ings required of students (Carkin, 2001). Myers (1992) describes textbooks as “the
repositories of codified knowledge” (p. 4). Hyland (1999b) describes introductory
textbooks specifically as providing “a coherently ordered epistemological map of the
disciplinary landscape . . . [which] can help convey the norms, values and ideolog-
ical assumptions of a particular academic culture” (p. 3). Textbooks are frequently
characterized as presenting factual information, representing the consensus of disci-
plinary experts, and displaying a limited sampling of the repertoire of conventions
and functions of disciplinary practice (Geisler, 1994).
Despite the increasing number of EAP studies focusing on academic language,
there is no holistic or comprehensive picture of variation in textbooks, either by disci-
pline or through an academic career, from freshman through graduate school. Current
understanding of academic textbooks is fragmentary and characterized by studies
of particular features or categories of features in a limited number of texts or even
passages of texts. Nevertheless, numerous discrete studies have increased our un-
derstanding of ways textbook writers use particular sets of features to help students
understand the text (Hyland, 1999b; Myers, 1992). Love (1991, 1993), for example,
is concerned with the ways in which introductory college textbooks “acculturate”
students into a disciplinary field Her examination of textbooks shows that they ex-
hibit “process–product” discourse cycles that employ a heavily nominalized style as
a consequence of events that take place over time (e.g., geological processes), which
are then “subjected to mental processes which categorize them, relate them to each
other, and generally ‘bring them to order”’ (Love, 1993, p. 202). Her analysis offers
valuable insights into the relationship between an introductory textbook, its student
readers, and particular lexico-grammatical features that “reflect and . . . construct the
epistemology of the discipline (1993, p. 217). However, Love produces no counts or
distribution patterns for some of her more quantifiable features (e.g., nouns and nom-
inalized processes in subject position), so we cannot know how pervasive or how
representative her findings are.
Hyland (1999b) focuses on the use of metadiscourse in introductory textbooks. He
notes that textbook authors “are unable to invoke community knowledge as the novice
[student] lacks experience of the linguistic forms which give coherence and life to that
knowledge” (p. 6). He finds that, on average, compared to published research articles,
textbooks employ over twice as many textual as interpersonal forms of metadiscourse
to organize the text. Textbooks display a more frequent use of textual forms (connec-
tives, code glosses, endophoric markers) to assist comprehension, whereas research ar-
ticles display more frequent use of interpersonal forms (hedges and person markers) to
assist persuasion (p. 10). Overall, textbooks display limited instances of interpersonal
94 CARKIN

and textual metadiscourse, with some disciplinary variation, suggesting that learn-
ing in a discipline through textbooks does not allow students into the “full range
of conventions within which the socio-cultural system of the discipline is encoded”
(p. 22). Students reading textbooks do not systematically encounter forms of argument,
uses of citations, relational markers specific to their disciplines, although textbooks
provide a “glimpse” of such elements.
Overall, our understanding of textbooks, especially the range of those used in
higher education, is arguably the weakest link among what is known about written
academic genres. Although there are many critical analyses that focus on the rela-
tionship between the text and “underlying critical concerns of power and politics of
language use, domination, and empowerment . . . ” (Bhatia, 2002, p. 21), such studies
have questionable value to EAP students who need English to accomplish fairly in-
strumental goals. EAP has focused on describing the way textbooks work, seeking to
connect the textbook genre with the academic goals and disciplinary practices that
surround it. EAP research has, thus, concentrated on studies of genre in relation to
academic discourse (Flowerdew, 2002; Swales, 1990), a wide range of diverse linguistic
and discoursal features found within such genres (cf. Biber et al., 2002), and classroom
applications of genre (cf. Hyon, 2002; Johns, 1995, 2002).

Research Articles
In contrast to the number of studies on academic textbooks, research articles (RAs)
are extensively investigated. Flowerdew (2002) calls RAs “the pre-eminent academic
genre—in terms of its role as a vehicle for the generation of knowledge . . . and because
of its gatekeeping function as an indicator of academic achievement and professional
success” (p. 5). Swales (1990) devotes a chapter in his book to the English RA, and
offers an “overview of the textual studies of the English RA” (pp. 131–132) from 1972 to
1988. He observes “considerable variation” shown in the papers investigating RAs on
a number of fronts: scale of research, level of analysis, methodological and linguistic
approaches, fields (discipline), feature(s) investigated, etc. (p. 130). Most of the RAs
investigated are from science and technology disciplines.
In EAP, RAs have been investigated for pedagogical purposes, to help graduate stu-
dents understand how such genres work to deliver information that is situated within
disciplines and constructed among experts. Thus, some studies have investigated so-
ciohistorical accounts of a discipline’s development through its writing and writers
(e.g., Atkinson, 1996; Bazerman, 1988), demonstrating the evolution of modern gen-
res. Other studies examine patterns of citation, integral or nonintegral, as important
persuasive elements that serve to emphasize the relative importance of the message
or writer (Hyland, 2000; Swales, 1990). Many studies have focused on particular com-
ponents of RAs, such as abstracts (Hyland, 2000; Salager-Meyer, 1992; Swales, 1981,
1990), which represent summaries of entire articles with the purpose of persuading
time-pressed professionals that the entire article is worthwhile reading. Other stud-
ies have investigated particular features such as reporting verbs and tense choices,
showing that article writers select among features to identify or distance themselves
from assertions.
As one of the most-studied genres, RAs offer a wealth of information to EAP pro-
fessionals who would assist graduate students in understanding and writing them.
The most comprehensive examination of such articles to date is Swales (1990). As
more studies are added to the ever-growing literature, there is a need for integration
of the wide range of studies across disciplines, as well as a need for in-depth studies
of particular disciplines, charting how the RA in microbiology, for example, differs
from those in other disciplines.
 5. ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES 95

DIRECTIONS FOR THE FUTURE

The demand for English language education is a global phenomenon because of its
dominance in international business, technology, and science (Nunan, 2001; Swales,
1971; Trimble, 1985) and the volume of research articles published in English from
numerous countries around the world. The study of academic English is key to ac-
cessing new technologies, to creating new knowledge, and to distributing the contents
of scholarship in journals that are increasingly converting from national languages
to English (Swales, 2000). EAP is international in scope because of the preeminence
of English in publications of scholarship, science, technology, and business. Swales
observes that over the last 20 years “there has been a massive conversion . . . from other-
language journals to English-medium ones, and . . . almost all of the new journals that
have been springing up have an English-only submission policy” (p. 67). The hege-
mony of the English language, especially with regard to RAs, is not without negative
consequences in terms of its effect on the loss of research registers in other languages,
as Swales (2000) explains. The relationship between academic English and the access,
production, and distribution of information provides a rich research tableau for the
foreseeable future.
In attempting to characterize EAP, the fragmented and checkered nature of research
findings becomes apparent. In his review of research on needs of EAP students for
the TOEFL 2000 Project, Waters (1996) notes, “in research terms, we simply lack a
coherent overall picture of what EAP proficiency in North American higher education
involves” (p. 52). However, EAP is also marked by incremental progress toward an
increasingly refined description of particular elements and discourse patterns over the
last 3 decades. Swales (2001) notes that although EAP is a long way from “full accounts
of any genre” largely due to the “complexities arising from disciplinary variation” (pp.
50–51), steady progress is being made.
Because of the highly specific nature of EAP—the relation of academic language
to particular audiences with specific academic purposes, as well as to disciplinarity,
genre, register, and level of generality—studies targeting meaning-making elements
of its specificity, like those mentioned herein, will continue to provide incremental
information. Such studies need to be complemented with more comprehensive and
holistic perspectives examining larger patterns of use. Textbooks and lectures, com-
mon academic genres that constitute the formal input to most students throughout
their undergraduate careers, deserve a greater share of the EAP research effort. Sim-
ilarly, the study of academic conversations in higher education, as well as the study
of the range of written genres students encounter across the disciplinary curriculum
through various levels of study, afford ample opportunity for ongoing EAP research.
In the foreseeable future, research on disciplinary variation within, between, and
across spoken and written EAP texts and genres will continue to inform the profes-
sion. Through such studies, EAP professionals, as well as those interested in academic
language used in diverse disciplines, will benefit from increasing refinements in dis-
ciplinary discourses in particular, and academic language in general.

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6

Research in English
for Specific Purposes
Peter Master
San Jose State University

INTRODUCTION

The domain of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has had a strong research tradition
since its inception in the 1960s. This chapter delineates the current research concerns of
ESP in order to gain a sense of the direction in which the field is moving, with a special
focus on the years 2000–2002. The information is gleaned primarily from the pages
of the flagship journal of the field, English for Specific Purposes, which editors of the
journal have often used as an indicator of major trends in the field (e.g., Dudley-Evans,
2001; Hewings, 2002; Master, 2001). The chapter surveys data-based studies as well
as descriptions of ESP programs and environments, such as shadowing a business
manager. It then examines current issues that concern the field and concludes with an
investigation of the most significant research question that can be asked about ESP:
Does it work?

RESEARCH DOMAIN

ESP is a division of English Language Teaching (ELT), the only other member of
which is English for General Purposes (EGP; Master, 1997a; Strevens, 1988). Johns
and Dudley-Evans (1991) provide a broad definition of ESP as “the careful research
and design of pedagogical materials and activities for an identifiable group of adult
learners within a specific learning context” (p. 298) whose principal distinguishing
characteristics are needs assessment and discourse analysis, though Brown (1995)
maintains that discourse analysis is a requirement for determining the needs of any
language education enterprise. Discourse Analysis is a field unto itself, comprising an
important discipline within the field of Linguistics. In terms of ESP, where it seeks to
weigh the importance of various elements in the genuine language situations English
language learners will encounter, discourse analysis is concerned with microlinguistic
elements such as frequency counts (i.e., tense/aspect, mood, information structure,
and other text linguistic devices) as well as macrolinguistic concerns such as genre,
99
100 MASTER

levels of discourse in rhetorical subsections of texts (e.g., Swales’ notion of “moves”

or steps that “make a paper coherent to genre-experienced readers,” 1990, p. 190), and
learner interactions with discourse within specific disciplines.
English for Specific Purposes also comprises the largest representative of an in-
ternational movement known as Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP). The current
concerns of the LSP movement are exemplified by a recent call for papers for an in-
ternational conference on the subject. The topics of the 6th International Conference
on Languages for Specific Purposes (http://www.upc.es/eupvg/cilfe6/index.htm,
retrieved 9-26-02), held in Spain in early 2003 and entitled “The Role of Information
Technology in LSP Research and Pedagogy,” included the use of networks (especially
the Internet) and multimedia in LSP teaching; E-learning applications and experi-
ences; information technology in educational research; interaction in virtual learning
environments; information technology and materials development; information tech-
nology and learner autonomy; lexicology, lexicography, and terminology; translation;
and discourse and genre studies (corpus-based studies). The primary difference be-
tween LSP and ESP is the former’s inclusion of translation, which ESP is obviously
not concerned with.
Research in ESP, thus, occurs within the overlapping domains of English language
education for specific purposes and discourse/genre analysis.

DEVELOPMENTS, TRENDS, AND TRADITIONS

In an analysis of research trends in four western Applied Linguistics (AL) journals

between 1985 and 1997, Gao, Li, & Lü (2001) found that there has been a general shift
in AL to qualitative methods such that “qualitative research has gained essentially
an equal footing with quantitative research as a major research paradigm” (p. 10). In
the TESOL Quarterly, one of the four journals Gao, et al. analyzed, the qualitative re-
search over the 12-year period consisted of ethnography (32%), verbal reports (25%),
text analysis (22%), narrative accounts (17%), and classroom interaction analysis (3%).
In the other three journals (Applied Linguistics, The Modern Language Journal, and In-
ternational Review of Applied Linguistics), text analysis was the dominant subtype.
Gao et al.’s (2001) data provide a useful comparison for research in ESP. Hewings
(2002) provides an overview of ESP research as reflected in English for Specific Purposes,
published by Elsevier. Table 6.1 shows the topics of published papers over the 20+
year history of the journal. It is clear from Table 6.1 that text/discourse analysis has
dominated the pages of the journal since its inception and continues to increase into
the present decade. Program descriptions, on the other hand, sharply diminished after

TABLE 6.1
Topics of Papers (Hewings, 2002)

Vol. 1–5 Vol. 6–10 Vol. 11–15 Vol. 16–20

Topic 1980–1986 1987–1991 1992–1996 1997–2001

Text/discourse analysis 34 33 51 49
Program description 36 11 14 10
Needs analysis/syllabus design 11 12 6 9
Materials/methods 5 8 9 6
Argument/discussion (no data) 0 12 4 8
Testing 2 3 4 6
Teacher training 5 1 1 3
Other 7 7 10 9
 6. ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES 101

1986, primarily because submissions in this category were too often descriptions of
local programs without sufficient generalizability to other ESP contexts in the world.
(When I was a co-editor of the journal between 1995 and 2002, the most common
rejection letter I wrote concerned the lack of universal application of the description
of a local program). Needs analysis and syllabus design also decreased in the 1990s
after it had been made clear early in the decade that the views of the students (clients
or subjects) being taught ESP comprised an essential element of the needs analysis.
Materials and methods, on the other hand, continue to be developed in response to
specific needs analyses.
Hewings (2002) also shows the ESP sub-area represented by articles published in
English for Specific Purposes, which apply to some degree to ESP research as a whole.
Over the 20-year history of the journal, English for Science and Technology (EST) and
English for Academic Purposes (EAP) have dominated and continue to dominate,
whereas articles concerned with General ESP have fallen from 20% in the early years
of the journal to less than 5% in recent years. English for Occupational/Professional
Purposes (EOP/EPP) continues to hover around 10%. Hewings notes that, although
the interest in Business English has dramatically increased in the last decade (ac-
counting for almost 20% of what foreign students study in the United States; cf. Open
Doors, 2002), the Business English research base is still in its infancy and will remain
underrepresented in the pages of the journal until it is taught in universities.
Hewings also provides a closer analysis of the text/discourse analysis category,
including mode of communication and concern with professional versus student
products. Mode of communication refers to whether the data analyzed were writ-
ten or spoken. Between 1997 and 2001, analyses of written text comprised 86% of this
category, the remaining 14% spoken. In the early 1980s, the ratio was 73% written to
27% spoken, the spoken variety decreasing steadily ever since. Hewings believes this
may be partially due to the fact that written text is easier to analyze, even though
it is clearly more important for the ultimate user of ESP to be able to speak than to
write. It is also partially due to the increasing importance of genre analysis to the field,
which tends to focus on written rather than spoken genres. Similarly, there has been
a much greater concern with professional products (most recently 75% professional,
15% student, and 10% interaction between professional and student in generating a
product), though analyses of interactions have increased slightly over the years. Hew-
ings believes this is a natural state of affairs because professional product data has
a far wider application in ESP than does data gained from student products or their
interactions with professionals in producing them.
One of the strengths of research in ESP is its international character. Hewings
shows that there has been a steady increase in the number of international authors
published in English for Specific Purposes with a concomitant decrease in the percentage
of authors from the United Kingdom and the United States. In the period from 1997
to 2001, international authors accounted for 69% of the articles, with 19% from the
United States and 12% from the United Kingdom, whereas in the early 1980s, the
ratio was 39% from the United States, 25% from the United Kingdom, and 36% from
other countries. Hewings believes this is a testament to the growing acceptance of
ESP around the world and, consequently, its validity as a subject for research. It also
reflects the fact that ESP is generally more likely to be carried out in non-English-
speaking countries than in English-speaking ones and that ESP goes under different
guises in the United States, such as content-based instruction (CBI) or Workplace ESL
(Master, 1997b). Hewings shows that the 1990s were marked by a substantial increase
in papers from two regions of the world outside the United States and the United
Kingdom: Central and South America, and China and Hong Kong.
The gender of authors in English for Specific Purposes is also of interest. In the last
decade, female authors have been slightly better represented than males, most recently
102 MASTER

55% female and 45% male, the percentage of females rising from a low of 42% at the
beginning of the 1980s. Hewings notes, however, that the authors cited in English for
Specific Purposes articles are overwhelmingly male.
Hewings concludes his overview of English for Specific Purposes by speculating
on what the future holds for the field of ESP. He believes that although increasing
specificity is a primary characteristic of ESP research today, the field will have to be-
come more concerned with English as an International Language. “The growing use
of English as the means of communication in interaction between non-native English
speakers seems likely to have a major impact on the kinds of ESP programmes we pro-
vide and the type of research needed to underpin those programmes” (Hewings, 2002,
unpaginated). Similarly, Dudley-Evans and St. John (1997) believe that cross-cultural
issues will be increasingly important research issues, especially “what language is
culturally appropriate in different situations” (p. 232). They also think that critical
approaches to research will affect the development of ESP as they question the norms
of ESP teaching.
With regard specifically to English for Academic Purposes (EAP), Jordan (1997)
states that future research will undoubtedly focus on genre analysis at different levels,
computer- assisted language learning (CALL), disciplinary cultures (i.e., the “insider”
culture of specific discourse communities), learner independence, and collaboration
between EAP teachers and subject specialists (pp. 279–280). These categories are also
of interest to ESP, and topics such as genre analysis, CALL, and learner independence
are concerns of the entire ELT teaching profession.

CURRENT RESEARCH

The primary focus of current ESP research is specificity, that is, detailed explications
of the nature of the language used or required to communicate in specific academic
and occupational settings, usually accompanied by specific pedagogical applications
for non-native speakers of English. Current research in ESP as reflected in English
for Specific Purposes continues to be concerned with specificity in three broad areas of
focus: (a) macro-linguistic concerns such as writing, authenticity, and oral communi-
cation, (b) microlinguistic elements such as vocabulary and grammatical categories,
and (c) descriptions of various types of ESP programs. In the articles published in
the last three volumes of the journal (2000, 2001, and 2002), as shown in Table 6.2,
60% had a macrolinguistic focus, 21% had a microlinguistic focus, and 19% dealt with
program descriptions. The categories of ESP that these articles are concerned with are
described in Table 6.3.
Table 6.3 shows that articles concerning academic, science/technology, and busi-
ness topics continue to dominate the journal, accounting for more than two thirds
(69%) of the articles published. It should be noted that English for occupational/

TABLE 6.2
Focus in English for Specific Purposes 2000–2002

Year Vol No. Macrolinguistic Microlinguistic ESP Programs

2000 19 11 3 3
2001 20 13 6 4
2002 21 10 3 4
Total 34 12 11
Percent 60% 21% 19%
 6. ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES 103

TABLE 6.3
Topics of ESP in English for Specific Purposes 2000–2002

EAP EST EOP/EPP EBE EMP ELP

Year (Academic) (Sci/tech) (Occup/prof) (Business/econ) (Medical) (Legal)

2000 3 4 3 3 3 1
2001 10 4 4 2 3 0
2002 4 5 2 3 1 2
Total 17 13 9 8 7 3
Percent 30% 23% 16% 14% 12% 5%

professional purposes includes six Business/Economics articles and one on a new

area of focus in EOP: English for textile and clothing merchandisers.
The topics and the results of these studies are summarized by category in the next
section. They provide a detailed view of the research focus in ESP over the last 3
years.

English for Academic Purposes (EAP)

The macrolinguistic concerns in EAP included academic assessment, authenticity, data
gathering, negotiating in the classroom, writing, and use of the Internet. Macdonald,
Badger, and White (2000) questioned the validity of authentic materials in EAP classes,
finding relevant texts less motivating than interaction with a speaker, and EAP in-
structors’ live simulations of lectures more effective than taped authentic lectures.
Okamura and Shaw (2000) analyzed letters accompanying papers submitted for pub-
lication and found that academics, both native-English speakers (NES) and non-native
English speakers (NNES), used appropriate rhetoric and language, but that under-
graduate students and overseas English teachers used inappropriate rhetoric and
language, suggesting that the status of the learner must be considered in the teaching
of writing. Braine (2001) reported on the difficulties encountered in acquiring data
on undergraduate writing tasks in Hong Kong, apparently because of the sources’
uncertainty about their levels of English proficiency. Feak and Salehzadeh (2001) de-
scribed a video listening placement assessment for EAP courses at the University
of Michigan. Gao, Li, and Lü (2001) compared recent trends in research methods in
applied linguistics in China and the West, as described earlier. Hyon (2001) found
that genre-based instruction was remembered to some extent over time but noted
that certain approaches to genre may not aid students’ understanding of genre vari-
ation and complexity. Mavor and Trayner (2001) designed a genre-aligned frame-
work for teaching EAP courses in a Portuguese university. Vassileva (2001) examined
English and Bulgarian linguistics research articles and found that they were similar
in the quantity of hedging and boosting but different in the distribution of hedges
and the degree of deference to the discourse community. Basturkmen (2002) focused
on the negotiation of meaning in the language of interaction in college classrooms.
Paltridge (2002) suggested broadening the range of thesis/dissertation types analyzed
in teaching EAP students to generate the genre. Slaouti (2002) argued for the inclu-
sion of critical awareness regarding authority and academic status in teaching college
students to use the World Wide Web.
The microlinguistic concerns in EAP included academic use of lexicogrammatical
items and agency. Green, Christopher, and Mei (2000) analyzed a corpus of academic
texts written by Chinese speakers for the use of topic-fronted devices and sentence
initial logical connectors and found an overproduction of marked themes, leading to
104 MASTER

an overly emphatic tone. Lindemann and Mauranen (2001) analyzed the roles of just in
spoken academic discourse and found that the mitigating sense of the word involved
a phonologically reduced version, whereas the sense of “exactly” tended to use a full
vowel and be stressed, supporting the need for phonetic detail in EAP. Moore (2002)
researched the frequency and type of agentive elements (Halliday, 1994) in sociology,
physics, and economics textbooks and found economics to be closer to physics than
to sociology (even though economics is considered a social science), perhaps to give
it scientific credibility.
The academic courses focused on architecture, reading, and the use of textbooks.
Spector-Cohen, Kirschner, and Wexler (2001) developed an EAP reading program at
the University of Tel Aviv in Israel. Swales, Barks, Ostermann, and Simpson (2001)
described an EAP course for Master’s of Architecture students at the University of
Michigan. Yakhontova (2001) discussed the use of a U.S.-based EAP textbook in a
Ukrainian university course.

English for Science and Technology (EST)

The macrolinguistic concerns in EST included scientific/technical reading, writing,
and use of transparencies. Chimbganda (2000) reported that first year Bachelor of
Science students who used risk-taking strategies, such as restructuring discourse to
clarify the intended meaning, wrote better than those who used other strategies. Diaz-
Santos (2000) described the advantages of reading “technothrillers” such as Jurassic
Park in EST classes as a basis for orienting students, to the concerns of the scientific dis-
course community. Halimah (2001) compared the Arabic and English scientific writing
of 100 Arabic-speaking students and found that the mechanics were acceptable but
not the rhetorical style, which he attributed to the lack of focus on such matters in the
classroom. Ward (2001) found evidence that Thai engineering students evaded read-
ing English language textbooks by concentrating only on the applications, especially
the examples (so that they could pass examinations), while ignoring the background
knowledge of physical systems that is essential for an engineer. Lahuerta (2002) found
rhetorical organization to play a significant role in English as a Foreign Language (EFL)
students’ comprehension of EST text. Rowley-Jolivet (2002) noted the importance of
slides and transparencies in structuring the discourse at international scientific con-
ference presentations. Samraj (2002) analyzed the introductions of research papers in
wildlife behavior and conservation biology using Swales’ CARS (create a research
space) model, in which she found variation and the need to modify the model (see
also Swales (1990b)).
The microlinguistic concerns in EST included the scientific/technical use of gram-
mar, lexical phrases, and self-reference. Gledhill (2000) examined the collocations
of high-frequency words in introductions to cancer research articles, revealing that
semi-preconstructed phrases (e.g., patients who received drug X) abound in scientific
writing. Hyland (2001) investigated the occurrence of self-reference (self-citation and
first person pronouns) in 240 research articles in the hard and soft sciences, find-
ing that self-reference occurs at points where the authors “are best able to promote
themselves and their individual contributions. Their intrusion helps to strengthen
both their credibility and their role in research, and to help them gain acceptance and
credit for their claims” (p. 223). Martinez (2001) looked at transitivity in the physical,
biological, and social sciences, finding that the revelation and concealment of agency
allows the author to negotiate the tension between objectivity and personal impact
on the scientific community. Soler (2002) analyzed adjectives in scientific research ar-
ticles, which are far less frequent than nouns and verbs, and found them to occur
most often in the discussion section, where they play an important role in modulating
objectivity, certainty, and evaluation.
 6. ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES 105

The scientific/technical courses focused on teaching in South Africa and Malaysia.

Parkinson (2000) described a theme-based language course for EST students at a
South African university. Chien Ching (2002) reported on an EST writing course at a
Malaysian university.

English for Occupational/Professional Purposes (EOP/EPP)

The macrolinguistic concerns in EOP/EPP included professional/occupational au-
thenticity, oral and written communication, and workplace needs. Brett (2000) ques-
tioned the use of authentic materials when students using a CD-ROM based on au-
thentic spoken Business English (BE) lost enthusiasm for self-study on computers
and questioned the relevance of the materials. Gimenez (2000) compared email and
formal business letters from the same company and found that the standard business
letter format taught in Business English classes would not prepare students to gener-
ate appropriate email correspondence. Li and Mead (2000) focused on the workplace
needs of textile and clothing merchandisers for EOP courses at two educational insti-
tutions in Hong Kong. Gimenez (2001) analyzed cross-cultural non-native-speakers
of English engaged in business negotiations, finding that “[t]he way which prices
are negotiated appeared to be more related to the status-bound behaviour of the
negotiator than to culture” (p. 183). Henry and Roseberry (2001) analyzed a comput-
erized corpus of 40 job application letters at the level of strategy rather than move
or genre register and found a range of discourse and syntactic features that were not
described in textbooks on the genre. Upton and Connor (2001) used a hand-tagged
computerized learner corpus analysis to determine the politeness-strategy “moves”
in professional job application letters in three cultures (U.S., Belgian, and Finnish),
finding that the U.S. writers were more formulaic, the Belgians more individualistic,
and the Finns exhibited both traits to lesser degrees. The study supports the need
for computer investigations that go beyond lexico-grammatical patterning. Louhiala-
Salminen (2002) shadowed a Finnish international corporation manager, revealing the
interplay between speaking and writing and how English functioned as the medium
of communication in a multinational environment. Pinto dos Santos (2002) analyzed
the rhetorical moves in business letters of negotiation.
The single microlinguistic concern in EOP/EPP was the use of occupational/pro-
fessional metaphors. Charteris-Black and Ennis (2001) studied linguistic and concep-
tual metaphors in financial reports in Chilean and British newspapers, finding the
former to prefer psychological health metaphors and the latter nautical metaphors.

English for Business and Economics (EBE)

The macrolinguistic concerns in EBE included business authenticity, metaphoric
awareness, student socialization into the field, and written and spoken communica-
tion. Boers (2000) found that enhanced metaphoric awareness in reading economics
texts helped students to remember figurative expressions to recognize their inference
patterns. Charteris-Black (2000) made a case for basing ESP vocabulary teaching for
economics students on words that reflect the underlying metaphors of economics,
with animate metaphors (e.g., growth) to describe the economy and inanimate ones
(e.g., slide) to describe movements of the market. Hemais (2001) found that market-
ing journals depend to a greater extent on insights from practice than they do from
research. Northcott (2001) was concerned with the socialization of international stu-
dents into a business program at the University of Edinburgh. Crosling and Ward
(2002) questioned the focus on formal business presentations in university business
classes when the primary need in the business world is for communication in informal
contexts.
106 MASTER

The single microlinguistic concern in EBE was the business use of anticipatory it.
Hewings and Hewings (2002) used computerized corpora to analyze anticipatory it in
published business research articles and L2 student business dissertations and found
the latter did not sufficiently modulate their knowledge claims.
The business courses focused on teaching in Botswana and Hong Kong. De
Beaugrande (2000) reported on a pilot project to teach business at the University
of Botswana. Jackson (2002) compared the use of case studies in two business courses
at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

English for Medical Purposes (EMP)

The single macrolinguistic concern in EMP was medical communication. Frank (2000)
studied the language and communication problems between international students
and university student health center staff members, which they found to derive pri-
marily from medical vocabulary and from pragmatic difficulties arising from differing
cultural and procedural expectations and affective notions such as prejudice, manner
of speaking, and the value of patience and kindness.
The microlinguistic concerns in EMP included medical collocational frameworks
and communication. Marco (2000) studied collocational frameworks such as the of,
a of, and be to in mediscal research papers and found the collocates that fill these
slots to be genre-dependent. Ferguson (2001) examined if-conditionals in medical dis-
course and found that in spoken consultations they allow politeness and sensitivity,
whereas in research articles they provide operational definitions. Ibrahim (2001) an-
alyzed the questions that doctors in the Arabian Gulf countries use in consultations
and argued for consideration of the cultural underpinnings of doctor-centeredness.
The medical courses focused on teaching in Cuba, Hong Kong, and the United
States. Maclean, Betancourt, and Hunter (2000) described the 15-year evolution of
an EMP program in Cuba. Shi, Corcos, and Storey (2001) used videotapes of clinical
training sessions to help medical students acquire oral communication skills in an EMP
course at the University of Hong Kong. Bosher and Smalkowski (2002) described an
EMP oral communication course at the College of St. Catharine in Minnesota.

English for Academic Legal Purposes (EALP)

The macrolinguistic concerns in EALP included legal writing and the use of computer-
mediated materials. Feak, Reinhart, and Sinsheimer (2000) argued that EALP (English
for Academic Legal Purposes) students should learn to write legal research papers
(“notes”) rather than primary research reports as preparation for working in legal
contexts. Candlin, Bhatia, and Jensen (2002) justified the need for a computer-mediated
resource bank of language and discourse-based materials for teaching EALP because
they found the 37 EALP books currently available to be too context-specific and of
little use outside that context.
There was no microlinguistic focus in the EALP articles, and the single legal course
focused on teaching in Hong Kong. Bruce (2002) reported on an EAP course for first-
year law students at Hong Kong University.
This survey of articles makes it clear that specificity is the primary focus of ESP
research, manifesting in a variety of macro- and microlinguistic concerns in the six
major areas of ESP. Other areas of ESP, such as English for the Arts/Art and Design,
English for Sociocultural Purposes, and Vocational ESL (Master, 2000) have seldom
been represented in the journal, but it is hoped that research in these areas will appear
in the future.
 6. ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES 107

CURRENT CONTROVERSIES

Current controversies in the field of ESP include the extent of subject knowledge the
ESP practitioner needs to have, the value of genre-based instruction, and the charge
that EAP is “accommodationist.” A major concern, although one that has not yet been
labeled a controversy as such, is the efficacy of ESP itself.

Subject-Matter Knowledge
The question of how much subject-matter expertise the ESP practitioner must have
has been a controversy since the early days of ESP. Schachter (1981), representing
one extreme of a continuum of views on this matter, believed that EST teachers were
primarily ESL teachers making good use of content-specific materials in order to
impart communicative competence in English. As a result, she saw teacher knowledge
of content as a potential obstruction to the teacher’s true role and even recommended
that EST instructors stop teaching a particular area of science or technology after a
certain time because they would be unable to resist the temptation to teach content. The
other extreme is an entirely content-based curriculum in which linguistic knowledge
is subordinated to subject content instruction. Mackay (1981), for example, noted that
“some major ESP projects prefer to hire teachers of science who also happen to have
some ELT [English Language Teaching] experience or training” (p. 122).
The issue was aired in two articles in the “Issues in ESP” column in TESOL Matters.
Taylor (1994) argued that “given a solid base of ELT experience, the critical factors
for the ESP teacher are attitude and interest, not content knowledge” (p. 14). She
believed that “ultimately, helping students express themselves in a content area is
easier for an outsider than for a content expert, who usually takes linguistic and
content knowledge for granted and has difficulty seeing his or her discipline from
the non-English-speaking student’s point of view” (p. 14). Troike (1994), on the other
hand, maintained “It is far easier, and more efficient, to train subject-matter specialists
in the basics of ESL than to try to train ESL teachers in the technical content of the ESP
subject” and “if we try, or even pretend, to teach ESP without knowing the subject
matter, we are seriously fooling ourselves or shortchanging our students, or both”
(p. 7).
In my view, the degree of expertise of the ESP practitioner depends on the nature of
the ESP being taught. In most academic and occupational settings, I side with Taylor’s
belief that the ESP instructor is usually better prepared to deal with the real needs
of the ESP student than a content instructor. However, in highly technical contexts,
such as air traffic control or CAT scan technology, a trained subject-matter specialist is
essential, especially when human lives are at stake. Team teaching (Johns & Dudley-
Evans, 1991), that is, the presence of both a content and a language instructor in the
classroom, is an effective way to resolve the issue, but it is generally too expensive a
solution and not widely practiced, though a successful example is described in Master
(2000).

The Value of Genre-Based Instruction

Since the publication of John Swales’s Genre Analysis in 1990a, considerable attention
has been devoted to the notion of genre in the field of ESP. The issue concerns not
the value of genre as a construct but whether or not genre specifications should be
explicitly taught. The American New Rhetoric position is that they should not. With
its detailed ethnographic descriptions of genres in science, medicine, and business,
this school focuses on genre as social action (cf. Miller, 1984) and “provide[s] the field
of ESL with rich perspectives on what actions genres perform in various communities
108 MASTER

and how these groups come to value certain text types” (Hyon, 1996, p. 713). It is the
understanding of these social contexts that is important, and not the specifications of
the genre. “[W]hat has to be attended to . . . are features of the situation. . . . Knowing
the gross surface features is the easy part, and insufficient on its own” (Freedman
& Medway, 1994, pp. 11–12, cited in Hyon, 1996, p. 690). Teaching applications are
therefore not emphasized, though some New Rhetoricians are beginning to work out
means of applying their theories in the classroom, for example, by having university
students specify the purpose, audience, and circumstances of writing a text at the top
of an assignment and then assessing how well the writing responds to this context
(Coe, 1994, cited in Hyon, 1996).
The Australian school of systemic functional linguistics, on the other hand, be-
lieves that genre specifications should be explicitly taught. Based on Halliday’s (1978)
notion that language form is shaped by social context (i.e., the activity going on,
the relationships among participants, and the channel of communication), Martin,
Christie, and Rothery (1987; cited in Hyon, 1996) describe genres as structural forms
used by cultures for various purposes in certain contexts. The Australian school was
concerned that immigrant primary and secondary students (and now adult migrants
in the workforce) were not being given the school genres required for social success.
The two schools of thought are aimed at different populations. The New Rhetori-
cians are concerned with helping university students and professionals to function in
sophisticated academic and professional milieus, whereas the Australian school aims
to foster the survival of immigrant children and adult migrants in the school and the
workplace. ESP practitioners have tended to apply the Australian notion of genre
to all non-English-speaking students, including those in academic and professional
contexts, leading to accusations in some quarters that the teaching of genre specifica-
tions stifles creativity, and raising the issue of whether genre teaching is ultimately a
scaffold or a straitjacket.

Accommodation in EAP
Critical theory is concerned with “questioning the status quo to probe beyond con-
ventional explanations of why things are the way they are” (Benesch, 2001, p. 64).
Inspired by Freire (1998) and Foucault (1988), critical EAP encourages students to
“assess their options in particular situations rather than assuming they must fulfill
expectations” (p. 64). In this light, the longstanding effort of EAP practitioners to
aid their students by helping them to learn the requirements of the disciplines and
develop their academic communicative competence (Swales, 1990a) has been called
accommodationist (Benesch, 1993) and assimilationist (Pennycook, 1994) by critical
EAP theorists. Allison (1994) challenged these theorists, calling them ideologist and
imperialistic in their effort to dominate other viewpoints and arguing that EAP prag-
matism did not presume an unexamined status quo. Ultimately, the EAP pragmatists
agreed that criticism could be constructive (Allison, 1996), whereas the critical the-
orists acknowledged the struggles EAP practitioners have had in trying to develop
better programs for academic non-native speakers (Benesch, 2001).
In my view, all educational enterprises, although especially those within the En-
glish teaching profession (including not just EAP but the entire field of ESP), need to
constantly and rigorously question themselves. Not to do so is to run the risk that,
while benignly helping students to acquire access to better job opportunities and
greater academic success, ESP practitioners are unwittingly promoting the interests
of those already in power (Master, 1998). Widdowson (1980) warned of the danger of
providing a servant with just enough language ability to serve a master, describing
it as “the curse of Caliban.” Critical EAP theorists have reminded the field of ESP
that education is a political act no matter how innocently pragmatic we claim to be.
 6. ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES 109

For this reason, language teachers have to “remain vigilant in regard to all voices,
including their own” (Fiumara, 1990, paraphrased in Master, 1998, p. 724).

The Efficacy of ESP

When statistical analysis appeared in the 57 published articles summarized in the
previous section, it was invariably of the descriptive variety, that is, “a set of concepts
and methods used in organizing, summarizing, tabulating, depicting, and describing
collections of data” (Shavelson, 1981, p. 9). More than half of the articles used simple
descriptive statistics such as percentages, means, and in one case standard deviations;
two reported chi square values; and two reported correlation coefficients.
The category of research that appears to be missing in ESP research is quantitative
studies, that is, experimental or quasi-experimental designs supported by inferential
statistics. The most obvious topic that such research might be applied to is the efficacy
of ESP itself. Calls for such research have been made for over 30 years. Mackay (1981),
for example, noted that “the euphoria of the innovative phase in ESP programs has
died down” (p. 108), leaving the field open to several questions of accountability:
r Do these ESP/EST programs work?
r Are they more effective than previous programs aimed at general language pro-
ficiency?
r If so, in what ways are they more effective?
r Are there any ways in which they are less effective?
r Can the expense be justified?
r Should we spend money on continuous quality control of ESP courses?
r Is there any evidence that syllabus planners are performing at least as well now,
in terms of serving their clients’ needs, as they were prior to the ESP epoch?
r Are there any unintended or unforeseen outcomes resulting from the use of any
given ESP program? (cited in Master, 2000).

Johns and Dudley-Evans (1991) found that, even though the case for ESP had
been accepted internationally, “few empirical studies have been conducted to test the
effectiveness of ESP courses” (p. 303). They described the principal areas of concern
in ESP to be how specific ESP courses should be, whether they should focus on a
particular skill or integrate them all, and whether an appropriate ESP methodology
could be developed. They noted that EAP was still dominant internationally, but that
as ESP moved from its traditional EAP base, there would be “an increasing need for
research into the nature of discourse, written or spoken, that must be produced or
understood by those enrolled in ESP courses” (p. 307).
One of the few attempts to seriously address the efficacy of ESP instruction was
the Reading in EST (REST) Project (under the auspices of UCLA) at the University
of Guadalajara in Mexico (Hudson, 1991; Lynch, 1992; 1996). Lynch (1992) found
that a group of third-year chemical engineering students (Pretest n = 111; Posttest
n = 103) who received an EST reading curriculum that focused on previewing, sam-
pling, comprehending, and analyzing the rhetorical and grammatical structure of “au-
thentic chemical engineering texts that were being used in the students’ other courses”
(p. 65) over a 4-month period made statistically significant improvement ( p = .000) on
an English language test (the UCLA English as a Second Language Placement Exami-
nation, or ESLPE, whose reliability value for the Kuder-Richardson 21 formula [KR21 ]
ranged between .71 and .81 for the four administrations) compared to a control group
(Pretest n = 61; Posttest n = 54) of pharmacobiology students at the same university
who received “no English instruction whatsoever, not even traditional EFL classes” (p.
90). In the editors’ postscript to Lynch (1992), Alderson and Beretta (1992) described
110 MASTER

the study as “one of the first thorough attempts to evaluate an EST programme in a
university setting” (p. 96). Unfortunately, as the author notes, the absence of a treat-
ment for an equivalent control group “reduce[s] the question of treatment effect to
‘is the REST curriculum better than nothing?’ ” (p. 90) and thus, allows no empirical
proof of the efficacy of ESP to be drawn.
In another promising study based on the same program, Hudson (1991) investi-
gated the effect of EST content (reading) comprehension on general language acqui-
sition. The content, also drawn from the field of chemical engineering, was based on
journal articles concerned with such themes as materials and properties, electronics,
and physical and mechanical processes. Using a test that examined reading grammar,
reading comprehension, and general reading ability (with KR20 reliability coefficients
ranging from .84 to .90 for the three forms of the test), Hudson found significant im-
provement in all three areas after the experimental group (n = 152) had received 2
years of academic instruction compared to a control group (n = 212) that had received
no instruction (labeled “uninstructed” in Tables 1 and 2, Hudson, pp. 93–4). The ab-
sence of a treated control group means that this study also provides no evidence of
the efficacy of ESP, nor of content-based instruction (CBI), athough it had the potential
to do both.
Brown (1995) used an EST program (also conducted under the auspices of UCLA)
begun in 1980 at the Guangzhou English Language Center (GELC) at Zhongshan
University in Guangdong Province in the People’s Republic of China as one of two
examples (the other is the University of Hawaii) of a systematic approach to program
development. In the chapter on program evaluation at GELC, Brown stated, “It turned
out, in general terms, that students who learn English for science and technology
appear to gain systematically in their overall proficiency as measured by tests like the
TOEFL” (p. 240). On further examination, I was not able to ascertain any additional
information supporting this conclusion.
Kaspar (2000) provided indirect evidence for the improved performance of high-
intermediate to advanced EAP students who were given sustained content-based
instruction using the Internet as a resource in either business or environmental sci-
ence compared to the rest of the ESL program at the same level (who presumably
did not receive sustained content-based instruction). Based on reading and writing
examinations, 73.3% of the treatment group were able to skip a level (i.e., from ESL
91 to ESL 93, bypassing ESL 92) and move to ESL 93, a course for both native and
non-native speakers, whereas only 21.4% of the students at this level “in the program
overall” (p. 67) were able to do this (chi-squared = 28.47; p < .001). Unfortunately, be-
cause the study was not designed as an experiment, the data are entirely post hoc. No
pretest score was reported to provide an assessment of the level of the students prior
to the treatment, and the number of subjects is not indicated. The testing instrument
is not described, statistically or otherwise, nor are the criteria for skipping a level.
Finally, it appears that the treatment group was included as part of the control group
in the comparison. These factors remove the possibility of empirical results.
Despite these potentially promising leads, empirical proof of the efficacy of ESP
thus remains elusive. Echoing the need for research into ESP, Duff (2001) cites Jordan
(1997) and Zamel and Spack (1998) in maintaining that “insufficient research has ex-
amined language learning, discourse socialization, and assessment at more advanced
levels of secondary and postsecondary education for various academic or occupa-
tional purposes” (p. 606). She provides four major research questions to address what
she finds to be lacking. Those that best reflect the issue of the efficacy of ESP are (p. 607):
r What kinds of preparation, intervention, and assessment are most effective in
assisting ESL learners in these [i.e., ESP] settings to attain their own goals as well
as reach established external standards?
 6. ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES 111
r What factors contribute to underachievement or attrition among particular Eth-
nolinguistic groups of L2 students in academic/occupational programs, and
what interventions might improve completion rates and other desired outcomes
for these groups?
r What is the impact of ESL program completion on participants’ language abilities
and identities within their academic and professional communities?

Dudley-Evans (2001), in his farewell editorial, notes how focused and specific ESP
work has become.

The specificity I have noted is not necessarily of a subject-specific nature; it is rather

that, as ESP research becomes more sophisticated and the range of its activity much
broader, it has inevitably developed a much more focussed approach that looks at more
detailed questions. (p. 311) [A]lready in 10(1) [1991] the trend in English for Specific Purposes
towards articles presenting analysis rather than pedagogical issues and syllabus design
was apparent. . . . While not in any way rejecting the need for theory and analysis in ESP,
I do feel that we are reaching a stage where we need to consider how effective the courses
that are developed from this research are. Are we really delivering in the ESP classroom?
Are students in ESP classes more motivated than those in General English classes? I look
forward to reading some more papers on these topics in future issues.” (p. 312)

In short, despite 30 years of calls for empirical research demonstrating the efficacy
of ESP, not a single published study has appeared to this end. All we really have is
what Bowyers (1980, cited in Johns and Dudley-Evans, 1991) called “war stories and
romances.”

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

ESP has enjoyed more than a 30-year history of acceptance based on anecdotal suc-
cesses and the obvious motivational inspiration it provides for English language
learners, not only in academic and occupational settings but also in sociocultural con-
texts such as literacy and citizenship programs, prisons, and AIDS programs (Master,
1997b). It needs to heed the repeated calls to establish its empirical validity as a vi-
able means of second language acquisition. There is also a dire need for research
in the occupational and sociocultural aspects of ESP as well as the training of ESP
practitioners.
The field will no doubt continue to provide detailed descriptions of specific in-
stantiations of ESP like those that have characterized the last 3 years of English for
Specific Purposes. In this regard, Hewings (2002) believes that China and Hong Kong
will continue to be substantial contributors to the journal in the coming years, along
with Eastern Europe and Spain, where ESP is becoming of particular interest at the
university level.
It is hoped, too, that the field will begin to see the publication of experimental
studies based on inferential statistics. Although it is difficult to measure the effects of
syllabi and methodologies, one can imagine controlled studies in which non-native
speakers (NNSs) are taught skills using field-specific material and comparing their
performance to a similar group using non-field-specific material. For example, NNS
science majors could be taught reading skills based on journals in their fields (like
the REST study) while a control group of NNS science students is taught reading
skills using English literature or material from some other field such as psychology;
their performance on a common reading test could then be measured and compared.
An EOP example might be teaching a group of NNS manufacturing employees a
Vocational ESL/English for Occupational Purposes (VESL/EOP) class based on a
112 MASTER

careful needs analysis of their on-the-job language requirements while a similar group
receives general instruction in survival English, and comparing their performance on
a number of measures, such as a language test, a criterion-referenced skills test, or an
objective measure such as number of reported “rejects” (i.e., flawed products that must
be discarded) by each group on the manufacturing line over a given period of time.
At the same time, it is hoped that the field will continue to remain keenly aware
of the power of the double-edged sword ESP practitioners wield in representing the
most powerful nations on the planet while addressing the increasing demand for
instruction in English as the lingua franca of the learning and working world.

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7

English in the Workplace

Celia Roberts
King’s College, University of London

INTRODUCTION

It is hard to find any aspect of this topic, including the words to describe it in
this title, that is not contentious. At one end of the spectrum is the assumption
that the workplace is a good context in which to teach English as a Second Lan-
guage. It is assumed that workers need and want to learn English and that pro-
vided time and space can be negotiated with the employer, workplace English is
relatively unproblematic. At the other end of the spectrum are two different but con-
trastive positions. One is a practical and organizational view that employees will
only make real progress in using English if courses are tied to wider employer con-
cerns and initiatives that can benefit the workforce in several ways. Within this view,
workplace educators take on different roles and titles that may not include either
“English” or “teaching.” The second position takes a more critical and ideological
stance. It raises questions about who benefits from English courses, whether lan-
guage audits disadvantage the less communicatively competent and questions the
hegemony of English in multilingual workplaces. For most researchers and practi-
tioners in the workplace, these different views have to be held in tension. Negotiating
the scope, roles, and relationships of workplace educators is part of a larger struggle
in which the purposes, methods, and scale of their work are implicated. In this re-
view of research into language education in the workplace, these tensions have to be
acknowledged.
In this chapter, I will first describe some of the distinctive characteristics of English
in the workplace and associated research, then discuss some of the general theoret-
ical moorings of workplace research. I then focus on current research theories and
methodologies and illustrate these through five workplace studies. Finally, I consider
future directions in research and ways in which it needs to reflect the changing and
widening role of English in the workplace interventions, while acknowledging the
tensions between workplace priorities and critical perspectives.

117
118 ROBERTS

DISTINCTIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF ENGLISH

IN THE WORKPLACE

Unlike many of the other contexts described in this book, the workplace is a vast and
unwieldy canvas on which to create a picture of second language learning. Here the
context for second language learning is not the classroom but the whole communica-
tive environment. As Mawer (1999) puts it, “the workplace is the curriculum” (p. 60).
What is at stake is not just the improvement in language ability of individual workers
but the possibility of changing the communicative patterns and assumptions of staff
at all levels. This entails looking at how the organization is held together by talk and
writing and how these practices reflect or contest the potential for disadvantage and
discrimination in a multilingual workplace. If the workplace is the curriculum, then a
whole range of issues from new technologies to competency standards may become
part of the language educators remit.
The workplace context is particularly challenging because it is in such a state of
change. Although these changes seem to be overwhelming at this historical moment,
ever since workforces shifted from being monolingual to multilingual they have been
subject to multidimensional change (Ford, Anderson, Hull, Phelan, Read, Robson,
& Wingrove, 1976). The current changes include increasing use of technology, more
flexible work practices, more multitask working, flatter structures, and allied to all
of these, more language and literacy demands (Belfiore, 1993; Mawer, 1999). The
“new work order” (Gee, Hull, & Lankshear, 1996) may provide new opportunities for
workers, or it can be a means of controlling and excluding, or indeed a combination
of both.
Changing the communicative environment of the workplace involves interventions
that affect staff at various levels within the organization. Since the 1970s, research and
practice have included what has variously been described as “cultural awareness,”
“cross-cultural training,” and “diversity training.” The assumption that those with
least communicative power—non-English speakers—should not bear the brunt of
any changes led to the development of courses for, initially, supervisors, trade union-
ists, and managers on issues of intercultural communication. These, in turn, have
led to quite an extensive research and development program in North America, the
United Kingdom, and Australia in which the “gatekeeper” as guardian of scarce re-
sources has been targeted. In these settings, the workplace is the service encounter or
assessment interview where the communicative abilities of linguistic minority clients
or applicants are judged and where they are either let through the gate or not. These
gatekeeping encounters are also the only sites where some minority speakers may
have any chance to use English (Bremer, Roberts, Vasseur, Simonot, & Broeder, 1996).
These two types of workplaces—the multilingual company and the institution as a
gatekeeping site (and of course the company also includes gatekeeping activities)—are
both contexts in which English may be used rather than acquired. Although thousands
of English language courses have been run in workplaces, it is the opportunity to
use the workplace environment as a continuing site of language development that
is central to most workplace projects. This focus on language use rather than on
acquisition chimes well with theories of second language socialization. The “novice”
English speaker learns to use language as a social practice and through language
learns the sociocultural knowledge that is “wired into” (Agar, 1994) language use (see
Zuengler & Cole, this volume).
Second language socialization theories underpin research and practice in work-
place English. Language is seen as a social phenomenon or more precisely, a set
of practices that are relative to particular groups’ ways of being and acting. Al-
lied to this linguistic and cultural relativity is the acknowledgement that there is a
 7. ENGLISH IN THE WORKPLACE 119

linguistic dimension to discrimination and exclusion (Roberts, Davies, & Jupp, 1992).
The methodology for this research is drawn from a fairly elastic bag of discourse the-
ories that include Hallidayan functionalism, conversation analysis, pragmatics, and
interactional sociolinguistics. Combined with these and central to researching the
workplace is ethnography or, more precisely in many cases, ethnographic techniques
(Green & Bloome, 1997).
Because, as Hymes (1980) has suggested, ethnography is a kind of common sense
that we are born with (but tend to forget as we grow up), ethnographic tools are an ob-
vious means for trying to understand the unfamiliar and seemingly hostile contexts of
the workplace. It has been commonplace for workbased programs to undertake some
initial ethnographic investigation in order to, at the least, design a relevant course.
Because ethnographic studies are a kind of systematic common sense making, it is
difficult to know whether to count such initial investigations as research or not. The
databases of workplace reports in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and, until
15 years ago in the United Kingdom, represent a large body of practitioner research.
They combine detailed descriptions of workplaces with conceptual knowledge and
evaluations in ways that break down the barriers between research and not-research
(Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993). So research in this chapter will include both more
formal studies and will also draw on practitioner research in which the teacher is not
just an “articulator of some brought-in curriculum, but . . . [is] an active ethnographer
of the workplace, one whose professional investigations and tasks are always to be
set in the context of an appreciation of the structures and relations of power in the
workplace in question, in particular in respect of its channels, modes and practices of
decision-making” (Candlin, 1999, xiv).
Even if we take this expanded view of research, there is still relatively little research
on workplace English outside of the more general research on talk and the professions
and the “gatekeeping” research previously mentioned. There are a small number of
books that deal with the practice of teaching and learning language and literacy in
the workplace and its wider social implications in Canada (Belfiore & Burnaby, 1984),
the United Kingdom (Roberts, Davies, & Jupp, 1992), the United States (Hull, 1997),
and Australia (Mawer, 1999) and a few monographs such as Goldstein (1997), Clyne
(1994), and Willing (1992), but there have been surprisingly few articles in well-known
refereed journals. There are several possible reasons for this. The manufacturing and
service workplaces are not easy places to research compared with the classroom.
There are many constraints from management, the environment is noisy, the courses
are often short, and any improvements perceived or measured narrowly are tied to
very specific workplace goals (Belfiore, 1992; Goldstein, 1993; Katz, 2000).

CONNECTIONS WITH RELATED RESEARCH

English in the workplace research has its theoretical moorings in Hymesian notions
of communicative competence and the ethnography of communication. It also draws
on systemic grammar and the literature on pragmatics. To this extent, it shares an
approach with most teaching and research within the tradition of communicative lan-
guage teaching. Most English language courses and related research and evaluation
combine language and literacy teaching and draw on literacy research particularly
within the “new literacies” tradition (Barton, Hamilton, & Ivaniç, 2000; Cope, Pauwels,
Slade, Brosnan, & Neil, 1993; Street, 1995) and adult workplace literacy (Benseman,
1998; Holland, Frank, & Cooke, 1998; Smith, Mikulecky, Kibby, Drecher, & Dole, 2000).
The wider context of training in the workplace draws on the literature of adult
learning more generally and on research and policy around the changing workplace.
120 ROBERTS

The different approaches to adult learning are usefully summed up in Mawer (1999).
She discusses the development from relatively reductionist adult training to a more
holistic, humanistic learning approach, quoting Ford (1991), “dogs are trained, people
learn.” With this approach, the focus is on a more dialogic process in which learners are
involved in first understanding the new context in which they will have to operate and
in learning how to learn. Learning processes are embedded in what has been called
“the learning company” (Peddler, Bourgoyne, & Boydell, 1991) in which all aspects of
the system are expected to be critical and self-reflecting. As Mawer admits, however,
much of this visionary work remains at the level of rhetoric and is hard to reconcile
with the outcomes-orientated approach to rethinking vocational training based on a
narrow view of competencies.
This accusation of narrowness can also be laid at the door of some workplace lan-
guage and literacy schemes and their underlying theoretical assumptions. However
communicatively competent workers might become as a result of workplace courses,
research has shown that this is not a panacea for all the difficulties and inequalities of
the multilingual workplace (Cullity, 1998; Hull, 1993; Mikulecky, 1984). Many of the
problems can be attributed to inefficient or poor management, inappropriate styles
and expectations, and a range of other social and individual factors related to gender,
class, commitment, responsibility, and so on (Mawer & Field, 1995). Some of these is-
sues can begin to be addressed by focusing on those who interact with workers from
non-English speaking backgrounds.
The research on intercultural awareness and related training is part of the growing
body of research on talk and discourse at work. This research examines communicative
practices from the fine-grained level of interaction to the macro-ideological level of
institutional order. Drawing on Goffman’s “interaction order” (1974) and Giddens
(1991), a fundamental assumption of these studies is that the wider social order is
not a given but is actively produced in and through interaction. In other words as
participants interact together (and with those not physically present) they are actively
structuring the situation that feeds into social structures (Goffman, 1974).
There is a long tradition of discourse-based sociolinguistic and sociological studies
of professional communication. The majority of these have been in healthcare and
education and some in business and law (Bhatia, 1993; Cameron, 2000; Coleman,
1984, 1985, 1989; Fisher & Todd, 1983; Gibbons, 1987, 1994; Mehan, 1979). Some of the
early studies drew on speech act theory (Labov & Fanshel, 1977) to explicate language
patterns. More recently, while retaining a central interest in the relation of language
and context, sociolinguistic studies have focused on more institutional themes such
asymmetrical power relations and decision-making processes (Cicourel, 1992; Fisher
& Todd, 1986; West, 1984).
Within sociology, Conversational Analysis (CA) has come to dominate the research
on talk at work. The most relevant studies for this chapter concern healthcare and
medicine (Atkinson & Heath, 1981; Drew & Heritage, 1992; Heritage, Chatwin, &
Collins, 2001; Maynard, 1991; Heath, 1992; Peräkylä, 1995) and business and deci-
sion making (Boden, 1994; Firth, 1994). Within CA, talk is social action so there is no
distinction made between language and its context and outcomes. This talk (and non-
verbal communication) is designed to be accountable both to the speaker and to what
has gone before in the interaction. So interaction is made up of connected sequences
of actions that appear to have stable patterns. The patterns of communication and
the fact that they are jointly accomplished is the rationale for workplace programs to
have training for native and fluent speakers of English in positions of power, as well
as English language training. Central to the research and teaching of gatekeepers is
the assumption that their contributions help to construct the performance of inter-
viewees. Although workplace English can draw on the general tenets of CA, there is
still little research that is “pure” conversation analysis of intercultural communication
 7. ENGLISH IN THE WORKPLACE 121

(see Firth, 1994; Wagner, 1995 for exceptions). Given that CA relies on the speakers
and the analysts sharing the practical reasoning processes that make sense of interac-
tion, CA of intercultural communication can only be done where the analyst is fully
bilingual and bicultural (see also Gumperz & Levinson, 1996).
These discourse-based studies cover a wide spectrum of ideological positions. One
of the most powerful, and one to which most recent workplace English research sub-
scribes, can be described, broadly, as critical. Workplace literacy and gatekeeping
studies and to a lesser extent language research have engaged with issues of power
relations, with asking how structural inequalities—including the unequal access to
English as the language of power—come to be produced and with a commitment
to helping students to “engage critically with the conditions of their working lives”
(Cope et al., 1993, p. 26). This general critical stance is realized in three areas relevant
to the workplace: critical linguistics, in particular critical discourse analysis (CDA),
critical or “new” literacies, and critical pedagogy. CDA has tended to focus on the dis-
courses of work and institutional life and how these are constructing new work roles
and identities (Fairclough, 1989, 1992; Farrell, 2000; Sarangi & Slembrouck, 1996) For
example, many of the discourses of work are being colonized by competing discourses
(Fairclough, 1992; Wodak, 1996) which, these authors argue, for example, turn gate-
keeping interviews into “little chats” and ethically questionable capitalist practices
into morally uplifting missions.
The discourses of the “new capitalism” have come under heavy attack from critical
literacy. These new capitalist discourses are “imperialistic” (Gee, Hull, & Lankshear,
1996) as they take over discourses from religion, communities, and universities in
order to persuade workers of their core vision. The need to constantly change prod-
ucts and customize them to survive in the globalized market place requires workers
to become increasingly flexible and take more responsibility. This new work order
“empowers” workers to work harder, be more communicatively skillful, and to have
less job security. There are new work genres, many of them new types of meetings
where hierarchies are blurred, and new work and professional identities have to
be constructed and negotiated (Farrell, 2000; Hull, 1997; Iedema & Scheeres, 2003;
Schellekens, 2001).
Critical literacy also has an impact at the level of workplace courses. Here it links
with critical pedagogy and with the transformative goals of Paulo Friere (1972).
Whereas a skills approach may give some individuals opportunity, a critical peda-
gogy aims to help students re-assess their position in society and review critically
their working lives (Auerbach & Wallerstein, 1987).
This brief review of some of the associated research in language and literacy, in
talk and interaction at work, and in broader issues of workplace learning and train-
ing suggests both the breadth and the potential for controversy and tension in the
research on and for workplace English. The next section will review aspects of re-
search that are directly related to workplace education in the United States, Canada,
the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand with some reference to studies of
other languages.

DEVELOPMENTS AND CURRENT ISSUES IN RESEARCH

Compared with the large body of research on language and discourse in professional
institutions, there has been relatively little research on industrial workplaces or on
multilingual settings in work contexts more generally. For this reason, it is important
to include in this review both research that has informed teaching and assessment
practice and the numerous reports and accounts that have been published and/or fed
into resource banks such as the National Centre for English Language Teaching and
122 ROBERTS

Research, Macquarie University, Australia; the ERIC Clearinghouse on Adult, Career

and Vocational Education, United States and Canada; Workbase in New Zealand;
and the now defunct National Centre for Industrial Language Training in London
in the United Kingdom. Other reports have been published by government-funded
programs such as the Workplace English Language and Literacy Programme in Aus-
tralia; the Multicultural Workplace Programme in Canada; the National Workplace
Literacy Program in the United States.
Much of the research on English in the workplace has derived from practitioner
involvement. For this reason, research is dependent on opportunities for workplace
education that are highly dependent on political and commercial imperatives (Wyse,
1997). Whereas the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada were developing
workplace programs and related research in the 1970s and early 1980s, by the late
1980s the United Kingdom project was being scaled down. During this time, Australia
took the lead in developing English in the workplace and associated research. Recently,
the political scene in Australia has been less hospitable to this area, and in the United
Kingdom a new National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and
Numeracy has been set up that includes ESL research and ESL employees as one of
its key target populations. Inevitably research in this area has followed the political
imperatives of different countries and governments as issues of language, literature,
and ethnicity are constructed as relatively important or not to a particular country’s
economic and social well-being.
Turning now to specific research projects, we can identify four main approaches
used in the research on and for English in the workplace that have been particularly
influential: textual analysis of discourse, interactional sociolinguistics, pragmatics,
and ethnography.
The textual analysis of discourse has drawn on Halliday’s (1973) systemic/
functional model of language. This was particularly influential in the early analysis
of workplace texts (Roberts et al., 1992). Halliday’s focus on the relatively patterned
and predictable habits of meaning that develop within particular groups (1973) and
the significance of prosodic systems (1967) in making meaning fed into both the de-
velopment of language materials and awareness courses (Byrne & Fitzgerald, 1996;
Gumperz, Jupp, & Roberts, 1979; Roberts, 1998). Later developments of Hallidayan
linguistics in genre theory (Martin, 1984; Bhatia, 1993) have been used to highlight
the rule-governed nature of speech and written genres.
Some of the criticisms of the systemic/functional model—that it is overly prescrip-
tive and does not take account of the locally designed and jointly accomplished nature
of interaction—have been answered by studies in interactional sociolinguistics. Macro
issues of inequality, institutionalization, and discrimination and sociological notions
of ethnicity, social identity, networks, and gatekeeping are linked to micro issues of
discourse coherence, CA ideas of sequential organization, and concepts of face and
frame (Gumperz, 1982; 1997; 1999). Within this framework, small interactional mo-
ments can have large social consequences. Where speakers do not share the same way
of interacting, inferential processes, or conditions for negotiating, there is always the
potential for misunderstanding and negative social evaluation—what Erickson (1985)
calls “clinical labelling.”
Central to the ways in which people make sense to each other moment by moment
is the notion of contextualization (Auer & di Luzio, 1992; Cook-Gumperz & Gumperz,
1976). It is impossible for speakers to understand each other without a context, but
contextualization goes further than this in showing that language and paralinguistic
signs or cues actively create and shape the interaction moment by moment. These
“contextualization cues” (Gumperz, 1982; 1992a; 1992b) signal what is to be expected
in an exchange, what can be understood rather than explicitly conveyed, and how
 7. ENGLISH IN THE WORKPLACE 123

interpersonal relations and social identities are to be managed (Gumperz, 1996, p. 396).
The most important cues and, paradoxically, the most hidden ones are prosodic cues.
These function to show cohesiveness, to signal speaker involvement and perspective,
to show emphasis and contrast, and to show what is old or new information. Where
speakers do not share the same prosodic systems, both sides can misjudge the other
and this can lead to negative stereotyping. Using both naturally occurring and role-
played encounters, intercultural awareness training, based substantially on the studies
of interactional sociolinguistics, has been implemented in a range of industrial and
professional settings (Belfiore & Heller, 1992; Cope, Pauwels, Slade, Brosnan, & Neil,
1993; McGregor & Williams, 1984; Pauwels, 1994; Roberts et al., 1992).
Early developments in workplace English drew heavily on the Pragmatics liter-
ature. Speech act theory, with its emphasis on speaker intention and social context,
drove much of the functional approaches to language teaching and some early work-
based materials such as the doctor–patient communication project (Candlin, Leather,
& Bruton, 1974). Levinson (1983) has shown that there are systematic pragmatic con-
straints that largely determine how speakers make inferences from each others’ contri-
butions. Rather than some general idea of appropriate behaviour, language learners
can trace evidence of these constraints in naturally occurring encounters. Gricean
maxims that assume that speakers are motivated by rational efficiency (Grice, 1989)
and politeness theories that assume that people are motivated by “faces,” wants, and
needs (Brown & Levinson, 1987) constrain language performance and guide inferen-
tial processes. Because they consist of both universal and culturally specific elements,
their use as analytic tools was significant in both language courses and intercultural
awareness training. Together with interactional sociolinguistics, Pragmatics continues
to provide important insights into differences of communicative style and misunder-
standings (Li, 2000). However, its focus on individual speaker intention as the locus of
analysis and on oral communication rather than multimodality puts some limitations
on its usefulness.
The final approach in this section is a method rather than a theory. Ethnography
is the detailed investigation of the cultural and social patterns of interaction and the
values, beliefs, and assumptions that account for such interaction. Participant obser-
vation is the defining technique of ethnography and, in Agar’s term, to do this requires
being “a professional stranger” (Agar, 2000). This term is a kind of oxymoron, reflect-
ing the paradox in ethnography between just being an outsider—someone defined by
their lack of knowledge and familiarity—and being a professional—someone defined
by their knowledge and skills. Workplace educators find themselves in even more of
a contested situation than the professional ethnographer. This is because of the ten-
sions between trying to understand all the conflicting issues of the workplace from
the inside and meeting the demands of the company, which often expects quick-fix
solutions (Mawer, 1999). All the research studies discussed in the following have used
ethnography, either as an extended study in the tradition of anthropological ethnog-
raphy (Wallman, 1979; Westwood & Bachu, 1988), as micro-ethnography (Erickson &
Schultz, 1982), or as a set of ethnographic tools (Green & Bloome, 1997).

REVIEW OF ENGLISH IN THE WORKPLACE STUDIES

This section reviews five studies that illustrate the four main areas just discussed.
The majority of research sites are in manufacturing industry rather than in profes-
sional contexts or service industries, although studies from these contexts will also
be referred to. They have been selected on the basis that the workplace is the cur-
riculum and rather than discuss research that looks at how individuals or one group
124 ROBERTS

go through the process of language socialization (see Zuengler & More, this volume)
these studies look at language and literacy use across a range of settings within the
wider imperatives of the workplace.

Pragmatics
The first of these is Michael Clyne’s study of English as a lingua franca in multilingual
workplaces in Australia (Clyne, 1994). Most of the data were collected in two car
factories, a textile factory, an electronics factory, and the catering section of a hostel.
The corpus consists of audiotaped data of routine work communication supplemented
by video and audio data of formal meetings (182 hours in total). A pragmatic analysis
of the data draws on the literature on cross-cultural pragmatics (Blum-Kulka, House,
& Kasper, 1989) and pragmatic failure (Thomas, 1983) and concentrates on the speech
acts of complaints, commissives, directives, and apologies and also looks at “small
talk” (see also Holmes, 2000) in order to examine cultural variation in discourse. The
approach is a contrastive one in which different ethnic groups are compared and
gender and power relations are taken into account in discussing the extent to which
cultural differences cause communication breakdowns.
Clyne discusses systematic differences in the ways in which speech acts are re-
alized and how these relate to larger interactional concerns to do with turn-taking
and negotiating. For example, he argues that the European workers tend to have
“well-developed schemata intended to persuade others of their viewpoint” whereas
the Southeast Asian group negotiates as little as possible and says what is expected
(Clyne, 1994, p. 125). These differences are part of contrasts in overall communicative
style between the different groups. Three different communicative styles are identi-
fied: Style A represented by European speakers and Spanish speaking Latin Ameri-
cans, Style B speakers from South Asia, and Style C speakers from Southeast Asia. The
latter group is claimed to be at a disadvantage in intercultural communication in the
Australian workplace because they are less likely to assert themselves and directives
and complaints addressed to them tend to be longer and more explicit than those
directed to other groups (p. 153).
Clyne concludes that discourse patterns vary considerably between ethnic groups
and that these differences can be attributed to “sociocultural interactional parame-
ters” such as harmony, uncertainty avoidance, and individuality and to “discourse-
cultural parameters” such as orientation to content and the degree of linearity (Clyne,
1994, p. 203). These patterns vary as much across different minority ethnic groups
as they do between these groups and the majority or dominant Anglo-Australian
group. Given this conclusion, Clyne argues that English in the workplace programs
need to include some support in dealing with the different communicative styles of
the typical multilingual workplace, and these should focus on discourse and prag-
matic breakdowns (see also Duff, Wong, & Early, 2000; Li, 2002; and Roberts et al.,
1992).
Another major study that has been substantially influenced by pragmatics but also
draws on Halladayan and interactional sociolingusitic work is Willing’s research on
professional problem solving (Willing, 1992; 1997). As with Clyne’s study, problems
in communication in a linguistically diverse workplace are often based on culturally
specific styles of communicating. In white-collar problem solving, there are a range of
subtle linguistic skills that make the speaker relatively persuasive or not. For example,
speakers have to convey and listeners have to infer the degree of cognitive commit-
ment to the assessments and suggestions put forward and these depend crucially on
their use and understanding of modality. Willing argues (1997) that it is difficult to
distinguish clearly between epistemic and politeness modality and recommends that
there should be more concentration on modality in language courses.
 7. ENGLISH IN THE WORKPLACE 125

Interactional Sociolinguistics
The second study draws on the interactional sociolinguistic literature and on some of
the tools of ethnography. It is a case study of how formal assessment and gatekeeping
procedures shed light on the linguistic dimension of discrimination. This is part of
a wider practical and research concern about the relationship between competence
at a job and the linguistically complex demands of being trained and assessed for
doing the job (Brindley, 1994; Mawer & Field, 1995; McNamara, 1997; ProTrain, 1993;
Sefton, Waterhouse, & Deakin, 1994). The case study arose out of consultancy work
undertaken by the National Centre for Industrial Language Training in the United
Kingdom and was part of a formal investigation by the Commission for Racial Equality
(CRE) into the promotion procedures in a large engineering company (Brierley, Dhesi,
& Yates, 1992).
The question was: Had the company indirectly discriminated against applicants of
South Asian origin, who had applied to become foreman, because of an over-reliance
on the formal interview as a method of selection? The task, therefore, was to compare
the communication skills required to pass the foreman-selection procedures with the
skills required to do the job.
In addition to observation and audio recordings on the shopfloor and simulated
interviews, foremen were interviewed using ethnographic interviewing techniques
(Spradley, 1979). The simulated job interviews were based on the company’s proce-
dures and assumptions: The event was characterized by indirectness and by a stylized
truthfulness in which issues of face are paramount. The idea that candidates are ex-
pected to “sell themselves” but in deprecatory ways is quite different from selection
interviews in the Indian subcontinent that are designed to find out about any general
weaknesses in character. A comparison of the promotion interview and the commu-
nication that foremen had to deal with on the shopfloor showed that they were, not
surprisingly, very different and the pragmatic and discourse skills required of the
interview were far more complex.
Whereas the South Asian foremen handled shopfloor communication well, their
performance in the interviews was rated as less assured along a number of dimensions.
First, in terms of self-presentation they tended to come across as either over-emphatic
or too indirect. Second, the South Asian groups’ responses were not seen as displaying
immediate relevance either because their answers lacked lexical cohesion or because
their use of prosody differed systematically from that used by native English speakers.
Finally, this group had more difficulty being persuasive in their line of argument. This
was partly because of relatively more syntactically complex questions—for example,
demanding a hypothetical answer or, again, because of systematic differences in the
relative use of syntax and prosody between native English speakers and those whose
English is influenced by North Indian languages.
The researchers concluded that the selection interview was discriminatory because
Asian applicants who could communicate clearly on the shopfloor were put at a
disadvantage by the linguistic demands and implicit conventions of the interview.
Language training alone might address some of the symptoms but not the cause of
discrimination and would only serve to reinforce the existing and erroneous deficit
view of the South Asian applicants’ abilities as shopfloor communicators. As a result,
the company was served with a legal notice from the CRE requiring them to change
their promotion procedures.
This case study illustrates one of a number of cases in the United Kingdom, Aus-
tralia, and the United States (Hull, 1993; 1997; Wonacott, 2000) where it has been
assumed that the language and literacy competence of workers is directly related to
their job competence and potential. As we have seen, this is not just an educational
matter but has ramifications in the industrial and legal world. This study is also an
126 ROBERTS

example of the close connection between research and practical relevance that is typ-
ical of so many projects related to English in the workplace.

Ethnography
The third set of studies take a broader ethnographic and critical perspective. The first
of these (Goldstein, 1997) concerns language choice and the role of English in a Cana-
dian multilingual factory. The second focuses on literacy practices within the “new
work order” in the high-technology electronics companies in Silicon Valley, Califor-
nia, and in the service industries. Goldstein’s study arose out of her experiences as a
workplace English teacher. It challenges the assumption that English competency is
necessary to communicate in the workplace and for equal opportunities and promo-
tion. Drawing on the theoretical work of feminist sociolinguists Susan Gal, Jane Hill,
and Kathryn Woolard on the political economy of language choice and use, Gold-
stein’s ethnography is a study of Portuguese factory workers and their relationship
with supervision and quality assurance staff.
Language choice, whether Portuguese or English, and attitudes to learning English
depend not only on practical matters such as getting the job done or getting a better
job but on the symbolic value of language and the structural positions of the workers.
Portuguese serves as a means of maintaining ethnic identity and solidarity in what
is construed as the Portuguese manufacturing “family.” Language choice helps to
maintain boundaries and to manage social roles with code-switching used strategi-
cally to cross boundaries, but because most of the workers prefer to stay on the line,
Portuguese is, paradoxically, endowed with authority. It is the language of friendship
and of economic survival in this factory.
Workplace English, Goldstein argues, gives access to English but not necessarily
to promotion because a high level of education is required for jobs such as quality
controllers. English language training may help the company, but the question is how
necessary or helpful is it for the individual? Goldstein concludes that English classes
in the workplace are worthwhile provided that they are underpinned by an acknowl-
edgement that “language boundaries are part of people’s working and personal lives”
(Goldstein, 1997, p. 83). If language training is only part of the hegemonic process that
gives English absolute dominance and further marginalizes limited speakers of En-
glish, then it needs to be challenged. An alternative to most of the discourses of ESL
training is a critical pedagogy that, in the Frierian tradition, aims to help students to
think critically about their conditions of work and their position in society (Belfiore &
Burnaby, 1984; Bell, 1982). English can be empowering as long as it does not undercut
Portuguese values.
Hull’s studies of literacy practices also combine a critical perspective with practical
relevance. The new work order is characterised by “the shift towards high-technology
manufacturing, service-orientated industries, and new forms of organisation such as
self-directed teams” (Hull, 1997, p. 20). The restructuring of workplaces and the new
technologies require new literacy skills both on the production line and in training
(Farrell, 1999; Holland et al., 1998; Moore, 1999) . As with other studies mentioned,
attempts to assess literacy can label workers as less competent and skilled than they
are in doing the job and blocks promotion prospects (Hull, 1996; 1997; Katz, 2000). Hull
argues for new frameworks for understanding literacy in relation to the restructured
workplace and shows how finely tuned oral language abilities are also necessary.
The company rhetoric of empowerment through self-directed teams is critiqued
in Hull’s study of the training required for team work and the team meetings that
are meant to show self-direction in action (Gee, Hull, & Lankshear, 1996, chapters
4 and 5). Neither the training nor the meetings took into account the language and
literacy needs of the workers, many of whom had no voice in the proceedings. Indeed,
 7. ENGLISH IN THE WORKPLACE 127

the realities of training and work practices were far removed from the celebratory
discourses of diversity and empowerment of the new work order.
The new requirements in literacy, which have arisen as a result of new industry
standards and work organization, such as self-directed learning, demand changes in
workplace educators (see Mawer, 1999). To meet some of these demands, research
data from the Silicon Valley companies has been used to build a multimedia database
for workplace literacy tutors (Hull, 1996). This is a new departure from a tradition
that has developed in workplace English and intercultural communication programs
in which the research data is transformed into learning materials.
The final study is, again, a case study that shows the extent of involvement of
workplace English educators and the range of skills and responsibilities they can
have and is typical of a growing number of projects in Australia, the United States,
and Canada. Mawer’s study of Aus Tin, a medium size packaging/printing business
also illustrates a company whose workers were affected by the new work order when
mulitiskilling and team-based approaches to work design were introduced (Mawer,
1999). Because it was clear that many workers were concerned about the changes and
that recent training for them had been inappropriate, a communication skills audit
was undertaken. Such an audit can give an overall picture of language backgrounds
and abilities in a company (Sefton & O’Hara, 1992), but there is also the danger that it
can be used to label workers negatively, as already discussed. Research methods for
an audit combine audio and video recordings and collection of written texts with an
ethnographic perspective using interviews and more informal means of participant
observation to provide a description of the institutional processes and structures as
well as a more “insider” perspective from workers, management, and the unions.
Criterion-referenced assessments of oral and literacy abilities validated by workplace
personnel and self-assessments were also used in the Aus Tin audit (Mawer, 1999,
p. 92).
The communication skills audit was widened out beyond the needs of a specific
group of employees to look at the whole communicative context of the workplace in
light of restructuring and to document the skills and experience of workers so that
unrecognized overseas qualification and hidden skills could be recognized. The audit
showed that although nearly half the workforce did not have the necessary language
skills to manage the demands of the restructured workplace, there was a broad base
of technological knowledge and strong motivation to improve both computer and
language skills. Recommendations to the company and the consultative committee
were wide ranging. They included literacy and trainer training, a review of train-
ing programs, the integration of communication skills within enterprise competency
standards, and a greater use of skilled overseas qualified employees. In contrast to
the quick-fix approach often expected by companies, the recommendations were im-
plemented over a 3 year period.
Mawer describes the range and level of language and literacy courses offered. There
was the typical tension between company expectations based on difficult economic
conditions and the prevailing work culture, on the one hand, and, on the other, the
commitment to meet the expressed language training needs of the workers. An inno-
vative component of the first course was to allow participants to gain work experience
in one of the other departments to widen their skills base. A further innovation was
language support on the line in which informal learning took place as workers learned
to fill out the new forms. After a number of further courses, an appointment was made
of a full-time enterprise-based teacher who was able to consult much more fully with
supervisors and workers. The teacher was also involved in integrating the language
and literacy demands into the new competencies for each industrial task.
The workplace teachers were also involved in helping to develop a set of training
modules that were to be part of the skills-based pay system. The case study illustrates
128 ROBERTS

some of the resistances to this goal and highlights again the conflictive nature of many
workplace projects. Accompanying the development of new modules was a training-
the-trainers course that, like the on the line literacy training, was largely carried out
through informal learning. The final element in the case study was the role of the
teacher in facilitating a new enterprise agreement to replace the traditional industrial
award system.

Evaluation Studies
There is a final set of studies, most of them based on evaluation reports on training
and other interventions in a particular company. These reports assess the value of the
workplace educator involvement, look at some of the differences of opinion among
the different stakeholders over issues such as levels of language competence, and
raise questions about the role and positioning of workplace educators. Attempting to
assess the impact of courses on the workplace is notoriously difficult. Whereas it is
possible to test before and after and present some persuasive figures to show language
development, this type of assessment may have little impact on the company’s attitude
or commitment to greater changes. An ambitious project such as that at Aus Tin
previously described may have an impact in a range of different areas, but it may be
difficult to assess the overall impact. In some cases (for example, Mawer, 1994) a very
focused course can have large implications. A course for teaching calculator skills to
workers on the packing line had an immediate impact on productivity, but it also raised
awareness of the needs and potential for literacy development much more broadly.
Other evaluations have concentrated on the benefits to workers. For example, some
studies suggest that language courses can provide some level of economic protection
and improve chances of new employment (Belfiore, 1993; Goldstein, 1993) and that
they can reduce reliance on language brokers, who are often in a supervisory position,
and help workers cope with situations where there are conflicts over production
(Pierce, Harper, & Burnaby, 1993). Other studies have concentrated on the voices of the
workers and their perceptions of benefits (Benseman, 1998) both for themselves and
their families. Benefits to companies are well summed up in an Australian government
evaluation of ESL and literacy training in the workplace (Department of Employment,
Education and Training 1996). These are: direct cost savings, access to and acceptability
of further training, participation in teams and meetings, promotion, job flexibility, and
the value of training.
Added to a critical stance on English in the workplace discussed previously, are
evaluations that question the benefits of courses in terms of job prospects (Bell, 1995;
Katz, 2000) and give further impetus to the argument that intercultural awareness
training is also necessary to bring about change. Other critical evaluations ques-
tion the role and positioning of the workplace educator previously discussed. Farrell
(1999, 2000) discusses the construction of new working identities in contemporary
workplaces and how these are designed to accommodate to the new work order.
Workplace-based teachers are implicated in the social and political processes of these
new identities and types of knowledge. Finally, there are some studies that highlight
some of the differences among government, management, and staff. For example,
in a survey on apprenticeship schemes, workers were more positive than employers
about the skills they already had (O’Neil & Gish, 2001). Similarly, in an assessment
of target language skills for engineers and nurses, there was a discrepancy between
government policy on language levels and employers’ preferences (Hawthorne, 1997).
The studies reviewed here are representative of the formidable range of English
in the workplace issues. They also reflect the fluid boundary between research and
practice that action research and the reflective practitioner approaches have also en-
gaged with. The variety of studies theoretically, ideologically, methodologically, and
 7. ENGLISH IN THE WORKPLACE 129

in terms of their status as research and the breadth of research sites is one of the themes
that I now turn to in the last section.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR RESEARCH ON AND FOR

ENGLISH IN THE WORKPLACE

Research related to English in the workplace will no doubt continue to depend on

political and economic trends as they affect policy and provision in this area. Although
some research independent of these trends may be undertaken, as it has been in
the past (Clyne, 1994; Willing, 1992), it seems likely that most research, especially
practitioner-led research, will ebb and flow as workplace programs and the funding
for them do. Although these programs have been vulnerable to the changing shifts in
policy and to the priority given to training and development in manufacturing and
service industries, the links between research and action remains one of the strengths
of workplace English. So, when there is an active policy to promote workplace English,
there is a tendency also for a resurgence in research in this area.
Workplace English studies have always looked at learning beyond the classroom
and to this extent they have drawn on the language socialization studies not only in
reconceptualizing language as a social practice, but in focusing on language use in
routine interactions. The reality of multilingual work contexts makes the apprentice-
ship model a much less straightforward one (Clyne & Ball, 1990; Duff et al., 2000)
and one direction in which research could go is in looking at how English as a lingua
franca provides a context for developing English competence. There is a case here
for more longitudinal studies along the lines of the European Science Foundation’s
Natural Language Acquisition Project (Perdue, 1993).
The scope of much of the research on and for English in the workplace has mirrored
the scope of workplace projects during the 30 years since they first began. Early studies
focused on shopfloor language needs analysis and post-course evaluations. More
recently, as the studies mentioned have shown, the scope has widened considerably
so that the whole communicative environment of the workplace is now under scrutiny
(Hull, 1993).

Rather than focusing on those with “low language and literacy levels”—as identified by
some general proficiency scale of dubious predictive validity—a holistic, integrated ap-
proach is likely to involve an educational, support role with key people such as workplace
managers, team leaders and trainers. It may, for example, involve helping to develop rel-
evant and accessible vocational curriculum, facilitating effective teamwork, influencing
assessment systems and having input into the development of standards or training
plans. (Mawer, 1999, p. 64)

Research on the workplace as a communicative environment raises questions of

methodology. Recordings of naturally occurring interactions within a discourse anal-
ysis tradition remain central to any research on the interactive patterns of work talk.
But without ethnography, there is the danger that:

a researcher’s decision to tape-record conversation or discourse creates a contextual frame

that limits what is to be identified as relevant data, their organisation, and the kinds of
analysis and inferences to which these data will be subjected. (Cicourel, 1992, p. 293).

As Hak (1999) asserts, the recorded data becomes the text—the object of our study—
and everything else is merely context. He does not argue that we should try to
record the whole because this is impossible, but rather that we should think about
130 ROBERTS

what we are trying to find out. He suggests bracketing out interest in discourse and
communication and instead try to understand what the particular environment we are
studying looks like from the perspectives of those who work in it (p. 447). This leads
us to ethnography and to the goal that any recording of discursive events should be
embedded in an ethnographic method. “Ethnography” is an overused and often mis-
understood term but applied linguistics and sociolinguistics are increasingly using
ethnographic method to pursue a linguistic ethnography in which the communica-
tive ecology of the workplace (or other institution) is produced out of a dialogue of
close discourse analysis and ethnographic illumination. In the fraught and often con-
flictive environments of the shopfloor, the meeting room, or the hospital ward, the
“lurking and soaking” (Werner & Schoepfler, 1989) of the professional ethnographer
is not an easy task. And workplace researchers should never underestimate the po-
tential distrust, embarrassment, and anxiety that their presence as investigators may
produce.
Nevertheless, ethnography harnessed to the concerns of at least most of the in-
formants in the workplace is both methodologically and practically worthwhile. At
least, the workplace researcher has the new work order rhetoric of “participation,”
“the learning organization,” and “self-directed learning” to align with in striving for
some common ground from which to initiate the ethnographic project.
At the beginning of the chapter, I emphasized some of the tensions in workplace
English between employer/skills-orientated research and practice aimed at under-
standing, harmony, competence, and productivity (see Department of Employment,
Education and Training, 1996) and educationally orientated goals aimed at critical
awareness. These tensions are most sharply defined when critical theorists reflecting
on workplace English come up against practitioner/researchers working from the
inside in a particular company, as in the reports and papers previously discussed. For
example, Tannock (1997) critiques a course in a U.S. canning factory in which, it is
argued, the workers were more aligned to management values and priorities than to
a more emancipatory literacy project. Mawer, in discussing this critique, points out
that a discursive account of the literacy class has overlooked some of the structural
factors to do with the aims and length of the course that was to lead to accreditation
for two key jobs. Perhaps the workers were more concerned with getting skills for the
job than doing a critical analysis of the company mission? (Mawer, 1999, p. 284).
In practice, these differences—liberal versus critical—co-exist and are held in ten-
sion by individual researchers. They argue for the importance of using the work con-
text as a site for learning, recognize that this entails building up trust and confidence
with management as well as employees, but also look for ways of developing criti-
cal understanding of course participants’ working lives (Goldstein, 1993; Kalantzis &
Brosnan, 1993; Pierce, 1989; Pierce et al., 1993). Typical of the argument here is the ques-
tion of whether basic work-related English language training is a benefit or a means
of cornering migrant workers in unskilled, low-paid jobs (Auerbach & Wallerstein,
1987; Tollefson, 1991).
One area of research where a critical stance sits comfortably with the goals of an
organization is where research is done on issues of access, assessment, and selection
in a range of gatekeeping settings. This is where the workplace researcher and ed-
ucator meets the reflective employer who is aware that their own procedures may
be discriminatory. Concerns about institutional racism may galvanize employers to
call in discourse specialists to look at practices and procedures. Of course, in some
cases, the employer is beaten into a changed awareness by a legal stick, as previously
illustrated (Brierley et al., 1992) and in the many other cases in North America, the
United Kingdom, and Australia. But in most instances the reflective employers have
been from the service industries—health, employment, housing, police, and the civil
service—where there has been more of a tradition of equal opportunities.
 7. ENGLISH IN THE WORKPLACE 131

It is this type of discourse research that seems likely to grow in the future. Typi-
cally it combines pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis,
and elements of Hallidayan functionalism to shed light on a range of problems con-
cerning language and disadvantage. These may be, for example, in legal or police
settings (Eades, 1994; Gibbons, 1987; 1994), in job selection interviews (Adelsward,
1988; Auer, 1998; Sarangi, 1994a), or in examinations within the health field (McNa-
mara, 1994; 1997; Roberts & Sarangi, 1999). Methodologically, it has much in common
with the studies on intercultural communication in the workplace of the type exem-
plified by Clyne and his associates (Clyne, 1994; Clyne & Ball, 1990). But recent work
has been more critical of the approach that takes cultural background or ethnicity
for granted and then examines differences in communicative style (Sarangi, 1994b).
Such an approach assumes that cultural differences are privileged and are the reason
why misunderstandings occur. There are two major strands of criticism here. One
is a criticism of ethnic groups having fixed or essential characteristics (Hall, 1992).
Rather, identities are constructed out of communicative practices (Hanks, 1996) and
similar communicative experiences as Gumperz suggests: “It is long-term exposure
to similar communicative experience in institutionalised networks of relationships
and not language or community membership as such that lies at the root of shared
culture and shared inferential practices” (Gumperz, 1997, p. 15). So, for example, most
of the female workers that Goldstein (1997) studied were part of an institutionalized
network of relationships, but there were workers of Portuguese origin whose com-
municative practices were relatively different and who styled different identities out
of their interactions with other non-Portuguese groups.
Another criticism is that what characterizes communication between participants
with different language backgrounds is not so much cultural difference as the ability
to make one’s actions seem sensible, plausible, and attuned to the particular task.
For example, Day’s analysis of multicultural workplaces in Sweden suggests that
people’s identities as members of particular work groups was more significant than
their belonging to a certain national group. In meetings what mattered was the ability
to make the activity into a meeting rather than any particular cultural take on its
content (Day, 1992). This criticism is similar to Wagner’s study of business meetings
in which he argues that interactants do not have to agree on the precise nature of the
problem or necessarily be aligned in order for them to find a solution (Wagner, 1995).
In other words, just as culture may not be salient as some researchers have argued,
perhaps precise understanding and agreement may not be so necessary either. And
this point contributes to the larger debate in workplace English about the danger of
exaggerating language difference and deficit and of looking at workplace problems
through the prism of language. However much language feeds into the structuring
of workplace social life and holds it together, it does not account for all the conditions
of working life. Any researcher of workplace language has to remember this.
Compared with many other themes covered in this book, for example, the research
on second language acquisition, the output of English in the Workplace research
remains small, not least because of the contested nature of its aims and objectives.
However, its strength and its potential in the future, lie in its practical relevance, its
engagement with the real world of the workplace, and its capacity to incorporate
issues that go beyond any narrow conceptualization of language skills development.

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136
8

English as a Foreign Language:

Matching Procedures to the
Context of Learning
Brian Tomlinson
Leeds Metropolitan University

INTRODUCTION

This chapter provides a critical overview of the issues related to the learning and
teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in different social contexts. It asks
whether there are universally applicable principles and procedures or whether ap-
proaches should vary in relation to the distinctive features of different social contexts.

ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE (EFL)

EFL is learned by people who already use at least one other language and who live
in a community in which English is not normally used. This community is inevitably
influenced by norms that are not those of English-speaking countries and those norms
influence the teachers’ and learners’ expectations of the language learning process.

SOCIAL CONTEXTS

Most learners of EFL learn it in school together with a large class of peers of similar
age and proficiency. They typically have a coursebook, they are preparing for an
examination, and they are taught by a teacher who is not a native speaker of English.
However, there are many variations on this EFL scenario. The size of the class can
vary from 10 to 100. The school might have no electricity and no books (for example,
on some islands I have visited in Vanuatu) or it might have a computer room, a
library, and a language laboratory. The teacher might or might not be trained, fluent,
experienced, and a native speaker. Or they could be learning English in a language
school, at university, or at work. Whatever the social context of their learning, it will
affect their expectations and behaviour. For example, I have observed in Indonesia
137
138 TOMLINSON

and Japan different learner behaviour by the same students in their morning class and
in their afternoon club.

METHODOLOGY AND MATERIALS

Surprisingly much of the literature on EFL methodology seems to disregard contexts

of learning. For example, Duquette (1995) outlines very useful procedures for applying
theory to practice in order to implement a communicative approach but does not relate
the procedures to varying contexts of learning. Also it seems that many of the global
EFL coursebooks are written by qualified, native-speaker teachers whose experience
of EFL has been primarily in well-resourced language schools teaching small classes
of motivated learners. And yet most of the users of these books experience EFL in very
different social contexts, the majority in large classes of unmotivated learners with
inadequate resources and unqualified teachers. This situation persists despite criticism
of methodology imposed from “the West” (e.g., Holliday, 1994) and of global materials
written with “Western” classrooms in mind (e.g., Padwad, 2002). However, there
is an increasing recognition that, “Language teaching as lived out in the classroom
is always a local phenomenon”(Tudor, 1996, p. 210) and that, “Classrooms operate
within a cultural context which to a large extent determines not only what is to be
learned, but also how it is to be learned” (McKay, 1992, p. 47). This implies that
teachers and materials writers should at the very least be aware of the “culture of
learning” (i.e.,“what people believe about the ‘normal’ or ‘good’ learning activities
and processes” [Coleman, 1996, p. 230]).

LEARNING PRINCIPLES

There is much controversy among second language acquisition (SLA) researchers

and methodologists as to the optimum ways to learn a foreign language, but there
does seem to be general agreement on the basic principles of language acquisition
(Tomlinson, 1998a). What we need to know though is which, if any, of the generally
agreed principles can be applied to any social context in which English is learned as a
foreign language. Can teachers, in Asia, for example, establish a relaxed atmosphere
in the classroom, involve learners affectively in the learning process (Arnold, 1999;
Tomlinson, 1998b), and help learners to make decisions about their learning?

APPARENT CULTURAL DIFFERENCES

Flowerdew (1998, p. 323) asks, “Why is it that when one poses a question to a group
of Arab students the whole class is clamouring to answer, while a question addressed
to a class of Chinese learners may elicit no response, followed by a stony silence . . . ?”
The answer is that cultural norms can determine learning behaviour. But it could
be that students can modify behaviour if they perceive potential value in doing so.
Likewise teachers asked to implement innovative methodology might initially be
disturbed but eventually become accustomed. Dat (2002, p. 272) refers to Karavas-
Doukas (1998, p. 36), who says that teachers need time to come to grips with new
ideas and reflect on their implications until both skill and confidence help develop a
sense of ownership of those ideas. Dat quotes a teacher in one of his communicative
experiments in Vietnam as saying, “Some strategies don’t work because I am simply
not familiar with employing them. These will have to take time to develop into my
own techniques (p. 272).”
 8. ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE 139

THE CASE FOR CONTEXTUAL VARIATION OF PROCEDURES

Local Conditions
Most methodologists seem to agree that “language teachers must pay attention to local
conditions rather than taking a set of ideas” around the world with them (Stubbs, 2000,
p. 16). Benson (2000) comments that Harold Palmer’s “enthusiasm for phonetics and
direct teaching suffered badly when he was confronted by the realities of institutional
language teaching in Japan” (p. 47) and Maingay (1997) reports mistakenly assuming
that all the participants on a multinational teachers’ course would come to appreciate
the tutor’s process-oriented approach and “go back to their countries ready to use the
same approach with their trainees (pp. 120–121).”
Many researchers seem to agree that both curriculum and methodology should
only be determined after a consideration of local conditions. For example, Byram &
Cain (1998) describe an experiment in which learners of French in English schools and
learners of English in French schools were helped to acquire “cultural competence.”
Although the principles, aims, and objectives were the same in both countries, the
methods had to be different because “the teaching contexts prevailing in each country
were entirely different” (p. 32).
Richards (2001) points out that, “curriculum planners draw on their understand-
ing both of the present and long-term needs of learners and of society, as well as the
planners’ beliefs and ideologies about schools, learners and teachers” (p. 113). And
Kleibard (1986) reports that, “we find different interest groups competing for domi-
nance over the curriculum and, at different times, achieving some measure of control
depending on local as well as general social conditions” (p. 8). It is arguable that, if the
groups are local, their view of the curriculum will reflect local cultural values, whereas
if they are outsiders, their view will reflect culturally distant values. Richards (2001)
offers academic rationalism as a culture-free approach to curriculum development,
which “stresses the intrinsic value of the subject matter and its role in developing the
learner’s intellect, humanistic values and rationality” (p. 114). But perhaps the cur-
riculum ideology that is appropriate in most cultural contexts is “cultural pluralism,”
which argues that schools should prepare students to participate in several differ-
ent cultures and to develop cross-cultural competence. No cultural group is seen as
superior and the first language is valued and used (Auerbach, 1995).
Another perspective on this issue is provided by Pennycook (1994) who argues that
“English language teaching must start with ways of critically exploring students’ cul-
tures, knowledge and histories in ways that are both challenging and at the same time
affirming and supportive” (p. 311), and by Phillipson (1992) and Rodgers (1989) who
argue for greater consideration of sociopolitical factors when developing language
teaching programs.

Universal Conditions
While working in Indonesia, Japan, Nigeria, Singapore, the United Kingdom Vanu-
atu, and Zambia, I have heard claims about the uniqueness of social and educational
cultures. In each country the social cultures are distinctively different, but the educa-
tional cultures seem to be remarkably similar. One of the main objectives of educational
systems seems to be to maintain the status quo and to train students to become obe-
dient and responsible citizens (LoCastro, 1996). Classroom pedagogy is essentially
teacher-centered (Mitchell & Lee, 2003), the curriculum is dominated by knowledge
to be transmitted, and the emphasis is on convergence of behaviour and thought.
And in some countries the school culture of conformity and control is reinforced by
social norms of reverence for authority (Tomlinson, 1988). In Singapore, for example,
140 TOMLINSON

many teachers seem reluctant to encourage learners to express individual views (even
though critical thinking is emphasized in the curriculum).
Who can blame teachers for maintaining control? Often it is the pressure of their
examination culture and the resultant need to transmit huge amounts of knowledge
that determines their methodology. This is a point made by LoCastro (1996) with ref-
erence to the introduction of a new, more communicative curriculum in Japanese high
schools when she says that, “classroom teachers are under pressure to teach ‘exam
English.’ Unless the university examination system is changed, many feel that the
new curriculum will be virtually ignored, particularly at the senior high school level”
(p. 47). Be (2003) makes a similar point in relation to textbook innovation in Vietnam.

Learner Differences
Treating every student in the same way benefits some and handicaps others. Treating
Korean students like Spanish students, for example, would certainly penalize the
Korean students. But treating all Korean students in the same culturally appropriate
way would penalize those Korean students whose personalities and learning style
preferences do not conform to stereotypical Korean norms.

Expectations. Learners have expectations about how they will be taught EFL that
are shaped by cultural norms and by previous experience. For example, Dat (2002)
reports problems in Vietnam when the teacher breaks all expectations by acting as a co-
communicator. And Karavas-Doukas (1998) reports how a number of EFL innovation
projects failed because they attempted to “introduce practices within school cultures
that promote a different type of social order in the classroom” (p. 49). Often though,
if a teacher persists with an innovation, such phenomena of “temporary culture”
(Holliday, 1994, p. 23) as classroom patterns and expectations are changeable. Having
expectations broken does not necessarily inhibit language learning, and I have found
that learners can quickly adjust their expectations if the novel activities are introduced
on trial and if they find the activities to be enjoyable and useful. We have to be careful
though that we do not assume that learners will share teacher perceptions of what
facilitates the learning of a foreign language. McDonough (2002) claims that learners
and teachers inhabit different worlds. She reports administering a questionnaire on
the value of learning activities to teachers and to learners of Greek and French and
finding big discrepancies in their responses (e.g., only 20% of the teachers considered
grammar practice to be useful compared to 81% of the learners). Likewise, Spratt
(1999) reports only a 50% correlation in an experiment in Hong Kong between learner
preferred activities and teacher perceptions of their preferences; Nunan (1988) reports
a mismatch between learner and teacher perceptions of the usefulness of different
activities in Australia; and Barkhuizen (1998) reports a similar situation in South
Africa. McDonough (2002) finds that her own views as a learner and as a teacher of
differ considerably and she points out that, “Every class is unique and dynamic. It
develops and changes over time as all participants adapt, usually cooperatively to
build an individual classroom culture” (p. 410).

Needs and Wants. The value of relating actual classroom procedures to the learn-
ers’ reasons for learning English has long been recognized (Carter & Nunan, 2001).
For example, learners whose major need for English is to enable them to read articles
and books are unlikely to respond to a methodology that focuses on oral interaction in
groups (e.g., students in universities in Indonesia in which the medium of instruction
is Bahasa Indonesia but much of the literature they are referred to is in English). Often,
though, what learners “need” to do in the classroom conflicts with what they want
to do. For example, Canagarajah (1999) stresses that in Sri Lanka “not all students
 8. ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE 141

want to follow the curriculum offered by local universities, which tend to be heavily
oriented to English for academic purposes” (p. 94). If learner wants are not satisfied,
learning will be inhibited. For example, I well remember a group of Saudi Arabian pi-
lots who tired of focusing on English for aviation and wanted to develop their ability
to participate in social interaction. Learner wants are very rarely researched or taken
into consideration, but on a textbook project in Namibia the learners were asked what
they wanted English for and then such wants as writing love letters were catered to
in the resulting coursebook (Tomlinson, 1995)

Attitudes. The attitudes of learners toward pedagogic procedures undoubtedly

affects their effectiveness. For example, many studies suggest that group interaction
“has a role in engaging learners in the process of negotiating meaning, or construct-
ing knowledge jointly” (Tin, 2000, p. 186). However, these studies are mainly of “stu-
dents from Western cultural and educational backgrounds” and “we need to consider
whether the way group work works in these settings is the same as in other settings”
(p. 186). Tin found that in group work British students behaved reactively, whereas
Malaysian students behaved in an additive way.
In an ongoing multicountry research project investigating learner and teacher atti-
tudes, Tomlinson and Masuhara (2004) have found both differences and similarities
between high school learners of English in different cultures. For example, Spanish
students (n = 189) liked and valued both pair and group work, whereas Chinese stu-
dents (n = 236) did not. However, both the Spanish and the Chinese students liked
affective, experiential, and interactive activities best but valued individual, analytic
activities the most. Both the Spanish and the Chinese students valued activities that
are often discredited by methodologists (e.g., translation, dictation, and grammatical
explanation). Both the Spanish and the Chinese students rated reading stories as use-
ful, and they both quite liked doing it. One possibility Tomlinson and Masuhara are
considering is that there is a universal predisposition to learn a foreign language in
enjoyable and experiential ways but also a universal belief that you need to learn a
foreign language in primarily analytical ways. If this is true, which of these tendencies
should materials and methodology attempt to match?

Learning Styles. It is generally accepted that determinations of methodology

should take into consideration the learning style profile of the learners (Oxford, 1990,
1995, 1996; Wenden, 1991). There is evidence of cultural differences in preferred learn-
ing styles and Oxford (1996) is convinced that, “Cultural background affects strategy
choice” (p. xi). She claims that “many Hispanic ESL/EFL students choose particu-
lar learning strategies, such as predicting, inferring . . . avoiding details, working with
others rather than alone,” whereas “many Japanese English as a Second Language
(ESL)/EFL students reflectively use analytic strategies aimed at precision and accu-
racy, search for small details, work alone, and base judgments more on logic than on
personal interactions” (p. xi). An important point though is made by Bedell and Ox-
ford (1996) when they say that “culture should not be seen as a strait jacket, binding
students to a particular set of learning strategies all their lives. Strategy instruction
can help students see the value in ‘new’ language learning strategies that are not
necessarily within the limits of their cultural norms” (p. 60).
It is self-evident to anyone who has taught English in different countries that within
any classroom in any country there will be individual variations of preferred learning
styles (Lewis, 1996). Some learners will be predominantly analytical and will prefer to
learn the language by studying it, whereas most will be predominantly experiential
and will prefer to learn a language through exposure and use. Some learners will
prefer to process the new language visually, some aurally and many kinaesthetically.
But there is general agreement that current curricula, methodologies, coursebooks,
142 TOMLINSON

and examinations favor analytically inclined learners (Tomlinson, Dat, Masuhara,

& Rubdy, 2001), and it is possible that they influence the prevailing methodologies
throughout the world more than local cultures do.

Teacher Differences
Attitudes. Many researchers have concluded that the main variable in determin-
ing the success of methodological innovation is teacher attitude. If teachers view a
change as threatening, they will resist it; if they see it as enhancing their role or facil-
itating their performance, they will support it.
The most significant attitude of teachers seems to be one that asserts the need for
continuity. As Louden (1991) says, “Until those of us who look for improvement and
change in education learn to approach teachers with more respect for the power of
continuity in their work, we are likely to continue to be disappointed with the progress
of educational reform” (p. xiv). Other researchers have focussed on this problem of
encouraging teachers to do what they are not used to and not comfortable doing.
For example, Sercu (1998) says, “Belgian teaching is largely dominated by the knowl-
edge dimension of learning, and teachers feel uneasy having to deal with affective
or behavioural aspects of the learning process” (p. 200) Urmston (2001) concludes
that, “Preliminary findings suggest that English teachers in Hong Kong as a group
are quite cohesive and not open to change, as evidenced by the widespread resistance
to government initiated innovations such as a task-based curriculum” (p. 179).
Liu (1998) complains that the conditions that face EFL teachers in China (e.g., large
class sizes, poor resources, a didactic tradition) mean that they cannot teach in the
same “process or discovery-oriented” ways as their counterparts who teach small,
well-resourced classes where “interaction, group work and student-centeredness are
the order of the day” (p. 5). But I did manage to achieve interaction, group work
and student centeredness in classes of 90 without any audio-visual aids and with
an expectation of a didactic, product-oriented and teacher-centered approach in a
traditional university in Japan. Such an approach suited my teaching style preferences
and maintained my continuity of approach, and I was asked to demonstrate it in a
workshop and in an article (Tomlinson, 1991) to the other members of the department.
A few younger members found my approach suited to their preferred teaching styles
and modified their classroom pedagogy, but most of the staff, while appreciating my
approach theoretically, continued to teach English in the more didactic ways with
which they felt comfortable.
Although respecting the need for teacher continuity, we need to consider whether it
might be unfairly conflicting with learner needs and wants and act ultimately against
the interests of the learners. This might be especially so when teachers justify resist-
ing change by stating that it is not compatible with what learners need, want, and
expect. Dat (2002) describes experiments in Vietnam in which normally reticent stu-
dents proved the prophecies of their teachers wrong (e.g., “You don’t know them,
they just won’t speak”) by expressing themselves in English during cooperative ac-
tivities (p. 256). He also reports how some teachers when experimenting with new
methodologies still teach according to their own set of standards and beliefs. Other re-
searchers have warned against the danger of accepting teachers’ views about learners’
inclinations and capabilities. For example, Kubanyiova (2002), reports on enthusiastic
student participation in drama activities at Assumption University, Bangkok, despite
warnings by teachers (“who have inhibitions about acting”) that Thai students are
“too shy” to participate in drama activities (p. 179).
Teacher attitudes are usually amenable to change, providing the teachers are given
incentives to change them, as on the PKG English Programme in Indonesia (Tomlinson,
1990) when teachers were encouraged to change their attitudes by being given more
 8. ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE 143

responsibility and scope for initiative. As Karavas-Doukas (1998) says, “Teacher at-
titude change is a key aspect of the teacher training process . . . Developing changed
perspectives is a long and arduous process yet it is the first and necessary step toward
real change” (p. 37). On the PKG Programme many teachers did gradually change
their attitudes as a result of reflection on their current practice and of sanctioned
opportunities to experiment and to take initiative in deciding for themselves what
approaches and materials to use.
There is some evidence that what many teachers want is not radically different
from what SLA researchers and methodologists would recommend (Masuhara, 1998;
Tomlinson, 1990). For example, a 10-country research project I conducted for a British
publisher revealed that what teachers (and learners) want most from coursebooks is
interesting texts.

Teaching Styles. It is possible to characterize culturally typical teaching styles (for

example, overt transmission of knowledge in Korea), but I have found that within any
one culture there is a great variety of teaching styles. Some teachers are very serious,
whereas others make use of humor; some are quietly low key, whereas others prefer to
perform. Obviously teaching styles are influenced by culture, training, and experience,
but ultimately they are determined by personality. And, if teaching methodologies
do not cater to teaching style differences, they will not help learners to learn. Strong
versions of methods have little chance of engaging the full support of all the teach-
ers being told to use them. Flexible weak versions of pedagogic approaches, which
encourage teacher variation within a recommended framework, have a much better
chance of helping teachers to help their learners to learn.

Course Materials
There is evidence that what teachers and learners actually do in the classroom is de-
termined principally by what the coursebook tells them to do. Be (2003), for example,
reports a project in which 478 students and their 28 teachers in two schools in Vietnam
revealed they were using the textbook as a script rather than as a resource. Current
thinking is that textbooks should be written and evaluated with reference to their
context of use and that such variables as sociocultural background, attitudes to learn-
ing, previous language-learning experience, and expectations of the learning process
should be considered when making decisions about materials that will determine
what goes on in the classroom. McGrath (2002, pp. 17–22) provides an overview of
the literature relating to such factors and refers to Skierso (1991), Matthews (1991), Mc-
Donough and Shaw (1993), Cunningsworth (1995), and Masuhara (1998). Tomlinson
(2003b) also deals with these factors.

INEVITABLE ADAPTATION

Ellis (2002) claims that methodological variation is inevitable because “the way En-
glish is taught implicitly disseminates the cultural values of the person doing the
teaching” (p. 1), and Block (2002) says the impact of a guest teaching culture is in-
evitable. An example of this is the influence of the large number of American and
British teachers of English in Japanese private institutions; although McKay (1992)
points out that “although private institutions can often encourage a wider range of
methods, students may be hesitant to use them because of their prior experience in
public institutions” (p. 121). That foreign teachers necessarily import foreign teaching
approaches is true, but we must beware of assuming that all teachers from a culture
will teach in the same way as its stereotypical teacher.
144 TOMLINSON

Many researchers argue that cultural accommodation should be deliberately and

sensitively undertaken rather than left to chance. Harvey (1985), for example, stresses
the importance of considering the prevailing culture when deciding what and how
to teach. He argues for “a balanced approach and the use of existing potential” and
says that “the needs and skills of the learner cannot be ignored” (p. 186). He de-
scribes a course to upgrade the skills of science lecturers at Tianjin University and
concludes that “Chinese learning methods cannot simply be dismissed as ‘primitive,’
‘old-fashioned,’ or ‘misguided.’ There are a number of obvious historical, pedagogical
and psychological reasons for them” (p. 186).
Many researchers advocate focusing on features of methodologies that coincide
with local cultural values. For example, Shamin (1996) says, “An innovation, if it
clashes radically with the culture of the community, should be adapted to the local
culture before being introduced” (p. 119) and Flowerdew (1998) “advocates the use
of group work for a group of learners from a Chinese cultural background, where,
to some extent, Confusian values still prevail” (p. 323). Flowerdew refers to her own
experience teaching tertiary students in Hong Kong, and to the research of Cortazzi
and Jin (1996), Lam (1997), Nelson (1995), and Wong (1996), to support her claims that
students should be helped to learn in ways that match their cultural values and that
group work matches the values of Chinese learners of English. Flowerdew (p. 327)
supports Cortazzi’s (1990) stressing of the need for teachers “to acquire knowledge of,
and sensitivity towards, learners’ cultural and educational backgrounds, and perhaps
consider adjusting their own expectations accordingly” (p. 63), and she concludes that
teachers should “consider adjusting their teaching style so that it is congruent with
the students’ cultural background” (p. 63).
There is also evidence that attempts to innovate from within a culture often involve
compromise between the innovative procedures being advocated and the procedures
typically followed in that culture. Shamin (1996), for example, reports how she had
to modify her innovative methodology by reverting to a more authoritarian role to
overcome student resistance to her “communicative” approach in her classroom in
Pakistan. And LoCastro (1996) points out that the new high school courses in Japan,
whilst aiming to be “communicative,” actually reflect “the underlying attitudes held
by the Japanese educational system about language and language learning” by re-
taining a “content-oriented—specifically grammar-oriented—” curriculum (p. 44).
I have encountered this phenomenon myself while writing coursebooks for Singapore
secondary schools (Tomlinson, Hill, & Masuhara, 2000; Tomlinson, Hill, Masuhara,
& Ying, 2002; Tomlinson et al., 2003). Our brief was to write for the new English
Language Syllabus 2001 (which aims at the development of independent and critical
thinking skills), but we were constrained by the need for our books to be approved
by Ministry officials still driven by the content and modelling norms of the prevailing
educational culture (Singapore Wala, 2003).

THE CASE FOR THE UNIVERSAL APPLICATION

OF PRINCIPLED PROCEDURES

Beginning to Learn a Foreign Language

Both the European Science Foundation (ESF) Project (Myles, 2000; Perdue, 1984, 1993a,
1993b) and the theoretically opposed Universal Grammar (UG) research have pro-
vided evidence of learner similarity regardless of cultural background. For example,
the ESF Project has concluded that there are three initial stages shared by all learners,
that “pragmatic and semantic universals play an important part in the shaping of early
interlanguages” (Myles, 2000, p. 80) and that, “in spite of the fact that the ESF research
 8. ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE 145

design was conceived in order to highlight differences . . . it ended up showing very

convincingly how similar the early language systems are in all learners, whatever their
background” (p. 80). UG also claims that all learners, regardless of first language or
culture, exhibit very similar characteristics (especially at the beginning stages). There
are a number of differing UG hypotheses (see Myles, 2000, p. 76), but it seems that
all of them are supported by research evidence that demonstrates universality in the
beginning stages of learning a foreign language. If this is true, procedures for helping
learners in one culture would seem to be useful for helping learners in another.

SLA Research
Most reports of second language acquisition (SLA) research seem to share an assump-
tion that the principles (if not the procedures) of successful language acquisition are
universal (see Ellis, 1994, and Scovell, 1998, for overviews). However, a number of
applied linguists have questioned the universal validity of research that has been
conducted mainly by Western researchers in Western cultures. For example, Kachru
(1994, p. 796) complains that most of the data has been taken from immigrants and
international students studying in North America, Britain, or Australia and that little
effort has made to collect information from other contexts in the rest of the world.
And Sridar (1994) points out that the dominant L2 acquisition paradigm “leaves out
vast millions of L2 users who learn and use second languages in their own countries”
(p. 801). These complaints are undoubtedly valid and more research is needed compar-
ing SLA acquisition between equivalent populations in different cultures. However,
nobody seems to have come up with any evidence suggesting that the basic principles
of successful language acquisition vary from culture to culture.

Evidence of Successful Changes of Approach

Dat (2002) describes how in Vietnam a conservative, traditional practitioner teaching
a deeply reticent class managed to encourage his very quiet class to speak in English
by moving from a habitually authoritative role toward a more flexible innovative
approach. This example is typical of the experience I have had as a teacher trainer
in many different cultures where I have found that students and teachers are willing
to experiment with methodological change if the changes are justified to them and
if the changes are perceived as potentially valuable. There are also many examples
in the literature of such willingness to change and of pedagogic procedures being
valuable irrespective of the culture they are used in. For example, Fu (1995) says
that “What and how teachers do and say things greatly affects the atmosphere of the
class community. Teachers’ sharing of their own stories is an important way to set an
intimate tone for their classes and is a good model for a learning community of equal
partners” (p. 199). Davies (2002) also recommends teachers using their own lives and
views as material to, “focus upon the personal experiences of the teacher in relation
to particular sociocultural themes” (p. 369), and McDonough (2002) reports that 100%
of the learner respondents in her survey rated the teacher talking about herself as
useful. Fu argues that teachers should not be “afraid of doing something incongruent
with the ways students were raised, as every culture has room for improvement and
every nation progresses by adopting other strengths for its own benefit” (p. 199) This
position is endorsed by Lewis and McCook (2002), whose study of 14 high school
teachers’ journals on an in-service training course in Vietnam revealed that, “the
teachers stated their roles in terms of both communicative and traditional language
learning principles” (p. 151). In other words, they did what many teachers have done
in my experience. Instead of rejecting culturally unusual approaches outright, they
tried them, evaluated them, and eventually adapted them in ways that suited their
146 TOMLINSON

culture and their personality. Of course, they only did this if the new ways were
introduced as potentially valuable additions to their repertoires, and they justifiably
resisted methodologies that were imposed on them as compulsory replacements for
their normal practice.
Many researchers have found that students and teachers are especially willing to
accommodate change if the new approaches mirror features in their social culture that
have not previously been exploited in their educational culture. For example, Cheung
(2001) suggests that the teacher-centered, accuracy-focused approaches typical of the
Hong Kong classroom do not help students to apply what they have learned to real
life situations and advocates an innovative learner-centered approach that uses Hong
Kong popular culture to help students to learn English. Also group activities have
been found to be particularly suitable for EFL learners in many collectivist cultures
where a sense of belonging to the group is important (Rodgers, 1988, p. 7; Fu, 1995,
p. 199; Williams & Burden, 1997, p. 79).
It has also been found that many learners do not expect or even want foreign
teachers to imitate local cultural norms when teaching a foreign language. Guest
(2002), for example, concludes that, “While students may hold preconceptions as
to how a ‘normal’ class operates within their own culture, isn’t it likely that they
will automatically readjust their expectations when a foreign teacher appears on the
scene?” (p. 159).
Many researchers have stressed the importance of the teacher in determining what
actually happens in the classroom (Masuhara, 1998). If the teacher values a method-
ological change, it will be reflected in a significant change in classroom activity. If
the teacher is resistant, the changes will be at the best cosmetic. The teachers’ own
beliefs can affect classroom action more than a particular methodology or coursebook
(Williams & Burden, 1997). For example, as Piper (1998) observes, the reason why
conversational skills fail to develop in the classroom is because many teachers tend
to control learner talk not by helping it to meet the learners’ purpose but by directing
it to the teacher’s purpose (p. 245). And, as Howe (1993) says, whether students are
“passive” or “active” in class depends more on their teachers’ expectations than on
culturally based learning styles. Many researchers have reported on the positive ef-
fects of teachers changing their beliefs and expectations, but there are also reports in
the literature of teachers endorsing Kenny and Savage’s view (1997) that:

All human systems tend to seek stability and hence preserve themselves from undesirable
or unnecessary change. Except in dire situations where it is a choice between changing
and perishing, it is much easier to stay the same. (pp. 291–292)

For example, Lamb (1995) compared in-service content on a project in Indonesia

with classroom practice 1 year later. He found that only a few teachers reported
fundamental change in their classroom practice, whereas most reported “no uptake,”
“confusion,” and “adaptability and rejection.” Hird (1995), likewise, reports on the
results of an in-service course in Huangzhou after which teachers “saw only limited
possibilities for the use of Western methodology in their teaching” (p. 22).

Breaking the Norm

Tennant (2001) outlines a course on Japanese art that was taught to a group of second-
year students at a Japanese university using English as the medium of instruction.
The project approach used by Tennant combined an universal approach with local
content. It was unusual in Japanese cultural terms in that it set challenging tasks
and required initiative and independent research, but it seemed to have been very
successful. Such an approach constitutes an increasingly common way of breaking
 8. ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE 147

the norm by combining culturally familiar features with features that are so culturally
divergent that they might otherwise be resisted.
Holliday (2001) demonstrates “the standard appropriate methodology combina-
tion of capitalizing on existing cultural resources to motivate people in innovatory ed-
ucational settings—or using cultural information to engineer effective change” (p. 4).
He gives the example of a group of professors in the University of Damascus whose
“desire for L1 medium lectures in formal grammar was seen not as a constraint but
as a cultural resource” (p. 4), and who were therefore given texts on grammar with
Arabic translations as their texts on their reading course. Another example of a covert
approach is given by Coleman and Ainscough (2001) who describe how groups of
Japanese students on the Foundation Course at the University of Kent are taught “a
course that has, for the students, the face validity of a content-based course, but which
is delivered using methodologies and materials which teach, in a covert fashion, the
EAP skills they need” (p. 9).

Culture Stretching
Reid (1987) claimsthatlearners benefitfrom “style-stretching,” thatis,learningthrough
styles that are not necessarily their own preferred dominant styles. It is likely that
learners gain in similar ways from culture stretching.
Dat (2002) describes experiments in Vietnam in which normally reticent students
proved the prophecies of their teachers wrong by expressing themselves in English
during cooperative activities. The experiments stretched their culture, and they bene-
fited from it. But Dat says many learners are denied this chance because “By refusing
to believe in learners’ potential to express themselves in English and their willingness
to participate in English, many practitioners form self-fulfilling beliefs about their stu-
dents’ incompetence that leads to habits of accepting the status quo and preventing
change from happening” (p. 256).
A number of projects have stretched the participants’ culture without any appar-
ent problem. For example, Beretta and Davis (1985) evaluated the Bangalore/Madras
Communicational Teaching Project positively without any reference to problems en-
countered because of the cultural unfamiliarity of the approach. And Parish and
Brown (1988) describe a teacher training program for teachers of English in Sri Lanka
(PRINSETT) without once mentioning cultural unfamiliarity as a problem. Instead
they assert that:
Participants are engaged in language tasks and methodological analysis that they have
never been exposed to. The active-participatory approach is non-traditional and com-
pletely novel in their experience. The work is demanding but the response is extremely
positive. (p. 27)

Tomlinson (1990) reports that:

The PKG English Programme (in Indonesia) has been successful in getting the teachers on
its courses to question their standard practice and to develop new approaches to teaching
English. This has been achieved by first of all helping them to develop their own confi-
dence and skills as users of English, and by inviting them to compare the methodology
which helped them with the methodology which they use with their students. (p. 32)

The School Culture

There seems to be a universal school culture of conservatism and control that en-
courages convergence and conformity and that rewards hard work and analytic skill
(Tomlinson, 1988). This culture is reflected in global EFL coursebooks (Tomlinson,
148 TOMLINSON

1996; Tomlinson et al., 2001) and in particular in beginners’ EFL coursebooks (Islam,
2001; Tomlinson, 1999). Islam demonstrates how beginners’ coursebooks in Japan and
in Spain are very similar in their bias “towards the learning preferences of analytic,
studial, left brain learners at the expense of global, experiential, right-brain learners”
(p. 16). He then demonstrates how using a Total Physical Response (TPR) Plus Ap-
proach (Tomlinson, 1994) was successful in motivating Japanese beginner learners of
English despite (or maybe because of) it being very different from what they were
used to. Tomlinson (2002) also reports how students in a secondary school in Spain
said they wanted to do different things in English lessons from what they were used to
doing in other lessons, and Coleman and Ainscough (2001) say, “Most of our students,
having been exposed to many hours of grammar-focused lessons in Japan, resist such
lessons at Chaucer College” (p. 9).
Breen and Littlejohn (2000a) include reports on projects that have involved success-
ful negotiation between learners and teachers and between learners and the syllabus
in school cultures in which such negotiation is far from the norm. For example, Slem-
brouck (2000) reports how he overcame objections from a “sceptical department head”
at Ghent University in Belgium and was eventually given “carte blanche to try out a
negotiated syllabus” (pp. 139–140).

The “Good” Language Learner

Most descriptions of what a “good” language learner does are culture free and assume
the procedures are universal. For example, Rubin and Thompson (1983) list 13 things
that a “good” language learner does, including:
r Good learners find their own way.
r Good learners are creative and experiment with language.
r Good learners learn to live with uncertainty and develop strategies for making
sense of the target language without wanting to understand every word.

If such tendencies do facilitate language acquisition, then learners in school cultures

that inhibit individuality, initiative, creativity, and experimentation are at a consider-
able disadvantage. As Breen and Littlejohn (2000b) say: “In classrooms that require
conformity to externally determined decisions . . . students have to try to make sense of
the curriculum covertly as best they can or withdraw into surviving as an individual
not wishing to appear out of place” (p. 21).

The “Good” Teacher

Dat (2002) says:

It is uncommon to see a class getting bored and uncooperative when working with a
cheerful, approachable and dedicated teacher. . . . Conversely, a teacher who cares about
maintaining hierarchy tends to prevent language tasks from developing into dynamic
interaction. (p. 269)

Dat was talking about teachers in Vietnam. Is what he says universally true? Is there
such a thing as a good teacher who, regardless of the cultural norms of the society
and the school, manages to facilitate language acquisition through being “cheerful,
approachable, and dedicated?” My experience of teaching or observing in classrooms
in more than 40 countries supports Dat’s hypothesis and suggests that the “good”
language teacher is also positive, supportive, and sympathetic and, above all, has a
good sense of humor. It would be very interesting to see the results of research that
sets out to investigate the phenomenon of the universally “good” teacher.
 8. ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE 149

Universal Likings
Some approaches to teaching EFL mirror universal tendencies and preferences and
are suitable for use in any classroom regardless of its culture. For example, I have
used humor, achievable challenge, fiction, and incongruity in classrooms in cultures
as supposedly different as the British, the Japanese, and the Ni-Vanuatu. What was
perceived as funny or incongruent or as a narrative norm varied from culture to
culture. However, very few students were resistant to activities that were based on
narrative and that involved the learners in doing something unusual, challenging, and
funny. On the Indonesian PKG project we developed an approach called TPR Plus
(Tomlinson, 1990, 1994), which incorporated these features, and I have developed
this approach and used it without resistance in cultures as different as those to be
found in Brazil, Botswana, Namibia, Turkey, Singapore, Spain, and Vietnam. I have
also found that listening to and reading stories is a universally popular and useful
way of learning a foreign language. “Narrative is the universally preferred means of
learning about life and throughout the world both children and adults have always
learned more effectively from narrative than from any other way.” (Tomlinson, 2003a,
p. 14). It is very interesting that just about all the literature on research into the effects
of extensive reading projects reports positive effects on language acquisition in many
different countries regardless of local cultural norms (Day & Bamford, 1998; Davis,
1995; Elley, 1991).
Cook (2000) points out the importance in language learning of universal likings and
says, for example, that, “It may be that the adult liking for fiction is in part due to the
freedom of interpretation which it allows, and the absence of negative consequences
when one individual’s interpretation diverges from those of other’s” (p. 54). He also
says that, “The human response to incongruity in verbal humour . . . seems to be built
upon some general innate liking for incongruity in general” (p. 74).

Cultural Variability
It is obviously reductionist to talk about Western culture and oriental culture or Ameri-
can culture and Chinese culture. Each human being belongs to many different cultures
and is conditioned by membership in them. But “we are also distinct from each other
because we each diverge in what we typically think, feel, believe and do” (Tomlinson,
2000, p. 5). To assume that a learner of a foreign language will automatically conform
to the generalized norms of their national, racial, religious, or peer group cultures is
misleadingly simplistic. In my experience, most learners are quite willing to add their
own version of the foreign language culture (and of a novel way of learning it) to their
cultural portfolio and in doing so they perceive little threat to their cultural identity.
Kramsch (2001) supports this view of cultural variability and pluralism when she
says, “Today, many studies in cross-cultural psychology seem simplistic because they
ignore the cultural diversity within a given nation-state and the increasing potential
for change within a global economy” (p. 203).
Who are the native speakers of a language and what are the cultural norms they
represent? According to Kramsch (1998) the native speaker is a stereotype who is
“a mono-lingual, mono-cultural abstraction; he/she is one who only speaks his/her
(standardized) native tongue and lives by one (standardized) national culture. In
reality, most people partake of various languages or language varieties and live by
various cultures and sub-cultures” (p. 80).
The main point is that we should be aware of the dangers of cultural over-
generalizations and should remember that in the classroom we are teaching EFL to
a class of diverging individuals rather than to a convergent group of cultural stereo-
types.
150 TOMLINSON

Research Procedures
The research projects reported in this chapter were almost all action research projects
that set out to investigate the effects of pedagogic interventions in real classrooms in
actual social settings by using such procedures as case studies, interviews, question-
naires and observations (Burns, 1999; Kemmis & McTaggart, 1988; Mingucci, 1999).
Consequently, most of the research has been qualitative, rather than quantitative, and
it has been indicative rather than conclusive. However, many of the projects have
included an element of deliberate experimentation and have focused their inquiry on
specific variables while acknowledging the impossibility of controlling all the vari-
ables in a real environment. For example, on the PKG Project in Indonesia (Tomlinson,
1990) the classes of the participating teachers on the In-On Service Programme became
experimental classes that followed a locally determined version of the communica-
tive approach. On the Bangalore Project (Beretta & Davies, 1985) a number of classes
followed a task-based approach rather than the locally normal approach, and on the
Book Flood Project in Fiji (Elley, 1991) experimental classes were chosen to follow an
extensive reading approach once a week.

CONCLUSION

It seems that no particular pedagogical procedure can be used effectively without some
modification from context to context but also that a procedure that proves effective in
one context of learning has the potential to be effective in other contexts of learning
too.
The basic principles of SLA appear to be universal, as do the principles of inter-
language use. What seem to differ from culture to culture are the typical procedures
through which these principles are most effectively applied. However, these proce-
dures are more flexible and amenable to modification than is generally acknowledged;
and ultimately most teachers and learners are willing to experiment with change pro-
viding that the change is nonthreatening and potentially beneficial. What seems to
really matter is that there is an initial negotiation between teachers and students to find
“ways to accommodate the cultural differences that exist” (McKay, 1992, p. 51). That
way modified versions of most approaches can become acceptable to most students.
In my view, EFL teachers, wherever they are, should teach in ways that suit their
beliefs and personality while being sensitive to the needs and wants of their learners
and to the prevailing norms of the cultures in which they are teaching.

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Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Wong, W. (1996). How do Hong Kong students learn? Implications for Teaching 13. Hong Kong: Educational
Technology Centre, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
154
9

Teaching and Learning

of World Englishes∗
Yamuna Kachru
University of Illinois

INTRODUCTION

The unprecedented spread of one language, English, all across the globe has raised
issues that need urgent study and action, as they affect all domains of human activity
from language in education to international relations. The first such issue is to un-
derstand the role that English plays, the status that it has, and the purposes it serves
in different contexts—contexts that are different from where the language originated
and assumed its present form.
In order to study what English means and does, it may be useful to look at a particu-
lar construct suggested in B. Kachru (1985) according to which the English-using world
can be divided into three concentric circles. This conceptualization is based not only
on the historical context of English but also on the status of the language and its func-
tions in various sociocultural domains in different regions. The Inner Circle consists of
the native English-speaking countries, e.g., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K.
and the U.S.A. The language originated in the UK and was taken to the other countries
of the Inner Circle by population migration, i.e., English-speaking people moving to
these regions. The Outer Circle comprises the former colonies or spheres of influence
of the U.K. and the U.S.A., e.g., India, Kenya, Nigeria, the Philippines, Singapore,
among others. There was no large-scale movement of English-speaking populations
to these countries, instead, a small number of administrators, educators and mission-
aries were responsible for language spread among the indigenous population in these
countries. Now, the nativized varieties of English in these countries have achieved the
status of either an official language, or of an additional language widely used in edu-
cation, administration, legal system, etc, although the indigenous languages continue
to be used in many domains of activity. The Expanding Circle consists of cuntries
which, though not directly colonized, gradually came under Western influence and
where English is fast becoming a dominant second language in academia, business
and commerce, higher education, media, and science and technology, e.g., in the Arab
world, China, European countries, Japan, Korea, and many countries in South and
Central America. In these areas of the world, English does not have an official status.
155
156 KACHRU

The varieties of English used in all these Circles are referred to as world Englishes,
the justification being that Englishes in the three Circles display variation in form, func-
tion, literary creativity, and acculturation in the new contexts. The acculturation of the
language is at all levels—phonology, lexicon, syntax, discourse and literary creativity.1
The aim of this paper is to present a brief survey of the state of research on World
Englishes (WEs) from the point of view of teaching and learning of English around
the world. Because the area of study known as second language acquisition (SLA) is
intimately related to the teaching and learning of English globally, I will also look at
how research on WEs connects with research in SLA. Finally, I will discuss the motiva-
tions for and advantages of teaching and learning world Englishes in all the Circles of
English.1 This obviously has serious implications for institutions involved in four do-
mains of activity: teacher training programs such as the Masters in Teaching English
to Speakers of Other Languages (MATESOL) and teacher certification in Teaching
English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL); professional organizations dedi-
cated to the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical concerns of English
Language Teaching (ELT) professionals; journals dedicated to the same concerns; and
the vast English language textbook, reference book, and language testing industry. I
mention these in particular as they have the most significant impact on ELT practices
across all the Circles.
I will begin with some background observations. It is essential to outline explicitly
the perspective of researchers studying varieties of English around the world before
considering in what domains of research the study of WEs either does or does not
intersect with research in SLA. That English has acquired both a range and a depth
unparalleled in human history is uncontroversial. By range is meant the functional
allocation of the language in intimate, social, and professional domains by its users,
and by depth is meant the penetration of the language in various strata of society across
cultures and languages (B. Kachru, 1986a; B. Kachru & Nelson, 1996). That English
has developed a number of varieties in its diaspora is also beyond debate. However,
there is vigorous debate on the status of Outer and Extended Circle varieties and
how to characterize what is meant by “standard” in relation to varieties used in all
the Circles. The debate on standards and varieties, as researchers in WEs believe, has
just as much to do with attitudinal and ideological positions with regard to status of
the varieties as to an unwillingness to face the linguistic and acquisitional realities
(Sridhar, 1994). One clear evidence of attitudinal bias is provided by the instruments
of testing proficiency in English developed in the United Kingdom and the United
States and used around the world (see Davidson, 1994; Lowenberg, 1992, 1993, 2001).
The concept of Standard English and its relevance for WEs is addressed in more detail
a little later in this chapter.

EMERGENCE OF VARIETIES IN DIASPORA

The diaspora of English, as B. Kachru (1992c), suggests is of two types. The first arose
as a consequence of the migration of the English-speaking people and comprises
Australia, North America, and New Zealand. The second resulted from the diffusion of
English among speakers of diverse groups of languages in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean,
and other parts of the world. These two diasporas have distinct historical, linguistic,
sociological, pedagogical, and ideological contexts.
The English language has undergone a number of linguistic processes—some sim-
ilar, some quite different—in both types of diaspora. These processes were set in
motion as a result of the physical context and patterns of settlement, for example, in
the Inner Circle in North America and Australia. Populations from various parts of
Europe and later from other regions of the world arrived and settled down next to
 9. WORLD ENGLISHES 157

each other in these countries of the Inner Circle. A composite language and culture
grew out of this various population that gave the varieties of the first Diaspora their
characteristic structure. The evidence for this can be found, for instance, in the many
features of African, Native American, and Hispanic idioms, metaphors, and discourse
strategies that have become a part of American English. It is clear that varieties of Inner
Circle English, such as American, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand emerged
because of the processes set in motion by language contact. The same factors are res-
ponsible for what occurred in the Outer Circle varieties such as Indian, Nigerian, and
Singaporean.
In the early 20th century, American English gave rise to the same attitudinal pre-
judices that are now directed against the Outer Circle varieties, as is clear from the
following quote from New Statesman (June 25, 1927) in Mencken (1936, p. 33)2 :

[T]hat their [America’s] huge hybrid population of which only a small minority are even
racially Anglo-Saxons should use English as their chief medium of intercommunication
is our misfortune, not our fault. They certainly threaten our language, but the only way
in which we can effectively meet that threat is by assuming—in the words of the authors
of “The King’s English” [by H. W. and F. G. Fowler, Oxford, 1908] that “Americanisms
are foreign words and should be so treated.”

The only difference in the emergence of the two types of Diaspora varieties is that in
the case of the first, the language was brought in by a significant number of immigrants
from the Mother country and adopted by other immigrants, initially mainly from
Europe. In case of the second Diaspora, the language was brought in, one might say,
by a handful of users of English, not all of them English-speakers,3 and transplanted in
Africa, East, South, and Southeast Asia and other so-called Anglophone regions of the
world. This one difference, however, leads to very different historical, sociocultural,
and canonical contexts of development of varieties and their literatures in the second
Diaspora.

AIMS AND FOCUS OF RESEARCH

Researchers in WEs are interested in all aspects of the emergence, grammars, sociolin-
guistics, ideological issues, creative literatures, and teaching and learning of WEs (see
the collected papers in B. Kachru, 1986a, 1992a; Smith, 1987; Thumboo, 2001). They
have worked on the historical background of the dissemination of English in the
world (e.g., Bamgbos. e et al., 1995; Bautista, 1997; B. Kachru, 1983; Pakir, 1991a, 1991b,
2001; K. Sridhar, 1989; among others). They are involved in studying the linguistic
processes that are responsible for variety-specific characteristics as well as common
features among varieties of the language in different regions of the world. These in-
clude phonological, lexical, and grammatical processes, discourse strategies, and tex-
tual properties (see, Bokamba, 1992; B. Kachru, 1983, 1986a; Lowenberg, 1986, 1991;
Smith, 1987; Smith & Forman, 1997; Thumboo, 2001). In addition, they are interested in
investigating the sociocultural contexts of use of English, particularly in the second Di-
aspora (see, B. Kachru, 1986a, 1992a; Y. Kachru, 1993, 1995a, 1995b, 1997a; Nelson, 1992;
K. Sridhar, 1991; Tawake, 1993, 1994; Valentine, 1988, 1991, 1995, 2001; among others).
It has been demonstrated beyond controversy that all Outer Circle varieties have a
standard, or “acrolectal,” form, which is mutually intelligible among all English-using
populations. The characteristic features of the acrolectal forms within regions/national
boundaries—whether they have been codified or not—are widely attested in highly
literate domains of use, for example, the domains of academia, creative literature,
diplomacy, higher administration, media, etc. (Bautista, 1997; B. Kachru, 1983; Pakir,
1991a, 2001).
158 KACHRU

In view of the differing conventions of use and usage, intelligibility among the
varieties is another topic that has been explored to some extent. Several studies have
been conducted to determine if the claim regarding superior intelligibility of Inner
Circle varieties can be sustained on the basis of empirical investigations (Frenck &
Min, 2001; Smith, 1992; Smith & Christopher, 2001; Smith & Nelson, 1985; Smith &
Rafiqzad, 1979). Another aspect of the intelligibility issue is that of the intelligibility
of indigenized varieties in their native settings (see B. Kachru, 1992b; Sridhar, 1994;
Sridhar & Sridhar, 1986, 1992). As Sridhar (1994) observes, accent, transfer from sub-
stratum languages, code-mixing and switching, etc. are enriching resources in stable
multilingual communities with shared verbal repertoires. They are not an impedi-
ment to intelligibility; instead, they are as natural as style or register switching in
monolingual communities (p. 802).
Language contact and convergence in these regions have not only affected English,
they have also had an impact on the local languages. Therefore, researchers in WEs
are interested in looking at the two-way interaction between English and local lan-
guages to understand the effects of contact and convergence. The interface of contact
and convergence has been termed “nativization” (of English) and “Englishization”
(of local languages). Englishization of local languages has been discussed in studies
such as Baik (2001), Hsu (1994a, 1994b, 2001), B. Kachru (1979), and Shim (1994).
Most users of English in these regions (i.e., Africa, Asia) are bilinguals, or even
multilinguals (I will subsume “bilingual” under “multilingual” and will use “mul-
tilingual” to indicate both categories henceforth). A great deal of WE research fo-
cuses on the language use of multilinguals. For example, considerable work has been
done on code repertoire of multilinguals and the phenomena of code-mixing and
switching (Bautista, 1990, 1991; T. Bhatia & Ritchie, 1989; Bhatt, 1996; B. Kachru, 1978;
Kamwangamalu, 1989; Kamwangamalu & Li, 1991; Pandey, 2001; among others).
The teaching and learning of English in the Outer and Expanding Circles is one
sub-topic within the range of topics that WE research is concerned with (Brown, 1993,
2001; Brown & Peterson, 1997; B. Kachru, 1995c, 1997b; Y. Kachru, 1985a, 1985b, 1997b).
This research is informed by the findings of the fields of first and second language ac-
quisition (FLA and SLA), ethnography of communication, literacy, psycholinguistics,
multilingualism, neurolinguistics, and other relevant fields. A large body of research
is devoted to how fluent, proficient users of the varieties use them in administration,
business, diplomacy, education, law, literary creativity, politics, religion, and other
spheres of human activity (see, e.g., papers in Baumgardner, 1996a; V. Bhatia, 1997;
B. Kachru, 1992a; Smith, 1987; Thumboo, 2001).
All institutionalized varieties have a body of literature that is useful for teaching
language as well as the culture of the region. For readers across languages and cul-
tures one resource for gaining familiarity with the varieties of English in the second
diaspora is the literature created in them. Appreciation of literary creativity in world
Englishes makes it hard to maintain prejudicial attitudes toward what is perceived as
“non-standard” because it is unfamiliar. Some research has been devoted to classroom
utilization of world English literatures for raising consciousness about the multicul-
tural identity of world Englishes (see, e.g., Courtright, 2001; B. Kachru, 1986b, 1995a,
1995b, 2001; Nelson, 1992; Smith, 1992; Tawake, 1994; Thumboo, 1985, 1986, 1988,
1991, 1992).
There is, of course, variation within regional varieties, such as South Asian En-
glish or West African English, and national varieties, such as Singaporean English,
just as there is dialectal and diatypic variation within the English-speaking popula-
tions of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States
(McArthur, 1992). The basilectal, or pidgin-like forms, and the mesolectal, or collo-
quial forms, which may or may not be mixed with substratum language forms, are
used for various purposes in the Outer and Expanding Circles, just as various speaker
 9. WORLD ENGLISHES 159

and speech types are used by Inner Circle speakers and writers. The focus of research,
however, is not on just this variation and relating it to theories of acquisitional de-
ficiency. Rather, the interest is in the functional allocation of the varieties within the
English-using communities (see, e.g., Bamiro, 1991; B. Kachru, 1986a; Taiwo, 1976;
Tay, 1993).
A great deal of attention is directed toward the communicative needs of the users
that underlie the observed linguistic differences between the Outer and Expand-
ing Circle varieties as compared to the Inner Circle ones (see the discussions in the
sphere of literary creativity in Dissanayake, 1985, 1990; B. Kachru, 1992b, 1995a, 1995b;
Y. Kachru, 1988b; Thumboo, 1985, 1986, 1992).

WORLD ENGLISHES AND INTERLANGUAGE (IL)

The world varieties of English have been labeled variously as “interference” varieties
(Quirk et.al., 1985) and interlanguages (Selinker, 1992). To characterize these standard
forms of the Outer Circle as Interlanguage is unjustified on several grounds, including
that of the definition of IL from Selinker (1992):

An “interlanguage” may be linguistically described using as data the observable output

resulting from a speaker’s attempt to produce a foreign norm, i.e., both his errors and
non-errors. (p. 231)

Users of standard Indian, Nigerian, or Singaporean English are NOT attempting to

produce a “foreign” norm; they are functioning in their own variety. As the famous
Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, has observed:

Most African writers write out of an African experience and of commitment to an African
destiny. For them that destiny does not include a future European identity for which the
present is but an apprenticeship. (Jussawalla & Dasenbrock, 1992, p. 34)

Confusing attitudes with sociolinguistic reality is not new in linguistic research.

There are Americans, just as there are Indians or Singaporeans, who think their own
variety is not as “pure” or “elegant” as British English or some other “foreign” norm.
That, however, does not lead to questioning the existence of a standard variety of
American English, nor should it result in denying the status they deserve to the
standard varieties of the Outer Circle.
One major issue, related to this point, is that of input. Most of the input the learners
of English receive in the Outer (and Expanding) Circle is from internal sources (Sridhar
& Sridhar, 1986). No need is felt, certainly in many of the Outer Circle countries,
for making either American or British English input available to a large majority of
learners. Therefore, defining input in terms of external norms and making judgments
about acquisitional deficiency is irrelevant and unjustifiable. The entire theoretical
conceptualization of data and analysis are challenged by these realities (B. Kachru,
1995c, B. Kachru & Nelson, 1996; Y. Kachru, 1994; S. N. Sridhar, 1994).
As regards the characterization of the features of Indian, Nigerian, or Singaporean
varieties as fossilization, that is not applicable to these varieties either. Again,
this is justifiable on the basis of the definition of fossilization from Selinker (1992):
“[F]ossilization names the real phenomenon of the permanent non-learning of
[target language] TL structures, of the cessation of IL learning (in most cases) far
from expected TL norms” (p. 225).
In case of the institutionalized varieties, the TL norms are the internal norms. There
is no evidence to suggest that educated users of national or regional varieties differ
among themselves with regard to their linguistic and communicative competence any
160 KACHRU

more than their counterparts in the Inner Circle do. Individual variation in competence
and performance is a universal phenomenon and applies regardless of the context of
Inner or Outer Circle.
The arguments with regard to incompleteness are equally irrelevant in the context
of institutionalized varieties. The “Bloomfieldian duplicative model of bilingualism,
one in which the ideal bilingual has a native-like command of both languages each
complete in itself . . . is naive. Bilingualism, typically, does not duplicate L1 compe-
tence; it complements it . . . a bilingual acquires as much competence in the two or
more languages as is needed and . . . all of the languages together serve the full range
of communicative needs” (pp. 801–802). It is neither necessary nor to be expected
that multilinguals would use the same language for all their communicative needs as
the monolinguals do (see, e.g., the discussion in Lavendra, 1978, where Italian immi-
grants in Argentina are shown to use Italian and Spanish as style/register variants). A
bilingual person is not two monolingual persons joined at the hips, with two separate
nervous systems; he or she is one whole person with two linguistic, and sometimes,
two cultural conventions that are sometimes in harmony, sometimes in conflict.

IDEOLOGICAL ISSUES

One major consideration that is left out of the discussion on WEs in the SLA literature
is that of sociocultural identity. As Crystal (1985) aptly observes, “[A]ll discussion of
standards ceases very quickly to be a linguistic discussion, and becomes instead an
issue of social identity” (p. 9). There is enough evidence in sociolinguistic literature
to show that users of institutionalized varieties are secure in their identities and do
not wish to acquire the identity of either an American or a British speaker of English.
Research on world Englishes has focused attention on theoretical concepts of native
speaker, data, and norm. Sociolinguistic and attitudinal factors have been highlighted
to reveal the ideological biases in what Pennycook (1994) calls the discipline of lin-
guistics, applied linguistics, and the teaching of the language. Pennycook claims that:

With the spread of English across the empire, the issue of the standardization of English
became not merely one of cultural politics within Great Britain but increasingly one of
imperial cultural politics. (p. 110)

That there are now several centers of power that compete in promoting several
native models of English and market distinct methodologies cannot be denied. The
motivation is clearly the exploitation of the economic, power of English, as is obvious
from the following quote: “As the director of a dynamic worldwide chain of English
language schools puts it, ‘Once we used to send gunboats and diplomats abroad; now
we are sending English teachers’” (Phillipson, 1992, p. 8).
The question of standards brings in the related issues of ideology and economic
interests. An American or a British model brings in tremendous cultural, economic,
and political advantages to the mother country of the target model in the areas of the
job market for ELT professionals, publishing industry, and testing business.
It is interesting to note that the entire notion of a standard language is a relatively
recent phenomenon in the history of the English language (McArthur, 1998).4 The term
“standard” was first used for the flag of the English monarch and later transferred to
weights and measures and the royal assets. Much later, in the 18th century, it came to
be associated with literature and language (McArthur, 1998, p. 161). Still later, when
British colonialism spread to different parts of the world, under the influence of the
Roman tradition laid down by Cicero for Latin, the “foreign usage” was accorded the
least quality and prestige.
 9. WORLD ENGLISHES 161

Researchers in WEs examine the issue of standard English from the perspectives
of linguistics, education, sociolinguistics, critical theory, and ideology (Bhatt, 2001;
B. Kachru, 1986a; Pakir, 2001). Ultimately, their concern is with sociolinguistic realities
that the learners and teachers of English confront in the various global contexts of the
ELT trade.
Having stated the research concerns of the field of World Englishes, let me now
very briefly outline the research concerns of investigators of SLA before pointing out
the relevance of the former area of studies to the latter.

AIMS AND FOCUS OF SLA RESEARCH

There is widespread consensus among scholars that SLA emerged as a distinct field of
research in the late 1950s to early 1960s (e.g., Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991; Mitchell &
Myles, 1998; Ritchie & T. Bhatia, 1996). There is also a high level of agreement that the
following sets of questions have attracted the most attention of researchers in this area:

r Is it possible to acquire an additional language in the same sense as one acquires

a first language? If yes, are the two processes similar? If not, what is the difference
between acquisition and learning?
r Is there a critical or sensitive period for additional language acquisition as there
seems to be for first language acquisition?
r What is the explanation for the fact that adults have more difficulty in acquiring
additional languages than children have?
r What motivates people to acquire additional languages? Is the motivation pri-
marily integrative or is it instrumental? Is there a difference between the end
results of the process of language acquisition depending on the nature of moti-
vation?
r What is the role of instruction (i.e., language teaching) in the acquisition of an
additional language?
r What sociocultural factors, if any, are relevant in studying learning/acquisition
of additional languages?

From an examination of the literature of the field it is clear that all the approaches
adopted to study the phenomena of SLA so far have one thing in common: The per-
spective adopted to view the acquiring of an additional language is that of an individ-
ual attempting to do so. Whether one labels it “learning” or “acquiring” an additional
language (Krashen, 1981, 1985), it is an individual accomplishment and what is un-
der focus is the cognitive, psychological, and institutional status of an individual.
That is, the spotlight is on what mental capabilities are involved, what psychological
factors play a role in the learning or acquisition, and whether the target language is
learnt in an instructional setting or acquired through social interaction with its natural
populations. Generalizations are presented in terms identical to individual language
acquisition rather than taking into account the communicative needs of the commu-
nity in using the additional language within its social and cultural context. This is
as true of the morpheme acquisition studies (e.g., Bailey, Madden, & Krashen, 1974;
Dulay & Burt, 1974; Krashen, Butler, Birnbaum, & Robertson, 1978; Larsen-Freeman,
1976), as it is of studies inspired by properties of universal grammar, although the
latter have utilized several approaches.
The approaches based on linguistic universals have drawn on theoretical models
such as Principles and Parameters (e.g., Flynn, 1987; Flynn & O’Neil, 1988;
Marthohardjono, 1993; White, 1989) and Minimalist Programs (e.g., Archibald, 2000;
T. Bhatia & Ritchie, 1996; Herschensohn, 2000). Models that exploit typological and
162 KACHRU

implicational universals have utilized the notion of Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan &
Comrie, 1977), and the notion of markedness resulting from accessibility hierarchy
(e.g., Eckman, Bell, & Nelson, 1988; Rutherford, 1984). These models, naturally, ap-
proach language acquisition from the perspective of the I-grammar, an abstraction that
represents the linguistic competence of an idealized native speaker–hearer (Chomsky,
1986).
There are studies that claim to be based on sociolinguistic model(s) of second
language acquisition (e.g., Preston, 1989); however, the individualistic orientation of
learning/acquisition is maintained in these studies. Even studies that claim to take
into account notions from pragmatics and communicative competence exhibit the
same characteristics (see, e.g., discussions of interlanguage pragmatics in Blum-Kulka,
House, & Kasper, 1989; Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993). Although research in pragmat-
ics is based on speaker intentions, research on second or foreign language pragmatics
neglects speaker intentions and analyzes second language speaker utterances solely
from the perspective of the hearer, who is presumed to be a native speaker of the
language under focus. This leads to notions of “pragmatic failure,” which has no the-
oretical sanction if viewed from the perspective of speaker intentions. According to the
Gricean cooperative principles (Grice, 1975), speakers and hearers are assumed not to
intend misleading each other, unless they intentionally violate the maxims. It is hardly
the case that in a majority of the contexts the users of a second or foreign language in
communicating their intentions are deliberately misleading their interlocutors.
There is no recognition of the fact in SLA research that additional languages are
learnt/acquired in bilingual and multilingual contexts. The uses and functions of the
additional language are determined by the needs of the community, that is, the com-
petence in the target language that a multilingual acquires in such contexts is largely
a function of the niche the additional language occupies in the linguistic repertoire
of the community. An almost total disregard of this fact has resulted in the neglect
of a variety of issues that need to be raised in the context of the learning or acquisi-
tion of languages of wider communication, especially English. These are precisely the
questions that research in world Englishes raises and attempts to answer.
One major difference between WEs and classical SLA perspectives is that unlike
research in WEs, which is informed by research findings in a variety of fields, SLA
research so far, by and large, has neglected to incorporate in any serious sense the
insights of ethnography of communication, literacy studies, multilingualism, and,
of course, research on WEs (see, however, Brisk, 2000 and Pavlenko, 2001). It is not
the case that there is a lack of awareness of multilingualism, issues of identity, and
other issues in the field of language education in general (see, e.g., Grosjean, 1982;
Hakuta, 1986; Mohan, Leung, & Davison, 2001; Ogulnick, 2000). The theorizing in
SLA, however, has not transcended the bounds of ideologically entrenched bias that
has been pointed out in WE literature (B. Kachru, 1997a; Y. Kachru, 1994; Sridhar,
1992, 1994; Sridhar & Sridhar, 1986).

RELEVANCE OF WES TO SLA

Theoretically, research in SLA could benefit from reevaluating the usefulness of the
concepts of native speaker, linguistic competence, transfer, interlanguage, and fos-
silization in the context of acquisition of additional languages. The pronounced mono-
lingual bias in SLA research has so far excluded a large population of multilingual
speakers of languages from playing any role in such research. As Pennycook (1994)
observes:

[T]hought on linguistics from Saussure through to Chomsky and beyond has taken mono-
lingualism to be the norm, a view clearly rooted far more in the language myths of Europe
than in the multilingual contexts in which most people live. (p. 121)
 9. WORLD ENGLISHES 163

Current paradigms of research are hardly conducive to producing scientific know-

ledge of SLA constrained as they are by the “language myths of Europe.” They in-
hibit generation of alternative perspectives on SLA that multilingual contexts provide
(Y. Kachru, 1994). To take just one example, many languages of wider communication
(LWC), including English (in the Outer Circle), modern standard Hindi (in India), and
Swahili (in East Africa) are used essentially by populations who are almost exclusively
multilinguals.5 SLA theories at this point have hardly anything relevant to say about
the acquisition of these LWCs (Y. Kachru, 1996b), because they have a large number of
speakers but no well-defined body of “ideal native speakers.” The question naturally
arises as to how we can afford to ignore such a widespread phenomenon and still
claim to formulate “universal” theories.
Claims of universalism in SLA theories at this point, therefore, are meaningless. It
is a greater pity because a wealth of data is available in Outer and Expanding Cir-
cle Englishes for the unbiased researchers to formulate adequate theories of SLA. As
Sridhar (1994) observes, “[w]hat we need is a more functionally oriented and cultur-
ally authentic theory, one that is true to the ecology of multilingualism and views the
multilingual’s linguistic repertoire as a unified, complex, coherent, interconnected,
interdependent, organic ecosystem, not unlike a tropical rain forest” (p. 803). As
B. Kachru (1990) points out, world Englishes provide the most extensive “laboratory”
to date for applied linguistic and sociolinguistic research. Observation and analyses
in this laboratory could bring important SLA concepts and claims into focus and also
bring serious gaps to light.

LEARNING AND TEACHING OF WORLD ENGLISHES

In any context of language learning and teaching, the issue of what to learn or to
teach is bound to rise. In the case of ELT, the debate in recent decades has been about
which English to aim for. For a majority of ELT experts in the Inner Circle as well
as in some members of Outer and Expanding Circle the competing standards are
still British or American English. Other members of the Outer Circle, however, have
started challenging the exocentric norms and rethinking the question of standards
(see Bamgbos.e, 1992; Gill & Pakir, 1999; B. Kachru, 1985, 1991; Pakir, 1991b, 1997).
The observations relevant to the debate are the following. Contrary to the myth
that people in China or India or Japan or Nigeria learn English to interact with users
of English from the Inner Circle, English is basically used by people of Outer and
Expanding Circle interacting with each other within or outside their respective Circle.
In an overwhelming majority of contexts, no one from Inner Circle is either involved
or even relevant.
The fear that development of multiple endocentric norms would result in a Tower
of Babel is also unfounded. The American, Australian, British, Canadian, and New
Zealand norms differ significantly in some respects, yet, the observed and documented
differences present no barrier to mutual interaction.
In recent years the trend in intellectual fields related to language study has been to-
ward a shift from communicator to message to receiver to context (Dissanayake, 1997;
Pakir, 1997). Pluricentric languages such as Chinese, English, French, and Spanish are
likely to give rise to different norms in different geographical regions (Clyne, 1992).
The sociolinguistic profile of WEs suggests that just as the Inner Circle shows a range
of variation in its regional and social dialects, so do the Outer and Expanding Circles.
And these varieties have functions within their sociocultural contexts. Therefore, it is
neither possible nor desirable to impose any rigid linguistic norm on the entire world.
Pakir (1997) describes the situation in Singapore; similar phenomena can be and have
been documented for South Asia, Africa, and other parts of the English-using world
(e.g., Bamiro, 1991; B. Kachru 1986a; Owolabi, 1995).
164 KACHRU

The question naturally arises: If each region using English for its purposes devel-
ops its own variety of English, how can there be any mutual intelligibility among
them? Research has shown that no particular variety is in a privileged position as
far as mutual intelligibility is concerned. The more varieties one is exposed to, the
more one learns how to accommodate the differences in accent, lexicogrammar, and
discoursal strategies (Smith, 1992). And it is becoming easier to get acquainted with
more and more varieties of English through the media as the new century advances.
The resources of Internet and cable news are examples of two channels through which
one can get exposure to almost all varieties of English.
Research studies in the fields of grammatical description (e.g., Baumgardner, 1993,
1996b; Bautista, 1997; Cheshire, 1991; B. Kachru, 1983; Lowenberg, 1984; Platt & Weber,
1979; Rahman, 1990; Simo-Bobda, 1994, among others) are documenting the phono-
logical lexical, and grammatical features of world Englishes. Dictionary-making has
woken up to the usefulness of documenting the immense impact of language con-
tact on the lexicon of English, and there are several attempts at incorporating items
from different regional Englishes into the mainstream dictionaries of Inner Circle va-
rieties (Encarta World English Dictionary, 1999, had consultants for East Africa, Hong
Kong, Hawaii, Malaysia-Singapore, South Africa, South Asia, U.K. Black English, and
U.S. African American English; The Macquarie Dictionary, 1997, has lexical items from
Southeast Asian Englishes, for example, Malaysia, Singapore, and The Philippines).
Dictionaries and partial lexicons of different World Englishes are also being compiled
and published for wider dissemination (e.g., Allison, 1996; Baumgardner, 1996a; But-
ler, 1997; Hawkins, 1984; B. Kachru, 1973, 1975; Lewis, 1991; Muthiah, 1991; Pakir,
1992; Rao, 1954, among others).
The international corpus of English (ICE) project, initiated in late 1980s (Green-
baum, 1990, 1991; Greenbaum & Nelson, 1996) will, it is projected, result in several
descriptive studies of World Englishes on the basis of corpora gathered in eighteen
different countries from the three Circles (Nelson, 2004).
Studies on discourse conventions—spoken as well as written—are yielding valu-
able insights into how English is used as a medium of communicating different so-
ciocultural practices (J. Bhatia, 1992; D’souza, 1988; Gumperz, 1982; Y. Kachru, 1987,
1991, 1993, 1995a, 1995b, 1996a, 1997a, 1998a, 1999, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2003; Nwoye,
1992; Valentine, 1988, 1991).
Finally, English teachers are looking at literary works created in African, Indian,
Singaporean, and other varieties for making participants in their classes aware of the
cultural meanings of World Englishes (Courtright, 2001; B. Kachru, 1986b; Tawake,
1993, 1994).
The survey above and studies such as B. Kachru (1997b) suggest that there are
enough resources for imaginative use in the teaching and learning of world Englishes.
For instance, Hannam University and Open Cyber University in Korea have intro-
duced and are developing the Internet as a resource for teaching WEs to Korean
learners of English (Jung & Min, 2002; Shim, 2002). Both sets of teachers are collecting
materials from the websites of all the three Circles of English and preparing appro-
priate units for language teaching based on these materials.
There is, however, a great deal of work to be done before all those involved in ELT
worldwide feel comfortable with the paradigm shift that teaching and learning WEs
signals. Applied linguistics and ELT professionals have yet to take a principled stand
and prepare themselves to incorporate the world Englishes perspective into their
academic practices. These then will have an effect on the education policymakers,
and educational authorities will then be able to adopt an appropriate stance toward
the teaching and learning of English.
One of the key areas to bring about a change in the current practices of ELT profes-
sion is that of EL teacher training. Almost no teacher training program in the Inner
 9. WORLD ENGLISHES 165

Circle at this point has a component of making trainees aware of world varieties
of English (B. Kachru, 1997a; Vavrus, 1991). A pilot project started at Portland State
University throws interesting light on what the consequences are when a serious
component of world Englishes is introduced in a certificate or master’s program of
training teachers in English as a second language or TESOL (Brown & Peterson, 1997).
The aim of the project was to see how the prior knowledge structures of trainees in
such programs undergo modification as a result of their introduction to the key areas
of research on world Englishes.
First, a list of concepts was developed on the basis of existing research on WEs.
These fell into four sets: theoretical, pedagogical, ideological (status of varieties), and
descriptive (description of grammars of varieties). The 27 concepts that were devel-
oped were used as labels and printed out on 2 × 3 cards. These consisted of labels
such as American English, British English, Indian English, Nigerian English, German
English, Japanese English, etc., categories such as English as a Second Language (ESL),
English as a Foreign Language (EFL), concepts such as monolingual, bilingual, inter-
language, nativization, standard English, and others, and ideological positions such
as the native speakers being the best teachers of English in any context. Trainees en-
rolled in a three-quarter, nine-credit course were asked to sort out the cards before and
after taking two types of courses: one that exposed them to a 4-hour unit on issues in
world Englishes and another that was a quarter-long, three-credit course. All of them
had completed a required methodology sequence with a 4-hour unit of terminology
and issues in world Englishes.
For each administration of the sorting task, the resulting sorts were transformed
into 27 × 27 matrices representing all 351 possible pairings of labels. Each cell of the
matrices represented a pairing of two concepts and the values in the cells indicated
how many students placed any two labels together during a sorting task. The similari-
ties of co-occurrences were treated as similarity measures. Four analytical procedures
were used to compare the results of the sorting tasks (Brown & Peterson, 1997, p. 36).
The findings of the project made it obvious that before and after the 4-hour ex-
posure to world Englishes concepts, the students had a very simplistic conceptual
structure of the phenomenon. The future teachers of English ready for the world mar-
ket for TESOL jobs categorized the labels into two groups: one containing examples of
varieties of English and the other containing theoretical, pedagogical, and ideological
concepts. The two groups contained two subgroups each. The varieties cluster showed
clear native/non-native grouping, that is, it distinguished the three traditionally rec-
ognized varieties—American, Australian, and British—from all others, for example,
Brazilian, German, Indian, Japanese, Nigerian, and Singaporean. The concepts clus-
ters showed, on the one hand, the grouping of norms, monolingualism, preference
for native speaker teachers,6 nativization misidentified with native speakers or the
process of making someone nativelike, and, on the other hand, grouping of ESL/EFL,
bilingualism, interlanguage, creativity, and liberation, signaling a positive attitude
toward bilingualism in English.
After the quarter long, three-credit course, however, the sortings show a much
richer conceptual structure. The trainees show awareness of the three Circles of En-
glish and their three different historical and sociocultural contexts of development.
Within each Circle they are able to sort corresponding theoretical, pedagogical, and
ideological concepts, for example, English as a native language is associated with the
Inner Circle, ESL with the Outer Circle, and EFL with the Expanding Circle. Standard
English, restrictive, monolingual, preference for native speakers as teachers are all
associated with the Inner Circle, which is the prevalent ideology of the ELT profes-
sion. On the other hand, bilingual, liberating, creativity, differences (from Inner Circle
Englishes) and no preference for native speaker teachers are associated with Outer and
Expanding Circle varieties, which corresponds to the stance of researchers in WEs.
166 KACHRU

The other noticeable fact is the nature of the conceptual structures. The Multi-Step
Graphic Scaling diagrams (Brown & Peterson, 1997, pp. 40–41) show the simplistic
organization of knowledge structures in trainees exposed to just 4 hours of WEs. In
contrast, the conceptual structure of trainees with exposure to a three-credit course
shows a much richer network of interlinked concepts. That is to say, the trainees in
the TESOL program at the end of their course gained much more awareness of the
sociolinguistic realities of the spread of English and the theoretical, pedagogical, and
ideological issues raised by the global diffusion of the language.
Many of the trainees come to the TESOL programs from language and literature
departments, as TESOL is not generally an undergraduate program. More language
and literature departments, therefore, have to incorporate WE literatures (or vari-
ous Spanish, French, Portuguese, or Chinese literatures, as the case may be) in their
undergraduate curricula to sensitize students to the issues raised by LWCs. Univer-
sities in India have started including WE literatures in their undergraduate English
literature curricula, and several universities in the United States have made options
available in “ethnic” literatures (e.g., African American, African, Asian American,
Indian, or South Asian). Awareness of differences resolves many issues of prejudice
and resistance to variety and myths about standards and “ownership” of the language
(Widdowson, 1994).

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, the WE research community is anticipating a paradigm shift in the

teaching and learning of English in the Inner, Outer, and Expanding Circles that will
bridge the gap between sociolinguistic reality and prevailing myths about English, and
the “native” speakers and “other” users of English. The emphasis is on inclusiveness
of the global fellowship of the English-using populations. The aim is to make users of
English aware of and responsive to the following (see also B. Kachru 1997b):

1. Sociolinguistic profile of the English users in largely monolingual and complex

multilingual communities.
2. Variation within varieties and their societal function.
3. Attitudinally neutral investigation of variety-specific characteristics of regional
Englishes (not only of less well-studied Inner Circle varieties such as Australian,
Canadian, and New Zealand Englishes, but also those of Outer and Expanding
Circles.
4. Similar investigation of stylistic, discoursal, and genre-related differences and
innovations in specific sociocultural contexts.
5. In-depth study of literary creativity and canons of English literatures.
6. Attitudes and experiences that facilitate intelligibility across varieties.
7. Awareness of factors that promote the teaching and learning of English in var-
ious contexts instead of promoting belief in the “myths” of “native speaker,”
“natural [to the Inner Circle] input,” “authentic [from the Inner Circle] materials
for teaching,” “pragmatic failure,” and others (B. Kachru, 1995c).

Learning and teaching world Englishes does not mean learning and teaching of
each regional variety to everyone in the Inner Circle classrooms or everyone learning
English in Brazil, China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, or Southern Africa. It means making
learners aware of the rich variation that exists in English around the world at an ap-
propriate point in their language education in all the three Circles and giving them the
tools to educate themselves further about using their English for effective communi-
cation across varieties. The burden of communication, when the opportunity arises, is
 9. WORLD ENGLISHES 167

not on just the users of Outer and Expanding Circle varieties. It is equally on the speak-
ers of Inner Circle varieties, as success in communication depends on cooperation be-
tween interlocutors. The applied linguistics and ELT professions have a responsibility
to equip learners of English to meet the challenge of globalization. World Englishes is
one of the most effective instruments that could be employed to meet this challenge.
It is encouraging to see the awareness of the complex issues of contexts, cultures,
identities, etc. involved in the development of world Englishes in some recent work.
This awareness is reflected in studies that deal with descriptions of English as an
international language (e.g., Jenkins 2000) and those that emphasize the communica-
tive language teaching methodologies based on the relationship between context and
communicative competence in particular social and cultural settings (e.g., Berns, 1990;
Savignon, 2002).

NOTES

* I am grateful to my friend and colleague, Cecil Nelson, for reading an earlier draft of this paper and com-
menting on it, and to Wooseung Lee for checking and rechecking the citations and references in the paper.
1. For a succinct description of the conceptualization of world Englishes, see B. Kachru (1997b). See also
Kachru, B. & Smith (1986). For acculturation of English in Asia and Africa, see the references cited in
appropriate sections of this paper.
2. New Statesman was reacting to an International Conference in English that was held in London, but the
call for it had come by the American side of the Atlantic.
3. Many of the agents of the spread of English in the former colonies came from various parts of the British
Isles and Western Europe. Many English medium schools were and are still run by Belgian, Dutch, and
other missionary organizations all over the world. As Mesthrie (1992) observes, the South African Indian
English (SAIE) developed as a distinct variety as a result of several factors, including “the teaching of
English by a French-speaking missionary to Tamil-speaking children via the medium of a Zulu-based
pidgin” (p. 29).
4. In the Indian tradition, there was a distinction made between sanskrit (“cultured, refined”) and prakrit
(“natural, unsophisticated”) forms of language beginning in the pre-Buddhist times (i.e., prior to 500
BC). In the Greek and Roman tradition (McArthur, 1998), Greek spoken by the upper class in Attica,
including Athens, was the language of oratory and, thus, the focus of teaching oratory; the common di-
alects of the non-Attic populations was not highly valued. Cicero made a distinction among city usage,
country usage, and foreign usage, where the first had the most quality and prestige, the second less so,
and the last one was “to be deplored” (McArthur, 1998, p. 163).
5. In many parts of the Chinese-speaking world, a majority of the population speaks one of the dialects
(e.g., Cantonese, Hokkien, Taiwanese) but learns and functions in Mandarin Chinese. In the Hindi belt
of India, people speak one of the dialects of the Hindi region, for example, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj,
Garhwali, Kumauni, Magahi, etc., at home and in their intimate domains, but are educated and function
in the larger context in modern standard Hindi. These so-called dialects of the Hindi area are mutually
unintelligible and have very different grammars from each other and from Standard Hindi.
6. The belief, contrary to reality on the ground, that native speakers are the best teachers of ESL and EFL,
still persists in the TESOL profession, and prevailed in Singapore and most Anglophone Outer Circle
regions until very recently. China, Japan, Korea, and other Expanding Circle regions continue to sub-
scribe to this view although a majority of English teachers in these countries are local users of English.
See Canagarajah (1999) for a detailed discussion of this attitude in the ELT profession.

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174
II

Methods in Second
Language Research

175
176
Introduction

Throughout the history of learning another language (and therefore the history of
human mobility and migration), many research projects and experiments have been
carried out to shed light on how second languages are learned and used. Many good
examples of these can be found in the famous book by A. P. R. Howatt (A History
of English Language Teaching, Oxford University Press, 1984/2004), who describes
many studies conducted in the early 20th century on the teaching and learning of
English in various parts of the world.
However, in the 1950s when applied linguistics arrived on the scene as a formal
discipline, it was a latecomer among the human sciences, such as anthropology, be-
havioral sciences, educational theory, psychology, sociology, and their numerous sub-
domains, such as the sociology of learning. Thus, applied linguistics and its attendant
research into second language (L2) processes had the advantage (or disadvantage,
depending on the point of view) of the scientific research paradigms and methods
developed for the purposes of gathering knowledge in other human disciplines. Al-
though at the present several research methodologies are widely employed in applied
linguistics and L2 learning, none is specifically unique or was specifically developed
for language studies.
For this reason, the methods employed in L2 research and discussed in Part II
necessarily draw on those that had already been designed, established, and refined
elsewhere among other data-driven disciplines. In the research in social and behav-
ioral sciences, all methods of empirical data gathering and, by outcome, all collected
data is social in nature and fundamentally depends on the processes and methods by
which it is gathered, interpreted, and used. The canonical methods of data gathering
find a large number of classifications, depending on the disciplines where they were
designed and developed. For example, the methods commonly called ethnography
and participant observation were originally created in anthropology, survey-based
and experimental research have long served the needs of psychology and the social
sciences, and archival research methods have benefited history and political science.
Each research method has a foundational basis in paradigmatic procedures and
logical progression. The types of hypotheses researchers set out to test determines
the data gathering tools and, therefore, the types of analysis that can be applied to
particular data. For instance, Quantitative research methods are crucially distinct from
Qualitative because quantitative data is very difficult to gather naturalistically.
The means of data analysis fundamentally depends of the type of data gathering
methods and the kinds of the data that are valued. For instance, while individuals’
personal histories and narratives can be valued in one domain of research, quantitative
data may be believed more valid and generalizable in another. In many cases, the
methods for collecting data can be combined, resulting in dual or triple approaches
to research design. In some disciplines, such as psychology, experimental data is
considered to be of great merit, and in anthropology, the data gathered in naturally
occurring contexts is probably considered to have the highest credibility.
177
178 PART II: METHODS

Numerous methods for data gathering and analysis have become recognized in
social sciences and, by extension, in L2 research. However, practically in all cases,
the type of collected data determines the applicable methods of analysis. The quan-
titative data gathered from relatively large population samples in experiments or
naturalistically can be analyzed numerically and/or statistically, but the information
obtained in a small number of representative cases requires qualitative and/or inter-
pretive analytical research procedures. Each has a number of advantages and disad-
vantages, and strengths and flaws, and each is strongly preferred or dispreferred by
particular groups of or individual researchers in L2 processes. There are, of course,
exceptions among researchers, and it is possible to find those who conduct qualitative
and quantitative studies, but they are infrequent. In this regard, an individual’s belief
in the validity and merits of particular research methods, the types of data considered
to be representative and analyzable, and the methods of by which the data can be
analyzed can be a matter of religion.
The chapters in Part II discuss the prevalent methods in L2 research. Although
Ethnographic/Qualitative and Case Study research methods and Quantitative re-
search methods draw on the classical and fundamental research paradigms, others,
such as Classroom and Action research, represent adaptations of these methods to
narrow and specific contexts of L2 teaching.
r Chapter 10, by Linda Harklau, presents an overview of the Ethnographic Re-
search methodology, also called Qualitative. Participant or nonparticipant obser-
vation represents the coin of the qualitative studies’ realm, and all ethnographic
data require a researcher’s interpretation. In the case of qualitative studies, re-
searchers usually do not set out to test a particular hypothesis but gather the data
in naturalistic contexts.
r Chapter 11, by Leo van Lier, discusses Case Studies, which are a very common
approach to qualitative data collection in second language research. As with
other ethnographic methods, one of the most important advantages of case study
research is that it allows the researcher to note the specific contexts in which L2
processes occur and to track and document changes over time.
r Chapter 12, by Anne Lazaraton, provides an overview of the types of quantitative
studies carried out in L2 research and compares their popularity to qualitative
methods. In general terms, quantitative data are gathered by means of carefully
designed experiments and are analyzed statistically, provided of course that the
sample involved in data gathering is sufficiently large.
r Chapter 13, by David Nunan, reviews the methods commonly adopted in Class-
room Research, as well as the purposes and uses of its findings. The main goal
of Classroom Research is to shed light on the relationship between classroom
teaching, including instructional methods and tasks, the role of the teacher’s in-
put, learner language gains and sequences, and interactions among learners and
the teacher. David Nunan points out that in terms of data gathering methods, re-
searchers have debated the merits of experimental versus naturalistic approaches
to data collection and analysis and the merits of collecting data in classroom rather
than in non-classroom settings.
r Chapter 14, by Anne Burns, discusses the methods and applications of Action
Research that primarily represents a systematic and self-reflective inquiry by the
participants with the goal of improving their own practices and situations. One
of the major distinctions between formal paradigmatic research and Action Re-
search is that the latter has the primary objective of addressing participants’ own
practical concerns. An example of application of Action Research to L2 teaching
can be a practical and data-driven decision of whether to change a language-based
curriculum or a teaching method in a particular school or location. As Anne Burns
notes, Action Research data gathering can allow teachers to have a voice.
10

Ethnography and Ethnographic

Research on Second Language
Teaching and Learning
Linda Harklau
University of Georgia

The term ethnography refers to a range of diverse and ever-changing research ap-
proaches (Atkinson, Coffey, Delamont, Lofland, & Lofland, 2001) originating in an-
thropological and sociological research and characterized by first-hand, naturalistic,
sustained observation and participation in a particular social setting. The purpose
of ethnography is to come to a deeper understanding of how individuals view and
participate in their own social and cultural worlds.
Over the past 25 years, ethnography has become a major approach to research on
second language learning and teaching. The epistemological assumptions and meth-
ods favored by individual researchers often depend on the scholarly communities into
which they are socialized (Davis, 1995). Nevertheless, in spite of the ethnographic prin-
ciple of self-examination, few researchers explicitly articulate the intellectual ancestry
of the approaches they use. This review contextualizes ethnographic research on sec-
ond language (L2) learning in three diverse scholarly communities that have shaped
its development: cultural anthropology and sociology; linguistic anthropology and
sociolinguistics; and ethnographies of teaching and learning.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY

Ethnography originated as the primary research methodology of the emerging dis-

cipline of anthropology in the 1870s to the 1920s (Goldschmidt, 2001; Lenkeit, 2001).
Heavily influenced by the work of Boas (Salzman, 2001), its aim was to counter so-
cial Darwinist claims of human differences as biologically and racially determined
through empirical documentation of the diversity of human cultures (Goldschmidt,
2001). In North America, early ethnographies were conducted among Indian tribal
communities (Goldschmidt, 2001) and non-industrialized cultures abroad (Brewer,
2000). Ethnography was also the dominant methodology of the Chicago School of soci-
ology established in the 1920s and 1930s. Drawing on G. H. Mead’s work and symbolic
179
180 HARKLAU

interactionism, it sought to document urban life (Deegan, 2001; Goldschmidt, 2001).

In Britain, early influences in anthropology and sociology included Malinowski and
Radcliffe-Brown’s Durkheimian notions of social structure (Kuper, 1996). Early British
ethnography often focused on cultures in colonies abroad. It documented the func-
tions of political institutions, rituals and mythology, and social networks such as
kinship systems (Kuper, 1996). Post-World War II interaction among anthropolo-
gists and sociologists blurred the distinctions among U.S. ethnographic traditions
(Goldschmidt, 2001; Wolcott, 1999). Ethnoscience and cognitive anthropological ap-
proaches influenced by the structural linguist Pike (1967) were prevalent in the 1960s
and 1970s (Barfield, 1997). In Britain, Levi-Strauss led a movement toward structural-
ism with influences from French linguistic and sociological theory (Kuper, 1996).

Methodologies
Ethnographies typically focus on small societies or small bounded units (e.g., a town)
within broader social units. Therefore, although not all case studies are ethnographic
or even qualitative, all ethnographic research involves case study (Brewer, 2000,
p. 77). Because of the particularity of case study, ethnographers disagree on the extent
to which it is feasible or desirable to generalize from ethnographic findings.
Although some ethnographers resist codification of their procedures (Brewer, 2000,
p. 9), it can be said that the hallmark of “classical” ethnographic methodology is par-
ticipant observation. This traditionally has meant residing or spending considerable
lengths of time interacting with people in everyday naturalistic settings, observing
and recording their activities in extensive fieldnotes, and interviewing and conversing
with them to learn their perspectives, attitudes, beliefs, and values (Salzman, 2001).
A major portion of the participant observer’s work is to generate a descriptive corpus
of fieldnotes as a contemporaneous record of events and experiences as they unfold.
Data are ideally gathered from most participants—or “informants”—in the setting,
but may be chosen with random samples or based on individuals’ particular knowl-
edge, skills, and insights (Lenkeit, 2001). Key informants work most closely with the
ethnographer. Ethnographers typically conduct informal interviews with informants
in the setting (Brewer, 2000, p. 63; Lenkeit, 2001) entailing open-ended questions that
evolve in situ. More formal interviews, consisting of a schedule of questions, may be
conducted as the research continues. Often formal interviews are audio-recorded and
transcribed. Ethnography may incorporate other field methods including life histo-
ries (Darnell, 2001), narrative analysis (Cortazzi, 2001), photography and videotape
(Lenkeit, 2001; Nastasi, 1999), archeological data, written documents (Brewer, 2000),
or other data documenting historical trends, and surveys (Salzman, 2001). Some (e.g.,
Brewer, 2000, p. 74) include studies of natural language in field methods.
Another distinctive feature of ethnographic work is comparison across multiple
data sources, commonly known as “triangulation.” Although varying by researchers’
underlying epistemological stance and training, data analysis tends to be distin-
guished by an inductive process initiated in the course of data collection (Brewer,
2000, p. 107). Data are ultimately organized into patterns, categories, or themes that
are compared against negative or disconfirming data and, thus, evolve as data col-
lection proceeds. Often this process entails uncovering the implicit “commonsense”
sociocultural knowledge, beliefs, and practices of participants (Herzfeld, 2001). In
later stages of analysis and writing, meaning is attached to the data by theorizing the
meaning of and relationships among categories.

Epistemological Stances
The epistemological status of ethnographic knowledge has been debated in recent
years. In early work, researchers conferred the status of science on ethnographic
 10. ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH 181

knowledge and tended to take their findings as self-evident, de-emphasizing the role
of researcher’s training, background, and preexisting theories (Goldschmidt, 2001;
Salzman, 2001). Some continue to see ethnography as contributing to a science of
the social (e.g., Bernard, 2002). Although these researchers acknowledge that ethno-
graphers can never be completely objective, at the same time they believe that care-
ful attention to methodology, study replication, and comparing across settings—or
“ethnology”—can result in the training of subjectivity and uncovering of replicable
findings about cultural patterns. Contemporary ethnographies in this vein often in-
corporate quantifiable data and statistical analyses (Lenkeit, 2001; Salzman, 2001, p. 8).
Other theorists take interpretivist or phenomenological stances. They contend that
anthropological facts are inseparable from the concepts, categories, and theories of
the ethnographer and are therefore necessarily interpretations (Salzman, 2001). From
this perspective, ethnographies are guided by general or “heuristic” theories that
direct attention to certain factors but do not predetermine results (Salzman, 2001).
Ethnographies in this vein have been influenced by a strand of philosophical thought
suggesting that human beings and the social world are fundamentally different in
nature and behavior than physical and inanimate objects because of the capacities
for language and meaning making. Therefore, the social world cannot be reduced
to what can be observed but rather is created, perceived, and interpreted by people
themselves. To gain knowledge of the social world, one must gain access to actors’
own accounts of it (Brewer, 2000, p. 35).
Work in Britain by Evans-Pritchard (1962) and in the United States by Geertz
(1966/1973) anticipated a dramatic shift away from a focus on cultural structures
and their functions and toward cultural symbols and their meaning. In the 1980s
proponents of postmodern approaches including Marcus and Fischer (1986), Clif-
ford and Marcus (1986), and Van Maanen (1988) drew on trends in literary crit-
icism to explicitly reject scientific epistemology and instead portray ethnography
as a literary-like interpretive enterprise (Goldschmidt, 2001). These scholars chal-
lenged whether there is an objective or knowable “real” world that can be accu-
rately described (Brewer, 2000, p. 47). Postmodern ethnography thus rejects any pos-
sibility of scientific notions of validity, reliability, and generalization. It also ques-
tions the ethnographer’s claim to privileged status or knowledge. It requires that
researchers practice “reflexivity,” exploring their own subjectivity as well as infor-
mants’ (Tedlock, 2000). The central role of the researcher in what is found is made
clear (Salzman, 2001), and the circumstances and contingencies surrounding the pro-
duction of data are addressed explicitly (Brewer, 2000). Postmodernism has also
spurred experimental forms of writing and ways of presenting ethnographic results
(Tedlock, 2000).
Postmodernism has precipitated a major epistemological divide in ethnographic
theory (Brewer, 2000; Darnell, 2001; Salzman, 2001). Some (e.g., Brewer, 2000, p. 26;
Herzfeld, 2001; James, Hockey, & Dawson, 1997) attempt to steer a middle path, rec-
onciling postmodern critiques and notions of representation with more traditional
ethnographic realist modes of inquiry and writing. Epistemological divisions are fur-
ther overlaid with a number of “schools” (Salzman, 2001) or “styles” (Brewer, 2000,
p. 5) of ethnographic research, each drawing on its own theoretical perspectives that
in turn affect methods and reporting. For example, neo-Marxist critical realist ap-
proaches (e.g., Harris, 1979) explain processes of social and cultural change by iden-
tifying material conditions that underlie them (Salzman, 2001). These may include a
moral dimension of advocacy for oppressed and exploited peoples (Scheper-Hughes,
1995). Ethnographers working from feminist perspectives have made claims for the
uniqueness of their contributions to ethnography (see, e.g., Behar & Gordon, 1995;
Lather, 1991). In the “contemporary carnivalesque diversity of standpoints, methods
and representations” (Atkinson et al., 2001, p. 3), no single philosophical or theoretical
orientation can lay exclusive claim to correct or true ethnography.
182 HARKLAU

LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Linguistics as a discipline originated in early anthropological work. Over time, how-

ever, the interests of linguists and anthropologists diverged (Lenkeit, 2001). In the
1950s and 1960s several linguistically and interactionally-oriented schools of anthro-
pological and sociological inquiry reinvigorated the links between ethnography and
language. These included the sociology of language, ethnography of communication,
and interactionist sociolinguistics.

Sociology of Language
Fishman (1968) first coined the term “sociology of language” to designate a strand of
scholarship utilizing traditional ethnographic methods to document language choices
and use in multilingual workplace, school, and community settings (Dorian, 1999).
Sociologists of language also link language use with macro-level national language
and education policies (e.g., Davis, 1994; Francis & Ryan, 1998; Goldstein, 1997b;
Hornberger, 1988; Zentella, 1997). They may incorporate quantitative analyses of au-
dio recorded language and code-switching data, and elicited self-report data such as
questionnaires.

Ethnography of Communication
Hymes (1964) first proposed the notion of ethnography of speaking, later dubbed the
ethnography of communication. Based on the work of European linguist Jacobson,
Hymes and colleague Gumperz (Gumperz & Hymes, 1964) proposed that the speech
act replace the linguistic code as the primary unit of study and analysis in linguistics.
Hymes suggested that the appropriate methodology for this work was ethnography
of communicative events, with a multi-faceted description of the setting, participants,
purposes, topics, codes, and channels of speech acts and speech events (Hornberger,
2000). Hymes and Gumperz initiated an innovative strand of ethnographic work that
has remained highly influential over the past 35 years.
The primary focus of ethnography of communication studies has been face-to-face
interaction. Initial work in this vein tended to be taxonomic, aimed at creating inven-
tories of community speech practices and recurrent routines (Keating, 2001). Most
ethnography of communication research features samples of audio- or videorecorded
interactions selected from a larger corpus. These are exhaustively analyzed with ref-
erence to turns at talk, speech acts, sequences of speech acts, interactional encounters,
speech events, social occasions, speech situations, and other aspects of communicative
practices (Keating, 2001). Thus, ethnography of communication can be distinguished
in method and emphasis from ethnographic approaches in cultural anthropology
and sociology where audio and video recordings of behavior have been regarded as
supplemental to participant observation and fieldnotes (see, e.g., Nastasi, 1999).

Interactionist Sociolinguistics
Several approaches to the study of interaction emerged in American sociology in mid-
20th century (Pollner & Emerson, 2001). Reacting against sociological approaches
focusing on a priori social structures, Garfinkel’s (1967) pioneering work on eth-
nomethodology focuses instead on how shared but implicit competencies, assump-
tions, and knowledge of interactants within a cultural setting produce and sustain
order in social life (Pollner & Emerson, 2001). Subsequent work in this vein in-
cluded Cicourel’s (1973) “cognitive sociology” and conversation analysis (Atkinson &
Heritage, 1984). Goffman (1974), a sociologist in the symbolic interactionist tradition
 10. ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH 183

(Deegan, 2001, p. 21), also produced ethnographic work aimed at developing elab-
orate and highly theorized abstractions about “interaction rituals” and “frames” of
linguistic and social behavior in given social contexts. Contemporary theorists in this
vein include Gubrium and Holstein (1997) and Silverman (1993).
Although interactionist approaches share some methodological attributes of
ethnography of communication, there are also significant disagreements between
them in desirable scope, focus, and modes of investigation (Gubrium & Holstein,
1997; Pollner & Emerson, 2001). Whereas ethnography and ethnography of commu-
nication tend to focus on the emic (Pike, 1967) substance of participants’ worldviews,
understandings, and experiences, ethnomethodologists instead focus etically on the
linguistic and interactional procedures through which people construct social realities
(Gubrium & Holstein, 1997). Ethnomethodology thus rejects ethnographic methods
for eliciting participant perspectives such as interviews (Pollner & Emerson, 2001)
as subjective, focusing instead on close analysis of observable and recordable verbal
and nonverbal behavior (Gubrium & Holstein, 1997). Audio or video recording of
interaction is often essential to this work. Although advocates argue that recordings’
reviewable nature makes possible more empirically verifiable assertions, others argue
that researcher perspective nevertheless affects what is taped and how it is transcribed,
coded, analyzed, and interpreted (Nastasi, 1999).
In spite of theoretical and methodological differences, ethnography of communica-
tion and interactionist approaches have been intertwined throughout their develop-
ment (Wieder, 1999). For example, subsequent to his founding work in the ethnogra-
phy of communication, Gumperz (1981) drew on Goffman’s work to develop “interac-
tional sociolinguistics,” examining how “contextualization cues” such as intonation,
speech rhythm, and lexical, phonetic, and syntactic choice interact with participants’
background knowledge.
The scope and focus of interactionist approaches in the past decade has been af-
fected by the increasing influence of neo-Marxist and critical perspectives. Theorists
(e.g., Gal, 1989; May, 1997) argue that these approaches have focused too exclusively
on the immediate context of talk and have not given adequate consideration to how
language as a symbolic system operates in power, domination, and global political
economy. Gal (1989), for example, rejects the notion that there is an unproblematic
reality that researchers reveal. Instead, because language in part structures reality in
society, it must be seen simultaneously as an ideologically laden form of social repre-
sentation and action (Duranti, 1994). Although understanding the origins of inequality
among speakers was an original goal of the ethnography of communication (Hymes,
1973), in recent years there has been increasing impetus toward “locating linguistic
practices as parts of larger systems of social inequality” (Hornberger, 2000, p. 363).

ETHNOGRAPHIES OF TEACHING AND LEARNING

American sociologists had conducted ethnographic research in schools since the

Chicago School era (Bogdan & Biklen, 1998). The late 1940s and 1950s marked the
entrance of U.S. anthropologists onto educational terrain (see, e.g., Spindler, 1955).
The publication of Glaser & Strauss’ 1967 volume on “grounded theory” marked
a growing discontent with the dominance of positivism and experimental methods
throughout the social sciences (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1993, p. 12). Qualitative
approaches to research—especially ethnography—began to appear in education and
other fields including nursing and health studies, business and the organization of
work, science and technology, human geography, social psychology, cultural and me-
dia studies, and education (Atkinson et al., 2001), and have gained in prominence
ever since (Gilmore & Glatthorn, 1982; Spindler, 1982).
184 HARKLAU

Most classroom-based ethnographic research conducted over the past 3 decades

has theoretical roots in ethnomethodology, phenomenology, and symbolic interaction-
ism (Gordon, Holland, & Lahelma, 2001). These include Mehan’s (1979) “constitutive
ethnography” and Erickson’s (1975) “microethnography.” Like other interactionally-
oriented work, these approaches adopted video recording as a primary data collection
method in order to record subtleties of naturally occurring face-to-face interactions.
These approaches therefore shared a tendency toward intensive etic analysis of inter-
action and de-emphasis on participant observation and emic participant perspectives
(Bogdan & Biklen, 1998).
The ethnography of communication, with a broader focus on school and com-
munities (Watson-Gegeo, 1997), also figured prominently in the developing field of
educational ethnography. Hymes and Gumperz both played early and active roles in
the establishment of a community of scholars in educational ethnography (Cazden,
John, & Hymes, 1972; Gumperz, 1981). The civil rights movement and desegregation
in the 1960s provided increasing impetus for ethnographic studies of disadvantaged
and academically unsuccessful students and schools (Bogdan & Biklen, 1998). New
attention focused on ethnolinguistic and racial minority students. Paralleling the de-
velopment of work on child language socialization in linguistic anthropology (e.g.,
Schiefflin & Ochs, 1986), a major thrust of early educational ethnographic work was to
document child language socialization and cultural transmission in language minor-
ity communities in North America (Keating, 2001). Research demonstrated that class-
room interactions in Western-style schools have strong, culturally based, and often
implicit expectations for interaction among students and teachers. Scholars showed
that there were significant discontinuities or mismatches between these communica-
tive norms and those in language minority students’ homes and local communities
(Gal, 1989), and that institutional processes of power create differential school out-
comes through interactions and texts.
The use of ethnography in educational circles was also promoted by scholars taking
Vygotskian and Bakhtinian sociocultural perspectives who sought to document how
learning and development are situated in sociocultural contexts (e.g., Scribner & Cole,
1981; Tharp & Gallimore, 1988). Ethnography of communication and sociocultural
perspectives were also drawn on by literacy scholars seeking to counter cognitively
and innativist perspectives on reading and writing development. These scholars have
sought to document literacy practices—the ways in which reading and writing are
used in particular sociocultural contexts—as well as the beliefs and attitudes about
literacy that underlie these practices (Athanases & Heath, 1995; Barton, 1994; Cook-
Gumperz, 1986; Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Hornberger, 2000; Lam, 2000; Street, 1984;
Szwed, 1981).
From its beginnings, ethnographic work on language and communication has been
eclectic, borrowing from diverse disciplinary and intellectual traditions (e.g., Cazden,
John, & Hymes, 1972; Fishman, 1968; Gilmore & Glatthorn, 1982; Green & Wallat,
1981; Gumperz & Hymes, 1964; Spindler, 1982). Epistemological and methodologi-
cal distinctions among ethnography of communication, interactionist sociolinguistic
methods such as ethnomethodology, and discourse analytic methods deriving from
conversation analysis and Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics have been ob-
scured as these intellectual traditions have borrowed from one another (Duff, 2002).
Many first and second language and literacy educators (e.g., Ernst, 1994; Freeman,
1998; Green & Bloome, 1997; Lin, 1999; Rymes, 2001; van Lier, 1988; Watson-Gegeo,
1997; Willett, 1995) do not differentiate among these traditions or characterize their
work as a combination of approaches.
Other ethnography draws its methodological and epistemological roots from social
anthropology and sociology. For example, Ogbu (1987) and colleagues’ (e.g., Gibson &
 10. ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH 185

Ogbu, 1991) “cultural ecological” thesis argues that although interactionally oriented
approaches can explain how processes of minority school failure and language learn-
ing unfold, they cannot explain why. Influenced by Durkheimian sociology and neo-
Marxist work on class structures (Gordon et al., 2001), Ogbu looks instead to broad
sociohistorical and political forces shaping particular minority groups’ “folk models”
of their place in society. Other work in this tradition has focused at the institutional or
community, rather than classroom, level (e.g., Gebhard, 1999; Goto, 1997; Lee, 2001;
Levinson, Foley, & Holland, 1996; Olson, 1997; Trueba & Bartolomé, 2000; Weis & Fine,
2000). Ethnographers in the past 2 decades have increasingly portrayed the immedi-
ate context of face-to-face interaction and the broader contexts of school, community,
and society as mutually constitutive (e.g., Davidson, 1996; Phelan, Davidson, & Yu,
1998; Weis & Fine, 2000).
Paralleling other areas, critical approaches have gained influence in educational
ethnographic inquiry in recent years (see, e.g., Canagarajah, 1993; Goldstein, 1997a;
Gordon et al., 2001; Toohey, 1995; Trueba & Bartolomé, 2000; Watson-Gegeo, 1997).
These share some philosophical affinities with longstanding traditions of participatory
ethnography conducted in collaboration with or by participants such as teachers (see,
e.g, Gonzales & Moll, 1995) and ethnography utilized as a pedagogical tool to learn
inductively about students’ own or target cultures (e.g., Allen, 2000; Roberts, Byram,
Barro, Jordan, & Street, 2001). Ethnographies of teaching and learning language have
not been immune from incursions of poststructuralism that have influenced other
ethnographic efforts in recent years (Duff, 2002), with particular scrutiny given to the
anthropological and ethnographic concept of “culture” (e.g., Atkinson, 1999; Holliday,
1999).

CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHIES OF ADDITIONAL

LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING

The rising popularity of ethnography in social science research was noted in sev-
eral early articles in TESOL (e.g., Hannerz, 1973; McLeod, 1976). Many ethnographic
studies of classroom processes—including some focusing on bilingual students (e.g.,
Saravia-Shore & Arvizu, 1992; Trueba, Guthrie, & Au, 1981)—have appeared since
the mid-1970s. However, only after the mid-1980s have a significant number focused
on second language learners and second language learning per se (Watson-Gegeo,
1988). By 1995, Lazaraton found a small but increasing proportion of this research in
applied linguistics journals. In the past 15 years, ethnography has become a recog-
nized research tradition on L2 teaching and learning representing a wide diversity of
perspectives and findings.

Topics
Ethnographies of second language learning span instructional settings from elemen-
tary (e.g., Dagenais & Day, 1998; Edelsky, 1986; Ernst, 1994; Huss-Keeler, 1997; Toohey,
2000; Willett, 1995), to middle grades (e.g., Gomes & Martin, 1996; Katz, 1996; Lin,
1999; McKay & Wong, 1996; Toohey, 2000; Toohey, Waterstone, & Jule-Lemke, 2000;
Valdés, 2001), to secondary (e.g., Duff, 1995; Duff, 2002; Goldstein, 1997c; Guerra,
1996; Harklau, 1994; Harklau, 2000; Heller, 1999; Ibrahim, 1999; Rampton, 1995; Terdal,
1993; Vollmer, 2000), to adult education and college (e.g., Atkinson, 2003;
Atkinson & Ramanathan, 1995; Benson, 1989; Burnett, 1998; Canagarajah, 1993;
Flowerdew & Miller, 1995; Losey, 1997; Morita, 2000; Nelson & Carson, 1996; Nunan,
1996; Ramanathan, 1999; Spielmann & Radnofsky, 2001; Warshauer, 1998). Other
186 HARKLAU

ethnographies address workplace (Goldstein, 1997b; Holliday, 1995; Katz, 2000; Li,
2000) and community settings (Dagenais & Day, 1999; Norton, 2000; Trosset, 1986;
Valdés, 1996; Vasquez, Pease-Alvarez, & Shannon, 1994; Weinstein, 1997).
Classroom-based ethnographic studies of L2 learning in recent years have fo-
cused on a wide range of topics including teacher perspectives on lesson plan adjust-
ments (Nunan, 1996) and lectures (Flowerdew & Miller, 1995), student perspectives
on lecture comprehension (Benson, 1989; Flowerdew & Miller, 1995), dialog jour-
nals (Holmes & Moulton, 1995), cross-cultural expectations on parent involvement
in school (Huss-Keeler, 1997), experiences of learners in English as a Second Lan-
guage (ESL) (Gomes & Martin, 1996) and mainstream classrooms (Duff, 2002; Willett,
1995), student accommodation and resistance to learning English in a post-colonial
context (Canagarajah, 1993), the relationship of gender and language learning (Losey,
1997; Woolard, 1997), the effects of computers on foreign language classroom inter-
action (Burnett, 1998), the experiences of multilingual children in French immersion
programs (Dagenais & Day, 1998), microanalyses of ESL and English as a Foreign Lan-
guage (EFL) classroom interactions (Duff, 1995; Ernst, 1994; Nelson & Carson, 1996;
Toohey et al., 2000) and oral presentations in graduate seminars (Morita, 2000).
Several studies harness ethnographic methodology in order to conduct needs anal-
yses (Holliday, 1995; Northcott, 2001) or to describe and evaluate bilingual and L2
curricula and programs (Edelsky, 1986; Freeman, 1998; Guthrie, 1985; Shaw, 1996;
Terdal, 1993). Holliday (1994) advocates an “ethnographic action research” approach
in order to develop and evaluate context-sensitive L2 curricula. Other program and
curriculum-focused ethnographies include an analysis of contrasting programmatic
cultures and expectations in L1 and L2 college composition programs (Atkinson
& Ramanathan, 1995), tensions among Anglophone and Francophone teachers at a
Canadian French immersion school (Cleghorn & Genesee, 1984), the role of race and
gender in study-abroad program experiences (Siegal, 1996; Talburt & Stewart, 1999),
and influences on computer use in an ESL composition classroom (Warshauer, 1998).
At the institutional level, ethnographic studies have focused on interethnic peer
communication at an English high school (Rampton, 1995), Latino youth involvement
in gangs (Katz, 1996), sociopolitical factors in English learning in postcolonial contexts
(Atkinson, 2003; Lin, 1999; Ramanathan, 1999), the influence of race on English lan-
guage learning (Ibrahim, 1999), and language learning anxiety in an intensive French
program (Spielmann & Radnofsky, 2001). Other studies have aimed to describe holisti-
cally the experiences of additional language learners in settings including a Canadian
French immersion high school (Heller, 1999), North American English-medium ele-
mentary schools (Toohey, 2000), middle schools (McKay & Wong, 1996; Valdés, 2001),
and high schools (Goldstein, 1997c; Harklau, 1994; Vollmer, 2000).
Yet other ethnographies take place in a wide range of community and workplace
settings. Goldstein (1997b) and Katz (2000) utilize critical ethnography to illustrate
underlying assumptions in workplace ESL. Li (2000) looks at cross-cultural commu-
nication styles in the workplace. Norton (2000) and Trosset (1986) document adult
language learning across community settings. Several studies document the home
and community lives and language practices of children, youth, and adults in order
to contrast them with classroom contexts (Dagenais & Day, 1999; Guerra, 1996; Moore,
1999; Valdés, 1996; Vasquez et al., 1994; Weinstein, 1997).

Methods
In addition to participant observation, fieldnotes, recordings, and interviews, ethno-
graphies of L2 teaching and learning have also incorporated a variety of other data
sources including teacher lecture notes and handouts (Benson, 1989), annotated lesson
plans (Nunan, 1996), samples of textbooks and student-written materials (Canagarajah,
 10. ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH 187

1993; Dagenais & Day, 1998; Flowerdew & Miller, 1995; Harklau, 1994; Huss-Keeler,
1997), participant diaries and journals (Flowerdew & Miller, 1995; Katz, 1996;
Norton, 2000; Shaw, 1996), dialog journals (Holmes & Moulton, 1995); elicited writing
on target language attitudes (Canagarajah, 1993); participant life history narratives
(Guerra, 1996); participant commentary on video recordings (Morita, 2000; Nelson &
Carson, 1996) and other member checks (Moore, 1999), focus groups (Flowerdew &
Miller, 1995; Talburt & Stewart, 1999), and questionnaires (Canagarajah, 1993; Holmes
& Moulton, 1995; Morita, 2000; Northcott, 2001). Many studies focus on one (Benson,
1989) to several (Dagenais & Day, 1998; Harklau, 1994; Holmes & Moulton, 1995; Katz,
1996; Li, 2000; Losey, 1997; Moore, 1999; Norton, 2000; Toohey, 2000) focal participants
within the study context.
Studies may also incorporate ethnographic principles and techniques in pseudo-
experimental, case study, discourse analytic, and survey research designs (see, e.g.,
Blanton, 1998; Gomes & Martin, 1996; Harklau, 2000; Lam, 2000; Liebman-Kline, 1987;
Liou, 1997; Rivers, 2001; Siegal, 1996; Takashima, 1992; Taylor, 1992; Tella, 1992). Others
tap ethnographic techniques such as interviews or written reflections in exploratory
research and pilot studies (see, e.g., Bartelt, 1997; Goldstein, 1997c).

Weaknesses and Controversies

Paralleling other applied fields such as education (see, e.g., Athanases & Heath, 1995;
Rist, 1980; Spindler, 1982), there is an ongoing tension in the second language research
community between codifying what constitutes “good” ethnography and yet honor-
ing diverse scholarly traditions and perspectives. Sociologists and anthropologists
until recently relied on disciplinary apprenticeship (Deegan, 2001, p. 20) and rarely
articulated their methods formally. The spread of ethnography into other disciplines
without established ethnographic traditions in the 1970s generated new textbooks
and handbooks (e.g., Bogdan & Taylor, 1975; Lofland, 1971). Much of the impetus to
standardize and formalize ethnographic conventions still comes from applied fields,
particularly education (see, e.g., Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Hammersley & Atkinson,
1993; Wolcott, 1999).
One difficulty is that the proliferation of ethnographic approaches in applied fields
has had a homogenizing influence, folding ethnography into a broader and often un-
differentiated category of “qualitative research.” Some (e.g., Edge & Richards, 1998;
Watson-Gegeo, 1997; Wolcott, 1999) continue to caution that not all qualitative ap-
proaches are in fact ethnographic. For example, Atkinson et al. (2001) note that al-
though in-depth interviews, focus groups, and the collection of textual materials may
be valuable methods of qualitative inquiry, they do not constitute ethnography when
collected independent of participant observation. Likewise, in applied linguistics,
Lazaraton (1995) has pointed out that TESOL Quarterly’s original qualitative research
guidelines confounded the disparate approaches of ethnography and conversation
analysis.
The lack of clear definitions also leads to concerns about the misapplication of
the term “ethnography” to inadequately conceptualized or designed research (e.g.,
Watson-Gegeo, 1988). Mindful of the dominance of quantitatively-oriented positivist
and postpositivist perspectives in applied linguistics, ethnographers worry that a lack
of clear standards will reinforce a “default assumption” that qualitative studies lack
rigor (Davis, 1995, p. 432). Nevertheless, as Atkinson et al. (2001) and Wolcott (1999)
acknowledge, there remains considerable debate on what may be called ethnography.
The level of methodological reporting and detail varies widely in ethnographic
research reports in applied linguistics. A lack of detail in some publications—for
example, amounts and types of data collected—is problematic because many (but not
all) scholars assess studies’ rigor, validity, or credibility by their methodology. That
188 HARKLAU

being said, the overall amount of data and variety of data sources in ethnographic
studies of additional language learning and teaching appear to be increasing. Whereas
some ethnographic studies of second language acquisition (SLA) may still involve as
little as 5 weeks of fieldwork (e.g., Talburt & Stewart, 1999), it is no longer unusual for
ethnographies to span multiple years (e.g., Flowerdew & Miller, 1995; Harklau, 1994;
Heller, 1999; Toohey, 2000; Valdés, 1996).
A final difficulty is that ethnographic work remains limited primarily to White
Anglophone researchers in English-speaking countries. There remains a paucity of
ethnographic work on language learning outside of North America and Britain (but
see Atkinson, 2003; Canagarajah, 1993; Duff, 1995; Flowerdew & Miller, 1995; Lin,
1999; Moore, 1999; Ramanathan, 1999; Siegal, 1996; Talburt & Stewart, 1999; Woolard,
1997). English remains the target language in the vast majority of studies (but see
Burnett, 1998; Dagenais & Day, 1998; Dagenais & Day, 1999; Moore, 1999; Spielmann
& Radnofsky, 2001; Trosset, 1986; Woolard, 1997). Although McKay & Wong (1996)
argue that researcher ethnicity and linguistic background are crucial in what ethno-
graphic data are collected and how they are analyzed, much of the ethnographic
work in applied linguistics neither takes a reflexive stance on researcher subjectiv-
ities nor explicitly articulates epistemological positionings. By its absence, this sug-
gests the predominance of realist orientations. Researchers taking critical and post-
structuralist perspectives (see e.g. Canagarajah, 1993; Goldstein, 1997b; Harklau, 2000;
Ibrahim, 1999; Katz, 2000; Lin, 1999; McKay & Wong, 1996; Norton, 2000; Toohey, 2000;
Vollmer, 2000) tend to be more explicit regarding their epistemological stances toward
ethnographic knowledge.

CONCLUSION

As this review has suggested, there are some hallmarks of ethnographic research com-
mon to most studies. For example, virtually all approaches are marked by firsthand,
naturalistic, sustained participant observation in the social setting(s) under study.
Multiple sources of data are also deemed desirable by most ethnographers, as well
as an iterative, in-depth, and systematic process of data collection and analysis. In
addition, there appears to be an emerging consensus that micro-level processes of
interaction are embedded in or mutually constitutive with macro-level institutional
and societal economic, cultural, and political structures, even though in actual practice
researchers focus at particular contextual levels (Duff, 2002; Scollon, 1995). Beyond
these commonalities, however, we run into vastly different notions of what constitutes
ethnography. Nevertheless, second language researchers often use the term ethnog-
raphy generically without situating their work in specific intellectual and method-
ological traditions. Even fewer articulate contrasts among ethnographic traditions.
Perhaps one reason for this is that ethnographic schools of thought tend to be
defined in opposition to other modes of inquiry rather than against each other. For
example, well into the 1990s qualitative research methodologies in applied linguistics
were typically only discussed insofar as they contrasted with psychometric, post-
positivist approaches, neglecting contrasts within qualitative traditions (Lazaraton,
1995). Likewise, linguistic anthropologists have tended to contrast ethnography of
communication against structuralist linguistics (Gal, 1989; Watson-Gegeo, 1997) or
experimental social psychology (Wieder, 1999) rather than against other ethnographic
traditions. Hence, they have tended to emphasize its historical links with other
ethnographic traditions (Keating, 2001) and downplay differences in approach and
emphasis.
Another reason is the often implicit influence of these ethnographic communities
of practice on one another. All ethnography entails a tension between representations
 10. ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH 189

of participants’ emic perspectives and the abstractions and interpretations layered on

them by the ethnographer’s etic perspective (Watson-Gegeo, 1988). However, as this
review indicates, schools of ethnographic inquiry also vary significantly in their over-
all focus, be it the traditional anthropological emically-oriented what of participant
understandings and experiences, or the interactional sociolinguist’s etically-oriented
how participants structure social realities through interaction. The epistemological
and methodological disparities underlying these foci were quite salient to early edu-
cational ethnographers but have received less attention over time. Although both foci
are equally worthy and enlightening, research in second language studies would ben-
efit from more awareness and explicit differentiation about the differing assumptions,
premises, data collection, and methods of analysis guiding ethnographic approaches.
Ethnographers and other qualitative researchers in second language studies no
doubt still contend with misunderstandings and questions about their work from
psychometrically- and experimentally-oriented colleagues. Yet this review has traced
an ethnographic tradition within studies of second language learning and bilingual-
ism that extends back more than 30 years, and a century-long tradition of ethnography
underlying that. It also indicates both emerging and longstanding strands of schol-
arship in which ethnography has been the predominant methodological frame. The
long history and current vitality of ethnographic work in second language studies
suggests that it should no longer be necessary to legitimize ethnographic approaches
in applied linguistics. A defensive stance contributes to prescriptivism and hampers
applied linguists from joining the lively and contentious conversation taking place
among other ethnographers and qualitative researchers regarding the nature and form
of ethnographic knowledge.
Given the varying approaches associated with ethnography, I believe it is undesir-
able or even impossible to develop absolute pronouncements for what ethnography
is or should be in studies of second language learning. After all, as Moore (1999) ar-
gues, agreement would preclude the sort of self-reflexive and critical stance that is
advocated across much of the field. Rather, what this review suggests is that we must
ultimately judge the utility and quality of ethnographic work by researchers’ ability
to situate their work within a particular ethnographic and intellectual tradition (see
Davis, 1995 for a similar argument) and to show how their work makes a novel or
useful contribution to scholarship in that tradition.

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11

Case Study
Leo van Lier
Monterey Institute of International Studies

WHAT ARE CASE STUDIES?

As a research methodology, case study research has been extremely influential in

shaping the way we talk about education, yet it has traditionally been regarded as
somewhat of a soft and weak approach when compared to studies that have been
deemed more rigorous, randomized, or experimental in nature. In general education
we can cite Wolcott’s classic case study of “The man in the principal’s office” (1973)1 ; in
language acquisition theory, Halliday’s study of Nigel (1975); and in second language
learning, Schmidt’s study of Wes (1983). These and many other case studies have
shaped discussion and research in their respective fields of focus in forceful and
productive ways. This chapter aims to examine the case study as a valuable tool to
examine educational reality.
Case study research is primarily a form of qualitative and interpretive research,
although quantitative analyses are sometimes used if they are deemed relevant. It
relates in various ways to other kinds of research, such as action research, ethnography,
and experimental research. This chapter describes what case study research is, how
and why it is done, and evaluate its impact on the field over the past 2 or 3 decades.
Case study research has become a key method for researching changes in complex
phenomena over time. Many of the processes investigated in case studies cannot
be adequately researched in any of the other common research methods, such as
laboratory experiments, cross-sectional process-product research (such as pretest–
treatment–posttest measures), and direct testing. But how do we know when a case
study is the best way to approach a certain area of investigation and when another
method might be more effective? I will try to answer that question in this introduction.
Among the advantages of the case study approach are the attention to context and
the ability to track and document change (such as language development) over time.
In addition, a case study zeros in on a particular case (an individual, a group, or a
situation) in great detail, within its natural context of situation, and tries to probe into
its characteristics, dynamics, and purposes.
When a case study is about an individual, we want to understand how that in-
dividual functions in the real context in which he or she lives or works. As Johnson
says:

195
196 VAN LIER

case studies can provide rich information about an individual learner. They can in-
form us about the processes and strategies that individual L2 [second language] learn-
ers use to communicate and learn, how their personalities, attitudes, and goals interact
with the learning environment, and about the precise nature of their linguistic growth.
(1992, p. 76)

So, case studies focus on context, change over time, and specific learners or groups.
In other words, when we want to understand how a specific unit (person, group)
functions in the real world over a significant period of time, a case study approach
may be the best way to go about it.
One of the classic texts on case study research is Yin (1989). He defines case study
as, “an empirical inquiry that:

r investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context;

r when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident;
and in which
r multiple sources of evidence are used.”(p. 23).

Yin’s definition establishes some proposed features of the notion of case: a phe-
nomenon in a real-life context (as opposed to, presumably, a laboratory setting), but
one in which the notion of “boundaries” between phenomenon and context may be
somewhat blurred. Let’s explore this a bit further. Merriam (1988/1998) defines a case
as “a single instance, phenomenon, or social unit” (p. 27). Other authors likewise
struggle with this notion of boundedness. For Smith (1978), a case is a “bounded sys-
tem.” Stake (1995) calls it an “integrated system.” Miles and Huberman (1994) call
a case “a phenomenon of some sort occurring in a bounded context” (p. 25). These
quotes point to a major problem area, which we can sum up in the question: What
are the boundaries of a case? Merriam admonishes us that, “if the phenomenon you
are interested in studying is not intrinsically bounded, it is not a case” (p. 27). On
the other hand, Miles and Huberman suggest that intrinsic boundedness may not be
so easy to establish. They agree that the case must be the unit of analysis, in which
there is a “heart” or focus of the study, but then there is a “somewhat indeterminate
boundary defining the edge of the case: what will not be studied” (1994, p. 25).
We can see in this argument some kind of struggle about defining what a case
really is. Of course, if it is one person, the boundary—in a relatively trivial sense—
is the skin around the body. But this merely sidesteps the social, distributed side of
behavior, cognition, and interaction. The point here is that if the case study draws the
boundary rigidly, it may oversimplify and isolate the case.
Having looked at the characteristics of the notion of “case” and its boundedness in
the larger context, we can proceed to identify different kinds of cases. In the first place,
a case can be a single individual, such as a second language learner. However, a case
can also be a group of individuals with a common context, set of goals, or some kind of
institutional boundedness. Examples are a classroom, a foreign language department,
a program, a school, or an administrative office. Clearly, all of these examples, from
individual to group to institution, are bounded in some way, but in none of the cases
are the boundaries impermeable or watertight.
Another approach to specifying the notion of case is L. S. Shulman’s classification
of the use of cases and case methods in education. He distinguishes seven common
types of cases:

1. Case materials: the raw data that are used (diaries, interview data, transcriptions).
2. Case reports: first-person accounts, usually in narrative form.
 11. CASE STUDY 197

3. Case studies: third-person accounts, the most common way in which cases are
reported.
4. Teaching cases: case studies that are edited for training or teaching purposes, for
example, those commonly used in business schools.
5. Case methods of teaching: a methodology developed for teaching by means of
teaching cases.
6. Casebooks: collections of cases, for example, for teacher education (J. H. Shulman,
1992).
7. Case-based curriculum: a curriculum built around the use of cases, casebooks, etc.
(J. S. Shulman, 1992, p. 19).

In second language acquisition (SLA), most of the time we will be referring to

case studies (the third category above), that is, descriptive third-person accounts
of a learner or a group of learners. However, as I will illustrate, below, we can
also use case studies as input in SLA courses (including book-length autobiograph-
ical novels, as suggested in Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000), and we can, of course, also
use teaching cases in preservice or inservice professional development for language
teachers.

THE PLACE OF CASE STUDY RESEARCH IN SLA THEORY

AND PRACTICE

This section places case study research within the larger topic of research in SLA
and applied linguistics and discusses how it can contribute to the knowledge of the
field. As mentioned in the introduction, case study research is usually qualitative and
interpretive (even though there is no argument that precludes quantification, see Yin,
1989). Case studies are contextual forms of research, and as we have seen, one of
the inherent problems is to draw the boundaries around the case. Another variable
concerns the degree of intervention in the setting that is designed into the study. At
the least-intervention end research is more ethnographic, and at the more intervention
end research becomes action research.
These observations mean that ethnographies and action research are in a sense
case studies because they fall within the scope of Yin’s definition quoted above.
In Fig. 11.1 the variables “individual–collective” (i.e., one person or a group) and

no intervention

observation observation

individual collective

pedagogical action research

treatment,
elicitation

intervention

FIG. 11.1. Approaches to Case Study Research.

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“no intervention–invention” (i.e., if some kind of treatment or change is involved)

are juxtaposed to show how case studies may take varying approaches in prac-
tice.
In the past, case studies have often been accorded less status than more rigorously
controlled experimental or process-product studies because, as the argument often
goes, case studies are not generalizable. However, this criticism is unwarranted. It
is probably true that it is difficult to generalize from an individual (or a group) to
an entire population without the presence of strict controls to account for environ-
mental variables. However, there is also a form of generalization that proceeds not
from an individual case to a population, but from lower-level constructs to higher-
level ones. Futhermore, in the practical world in which case studies are conducted,
particularization may be just as important—if not more so—than generalization. By par-
ticularization I mean that insights from a case study can inform, be adapted to, and
provide comparative information to a wide variety of other cases, so long as one is
careful to take contextual differences into account. Furthermore, if two cases provide
apparently contradictory information about a certain issue, such as social and psy-
chological distance in the cases of Alberto (Schumann, 1978) and Wes (Schmidt, 1983),
this contrast can provide much food for thought and further research, thus being of
great benefit to the field.
If we look at the history of our field, it is no exaggeration to say that several famous
case studies have played a large role in shaping the knowledge base that we now
have. In first language acquisition we have the well known case study of Nigel by
M. A. K. Halliday (1975). This study was instrumental in shaping Halliday’s perspec-
tive on functional grammar and his view of language as social semiotic. In applied
linguistics, seminal case studies include the already mentioned study by Schumann
of Alberto (1978) a Puerto Rican immigrant to the United States, and Schmidt’s two
case studies, one of Wes (1983) a Japanese painter living in Hawaii, and the other of R
(Schmidt himself, as a learner of Portuguese in Brazil; Schmidt & Frota, 1986). The lat-
ter is also a first-person diary study, and thus illustrates a different genre within case
study.
These case studies helped to shape these researchers’ theoretical positions, and
they have also helped to shape the entire field in quite substantial ways. Schumann
developed his notions of social and psychological distance on the basis of the Alberto
study, and from these ideas he constructed the acculturation model, which to this day
is a prominent topic of discussion in the field. Schmidt, on the other hand, in his case
study of Wes, pointed to certain problems with Schumann’s model, and looked in
detail at the construct of communicative competence to suggest some ways in which
the acculturation model might have to be reevaluated. In the later study on R, Schmidt
focused on attention and noticing and used the case study findings to make detailed
proposals about the role of consciousness in a number of later studies. We can thus
conclude that, far from being marginal studies of merely anecdotal value, case studies
have played a key role in shaping the knowledge base of SLA.
Also worth mentioning is the value of case study as a vehicle for apprenticing stu-
dents in the field (in preservice and postgraduate programs). There are two particular
ways in which case studies are used (and are useful) as inductions into the field. First,
given the bewildering variety and complexity of the issues involved in SLA (from the
perspective of the novice), a well written case study can bring to life many key issues
and illustrate their relevance in dramatic, contextualized ways, something that a text-
book or a controlled experimental research study cannot do. Second, it can be very
valuable for graduate students in SLA to conduct a small case study as part of their
introduction to the research community. Once again, such hands-on contextualized
work can be instrumental in bringing to life the questions and problems discussed in
the theoretical textbooks and research reports.
 11. CASE STUDY 199

THE HISTORY OF CASE STUDIES IN SLA

This section summarizes some of the major case studies that have been conducted
and shows how they have been influential in the field. For convenience I will divide
them into studies of adult and child L2 development.

Case Studies of Adult SLA Development

I already mentioned the case studies by Schumann (1978) and Schmidt (1983; Schmidt
& Frota, 1986), and indicated how these studies have contributed tremendously to
some of the core discussions in our field. There have been a number of other case
studies of adult learners, and I will give just a brief overview here of some of the most
well known ones.
One of the major longitudinal studies was conducted under the auspices of the Eu-
ropean Science Foundation (ESF) over a period of 10 years, in five different European
countries (France, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom).
Participants were adult immigrants speaking a variety of minority languages: Pun-
jabi, Italian, Turkish, Arabic, Spanish, and Finnish. The study is actually a hybrid
between a crosslinguistic data collection project and a contextualized observational
project. It is perhaps due to this tension between controlled elicitation and participant
observation, the study has resulted in several publications that are quite different in
nature. Linguistic sequences and interlanguage grammars are carefully traced and
documented in, for example, Klein and Perdue (1992), whereas a more interpretive,
ethnographic perspective (i.e., a more traditional case study approach, with strong
narrative elements) was taken in Bremer, Roberts, Vasseur, Simonot, and Broeder, 1996.
As discussed in the following, the ESF study led to the description of a “basic va-
riety” of language, sufficient for minimal survival purposes, but one that immigrants
often cannot get beyond. One the other hand, the ESF study also showed the need to
study language development in its social context (see also Norton Peirce, 1995), and
to focus on issues of understanding, awareness, identity, and power.
Some other case studies of adult SLA, for example, Huebner (1983), Ioup, Boustagui,
El Tigi, and Moselle (1995), include detailed and meticulous documentation of lin-
guistic development. Huebner’s study of a Hmong immigrant in Hawaii tracks, for
example, the development of the article system over an extended period of time, and
Ioup et al. study the learning histories and the nativelike performance (including
syntactic and phonological) of two successful learners of Egyptian Arabic.

Case Studies of Child Second Language Development

There have been a large number of studies of first and second language acquisition
of children. The first well known effort was Leopold’s study of the acquisition of
German and English by his daughter Hildegard, conducted over a number of years
beginning in the 1930’s (Hatch, 1978). Another major effort is Slobin’s edited series
of crosslinguistic studies of first and second language acquisition in five volumes
(so far 1985–1992). This contains case studies in a number of different countries and
languages.
In addition, Elisabeth Bates, Brian MacWhinney, and associates (MacWhinney &
Bates, 1989) have conducted a series of studies from the perspective of the compe-
tition model of language acquisition, and more recently, the emergentist perspective
(MacWhinney, 1999). In these case studies the argument is made that the environ-
ment plays a crucial role in language acquisition, thus contradicting the perspective
of nativist researchers in the Chomskyan tradition who, by and large, consider the
environmental contribution to be limited, minimal, or even just trivial (Pinker, 1994).
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Given the great variety of child language acquisition studies, I will take one crucial
topic in SLA and see how case studies have dealt with it. This is the topic of sequences
of acquisition, that is, the stages that learners go through in the acquisition of the
second language. This issue is very important because educators, politicians, parents,
and all other stakeholders continually debate the question of how long it takes En-
glish language learners to reach a level of proficiency that allows them to profit from
mainstream education (Hakuta, 1986; Hakuta, Butler, & Witt, 2000; van Lier, 1999).

SEQUENCES IN SLA—A CASE IN POINT

L2 learners, especially young children, often begin their learning career with a silent
stage, which can last for several months. During this stage, which Itoh and Hatch (1978,
p. 78) call the “rejection stage,” learners don’t speak, and it is unclear how much they
absorb. It often appears to be a rather traumatic period, during which learners have
problems adjusting in the new setting, especially in immersion contexts.
Once learners begin to speak, they tend to use formulaic expressions for conversa-
tional interaction and acquire basic vocabulary. Most case studies report that gram-
matical structures used in these early stages are “unanalyzed,” that is, they cannot
be used to produce new utterances. Rather, they are acquired as whole chunks, as
if they were one word. An example would be “I dunno,” which contains a subject
pronoun (I), an auxiliary verb (DO), a negator (NOT) and a lexical verb (KNOW), but
learners do not know this at this formulaic stage (Fillmore, 1976). It is only later that
they begin to distinguish verbs, negators, etc., and auxiliary verbs are acquired even
later than that. So, a child may say, “I dunno” (or “adunno,” more precisely) after a
few months of learning English, and only later begin to realize that this is a phrase
consisting of four words. In addition, something that was said correctly at one stage,
such as an irregular verb form (gave, came) may at a later stage be changed to an in-
correct form (gived, comed) due to the powerful influence of a rule that is beginning to
be learned. This phenomenon is known as the U-shaped learning curve (Kellerman,
1985), where learning new structures involves breaking apart conversational chunks
that were learned earlier as unanalyzed units.
A more psycholinguistic or cognitive science approach to the issue of developmen-
tal processing is illustrated in the recent work of Manfred Pienemann (Pienemann,
1998). The processibility theory developed by Pienemann posits that there are certain
stages of cognitive complexity and processing constraints in language that lead to a
clearly identifiable progression in acquisition. Without going into the complex details
of Pienemann’s theory, at every stage there are certain prerequisites that need to be
met for further progress to be possible. For example, rich lexical information needs to
be available before a progression to complex syntactic patterns is possible.
Returning to the case studies, in most instances data are collected for about 6 months
or less to a year or a bit more, and they report little grammatical development beyond
the formulaic level (Fillmore, 1976; Itoh & Hatch, 1978). Some of the longer case stud-
ies, those that last for more than a year (Hakuta, 1975; Sato, 1990) report at the end of
their study a level of grammatical mastery that is still very simple. Syntactic features
such as third-person s (she walks), auxiliary verbs, modals, past tense, subordina-
tion, and relative clauses, and so on, are rarely developed after 1 year of exposure to
English.
In case studies of adults, which are often longer than 1 year, sometimes up to
3 or 5 years long (Huebner, 1983; Ioup et al., 1995; Klein & Perdue, 1992; Schmidt,
1983; Shapira, 1978), a picture of great variability emerges. It appears that adults (say,
learners19 and older; see also Bialystok & Hakuta, 1994) have a far greater range of
variation in terms of speed of acquisition and ultimate achievement than do younger
 11. CASE STUDY 201

learners. One plausible reason for this is that younger people are in a relatively ho-
mogeneous school environment, and the range of expectations and peer contexts is
similar. At least this applies to those younger people who are or remain in the school
environment, and who therefore are available to be tested.
Many studies of adults (e.g., Huebner, 1983; Schmidt, 1983; Schumann, 1978) show
very little grammatical improvement over time, and even studies of exceptionally
successful learners show a process that takes several years (Dietrich, Klein, & Noyau,
1995; Ioup et al., 1995). Klein and Perdue, in their extensive study of second language
development (the European Science Foundation project previously mentioned), re-
port that all learners (at least untutored learners) begin by developing a “basic vari-
ety” that is grammatically very simple, but versatile and flexible for use in everyday
conversation (Klein & Perdue, 1992). This basic variety is similar to what Schumann
called “pidginization,” and it may involve “fossilization” (Schumann, 1978). These
latter terms refer to cases in which the learner stays at this simple grammatical stage
indefinitely, a phenomenon Klein and Perdue also report for many of the learners
studied in their multiyear, multicountry project (Klein & Perdue, 1992). However,
Klein and Perdue also report cases of learners who, after 1 1/2 or 2 years (there is great
variability) begin to move out of the basic variety and begin to develop more com-
plex grammatical structures, which gradually allow them a wider range of linguistic
comprehension and expression.
To illustrate the issue of sequences in second language acquisition, the following
are some brief summaries of some of the classic case studies:

r Hakuta (1976): Hakuta studied the acquisition of English of Uguisu, the 5-year-
old daughter of a visiting scholar from Japan. Data were collected for a period of 60
weeks (roughly 1 year and 2 months), after Uguisu had had 5 months of exposure to
English. The first 5 months (before data collection began) appear to have been a silent
period. At the end of the data collection period (after data sample 30), the following
grammatical (morphosyntactic) features are reported as not having been acquired:

3rd person s
irregular past
regular past
plural s

Although Uguisu achieved criterion (that is, 90% correct use for articles around week
40; Hakuta argues, through an analysis of correct use, that full semantic control of the
article system is not acquired until much later).
r Yoshida (1978): A 3.5-year-old Japanese boy, Mikihide, was observed over a pe-
riod of 7 months to study vocabulary development. The Peabody Picture Vocabulary
Test (PPVT) was administered twice. During the first 3 months the subject produced
one-word utterances. Comprehension was far superior to production. In 7 months, he
acquired about 260 words, in many cases aided by recognition of English loanwords
in Japanese. In production, his pronunciation was not always recognized by native
speakers of English, and “iz” was used as a generic verb.
r Itoh and Hatch (1978): A Japanese child, Takahiro, 2.6 years old, was observed for
6 months in naturalistic context (observations, recordings). Itoh and Hatch identified
three stages of language development over the period of the study:

rejection stage (3 months)

repetition stage (end of 3rd month)
spontaneous speech stage (4th month)
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The repetition stage began when Takahiro’s aunt came to visit and began to play a
“repeat after me” game with pictures. At the end of the study, verb acquisition was
quite limited in comparison to nouns. He did not mark sentences for tense. There was
no evidence of 3rd person s, or of development of AUX (auxiliaries). His utterances
were not highly developed, but he could carry on conversations quite easily with
others.
r Sato (1990): Sato studied two Vietnamese brothers, 10 and 12, living with an
English-speaking family. The length of the study was 1 year and 3 months. The par-
ticipants went to school but received no native language support and no English as
a Second Language (ESL) classes. The oldest, Thanh, was placed in sixth grade, the
younger brother, Tai, in a third/fourth grade combination class. Sato focused on past
tense reference and found very little evidence of syntacticization and minimal im-
provement over time. No consistent inflected past verbs were observed. Next, Sato
discussed complex propositions and their syntactic encoding (predication, argument
structure) and found very little evidence of the acquisition of complex propositions.
Development of subordination, complementation, relative clauses, etc., was also min-
imal. At the end of the study the brothers were only just beginning to use logical
connectors.
r Butterworth and Hatch (1978): This study focused on a 13 year-old Colombian,
upper-class boy. He had had grammatical instruction in English in Colombia. He had
been in school in the United States for 2 months when the study began. The study
lasted 3 months, hence, final reports cover a 5-month span. Ricardo had problems
adjusting to America. He did not develop tense or aspect, did not use DO-support,
did not develop objective or possessive case for pronouns. Butterworth and Hatch
hypothesized that the tremendous pressure Ricardo was under to express complex
meanings resulted in reduction and simplification of both input and output. Overall,
he showed very little improvement over the period.
r Fillmore (1976): The study looked at the L2 development of five Latino children
over a period of 1 school year, from September to March. During that period, two of
the children went back to Mexico for up to several months. Note, this is an issue that
needs to be reckoned with: many students miss substantial portions of the school year
because their families take extended trips back home, especially around Christmas
time. Fillmore reported little solid progress in terms of structural development and
cited a wide variation in conversational strategies used by the children to join games
in the playground, etc.

To summarize, if we use case studies to address the question of how long it takes
for children to acquire a second language, no clear answer emerges because the case
studies are too short to provide the full picture. However, it does become clear that
second language acquisition, even for children (who are popularly supposed to just
“pick it up”), is a protracted affair, taking much longer than is commonly assumed.
Children do give the impression early on of surprising conversational ability, but
the case studies show that this impression is created by clever use of conversational
phrases.
Following from this conclusion, it should come as no surprise that when English
language learners reach a stage in their schooling (from fourth grade upward) when
cognitive and academic language skills become of paramount importance, they hit a
wall of complexity that their basic conversational skills cannot penetrate, and at that
point they fall further and further behind (a phenomenon Dutch researchers have
called divergence, see Verhoeven, 1990), unless specific steps are taken to develop their
academic-linguistic competence. Superficial examinations of these learners’ language
skills (often by linguistically naı̈ve/untrained counselors) suggest that this is not a
language problem, and these learners are then simply shunted into low expectation
 11. CASE STUDY 203

streams or tracks. Politicians and other public figures who know little or nothing about
language acquisition are able to claim, on the basis of hearsay about the linguistic
precocity of some children who, using a reduced basic variety, are able to impress
adults with their apparent fluency, that children can learn a second language within
a year, and that this is sufficient for mainstreaming in the school system. There are no
reliable data of any kind that could possibly support such claims or practices, which
therefore must be regarded as wholly irresponsible and unprofessional.
Case studies are a powerful way of showing some of the complexities of acquiring
a second language. Many more such studies are needed that document the acquisition
of academic discourse at the middle and secondary school level, to find out precisely
what the difficulties are that students face at that point and to develop strategies that
work (Gibbons, 2002; Nystrand, 1997).

CURRENT ISSUES

Currently a great deal of educational research focuses on longitudinal, situative (con-

textualized), and ecological studies, ideal topics for a case study approach. In gen-
eral education, an ongoing debate is that between cognitivist and situative research
paradigms (Anderson, Reder, & Simon, 1997; Greeno, 1997). Issues that are debated
include the role of social context (and social activity) in the acquisition of skills and
knowledge and, relatedly, the extent to which abilities acquired in one task context can
be transferred to another context. This notion of the relative situatedness of knowl-
edge and skills is also important in SLA. Proficiency is variable, and the conditions
that govern this variability are not at all well understood (Tarone, 1983). van Lier and
Matsuo (2000) take a conversation analytical approach to variation in L2 proficiency,
but it is likely that carefully documented case studies can also shed much further light
on this area (Norton, 2000).
Another area much in need of case study research is the role of technology in SLA
for example, case studies of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC; Warschauer
& Kern, 2000). Questions addressed include the similarities and differences between
face-to-face interaction and CMC, issues of motivation and autonomy in online learn-
ing contexts (Wegerif, 1998), and the challenges of building collaborative communities
of learners online. One area of great urgency is the so-called Digital Divide, the no-
tion that access to technology is inherently unequally distributed among different
social groups, genders, schools, countries, and so on. One approach taken to this issue
by politicians, administrators, and business leaders is to provide “free” (nothing is
ever really free, of course) hardware and wiring to poor neighborhoods and schools.
However, cursory inspection suffices to reveal that, even if equipment and wiring are
identical, access is not thereby magically equalized. For example, it is frequently ob-
served that in poorer schools students tend to do mind-numbing “drill-and-kill” types
of work, whereas in wealthier schools students will be designing websites, movies,
electronic portfolios, and so on (Crook, 1994; Merrow, 1995). Case studies can do much
to illuminate the ingredients of inequality in schools and to dispel the notion that the
Digital Divide is basically about hardware and software. It is much more basically
about pedagogy, professional preparation, and curriculum.
A further area in which the case study approach can be very useful is in teacher
education, both pre-service and in-service. I already suggested that in graduate SLA
courses students can profit from studying the prominent case studies in the field and
also from conducting their own small case study. In addition, teacher professional
development benefits from the use of case descriptions, either as small vignettes or
as longer narrative descriptions of specific settings. Examples of this include Bailey,
Curtis, & Nunan (2001), Clandinin and Connolly (1995), and Shulman (1992).
204 VAN LIER

Finally, critical applied linguists (Pennycook, 2001) and critical discourse analysts
(Auerbach, 1992; Clark & Ivanic, 1997; Fairclough, 1995) take an overtly ideolog-
ical stance that aims to bring about social and educational change in the settings
in which we work. They basically take the perspective that language is a political
tool, often used as a form of control, persuasion, exclusion, and discrimination. Lit-
eracy, writing, and general language classes can focus on the sources and processes
that produce these forms of linguistic inequality and assist learners in developing an
awareness of the uses and abuses of language and propose strategies to counteract
them. Case studies such as those conducted by Norton (1995, 1997, 2000), Heller and
Martin-Jones (2001), Sarangi (1999), and Coupland (1997) can highlight such issues
as racial discrimination, ageism, gender inequalities, stereotyping, the denigration of
specific accents and dialects (such as “Ebonics”), and so on. Such cases can speak
strongly to teachers, students, and policymakers, illustrating linguistic struggles in
more vivid ways than any textbook treatment or lecture can accomplish.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

There is an unmistakable direction in the social sciences toward a greater scrutiny of

contextual factors in our efforts to understand complex phenomena such as language
learning. After decades of research dominated by Cartesian (nomothetic) reduction-
ism, in which complex phenomena are broken down into small pieces that are then
investigated in controlled laboratory conditions, most researchers now acknowledge
the need to take contextual factors into account. This does not mean the abolishment
of nomothetic research, but it does mean the acceptance, broadly speaking, of contex-
tualized forms of research as an equal contributor to our stock of knowledge.
This acceptance requires the development of new research approaches. A crucial
element in this development is the examination of earlier pioneers who worked in
contextual ways, but whose achievements were drowned out by the experimental,
controlled, and causal claims of psychometricians and researchers looking for statis-
tical significance. Thus, the work of Vygotsky (1978; van der Veer & Valsiner, 1994),
Lewin (1943), Bruner (1986), Bateson (1979) and many others is experiencing a renais-
sance. Simultaneously, the traditional “hard” sciences such as mathematics, physics,
and biology are experiencing a ground shift. Quantum theory, chaos and complexity
theory, and systems theory are transforming our view of the entire physical world
(Capra, 1996). These changes will also transform the way the educational and second
language community does its research, and the way it builds its ontology and episte-
mology. For example, when I discussed the problems with boundaries in the introduc-
tion, I could have added a discussion on complex adaptive systems, self-regulating
systems, dissipative structures, and other concepts that derive from complexity the-
ory (Larsen-Freeman, 1997; van Lier, 2004). Clearly, the old order will no longer do.
Even if it continues its tradition of using the hard sciences (which turn out to be much
softer than we previously assumed) as an ideal to be emulated, it will have to come to
grips with a shift of focus toward context rather than isolation, understanding rather
than proof, and relations rather than objects.
With this renewed importance of context in mind, what are some topics that future
case studies might address? A few possibilities are:

r Activity theory. One model of activity theory has been illustrated by Engeström
(1966) in an investigation of medical clinics in Finland. It may be a useful con-
textual model for case studies in language learning contexts that systematically
examine practices and institutional structures alongside the activities of learners.
r Academic language development for mainstreamed English language learners. What
 11. CASE STUDY 205

are the difficulties that students face and how do they and their teachers deal
with them? Also, the role of the student’s native or other language(s) in the
acquisition of academic English abilities needs much more scrutiny than it has
hitherto received.
r Ecological validity in research and assessment practices. Contextualized case studies of
large-scale standardized testing compared with case studies in settings in which
authentic, performance-based forms of assessment are used (such as portfolios).
r Project-based approaches to language learning, with a focus on the use of various tech-
nologies. How do learners adapt to a learning situation that is not transmission-
based but in which they have choices and basically construct their own learning
environment?
r Systems theory as a model for contextualized research. In addition to Engeström’s
activity theory model previously mentioned, there are other contextual research
models that can be usefully applied in case study research. These include
Bronfenbrenner’s nested ecosystems (1979, 1993) and Checkland’s soft systems
model (1981; van Lier, 2004).

Contextualized research such as case study research is complex and messy. Some
theory of connecting context and case is necessary, regardless of how the boundaries of
the case are drawn. I have mentioned just three models of context: Engeström’s activity
theory, Bronfenbrenner’s nested ecosystems, and Checkland’s soft systems approach.
Which particular model is used is perhaps less important than the realization that a
consistent and systematic view of context and a clear connection between person and
context are necessary. This is particularly so when the case study is an intrinsic rather
than an instrumental one, to use a distinction made by Stake (1995). In an intrinsic case
study the case itself is the focus of attention, the case (a student, a class, a group, etc.)
is intrinsically interesting to the researcher. In such a case contextual factors are, as
previously argued, of key importance. If, on the other hand, the motivation for the case
study is a particular research question, the focus will be on gathering the relevant data
rather than on the case itself. This type of study is called an instrumental case study by
Stake (1995). In practice, however, it is often not easy to distinguish particular studies
so easily, because they usually combine both intrinsic and extrinsic or instrumental
interests, either from the outset, or because certain interesting phenomena emerge
during the study. But Stake’s general point is well taken: “The more the case study is
an intrinsic case study, the more attention needs to be paid to the contexts” (1995, p. 64).

CONCLUSION

Cases are specific persons, places, or events that are interesting and worthy of intensive
study. The case is a real-life entity that operates in a specific time and place. Whether
or not the contextual boundaries can be easily drawn, case study is contextual study,
unfolding over time and in real settings. Often the phenomena of interest become
visible as the case study proceeds, surprising facts come to light and demand attention.
Case studies have often been regarded as somewhat marginal compared to more
experimentally controlled types of study. I have tried to show in this chapter that,
in fact, case studies have played a crucial role in shaping our field, and that their
importance as ways of doing research is likely to increase over the near term, as the
importance of contextual analysis is realized more and more.
A number of resources containing advice about doing case studies exist. In the
general educational field, some of the major sources are Merriam (1998), Miles and
Huberman (1994), Stake (1995), and Yin (1989). In the applied linguistics and language
learning field, sources include Johnson (1992) and Nunan (1992).
206 VAN LIER

One of the inherent problems in doing case studies is the drawing of boundaries, in
time and space, around the case. How long? How many different places? How many
people and influences? Some contextual framework is needed, and I suggested three:
Engeström’s activity model (1996), Bronfenbrenner’s nested ecosystems (1979), and
Checkland’s soft systems method (1981). Any one of these models, or other systematic
models of context, can help the case researcher navigate the contextual chaos that
seems to surround every interesting case.
Once the case and its contexts are drawn as a rough sketch or framework, a major
task of the case study researcher is that of telling the story of the case. Descriptive
and narrative skill are essential to bring the crucial points across in vivid and realistic
ways to the audience for whom the case study is intended. Once again, such narrative
reporting has at times been sneered at for being subjective and unscientific. However,
recent work has forcefully established narrative (or discursive) work as potentially
rigorous and frequently highly incisive and revealing (Harré & Gillett, 1994; McEwan
& Egan, 1995; Wortham, 2001).
In addition to contributing in major ways to the field, case studies can be useful in at
least two other ways: as an induction to the field for graduate students in educational
linguistics, both in terms of studying the classic case studies and in terms of conducting
their own small studies; and as tools in teacher education and development (Bailey,
Curtis, & Nunan, 2001; Clandinin & Connolly, 1995).
It is perhaps appropriate to finish with a quote from Stake. It may sound somewhat
lofty, but it is a useful antidote to an educational and political culture that at times
seems to find significance and value only in rankings of people and schools based on
standardized test scores.

Finishing a case study is the consummation of a work of art. A few of us will find case
study, excepting our family business, the finest work of our lifetime. Because it is an
exercise in such depth, the study is an opportunity to see what others have not yet seen,
to reflect the uniqueness of our own lives, to engage the best of our interpretive powers,
and to make, even by its integrity alone, an advocacy for those things we cherish. The
case study ahead is a splendid palette (1995, p. 136).

NOTES

1. Wolcott calls his study an ethnography, but it is at the same time a case study, under the definitions
discussed in this chapter.

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12

Quantitative Research Methods

Anne Lazaraton
University of Minnesota

INTRODUCTION

In 1995, Ron Scollon (citing Goodwin, 1994) remarked that “research methodology
is a cover term for day-to-day practices which are often less well formed than our
final research reports suggest” (Scollon, 1995, p. 381). This is problematic, in the sense
that “the validity of any discipline is predicated on the assumption that the research
methods used to gather data are sufficiently understood and agreed upon” (Gass,
Cohen, & Tarone, 1994, p. xiii). For the discipline of applied linguistics, a fundamental
change in perspective (if not practice) would appear to be underway in its research,
from an essentially unquestioned reliance on and preference for quasi-experimental
studies employing parametric statistics in the 1980s, to a broader, multidisciplinary
perspective on research methodology, as well as the nature of research itself, in the
1990s and to the present time. The field seems to be struggling with a redefinition of
its research goals, methods, and paradigms, as can be seen in terms of our growing
acceptance of qualitative methods (e.g., Lazaraton, 1995), our increasingly pointed
questions about the significance of our research (e.g., Hamp-Lyons, 1998; Rampton,
1997), and our continuing explorations of alternatives in our research (e.g., Cumming,
1994). This chapter proposes to analyze the status of quantitative research in applied
linguistics by:

r Overviewing the nature of quantitative research in second language learning and

teaching in the last 20 years by surveying the literature on research methodology
published in four applied linguistics journals (Language Learning, Modern Lan-
guage Journal, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and TESOL Quarterly) and
in scholarly books to ascertain what applied linguists are and have been saying
about quantitative research methods.
r Summarizing the results of an empirical study that analyzed the published re-
search studies in these same journals over an 11-year period (1991–2001) to de-
termine what the actual research methods employed were.

It is hoped that this information will be useful for understanding our own choices
(and biases) in research methodology, for reflecting on how we go about training
209
210 LAZARATON

students in those research methods, and for appreciating, if not embracing, the method-
ological choices of others in their own research endeavors.

BACKGROUND: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

Perhaps the best place to start this retrospective is in 1982, with the landmark pub-
lication of Hatch and Farhady’s Research Design and Statistics for Applied Linguistics.
Grotjahn (1988) observed that it “filled a gap in applied linguistics, where a book
on research design and statistics was sorely lacking” (p. 64). The authors wrote the
beginner book to “demystify” statistics and to make the procedures covered easy to
carry out. Basic concepts in research design and research report formatting are cov-
ered, as are a number of parametric statistical procedures, from t-tests to ANOVA to
regression. Although now outdated (and out of print), the book teaches some basic
computer commands for and explains printouts from mainframe SPSS (using punch
cards!) to let the computer “do the work for you.” End of chapter exercises require
readers to solve problems that require statistical calculations.
In the next several years, two more texts, Butler’s (1985) Statistics in Linguistics
and Woods, Fletcher and Hughes’s (1986) Statistics in Language Studies also appeared.
Butler’s book (which followed and is similar to Anshen’s 1978 text, Statistics for Lin-
guists) provides a solid introduction to statistics for linguists, using problems with
linguistics data. The book (which is out of print) is aimed at beginners and covers
statistical concepts, research design, and various parametric and nonparametric sta-
tistical tests. Woods et al., in contrast, is a high-level text that teaches the reader how
to evaluate and to use statistics. Examples are also based on linguistic data, and there
is a heavy emphasis on understanding probability and statistical inference (but lit-
tle on research design). Advanced, multivariate procedures such as cluster analysis,
MANOVA, principal components analysis, and factor analysis are covered. End of
chapter exercises require the reader to compute statistics; an appendix explains how
to do these computations with a computer.
In 1986, Henning published an article in TESOL Quarterly to define quantitative
research methods and to analyze the kinds of articles that were being published in the
field at that time. He defined quantitative research as an endeavor in which quanti-
ties of data are tallied, manipulated, or systematically aggregated. He looked in two
journals—TESOL Quarterly and Language Learning—over 5-year periods from 1970 to
1985, and found an increase in the number of quantitative articles: In TESOL Quarterly
there was an increase from 12% to 61%, and in Language Learning from 24% to 92%.
He viewed this as “a positive development—a kind of coming of age of a discipline”
(p. 704).
At about the same time, Lazaraton, Riggenbach and Ediger (1987) conducted a
survey of 300 professionals working in the field, asking them about their attitudes
toward statistics and empirical research and their knowledge in these areas. Of the
surveys sent out, 121 were returned, mostly by university faculty working in North
America. The majority of the respondents indicated that they had taken, at most, one
or two courses in research design and statistics, a number most felt was insufficient
for the work they were doing or for the kind of advising they were being asked to
do in their jobs. The second area surveyed was the respondent’s ability to use and
to interpret 23 statistical terms (such as mean or median) and statistical procedures
(such as correlation or t-test). On a 4-point scale, respondents reported a mean of less
than 2 for terms like power, Rasch model, and Scheffé test.
Brown’s Understanding Research in Second Language Learning: A Teacher’s Guide to
Statistics and Research Design appeared in 1988. The text, designed for teachers with no
statistics background, focuses on the critical evaluation (in contrast to production) of
 12. QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS 211

statistical research. In other words, Brown aims for “research literacy” by covering the
basics of research design, simple statistical procedures, and approaches to research
evaluation. End of chapter review and application questions reinforce the material.
One year later, Seliger and Shohamy (1989) published Second Language Research
Methods, a guide to research methods and design, rather than statistical procedures
themselves. They focus on the process of both experimental and naturalistic research
(planning, data collection, analysis, report write-up) and the principles underlying it.
Readers are not taught how to do data analysis (in the one chapter devoted to it), but
are given examples to read and to process. End of chapter exercises reinforce chapter
concepts.
The results of the Lazaraton, Riggenbach and Ediger (1987) study led us to con-
clude that applied linguistics professionals felt limited in their ability to carry out the
empirical work they were doing. One outcome of this survey was the decision by
Evelyn Hatch to write a revision of Hatch and Farhady’s 1982 book, Research Design
and Statistics for Applied Linguistics. This resulted in The Research Manual: Design and
Statistics for Applied Linguistics (Hatch & Lazaraton, 1991), which is twice as long as
the original and includes information on nonparametric statistics. Since the survey
respondents reported trouble interpreting research terms and procedures, actual re-
search summaries for readers to critique are included, a unique feature of the text that
I consider extremely useful. Additionally, the book aims toward statistical literacy as
well as productivity. Not all applied linguists engage in statistical research, but most
need to have access to the professional literature, and without some basic knowledge
of research design and statistics, they are unable to read the majority of articles in
professional journals. A separate computer supplement (Lazaraton, 1991), which is
now outdated (and out of print, like The Research Manual), explains using mainframe
SAS and SPSS to solve end-of-chapter problems in the manual itself.
The same year, Nunan (1991) authored an article in Studies in Second Language
Acquisition that analyzed 50 published empirical investigations over the previous 25
years. He attempted to characterize the studies in terms of the environment in which
the data were collected, the rationale for the research done, the design and method
of data collection, the type of data collected, and the type of analysis conducted.
He found that 35 out of 50 studies were conducted in classrooms or under laboratory
conditions, whereas only two were conducted naturalistically. Unfortunately, he notes,
the insistence on conducting research in classrooms or under experimental conditions
limits the generalizability of findings, since elicited data may or may not be consistent
with data collected in more natural environments. Nunan found that 18 studies were
experiments, (32 were not), 10 were carried out by observation, 9 were conducted
by analyzing transcripts, and 25 used elicited data. Questionnaires, interviews, diary
studies, and introspection were rare. Nunan concluded his article by suggesting that
more classroom-based research be done, since the studies he had looked at were
narrow in scope and focus and failed to acknowledge the social context in which
learning foreign languages takes place.
Two additional texts appeared in 1992. The first, Johnson’s Approaches to Research
in Second Language Learning (now out of print), serves as a guide to six research ap-
proaches (correlational, case-study, survey, ethnographic, experimental, and large-
scale). The emphasis is on issues and interpretation in these research approaches
(rather than statistical procedures themselves), and concepts are reinforced by ex-
tended sample studies that are critiqued using evaluative questions developed for
each approach. No exercises are included, but extensive references conclude each
chapter. The second book, Nunan’s (1992) Research Methods in Language Learning, as-
sumes no prior knowledge of research design and statistics. It strives to help readers
understand and critique empirical research studies rather than produce them. He, like
Johnson, covers a range of research methods—experimental, ethnographic, case study,
212 LAZARATON

classroom, introspective, and interaction analysis. Sample studies are included in each
chapter, which help readers understand the concepts, as do end of chapter activities.
A valuable contribution to the topic of research methods is Cumming’s 1994 edited
article in TESOL Quarterly, “Alternatives in TESOL Research: Descriptive, Interpre-
tive and Ideological Orientations.” He asked various researchers to write a short
piece on alternative approaches to research, including descriptive approaches (look-
ing at learner language, analyzing verbal reports, and undertaking text analyses),
interpretive approaches (classroom interaction analysis and ethnography), and ideo-
logical approaches (critical pedagogical research and participatory action research).
However, although these are alternative orientations that one might choose in doing
research, the analyses that result are still heavily quantitative. Tarone (1994a), the au-
thor of the piece on analyzing learner language, says that “researchers typically agree,
in theory, that both qualitative and quantitative methodologies are essential to the ac-
curate description and analysis of learner language” (p. 676), yet goes on to remark
that “quantitative methods of research have probably been overdominant in attempts
to analyze learner language, as well as in suggesting implications of language anal-
ysis research for the ESL classroom” (p. 678). This comment is certainly in line with
what I found in the journal, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, where analyses
of learner language frequently appear and where over 90% of the articles from 1991
to 1997 were quantitatively based; this number was 100% from 1998 to 2001 (see the
following). Pennycook, in his piece on critical pedagogical approaches to research,
makes a similar point: “This lack of published work [in critical pedagogical research
in education], however, reflects not so much a paucity of critical work into questions
concerning ESL in the workplace, ESL and gender, ESL and antiracist education, and
so on, but rather the difficulty in getting such work published” (p. 691).
Several other research-related issues that have arisen recently should at least be
highlighted here. The proper study, scope, method, and data of second language
acquisition has been hotly debated in Modern Language Journal (e.g., Firth & Wagner,
1997, 1998; Gass, 1998; Long, 1997). Tarone (1994a), among others, reminds us that the
emphasis on elicited data and lab-like conditions in second language acquisition (SLA)
research means that we really have no idea of how people deal with language, with
language learning, and with the demands of using language in real contexts. Along
these lines, Nicholson and Bunting (2001) argue that there is a serious mismatch
between, on the one hand, the language learners studied and reported on in our
scholarly journals (primarily university students), and the characteristics of the adult
ESL learner population at large, on the other.
Additionally, mention must be made of several developments in TESOL Quarterly
over the last decade or so. The first was the debut of the edited Research Issues column
in the Winter 1990 issue of the journal. Twenty topics (see Appendix B for a complete
list), discussed by two scholars each, have dealt with both qualitative and quantitative
research issues such as multiple t-tests (Winter 1990), the use of verbal protocols (Sum-
mer 1998), and sources of bias in SLA research (Winter 1994). Second, TESOL Quarterly
has been at the forefront of setting out guidelines for statistical research (instituted
in the Summer 1993 issue), for qualitative research (Winter 1994), and for informed
consent (Spring 1999). It is heartening to see one of our journals take the lead in suggest-
ing standards against which both journal submissions and published research can be
judged. I would be remiss in not pointing out that Language Learning, in its September
2000 (Volume 50, Issue No. 3) issue, began requiring submitting authors “to provide
a measure of effect size, at least for the major statistical contrasts they report” (Ellis,
2000, p. xii). I applaud this effort to steer writers (and readers) away from putting too
much stock in significant p values, which are highly dependent on sample size.
Finally, it is worth remarking that no more widely used textbooks on research design
and/or statistics have been published since 1992, although several more specialized
 12. QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS 213

books have appeared: for example, Scholfield’s Quantifying Language (1995), which
covers the types and analyses of quantifiable data; McDonough and McDonough’s
Research Methods for English Language Teachers (1997), which provides an introduction to
qualitative and quantitative research methodology and data collection for classroom
research; Wray, Trott, and Bloomer’s Projects in Linguistics (1998) covers research topics,
tools, and techniques for 10 areas of linguistics, such as SLA, accent and dialects, and
language and gender; and Porte’s Appraising Research in Second Language Learning
(2002), which teaches the critical analysis of quantitative research studies. In any case,
the interested reader should consult Appendix A for a feature comparison of the 12
books mentioned in this section.
Thus, we have seen that a number of major textbooks, various journal articles, and
several journalistic decisions have shaped the current thinking on research method-
ology in applied linguistics. But how well does actual practice reflect these thoughts,
opinions, and edicts? It is also worth considering research methodology articles that
appear in our scholarly journals; furthermore, we should not overlook the contribu-
tions that the journals themselves make in setting or delimiting a research agenda
and its consequent methodological choices. The next section attempts to answer this
question.

THE STUDY: METHOD

I made a careful analysis of all the data-based, empirical research articles in four
applied linguistics journals over an 11-year period (1991–2001). The methodology
employed was in line with a survey by Thomas (1994) of four refereed journals span-
ning a 5-year period. Although she was interested in definitions of second language
(L2) proficiency, our goals are the same. She points out that the journals that we both
reviewed “prominently mention research on L2 acquisition in their statements of
editorial policy. Although their readerships probably overlap, they have differing his-
tories, institutional affiliations and theoretical perspectives” (p. 311). The four journals
were: Language Learning, subtitled “A Journal of Research in Language Studies”; Mod-
ern Language Journal, which is “Devoted to research and discussion about the learning
and teaching of foreign and second languages”; Studies in Second Language Acquisition,
whose editorial policy states that it is “devoted to problems and issues in second and
foreign acquisition of any language”; and TESOL Quarterly, which “represents a vari-
ety of cross-disciplinary interests, both theoretical and practical” and which addresses
“implications and applications of this research to issues in our profession.”
A number of articles appearing in these journals were excluded from the study.
First, articles in special topics issues were not included as these were guest-edited and
therefore not necessarily an accurate reflection of normal editorial policy or normal
submissions to the publication. Second, I only analyzed articles that reported first-
hand results of research; meta-analyses and replications of previous studies were
omitted. I also excluded conceptual and theoretical articles, position pieces that didn’t
report empirical research, book reviews, special edited columns, and solicited articles.
My goal was to get an idea of the “regular” articles published in these journals.
For each issue of each journal, I started by tallying the number of qualitative and
quantitative articles in order to get a rough idea of the kinds of research being pub-
lished. Those that statistically analyze data are clearly quantitative, whereas those that
report that, for example, the work is an ethnography using field notes and quotes from
respondents, are clearly qualitative. In some cases it was unclear how to categorize
approximately seven articles; in these cases, the data were analyzed quantitatively,
but the majority of the article consisted of quotes from learners, transcripts etc. These
articles were categorized as “mixed.”
214 LAZARATON

TABLE 12.1
Totals Across All Journals

Articles 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 Total

Qualitative 38 52 45 36 46 41 34 37 40 39 42 450 (86%)

Quantitative 0 6 4 3 9 7 4 7 7 9 11 67 (13%)
Mixed 0 (1) (2) (2) 0 (1) (1) 0 0 0 0 (7) (1%)
Total 38 59 51 41 55 49 39 44 47 48 53 524

Results
Table 12.1 shows that a total of 524 empirical articles were analyzed: 450 (86%) were
quantitative in nature, 67 (13%) were qualitative, whereas the remaining 7 (1%; shown
in parentheses in Tables 12.1 and 12.2) were a mixture of both:
However, these results are somewhat misleading, as shown by a breakdown by
journal in Table 12.2:
These data indicate that, with the exception of TESOL Quarterly, in the other jour-
nals, over 85% of the published articles employ quantitative research procedures
(Language Learning, 96%; Modern Language Journal, 87%; Studies in Second Language
Acquisition, 95%). Only in TESOL Quarterly was there anything approaching a balance
in research approaches, and still, nearly 60% of the articles were quantitative, whereas
just over 40% were qualitative. Modern Language Journal shows a trend in this direction,
in that 15 of the 22 (68%) qualitative articles were published in the last 4 years of the
11-year period. It seems that TESOL Quarterly (and perhaps Modern Language Journal)
would be the primary journal of the four to which one would consider sending a
qualitative research report, as there would seem be little chance of it being published
in the other refereed journals through the normal blind review process.
In the next stage, I looked at the statistical procedures used in the quantitative
research articles and tallied the number of times each procedure was used per year
over the four journals. These results appear in Table 12.3.
The most common procedures were those labeled as “descriptive,” where frequen-
cies, percentages, means, and standard deviations are presented. Although 76% (Lan-
guage Learning) to 90% (TESOL Quarterly) of the articles in all four journals presented
descriptive statistics, I found it surprising that this number was not 100%. This was
particularly noticeable in Modern Language Journal, where even ANOVA source tables
were missing. It is my belief that all statistical analyses should be accompanied by the
descriptive statistics on which they are based. It should be noted that even some of
the qualitative studies presented descriptive statistics, contrary to the belief that qual-
itative researchers never count. A couple of the published ethnographies presented
tables of frequency counts or percentages.
I found it particularly interesting to see that Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) ac-
counted for over 40% of the statistical analyses in the articles I examined. Clearly, a
lot of applied linguistics research is focused on the effect that a variable (or variables)
has on some outcome measure. Specifically, ANOVA was employed in almost 50%
of the articles in Language Learning and in over 50% in Studies in Second Language Ac-
quisition. This is somewhat troubling because the Lazaraton, Riggenbach and Ediger
(1987) survey found that ANOVA was not ranked among the easier procedures to in-
terpret or to carry out. As The Research Manual (Hatch & Lazaraton, 1991) points out,
ANOVA has a number of fairly stringent assumptions related to it, and my guess (but
not a fact, since I did not analyze this specifically) is that at least some of studies that
used ANOVA did so in violation of at least some of the assumptions of the procedure.
 TABLE 12.2
Data-based Studies By Year and Journal

Language Learning
Article 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 Total

Qualitative 13 14 13 15 13 14 14 11 13 13 15 148 (96%)

Quantitative 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 2 0 1 6 ( 4%)
Mixed (1) (1)
Total 13 15 13 15 14 15 14 12 15 13 16 155

Modern Language Journal

Article 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 Total

Qualitative 11 19 22 9 17 16 6 14 17 10 9 150 (87%)

Quantitative 0 2 0 1 2 2 0 2 3 5 5 22 (13%)
Mixed (1) (1)
Total 11 21 22 11 19 18 6 16 20 15 14 173

Studies in Second Language Acquisition

Article 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 Total

Qualitative 8 9 8 8 8 8 8 9 8 10 11 95 (95%)
Quantitative 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Mixed (1) (2) (1) (1) (5) (5%)
Total 8 10 10 9 8 8 9 9 8 10 11 100

TESOL Quarterly
Article 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 Total

Qualitative 6 10 2 4 8 3 6 3 2 6 7 57 (59%)
Quantitative 0 3 4 2 6 5 4 4 2 4 5 39 (41%)
Total 6 13 6 6 14 8 10 7 4 10 12 96

215
216
TABLE 12.3
Statistical Procedures By Year and Journal

Procedure 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 Total

Descriptive LL 8 10 8 13 11 17 9 8 11 10 8 113/148 (76%)

MLJ 7 15 19 9 14 14 5 14 14 8 8 127/150 (85%)
SSLA 6 6 8 7 7 6 9 7 8 9 11 84/95 (88%)
TQ 6 9 2 4 6 3 5 3 2 6 7 53/59 (90%)
Total 27 40 37 33 38 40 28 32 35 33 34 377/450 (84%)
Procedure 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 Total

ANOVA LL 8 5 6 7 6 7 7 6 5 9 5 71/148 (48%)

MLJ 4 6 7 5 6 6 2 8 10 4 4 62/150 (41%)
SSLA 3 3 4 5 6 6 3 4 5 6 5 50/95 (53%)
TQ 2 5 0 0 3 0 1 1 1 0 3 16/59 (27%)
Total 17 19 17 17 21 19 13 19 21 19 17 199/450 (44%)
Procedure 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 Total

Pearson LL 4 6 3 3 4 3 3 2 6 6 2 42/148 (28%)

MLJ 4 5 7 4 4 5 1 4 10 2 5 51/150 (34%)
SSLA 1 3 0 2 3 1 3 2 2 2 4 23/95 (24%)
TQ 2 1 0 0 2 0 1 0 0 2 2 10/57 (18%)
Total 11 15 10 9 13 9 8 8 18 12 13 126/450 (28%)
 Procedure 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 Total

t-test LL 4 2 5 2 4 3 3 3 2 3 2 33/148 (22%)

MLJ 5 2 4 1 5 5 2 3 3 1 4 35/150 (23%)
SSLA 1 1 3 3 3 1 3 3 1 1 2 22/95 (23%)
TQ 1 1 0 0 2 0 1 1 0 3 3 12/57 (21%)
Total 11 6 12 6 14 9 9 10 6 8 11 102/450 (23%)
Procedure 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 Total

Regression LL 4 3 2 1 3 2 1 1 3 2 2 24/148 (16%)

MLJ 3 6 2 0 2 1 0 1 0 1 3 19/150 (13%)
SSLA 0 0 0 2 1 0 1 2 1 0 2 9/95 (9%)
TQ 0 3 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 6/57 (11%)
Total 7 12 4 3 7 3 3 4 4 3 8 58/450 (13%)
Procedure 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 Total

Chi-square LL 1 2 0 0 1 5 2 0 1 2 0 14/148 (9%)

MLJ 2 1 2 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 8/150 (5%)
SSLA 3 0 1 1 2 2 0 0 3 1 0 13/95 (14%)
TQ 2 2 1 1 2 1 0 1 0 1 2 13/57 (23%)
Total 8 5 4 2 5 8 2 2 5 4 5 48/450 (11%)

217
218 LAZARATON

While many of the 199 ANOVA studies examined had large sample sizes (the largest
being 89,620 for a Language Learning study on TOEFL test takers), one study in Studies
in Second Language Acquisition had a sample size of 12 and ANOVA was run; Modern
Language Journal published a factor analytic study with an N = 41. In any case, one
implication of this finding is that if applied linguists are to learn to carry out and/or to
interpret just one statistical procedure, that procedure should be ANOVA. Otherwise,
they will be unable to read and evaluate the results in half of the empirical studies in
these journals.
The next most common statistical procedure was Pearson correlation, which was
employed in 28% of the studies. So, more than one fourth of the published research
was searching for relationships among variables. Following correlation, t-test was the
next most common procedure, applied in 23% of the articles. Rounding out the list
were regression analysis (13%) and then Chi-square (11%). Chi-square is a procedure
for analyzing frequency data, which are quite common in applied linguistics research,
so I expected to see it employed more often. On the other hand, Chi-square is often
misapplied, given that it has strong independence assumptions that data in our field
do not usually meet.
A number of procedures were used in less than 10% of the articles. For example,
multiple analysis of variance (MANOVA) was employed in 31 articles, factor analysis
in 27, and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) in 25 articles. Each of these procedures
has very stringent assumptions and usually have very high sample size requirements.
Appendix C presents a complete tally of the procedures that were less frequently em-
ployed. Nonparametric procedures (excluding Chi-square) were reported 58 times (or
in 13% of the articles), which is not a particularly notable number, but I hope that is an
improvement from the situation before The Research Manual (which covered a number
of statistical procedures) was published, where the rate might have been only 2%.

DISCUSSION

Clearly, a number of limitations are evident in this study. First, my analysis of the ar-
ticles was “telescopic”—I attempted to aggregate information and present an overall
picture of research methodology in the field. A more hybrid approach, perhaps sup-
plementing these macro-observations with an in-depth analysis of a subset of articles
would be more revealing. I did not look at whether the procedures used in each article
were carried out appropriately, either by the type of research questions posed or by the
type of data collected, nor did I look at the research orientations that Cumming (1994)
describes. An in-depth analysis would lend itself to investigating these issues.
Second, I only looked at four journals. While it can be argued that TESOL Quarterly
and Modern Language Journal have broad readerships across the second and foreign
language teaching professions, perhaps Language Learning andStudies in Second Lan-
guage Acquisition are more “niche” journals (such as Language Testing, Journal of Second
Language Writing, or SYSTEM, for example) that are not representative of applied
linguistics in the broad sense. A journal that was obviously overlooked is Applied
Linguistics—the reason being that, in my experience, it is not widely available in U.S.
universities. Perhaps a broader range of research methodologies is being used to con-
duct studies that are reported in these or other journals, which may, or may not, be ap-
plied linguistics journals. Or, perhaps these studies are not being published in journals
at all, or perhaps they are being presented at conferences but are not being written up.
What are the implications of so much published applied linguistics research em-
ploying fairly sophisticated analytical procedures? One result is that a great deal of
the research becomes obscure for all but the most statistically literate among us. Page
after page of ANOVA tables in a results section challenges even the most determined
reader, who may still give up and head right for the discussion section. In this way,
 12. QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS 219

journal articles, especially those in niche journals can (unconsciously) promote an “in
group/out group” mentality. A second outcome is that using high-powered paramet-
ric procedures may tempt one to overgeneralize results to other contexts or to other
language users, when, in fact, many research designs do not use random selection
from a population or random assignment to groups, but rather employ intact groups
of a very limited demographic profile. Tarone (1994b) insightfully notes:

crucially, it is then the responsibility of the researcher who is using a particular research
approach to restrict the claims that are made to the appropriate domain of that research
approach. The researcher must not only know the strengths and weaknesses of the method-
ology being used, but must also constrain the conclusions he or she draws at the end of
the paper by framing those conclusions in light of those strengths and weaknesses. In
general, the temptation is very great for a researcher to make grand claims regarding
his or her findings, claims that far exceed what is permitted by their methodological
underpinnings. (p. 326)

Finally, the appeal, or sexiness, of these procedures may tempt one to ask questions
that can be answered using these procedures, a sort of “wag the dog” syndrome. In
other words, we ask questions or collect data that lend themselves to sophisticated
statistical analyses, rather than collecting data first, and then seeing what questions
emerge, and what sorts of appropriate analyses can be used to answer them.

CONCLUSION

In a recent New York Times editorial entitled, “The Last Sociologist,” Orlando Patterson
(2002) sadly observes, “the rise in professional sociology of a style of scholarship that
mimics the methodology and language of the natural sciences . . . anxious to achieve
the status of economics and the other “soft” sciences, the gatekeepers of sociology have
insisted on a style of research and thinking that focuses on the testing of hypotheses
based on data generated by measurements presumed to be valid” (p. WK 15). Patterson
believes that this approach works well for only very limited aspects of social life. I
believe the same can be said for applied linguistics. Certainly, there is an important,
perhaps even a central, role for quantitative empirical research in applied linguistics,
but not for all research questions, in all social contexts, with all language users.
Although I continue to find myself somewhat disillusioned by these results (see
my comments in Lazaraton, 1998, 2000), they do seem to be useful in gauging where
the field is at, in deciding where to send my own future work, and in advising my
students where to send theirs. While the findings suggest that parametric statistical
procedures still “reign supreme,” I would hope that more care would be taken in
applying all statistical procedures appropriately as per their underlying assumptions.
And this can only occur if researchers and graduate students seek out educational
opportunities for training in research design and statistics. Perhaps the next frontier
in applied linguistics research should be developing alternatives to parametric statis-
tics for small-scale research studies that involve limited amounts of dependent data.
Finally, I would also hope that we would see more studies that combine qualitative
and quantitative research methods, since each highlights “reality” in a different, yet
complementary, way.

REFERENCES

Anshen, F. (1978). Statistics for linguists. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

Brown, J. D. (1988). Understanding research in second language learning: A teacher’s guide to statistics and research
design. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Butler, C. (1985). Statistics in linguistics. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
220 LAZARATON

Cumming, A. (Ed.). (1994). Alternatives in TESOL research: Descriptive, interpretive, and ideological ori-
entations. TESOL Quarterly 28, 673–703.
Ellis, R. (2000). Editor’s statement. Language Learning 50, 3, xi–xiii.
Firth, A., & Wagner, J. (1997). On discourse, communication, and (some) fundamental concepts in SLA
research. Modern Language Journal 81, 285–300.
Firth, A., & Wagner, J. (1998). SLA property: No trespassing! Modern Language Journal 82, 91–94.
Gass, S. (1998). Apples and oranges: Or, why apples are not orange and don’t need to be: A response to
Firth and Wagner. Modern Language Journal 82, 83–90.
Gass, S. M, Cohen, A. D., & Tarone, E. E. (1994). Introduction. In E. E. Tarone, S. M. Gass, & A. D. Cohen
(Eds.), Research methodology in second-language acquisition (pp. xiii–xxiii). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
Grotjahn, R. (1988). Introducing (applied) linguists to statistics: A review of two books and some general
remarks. [Review of the books, Statistics in Linguistics and Research Design and Statistics for Applied
Linguistics]. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 10, 63–68.
Hamp-Lyons, L. (1998). What counts as significant research? TESOL Research Interest Section Newsletter 5(1),
1–2.
Hatch, E., & Farhady, H. (1982). Research design and statistics for applied linguistics. Rowley, MA: Newbury
House.
Hatch, E., & Lazaraton, A. (1991). The research manual: Design and statistics for applied linguistics. Boston:
Heinle & Heinle.
Henning, G. (1986). Quantitative methods in language acquisition research. TESOL Quarterly 20, 701–708.
Johnson, D. M. (1992). Approaches to research in second language learning. New York: Longman.
Lazaraton, A. (1991). A computer supplement to The Research Manual. New York: Newbury House.
Lazaraton, A. (1995). Qualitative research in TESOL: A progress report. TESOL Quarterly 29, 455–472.
Lazaraton, A. (1998). Research methods in applied linguistics journal articles. TESOL Research Interest Section
Newsletter 5(2), 3.
Lazaraton, A. (2000). Current trends in research methodology and statistics in applied linguistics. TESOL
Quarterly 34, 175–181.
Lazaraton, A., Riggenbach, H., & Ediger, A. (1987). Forming a discipline: Applied linguists’ literacy in
research methodology and statistics. TESOL Quarterly 21, 263–277.
Long, M. H. (1997). Construct validity in SLA research: A response to Firth and Wagner. Modern Language
Journal 81, 318–323.
McDonough, J., & McDonough, S. (1997). Research methods for English language teachers. London: Edward
Arnold.
Nicholson, M., & Bunting, J. (2001, January). Mainstream TESOL research and under-represented popula-
tions. TESOL Research Interest Section Newsletter, 8(1), 4–5.
Nunan, D. (1991). Methods in second language classroom-oriented research: A critical review. Studies in
Second Language Acquisition 13, 249–274.
Nunan, D. (1992). Research methods in language learning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Patterson, O. (2002, May 19). The last sociologist. The New York Times, p. WK 15.
Pennycook, A. (1994). Critical pedagogical approaches to research: In A. Cumming (Ed.), Alternatives in
TESOL research: Descriptive, interpretive, and ideological orientations. TESOL Quarterly, 28, 690–693.
Porte, G. K. (2002). Appraising research in second language learning: A practical approach to critical analysis of
quantitative research. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Rampton, B. (1997). Second language research in late modernity: A response to Firth and Wagner. Modern
Language Journal 81, 329–333.
Scholfield, P. (1995). Quantifying language: A researcher’s and teacher’s guide to gathering language data and
reducing it to figures. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Scollon, R. (1995). From sentences to discourses, ethnography to ethnographic: Conflicting trends in TESOL
research. TESOL Quarterly 29, 381–384.
Seliger, H. W., & Shohamy, E. (1989). Second language research methods. Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press.
Tarone, E. (1994a). Analysis of learner language. In A. Cumming (Ed.), Alternatives in TESOL research:
Descriptive, interpretive, and ideological orientations. TESOL Quarterly Special Issue, 28, 676–678.
Tarone, E. E. (1994b). A summary: Research approaches in studying second-language acquisition or “If the
shoe fits. . . ” . In E. E. Tarone, S. M. Gass, & A. D. Cohen (Eds.), Research methodology in second-language
acquisition (pp. 323–336). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Thomas, M. (1994). Assessment of L2 proficiency in second language acquisition research. Language Learning
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Woods, A., Fletcher, P., & Hughes, A. (1986). Statistics in language studies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
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Wray, A., Trott, K., & Bloomer, A. (1998). Projects in linguistics: A practical guide to researching language.
London: Edward Arnold.
 APPENDIX A
Feature Comparison for Twelve Research/Statistics Books

Reader Research
Organizing Research Statistics Computer Critique activities/ report Other
Text principle design explained guidance guidelines Answer key format features

Hatch & Farhady Statistical yes 1–5, 7–10, 12– yes no yes/no yes Statistical tables, list of
1982 procedures/ 14, 18, 19 formulas
research design
Butler 1985 Basic statistical no 1–8, 10, 22, 1 chapter no yes/yes no Statistical tables, flow
concepts/ 28 charts to choose
procedures procedures
Woods, Fletcher, Statistical no 1–5, 7–8, 13– Appendix no yes/no no Statistical tables, chapter
& Hughes 1986 concepts/ 19, 22, 23 summaries
procedures
Brown 1988 Research reading/ yes 1–5, 7, 14 no yes yes/no yes
critique skills
Seliger & Steps in research yes 1–5, 7, 14, 17, 2 pages no yes/no yes
Shohamy 1989 process 18
Hatch & Statistical yes 1–5, 7–14, 16, separate no yes/yes yes Statistical tables; list of
Lazaraton 1991 procedures/ 18–30 text formulas, journals, test
research design assumptions; pretest
Johnson 1992 Research in none no yes no/no yes List of journals, large list
experimental of references
approaches
chapter
Nunan 1992 Research in 1–5, 7 no yes yes/no yes Glossary
experimental
approaches
chapter
Scholfield 1995 Types/analyses of no 1, 2, 7 no no no/no no Quality checks on
quantifiable data measurement

221
(continued)
 Appendix A (Cont.)

222
Reader Research
Organizing Research Statistics Computer Critique activities/ report Other
Text principle design explained guidance guidelines Answer key format features

McDonough & Research methods no 1, 2, 7 1 page features of no/no no Addresses of

McDonough good organizations,
1997 research journals; discussion
notes
Wray, Trott, & Topics, techniques, no 1 chapter 1 chapter no no/no no 250 project ideas
Bloomer 1998 tools for
linguistics
research
Porte 2002 Research paper yes 1–5, 7, 8, no yes yes/no yes Glossary, flow chart to
13, 14 choose procedures,
statistical test
assumptions,
statistical tables
Statistical procedures
1. Mean 16. ram
2. Standard deviation 17. Discriminant analysis
3. Chi-square 18. Factor analysis
4. t-test 19. Principal components analysis
5. ANOVA 20. Path analysis
6. z-test 21. Loglinear
7. Pearson correlation 22. Mann-Whitney U Test (Rank Sums)
8. Spearman rank order correlation 23. Sign test
9. Point biserial correlation 24. Median test
10. Phi coefficient 25. Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA
11. Kendall’s W 26. Friedman test
12. Implicational scaling 27. McNemar’s test
13. Linear regression 28. Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test
14. Multiple regression 29. Fisher’s exact test
15. Cluster analysis 30. Eta2
 12. QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS 223

APPENDIX B
Research Issues Columns in TESOL Quarterly

Winter 1990: Research issues debuts; Multiple t-tests

Spring 1991: The role of hypothesis testing in qualitative research
Winter 1991: Power, effect size, and second language (SL) research
Autumn 1992: Validity and reliability in qualitative research in SLA
Spring 1992: Regression models in an ESL context: Issues in onstruction and
interpretation
Spring 1993: Ethics in TESOL research
Winter 1993: Using Likert scales in L2 research
Winter 1994: Sources of bias in SLA research
Winter 1995: Research on the (writing) rating process
Summer 1995: Methodological challenges in discourse analysis
Summer 1996: Gender in research on language
Spring 1997: The politics of transcription
Summer 1997: Standards for teacher research
Winter 1997: Approaches to observation in classroom research
Summer 1998: The use of verbal protocols in L2 research
Winter 1998: Research on the use of technology in TESOL
Summer 1999: Poststructural approaches to L2 research
Winter 2000: Interview research in TESOL
Summer 2001: Corpus-based research in TESOL
Winter 2001: Research Issues column on identifying research priorities
Summer 2002: Narrative research in TESOL

APPENDIX C
Statistical Procedures Used in Fewer Than 10% of Articles
(number indicates actual frequency)

Procedure Frequency

MANOVA 31
Factor analysis 27
ANCOVA 25
Mann-Whitney U Test (Rank Sums) 18
Spearman rank order correlation 10
Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA 9
Path analysis 9
LISREL/Structural equation modeling 7
Bonferroni adjustment 5
Fisher’s exact test 5
Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks 5
Loglinear 4
Discriminant analysis 3
IRT/Rasch 2
Kendall’s Tau B 2
Kendall’s W 2
McNemar’s test 2
Multidimensional scaling 2
VARBRUL 2
Binomial test 1
Bryant-Paulston procedure 1
(continued)
224 LAZARATON

Appendix C (Cont.)

Procedure Frequency

Cluster analysis 1
Friedman test 1
G Theory 1
Implicational scaling 1
Kolmorgorov-Smirnov test 1
Logit model 1
MANCOVA 1
Mantel-Henzel 1
Mauchy sphericity 1
Maximum Likelihood Estimate 1
Median test 1
Multitrait-Multimethod 1
Point biserial correlation 1
Rule-space 1
Sign test 1
Uncorrelated proportions 1
z-test 1
13

Classroom Research
David Nunan
University of Hong Kong

DEFINING CLASSROOM RESEARCH

In order to provide a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of classroom research,

it is necessary to define the terms “classroom” and “research.” These terms, which at
first sight might seem unproblematic, turn out to be surprisingly difficult to articulate.
Most of us probably imagine that the concept of classroom is so familiar that it does
not need defining. A classroom is a room in which teachers and learners are gathered
together for instructional purposes. Thus, in 1983, Allwright wrote:

Classroom-centered research is just that—research centered on the classroom, as distinct

from, for example, research that concentrates on the inputs to the classroom (the syllabus,
the teaching materials) or the outputs from the classroom (learner achievement scores). It
does not ignore in any way or try to devalue the importance of such inputs and outputs. It
simply tries to investigate what happens inside the classroom when learners and teachers
come together. (p. 191)

Some years later, van Lier broadened the characterization somewhat, suggesting
that “The L2 [second language] classroom can be defined as the gathering, for a given
period of time, of two or more persons (one of whom generally assumes the role of
instructor) for the purposes of language learning” (van Lier, 1988, p. 47).
More recently, with the rapid evolution of information technology and the devel-
opment of “virtual” classrooms, the notion of the classroom as a place where people
gather together has come under challenge. (I will look at this issue of redefining the
concept of the classroom later in the chapter.)
Elsewhere, I have defined research as a “systematic process of inquiry consisting of
three elements or components: (1) a question, problem or hypothesis, (2) data, and (3)
analysis and interpretation” (Nunan, 1992, p. 3). To these three components, I would
add that the activity should be capable of meeting tests of validity and reliability and
that the results should be published. (Here, I am using “publish” in the broad sense
of “to make public.”)
Another distinction that needs to be drawn is between classroom research and
classroom-oriented research. Classroom research includes empirical investigations
carried out in language classrooms (however the term classroom might be defined).
225
226 NUNAN

Classroom-oriented research, on the other hand, is research carried out outside the
classroom, in the laboratory, simulated or naturalistic settings, but which make claims
for the relevance of their outcomes for the classrooms. In 1991, I carried out a detailed
review of classroom and classroom-oriented studies. Of 50 studies reviewed, only 15
were classroom based (Nunan, 1991a).

THE PLACE OF CLASSROOM RESEARCH WITHIN APPLIED

LINGUISTICS RESEARCH

Applied linguistics is a broad interdisciplinary field of scholarship that encompasses

theoretical, empirical, and practical work in diverse areas including first language
education, second language acquisition, language pathology, speech and hearing,
and language use in social and professional contexts.
Research in second language acquisition can be broadly divided into naturalistic
and instructed acquisition. From a psycholinguistic perspective, the following ques-
tions currently preoccupy researchers:
1. What cognitive structures and abilities underlie the L2 learner’s use of his or her
L2?
2. What properties of the linguistic input to the L2 learner are relevant to acquisi-
tion?
3. What is the nature of the L2 learner’s capacity for attaining the cognitive struc-
tures and abilities referred to in (1)? Here we may distinguish the following
subquestions:
a. What is the nature of the L2 learner’s overall capacity for language acquisition?
b. How is that capacity deployed in real time to determine the course of second
language acquisition (SLA)?
c. How are the L2 user’s two (or more) languages represented in the brain?
4. What changes in brain structure, if any, underlie changes in the capacity for
language acquisition across the life span of the individual?
(Adapted from Ritchie and Bhatia, 1996, p. 19)
Turning to the more specific issue of instructed acquisition, the focus has been on
identifying how instruction makes a difference in the acquisition of a second language.
Some key questions here are (Nunan, 1996):
r Is there a distinction between conscious learning and subconscious acquisition?
r Is learning a second language like learning a first?
r Why do some learners fail to acquire a second language successfully?
r How can we account for variation (a) between learners (b) within learners?
r What modes of classroom organization, task types, and input facilitate second
language development?

The last question brings us directly to the focus of this chapter, namely, what class-
room research has to tell us about the relationship between what goes on in the class-
room and second language acquisition. This research is reviewed in the next section.

TRENDS AND TRADITIONS

This section deals with both substantive and methodological issues. Substantive is-
sues have to do with the “what” of research, methodological issues with the “how.”
Substantive research seeks to identify relationships between language acquisition and
 13. CLASSROOM RESEARCH 227

variables such as instructional methods and task types, teacher input (e.g., input, ques-
tions, corrective feedback), and aspects of learner behavior such as acquisitional se-
quences and learner–learner interaction. Methodologically, researchers have debated
the merits of experimental versus naturalistic approaches to data collection and anal-
ysis, and the merits of collecting data in classroom rather than non-classroom settings.

Substantive Issues
The Methods Comparison Studies. In the 1960s, classroom research was domi-
nated by the so-called “methods comparison studies.” As the name implies, these
large-scale, highly expensive studies compared different methods, teaching tech-
niques, and programs in order to determine which were more effective. For example,
Scherer and Wertheimer (1964) set out to investigate whether audiolingualism, which
was then coming in to vogue, was superior to the traditional grammar-translation
approach. Using a classical experimental design, the researchers divided their sub-
jects (college students studying German as a foreign language) into two groups. One
group was instructed using a grammar-translation method, while the other group
was taught through audiolingualism, which emphasized listening and speaking and
adopted an inductive approach to grammar.
The study was unable to show the superiority of one method over another. Students’
strengths reflected the relative emphasis of the method through which they were
taught. The grammar-translation students were significantly better at reading and
translation, whereas the audiolingual students were significantly better at listening
and speaking.
Almost 20 years later, another psychometric study provided a clue as to the relative
indeterminacy of the methods comparision studies. In this study, Swaffar, Arens and
Morgan (1982) compared audiolingualism with cognitive code learning. However,
they made a key modification to the psychometric design utilized by other meth-
ods studies—they added a classroom observation element to the study. This enabled
them to provide an explanation for the inconclusive outcome from their study. (As
with earlier research, this study was unable to establish a clear-cut superiority of one
methodology over the other.) When they looked at the moment-by-moment realities
of the classroom, they found that the teachers used a range of different, overlapping
practices that rendered methodological differences meaningless. They concluded that
methodological labels such as “audiolingualism” and “cognitive code learning” are
illusory because they refer to a range of classroom practices utilized by all teachers
regardless of the methodology they were supposed to implement.

Focus on the Teacher: Input Factors. According to Tsui (2001, p. 121) classroom
research has focused on three different aspects of the pedagogical environment: input
factors, interaction, and output.

Input refers to the language used by the teacher, output refers to language produced by
learners, and interaction refers to the interrelationship between input and output with
no assumption of a linear cause and effect relationship between the two.

Input factors that have been investigated include the amount and types of teacher
talk, teacher speech modifications, questions, instruction, and error correction and
feedback. (For a detailed, book-length review of the research, see Chaudron, 1988).
In the field of general education, numerous studies have documented the ratio of
teacher talk to student talk. These studies have revealed that teachers tend to talk, on
average, twice as much as students, although some studies put the figure as high as
80%. (See, for example, Legarreta’s (1977) study of bilingual classrooms, and Tsui’s
228 NUNAN

(1985) investigation of Hong Kong classrooms in which over 80% of the talk came
from teachers.) Despite a growing recognition of the importance of student output
for acquisition (see the following), the persistence of teacher-dominated classrooms
is a concern. Another concern is that in classes containing first and second language
speakers, the great majority of the utterances (and therefore the pedagogical attention
by teachers) are directed to the first language speakers.
Studies of teacher-to-student speech show that teachers attempt to make their
speech more comprehensible by speaking slower, using simpler structures, clearer
articulation and more repetition, and by using more basic vocabulary than when in-
teracting with native speakers. Whether these modifications are helpful or not is not
at all clear. Research findings have led researchers “to question whether the modifi-
cation of input by teachers alone is sufficient to make the input comprehensible, and
whether they ought to examine the interaction between teacher and learners” (Tsui,
2001, p. 121).
Questions are a teacher’s stock-in-trade, and it is therefore not surprising that these
have been extensively studied. A particular focus of interest is the effect of the type of
questions teachers ask on student output. When comparing display questions (those
to which the teacher knows the answer) with referential questions (those to which
the teacher does not know the answer), the length and complexity of the student’s
response, as well as instances of negotiation of meaning (see the following) increased.
Unfortunately, without specific training, teachers tend to restrict the questions they ask
exclusively to those of the display variety. Brock (1986) found that in classrooms where
the teachers were not trained to ask referential questions, only 24 out of 144 questions
were referential. After training, out of a total of 194 questions, 173 were referential.
The significance of the study was that learners in classrooms where more referential
questions were asked gave significantly longer and more complex responses. Brock
concluded:

That referential questions may increase the amount of speaking learners do in the class-
room is relevant to at least one current view of second language acquisition (SLA). Swain
(1983), in reporting the results of a study of the acquisition of French by Canadian chil-
dren in elementary school immersion classrooms, argues that output may be an important
factor in successful SLA. (Brock, 1986, p. 55)

(I will review the literature on the input/output controversy in the next section of the
chapter.)
The next substantive issue I would like to review is teachers’ treatment of errors. A
number of different terms have been used for verbal responses given to learners in the
face of an incorrect utterance. These include “correction,” “feedback,” and “repair.”
In relation to classroom instruction, questions that researchers have posed include:
r Which errors do teachers correct?
r How do teachers correct errors?
r When do teachers correct errors?
r What effect does error correction have on subsequent learner output?

The last question, attempting to establish a causal relationship between error correc-
tion and acquisition, is the most important. It is also the most difficult to address, which
probably accounts for the relative paucity of studies in the area. As Ellis (1994) notes:

Opinions abound about what type of error treatment is best, but there is little empirical
evidence on which to make an informed choice. Currently, two recommendations seem
to find wide approval. One is that error treatment should be conducted in a manner that
is compatible with general interlanguage development (for example, by only correcting
 13. CLASSROOM RESEARCH 229

errors that learners are ready to eliminate). The other is that self-repair is more conducive
to acquisition than other-repair, as it is less likely to result in a negative affective response.
(p. 586)

Focus on the Learner. In the 1970s a series of studies was carried out that became
known as the “morpheme order studies” (Dulay & Burt, 1973, 1974). The main aim of
these studies was to seek evidence relating to the contrastive analysis hypothesis. This
hypothesis makes predictions about acquisition orders based on contrasts between a
learner’s first and second languages. It also predicts that the order in which particular
grammatical items are acquired will differ according to the first language of the learner.
What the studies found, however, was that second language learners from strikingly
different backgrounds (in the first instance, Chinese and Spanish) acquired a set of
target English language morphemes in virtually the same order, that this order did
not reflect the frequency with which items appeared in the input, and that the order
was very similar for both children and adults.
As a result of this research, the investigators proposed a “natural order of ac-
quisition” that was determined by the nature of the target language and that was
independent from the first language. Shortly thereafter, in a series of classroom stud-
ies, researchers attempted to see whether they could upset this natural order through
instruction. (They could not!) For a review of this research and a discussion of its
pedagogical implications, see Krashen (1981, 1982).
It was out of this research, that Krashen developed his distinction between con-
scious learning and subconscious acquisition, arguing that the methodological focus
in the classroom should shift from learning to acquisition. He further argues that the
SLA process itself was very similar to first language acquisition, and that teachers
should strive to replicate those conditions in the classroom. Central to his methodol-
ogy was the importance of a focus on meaning rather than form, along with the notion
that comprehensible input, that is, understanding messages in the target language,
was the necessary and sufficient condition for successful language acquisition.
This “acquisitionist tradition” (Nunan, 1991b) spawned numerous methodologies,
including the Natural Approach, developed by Krashen himself, along with Terrell
(see Krashen & Terrell, 1983) and the Total Physical Response (TPR; Asher, 1988). Both
methods purportedly rested on principles derived from insights into first language
acquisition. These included a focus on meaning rather than form, a focus on compre-
hension rather than production, particularly at the early stages of instruction, and an
adherence to the “here and now” principle. TPR also advocated providing input to
learners by getting them to carry out commands couched in the imperative.
Although these methodological principles grew out of SLA research, relatively little
research exists into their effectiveness in the classroom. An exception is TPR. Asher
claimed empirical support for the approach, arguing that TPR students significantly
outperformed students in regular classrooms. However, the research on which the
claim rested was called in to question by Beretta (1986):

In the 1972 report [comparing TPR with regular classroom instruction], one of the stories
used in classroom training in the TPR group is presented as an example; it is entitled
“Mr. Schmidt goes to the office.” Later in the report, we are informed that one of the
criterion measures used to compare experimental (TPR) and control (regular) groups is
a listening test involving a story entitled “Mr. Schmidt goes to the office.” In view of
this, it is hardly astonishing that the experimental students dramatically out-performed
controls ( p = .0005). On a reading test, no significant differences were found. (p. 432)

The two central tenets of the acquisitionist approach—focus on meaning not form
and the comprehensible input hypothesis—came under attack from a number of
230 NUNAN

fronts. Swain, a longstanding critic of the comprehensible input hypotheses (see, for
example, Swain, 1985, 1993, 1997), has argued that, while input was necessary, it was
not sufficient for second language acquisition. The conclusion was reached after a
series of classroom studies into French immersion programs in Canada showing that
students in input-rich classrooms did not develop native-like proficiency. Swain pro-
posed, instead, the “comprehensible output” hypothesis. This hypothesis argues that
in comprehending input, learners can “bypass” the syntactic system and go straight
for meaning. However, in producing and speaking, the learner must “syntacticize”
his or her utterance in order to be understood.
In listening, semantic and pragmatic information assist comprehension in ways that may
not apply, or may apply differently in production, in that the semantic and pragmatic
information can circumvent the need to process syntax. With output, however, learners
need to move from the semantic, open-ended, strategic processing prevalent in compre-
hension to the complete grammatical processing needed for accurate production. Output,
then, would seem to have a potentially significant role in the development of syntax and
morphology, a role that underlies the functions output may have in the learning of a
second language. (Swain, 1997, p. 5)

A growing body of classroom-oriented research has looked at modified interaction

and the role that such modified interaction might play in second language acquisition.
The term “interactional modification” or “conversational adjustment” refers to those
instances during a conversation in which the speaker restructures an utterance in
order to make it more comprehensible. The assumption behind the research is that
pedagogical tasks that maximize opportunities for interactional modifications will be
beneficial for second language acquisition. However, to date none of this research has
actually established a direct relationship between such modifications and acquisition.
Rather, the relationship is an indirect one and is predicated on the comprehensible
input hypothesis, as Long (1985) points out:
Step 1: Show that (a) linguistic/conversational adjustments promote (b) compre-
hensible input.
Step 2: Show that (b) comprehensible input promotes (c) acquisition.
Step 3: Deduce that (a) linguistic/conversational adjustments promote (c) acqui-
sition. Satisfactory evidence of the a → b → c relationships would allow the
linguistic environment be posited as an indirect causal variable in SLA. [The re-
lationship would be indirect because of the intervening “comprehension” vari-
able.] (p. 378)
Interestingly, Long’s chapter positing comprehensible input as a major causal vari-
able in SLA appears in the same collection as Swain’s chapter on comprehensible
output. Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive, and it is not unreasonable to
assume that in interactional classroom work both are fuelling the acquisition process.
In a recent study, Martyn (2002) investigated the influence of certain task character-
istics on the negotiation of meaning in small group work. One interesting methodolog-
ical aspect of Martyn’s work is that she conducted the research in intact classrooms
rather than in laboratory settings. The research is therefore genuinely classroom-based
rather than classroom-oriented.
Variables investigated by Martyn include:
r Interaction relationship: whether one person holds all of the information required
to complete the task, whether each participant holds a portion of the information,
or whether the information is shared.
r Interaction requirement: whether the information must be shared for successful
task completion, or whether it is optional.
 13. CLASSROOM RESEARCH 231
r Goal orientation: whether the task goal is convergent or divergent.
r Outcome options: whether there is only a single correct outcome, or whether
more than one outcome is possible.
r Cognitive demand: the processing load on the subject brought about by the com-
plexity of task content and processes.

Martyn’s research reveals the complexity of the relationship among task-type, inter-
actional modification, and language acquisition. The two task variables that emerged
as significant were information exchange requirements and cognitive demand. Tasks
with high-information exchange requirements generated significantly more instances
of negotiation than did tasks with low-information exchange requirements. Tasks that
placed high-cognitive demands on the subjects generated significantly higher density
of negotiation (defined as extended negotiation sequences) than did low-cognitive de-
mand tasks. In a qualitative analysis of her data, Martyn found that learners provided
one another with conditions for second language acquisition by drawing attention to
meaning/form relationships in negotiation of meaning sequences.
Although required information exchange and cognitive demand had a significant
effect on the amount of negotiation on meaning, there was also a range of other
interpersonal and interactional variables that were only revealed because the study
was carried out in a genuine classroom setting. Her research showed how complex
the learning environment is and also how difficult it is to isolate psychological and
linguistic factors from social and interpersonal ones. (For an excellent overview of
theoretical and empirical work on tasks, see Skehan, 1998).

Methodological Issues
Like most social sciences, a distinction is traditionally drawn between qualitative
and qualitative approaches to research. In his book on classroom research, Chaudron
(1988) elaborates this with four-way distinction (see Table 13.1).
This four-way distinction is somewhat misleading, because interaction and dis-
course analysis are techniques rather than traditions. In fact, the two techniques can
be used within either of the other two traditions in the table.

TABLE 13.1
Comparing Different Research Traditions

Tradition Typical Issues Methods

Psychometric Language gain from different Experimental method—pre- and

materials and methods post-treatment tests with
experimental and control groups
Interaction analysis Extent to which learner Coding of classroom interactions in
behavior is a function of terms of various observation
teacher-determined systems and schedules
interaction
Discourse analysis Analysis of classroom Study classroom transcripts and
discourse in linguistic terms assign utterances to predetermined
categories
Ethnographic Obtain insights into the Naturalistic “uncontrolled”
classroom as a “cultural” observation and description
system

Note: Adapted from Second language classrooms: Research on teaching and learning by C. Chaudron, 1988,
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
232 NUNAN

The distinction between qualitative and quantitative traditions has been criticized
by Grotjahn (1987) as being too crude. He points out that the qualitative/quantitative
distinction can refer to three different aspects of the data collection and analysis pro-
cess. These are the overall design (whether data are collected through an experiment or
nonexperimentally), the type of data (whether the data are qualitative or quantitative),
and the type of analysis (whether the data are analyzed statistically or interpretively).
Mixing and matching these variables gives us two “pure” research paradigms—the
exploratory-interpretative, based on a nonexperimental design, yielding qualitative
data that are analyzed interpretively, and the analytical-nomological based on an ex-
perimental design yielding quantitative data that are analyzed statistically. However,
they also provide us with six “hybrid” research forms.
Bailey (1999) accepts the notion that there are two dominant traditions, the exper-
imental and the naturalistic, and adds a third—action research. The defining charac-
teristic of action research is that it is carried out by classroom practitioners rather than
outside researchers. (Action research is discussed in some detail in the next section of
the chapter.)
A major methodological dilemma that has bedeviled classroom research for years is
how to capture differences in what goes on at the level of the classroom. Work already
described, by researchers such as Swaffar, Arens, and Morgan (1982) demonstrated
the importance of documenting and quantifying classroom processes if differences in
learner output are to be adequately explained. Formal experiments that only measured
input and output (so-called “black box” research; Long, 1980) failed in this respect.
The need for ways of documenting and quantifying classroom interaction led to the
development of observation instruments of different kinds. The most comprehensive
description and analysis of such schemes is by Chaudron (1988), which, unfortunately
is somewhat dated. Chaudron analyzed 23 different systems according to a number
of criteria. These include whether the observer codes a particular behavior every time
it occurs or only whether or not it occurs in a specific time period, whether the items
that are coded are high or low inference, the number of categories involved, whether
multiple codings are possible, whether the coding happens in real-time, whether the
system is based on an explicit theory of language or pedagogy, whether the instrument
was developed for research or teacher training purposes, whether the unit of analysis
is an arbitrary time period or an analytical unit such as a move or an episode, and the
range of behaviors and events sampled.
One of the most comprehensive systems of analysis (which was developed subse-
quent to Chaudron’s analysis) is the Communicative Orientation of Language Teach-
ing (COLT) Scheme (Spada & Frohlich, 1995). Apart from it comprehensiveness, COLT
is of interest because it is both theoretically and empirically motivated, being based
on an explicit theory of language teaching (communicative language teaching), and
a psycholinguistic theory of acquisition.

One of the primary motivations for developing COLT was a desire to respond to [the con-
cern that observation instruments have theoretical and empirical validity]. We wanted to
identify those features of instruction which communication theorists and L2 researchers
consistently referred to as contributors to successful learning. We also wanted to identify
features of communication and interaction which were believed to be important contribu-
tors to successful language learning in the L1 research literature. And, most importantly,
we wanted to define our instructional categories in such a way that these hypotheses
could be tested in process-product research. (Spada & Frohlich, 1995, p. 6)

The scheme itself consists of two parts. Part A focuses on the description of class-
room activities and consists of five major parts: the activity type, the participant or-
ganization, the content, student modality, and the materials used in the classroom.
Part B focuses on communicative features and identifies seven characteristics, namely,
 13. CLASSROOM RESEARCH 233

TABLE 13.2
Questions Relating to the Principal Features of the COLT Scheme

Feature Questions

PART A: Classroom Activities

Activity type What is the activity type—e.g. drill, role play, dictation?
Participant organization Is the teacher working with the whole class or not?
Are students in groups or individual seat work?
If group work, how is it organized?
Content Is the focus on classroom management, language
(form, function, discourse, sociolinguistics) or other?
Is the range of topics broad or narrow?
Who selects the topic—teacher, students, or both?
Student modality Are students involved in listening, speaking, reading,
writing, or combinations of these?
Materials What types of materials are used?
How long is the text?
What is the source/purpose of the materials?
How controlled is their use?
PART B: Classroom Interaction
Use of target language To what extent is the target language used?
Information gap To what extent is requested information predictable in
advance?
Sustained speech Is discourse extended or restricted to a single sentence,
clause or word?
Reaction to code or message Does the interlocutor react to code or message?
Incorporation of preceding Does the speaker incorporate the preceding utterance
utterance into his/her contribution?
Discourse initiation Do learners have opportunities to initiate discourse?
Relative restriction of linguistic Does the teacher expect a specific form or is there no
form expectation of a particular linguistic form?

Note: Adapted from Research methods in language learning by Nunan, 1992, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.

the use of the target language, information gap, sustained speech, reaction to code
or message, incorporation of preceding utterance, discourse initiation, and relative
restriction of linguistic form.
Table 13.2, adapted from Nunan (1992), sets out the key questions that an observer
would need to answer in relation to the different features of the scheme. The questions
clearly reveal the theoretical and empirical bias evident in the scheme.
One of the advantages of the scheme is that it enables an observer to quantify
classrooms interaction and make comparisons across intact classes. (By intact, I mean
classroom 5 that were constituted primarily for pedagogical purposes rather than to
serve the purposes of an experiment.)

CURRENT CONTROVERSIES

The Effect of Instruction—The Morpheme Order Studies/Recent Focus

on Form Research
A longstanding controversy in the field concerns the place of formal instruction in the
classroom. The research by Krashen and others (previously discussed), in the early
1980s called into question the place of formal instruction. In recent years, however,
234 NUNAN

formal instruction has made something of a comeback. For example, two academics
who have done extensive research on the subject recently wrote:

Our view is that some degree of carefully timed and delivered focus on form is likely to
be appropriate in most cases of L2 learning difficulty. . . . we believe that leaving learners
to discover form-function relationships and the intricacies of a new linguistic system
wholly on their own makes little sense. This does not mean, however, that we advocate a
constant focus on all forms for all learners all the time. (Doughty & Williams, 1998, p. 11).

Doughty and Williams support their claim by reporting several classroom-based

focus on form studies. Focus on form refers to the practice of explicitly drawing stu-
dents’ attention to linguistic features within the context of meaning-focused activities.
In other words, communication comes first, and a focus on form comes second. The
advantage of this reorientation is that “the learner’s attention is drawn precisely to a
linguistic feature as necessitated by a communicative demand” (Doughty & Williams,
1998, p. 3). Learners are therefore more likely to see the relationship between language
form and communicative function than if they are presented with grammar explana-
tions and exercises out of context.
A related concept is that of “consciousness raising” (Fotos & Ellis, 1991).
Consciousness-raising is a type of focus on form approach to grammar teaching.
According to Larsen-Freeman (2001, pp. 39–40), these exercises do not require stu-
dents to produce the target structures. Instead, students are made aware of the target
grammatical item through discovery-oriented tasks.
The current interest in focus on form has grown out of research questioning the
idea that as teachers all we need to do is to create opportunities for learners to be
immersed in and to communicate in the target language, and that it is unnecessary
to focus on form at all. Work carried out in immersion classrooms in Canada and
elsewhere has shown that when a focus on form is entirely absent, the learners do not
develop an adequate mastery of certain grammatical features. In fact, they appear to
end up with a kind of classroom pidgin language.

Controlling the Research Agenda

One controversy that has persisted for a number of years concerns the issue of who
should control the research agenda. The controversy has emerged in the face of
teacher-initiated action research. This section looks at the reasons for the emergence
of action research, which places control of the research agenda in the hands of the
practitioner, and briefly reviews the pros and cons of the movement.
One of the problems with a great deal of research is that it “has little to do with
[teachers’] everyday, practical concerns” (Carr & Kemmis, 1985, p. 8). As Beasley and
Riordan (1981) pointed out quite a few years ago:

the gulf between research bodies and the teaching profession has ensured that many
research programmes are not related to professional concerns and interests of teachers
and students. Priorities for research often reflect the interests of academic researchers or
central office administrators, not school people. Teachers and students in the classroom
are rarely actively engaged in the research. (p. 60)

Since these remarks were made, action research has emerged as a possible way
of bridging this gap between research and practice and between researchers and
practitioners. Action research contains similar ingredients as other forms of research—
specifically, questions, data, and interpretations/analysis. However, what makes it
unique is that it centers on questions or problems that confront teachers in their day-
to-day work, and it is carried out by teachers. The research therefore:
 13. CLASSROOM RESEARCH 235
r Begins with and builds on the knowledge that teachers have already accumu-
lated.
r Focuses on the immediate interests and concerns of classroom teachers.
r Matches the subtle, organic process of classroom life.
r Builds on the “natural” processes of evaluation and research which teachers carry
out daily.
r Bridges the gap between understanding and action by merging the role of the
researcher and practitioner.
r Sharpens teachers’ critical awareness through observation, recording and analy-
sis of classroom events and thus acts as a consciousness-raising exercise.
r Provides teachers with better information than they already have about what is
actually happening in the classroom and why.
r Helps teachers better articulate teaching and learning processes to their col-
leagues and interested community members.
r Bridges the gap between theory and practice. (Beasley & Riordan, 1981, p. 36)

Despite these purported benefits, action research has not escaped criticism. Some
researchers argue that while action research might lead to more reflective practice, it
does not qualify as research, that the average classroom practitioner does not have
the knowledge and skills to conduct the research in a way that would guard it against
threats to reliability and validity.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS
A Sociocultural Approach to Language Acquisition
Until recently, the psycholinguistic tradition has dominated research into language
acquisition in instructional contexts. However, there is some evidence that this is
beginning to change. Recently, several studies and a collection of articles (Lantolf,
2000) have appeared that are devoted to sociocultural theory and second language
learning. Underpinning this work is the Russian psychologist Vygotsky’s theory of
mediated cognition. In this theory, language is a cognitive tool through which humans
are able to act upon and change the world in which they live.
Classroom research features prominently in applications of sociocultural theory to
second language acquisition. The Lantolf volume consists of 11 chapters. Two of these
are theoretical, whereas nine are empirical. Of these nine, seven are classroom-based.
The titles of these seven chapters give a flavor of the orientation of this research and
highlight the challenge it offers to prevailing psycholinguistic/interactionist models
of SLA (see Table 13.3).
Given her work within the psycholinguistic tradition, the chapter by Swain is par-
ticularly interesting. Swain conducted an intensive analysis of classroom transcripts
collected by her and other researchers using the Vygotskian notion that output is a
socially constructed cognitive tool. The following extract and analysis provide a flavor
of this kind of analysis.

Classroom Extract
In this extract, two students are collaborating in writing a story based on a set of pictures.
The are trying to work out how to finish a sentence beginning Yvonne se regarde dans le
miroir . . . (Yvonne looks at herself in the mirror.)
Kathy: Et brosse les cheveux.
(and brushes her hair.)
Doug: Et les dents.
(and her teeth.)
Kathy: Non, non, pendant qu’elle brosse les dents et . . .
236 NUNAN

(No, no, while she brushes her teeth and . . . )

Doug: Elle se brosse . . . elle SE brosse
(She brushes . . . she brushes [emphasizes the reflexive pronoun].)
Kathy: Pendant qu’elle se brosse les dents et peigne les cheveux.
(While she brushes her teeth and combs her hair.)
Doug: Ya!
Kathy: Pendant qu’elle . . . se brosse . . . les cheveux, I mean, no, pendant qu’elle se PEIGNE
les cheveux.
(While she . . . brushes . . . her hair, I mean, no, while she COMBS her hair.
Doug: Ya.
Kathy: et se brosse . . .
(And brushes . . . )
Doug: Les dents.
(Her teeth.)
Kathy: Pendant qu’elle SE peigne les cheveux et SE brosse les dents.
(While she combs her hair and brushes her teeth [emphasizes the reflexive pronouns].)
(Adapted from Swain & Lapkin, 1998. Reproduced in Swain, 2000, p. 111).
Commentary
[Here] we see Kathy and Doug co-constructing the second half of the sentence that Kathy
is writing down. They end up with the correct, pendant qu’elle se peigne les cheveux et se
brosse les dents (while she combs her hair and brushes her teeth), but not without struggling
with which verb goes with which noun, and the reflexive nature of the particular verbs
they are using. . . . This dialogue between Doug and Kathy serves to focus attention and
to offer alternatives. Through dialogue they regulate each other’s activity, and their own.
Their dialogue provides them both with opportunities to use language, and opportunities
to reflect on their own language use. Together their jointly constructed performance
outstrips their individual competencies. (Swain, 2000, p. 111)

This type of analysis is very different from the quantification and statistical analysis
of instances of interactional modifications typical of much recent classroom-based and
classroom-oriented research. Ultimately, the researchers want to demonstrate how
these collaborative conversations provide opportunities for second language learning.

Broadening the Range of Methods/Triangulation

Another trend is a broadening of the range of research tools and techniques. Classroom
researchers appear to be increasingly reluctant to restrict themselves to a single data
TABLE 13.3
Classroom Research Drawing on Sociocultural Theory

Researcher Title of Study

Donato Sociocultural contributions to understanding the

foreign and second language classroom
Kramsch Social discursive constructions of self in L2 learning
Ohta Rethinking interaction is SLA: Developmentally
appropriate assistance in the zone of proximal
development and the acquisition of L2 grammar
Swain The output hypothesis and beyond: Mediating
acquisition through collaborative dialogue
Roebuck Subjects speak out: How learners position themselves
in a psycholinguistic task
Sullivan Playfulness as mediation in communicative language
teaching in a Vietnamese schoolroom
Verity Side affects: The strategic development of professional
satisfaction
 13. CLASSROOM RESEARCH 237

collection technique, or even a single research paradigm. The collection of original

studies in the edited volume by Bailey and Nunan (1996) bears this out. Although
not all of the qualitative studies in this collection are classroom-based, the majority
of them do draw on data from the classroom. Data include classroom transcripts,
interviews, retrospective protocols, journals and diaries, reports, curriculum accounts,
and ministerial documents.
One study from the collection illustrating the value of triangulation is that by Block
(1996). Block wanted to capture the complexities of classroom events by looking at
them from different angles. In particular, he wanted to investigate similarities and
differences in the accounts given by teachers and learners of day-to-day classroom
events and to compare these interpretations with his own as a researcher. The data-
base included classroom observation, oral diaries, and interviews.
Block found widely differing interpretations by different participants in the study.
He concluded his study by making the following observation on the research method-
ology he employed:

one might further investigate the idea of individual differences in data provision among
informants. Just as many authors have suggested that there are different types of language
learners (e.g., Oxford, 1990; Willing, 1988), it might well be the case that there are different
types of informants. We might even ask ourselves if there is a correlation between the
way an informant approaches data provision and the way he or she approaches language
learning. For example, is an analytical informant such as Alex [one of Block’s informants]
equally analytical in his choice of learning strategies? (Block, 1996, p. 192)

Extending the Concept of the “Classroom”

At the beginning of this chapter, I provided two characterizations of a classroom. In the
first, by Allwright, it was suggested that a classroom is a room in which teachers and
learners are gathered together for instructional purposes. The second characterization,
by van Lier, suggested that a classroom exists when two or more people (one of whom
is assumed to be a teacher) are gathered together for the purposes of teaching and
learning. Although they do not say so explicitly, both commentators imply that the
people are involved in face-to-face interaction.
However, with the increasing mobility of millions of individuals for employment,
educational and leisure purposes, the emergence of information technology, and the
rapid growth of e-learning, we can no longer make the assumption that language
learning will involve face-to-face interaction, nor that it will take place in a space that
looks anything like a classroom as traditionally conceived. As Legutke notes, “These
changes challenge our self-concept as foreign language teachers, because, much more
than in the past, we are now called upon to redefine our roles as educators, since
we need to mediate between the world of the classroom and the world of natural
language acquisition” (Legutke, 2000, p. 1).
What does this mean for classroom research? Does it mean that such research is
dead? I think not. In fact it opens up many exciting new research possibilities. At the
same time, it forces those of us involved in classroom research to redefine our agenda,
our methods, and our assumptions.
By way of example, I will mention some ongoing research being conducted by me
and a colleague, Mary Ann Christison (Christison & Nunan, 2001). This research grew
out of our involvement with GlobalEnglish, an Internet-based language school. Part
of the research involved a discourse analysis of the virtual, text-chat classroom, which
we compared with face-to-face conversation classes. When conducting our analysis,
we found that the analytical tools that we would normally employ in conventional
face-to-face classrooms were only partly useful, and that outcomes that were well
238 NUNAN

established in traditional classroom research were only partially replicated. For ex-
ample, in relation to discoursal “moves” and topicalization, we drew the following
conclusions:
1. All of the pedagogical functions identified in face-to-face classroom interaction
are evident in synchronous teacher-hosted chat.
2. Choosing the appropriate “responding” move is crucial, both to pedagogy and
also the ongoing interaction.
3. The “responding” move enables the teacher to build a pedagogical interaction.
4. The multilayering of discourse in chat is even more complex than in face-to-face
interaction (the “Russian Doll” syndrome).
5. Text chat may have pedagogical advantages over voice chat.

Legutke (2000) concludes his paper by speaking, not of the classroom, but of “the
learning environment.” He suggests that redesigning the language classroom is not
an all or nothing thing in which we jettison the old and embrace the new. Rather,
“the question is how the various old and newly emerging facets fit together, how the
design features and their related roles and actions interplay: the training ground and
the studio for set production, the communication center and the research laboratory,
and, of course, the traditional classroom” (Legutke, 2000, p. 21). In researching and
evaluating the classroom, or “learning environment” of the future, he suggests that
we confront seven criterial questions:

1. Does our learning environment provide for situated practice and meaningful
communication? What is worth communicating about?
2. Does our learning environment allow for interaction with an authentic audience?
3. Does our learning environment involve our learners in meaningful tasks?
4. Are learners encouraged to use a variety of representational resources to create
meaning and play with language?
5. Do students have access to these resources and have they learned how to use
them?
6. Are learners encouraged to turn mindfully to their own learning process and
become responsible for their own learning?
7. Do learners have a chance to cooperate in co-creating the learning environment?
Does the physical space allow for such cooperative behavior? (Legutke, 2000,
p. 22)

CONCLUSION

The aim of this chapter has been to review the topic of classroom research: past,
present, and future. I began the chapter by offering some definitions before situating
classroom research within the broader discipline of applied linguistics. The bulk of the
chapter is devoted to a review of substantive and methodological issues in classroom
research. In the final part of the chapter I touch on several current controversies before
looking ahead to what I see as future trends.

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14

Action Research
Anne Burns
Macquarie University

INTRODUCTION

This chapter begins by positioning action research (AR) in relation to other better
known paradigms of research and outlines shifts in the way it has developed and
been realized philosophically and practically. The second half focuses on how AR
has been taken up in English Language Teaching (ELT) contexts and highlights some
of the current debates around its validity as a research approach. Examples of three
different forms of current AR reporting are discussed. Predictions about its potential
to inform socioconstructivist and sociopolitical perceptions of language pedagogy
and practice are suggested.
Despite many varying definitions of AR (e.g., Bogdan & Biklen, 1982; Ebbutt, 1983;
Elliot, 1981; Halsey, 1972; Rapoport, 1970), one common thread is that participants in a
given social situation classroom are themselves centrally involved in a systematic pro-
cess of enquiry arising from their own practical concerns. This is the major distinction
between AR and other forms of applied research, in which participants investigate
issues considered theoretically significant in the field (Burns, 2000; Crookes, 1993).
Although interpretations and definitions of AR are still very much under develop-
ment, one of the most frequently cited is from Carr and Kemmis (1986, p. 162):

Action research is simply a form of self-reflective enquiry undertaken by participants in

order to improve the rationality and justice of their own practices, their understanding
of these practices and the situations in which the practices are carried out.

Thus, other central characteristics of AR are the enhancement of practice, the de-
velopment of new theoretical understandings, and the introduction of change into the
social enterprise.
Although not exactly new, AR is still (re)emerging as a branch of research in edu-
cation generally and is now gaining growing currency in the field of ELT. Its scope,
however, extends well beyond these fields to industry (Argyris & Schön, 1978), health
(Kember, 2001), and community (Batliwala & Patel, 1997) settings. In this chapter I
trace the history of AR, the various ways it has been conceptualized, and how it has
been taken up in the field of ELT. I discuss some of the criticisms leveled against this
241
242 BURNS

form of inquiry and point to some possible future directions. As the scope of the AR
literature is large, I confine my discussion in the second half of the chapter to the ELT
field.

THE ORIGINS OF ACTION RESEARCH

The sources of AR are located within “a quiet methodological revolution” (Denzin

& Lincoln, 1998, p.vii) that has been taking place over at least the last 50 years in
research in the social sciences and humanities. It is part of a movement toward qual-
itative, interpretive, and participative research paradigms that expanded dramati-
cally during the 20th century to contest the dominant positivist, scientific worldview
that originated in the 15th century with the Enlightenment. Reason (1998, pp. 261–
262), although acknowledging the role of positivist research in releasing society from
“the bonds of superstition and Scholasticism,” sees as its major limitation the nar-
rowing and monopolization of knowledge by an elite few, so as to “ . . . place the
researcher firmly outside and separate from the subject of his or her research, reach-
ing for an objective knowledge and for one separate truth” Reason, 1998, pp. 261–
262.
Participative, “naturalistic” inquiry with its exploratory–interpretive approaches
(Grotjhan, 1987, p. 59) is fuelled by democratic, egalitarian, and pluralist principles.
It has been broadly influenced by philosophical concepts of humanistic psychology
(Rogers, 1961), liberationist education (Freire, 1970) social phenomenology (Schutz,
1967), social constructivism (Berger & Luckman, 1966; Cicourel & Kitsuse, 1963), crit-
ical theory (Habermas, 1972) and feminist studies (Lichtenstein, 1988). It is with this
paradigm that AR is associated.
One of the early antecedents of AR in the field of educational inquiry was John
Dewey (e.g., 1904), who set out his agenda for research in terms of the centrality
of educational practices as the source of data and the ultimate test of the validity of
research findings. The concept of a distinctive focus on practice was both a challenge to
established forms of academic research and a democratization of the scope of research,
including as it did the possibility that practitioners themselves might become included
in addressing common pedagogical problems (McTaggart, 1991). Although in contrast
with the dominant themes of the time, Dewey’s insistence on the practical linked to an
intellectual tradition that can be traced back to Aristotle and was to become extremely
influential in educational inquiry in the 1940s.
Much of the current representations of AR is attributed to the work of the so-
cial psychologist Kurt Lewin (1946, 1948). He is generally regarded as “the father
of action research” (Marrow, 1969; McNiff, 1988; McTaggart, 1991), although Corey
(1953) argues that the concepts and terminology had already appeared in the writings
of Collier, U.S. Commissioner for Indian Affairs, who argued for a joint approach
by researchers and administrators that was “action-research, research-action” (1945,
p. 300). Lewin’s scientific experiments on the problems of social groups served as a ba-
sis for his conceptualization of research as a cyclical, action-based model that included
planning, reconnaissance, fact-finding, action, and analysis. His experimentation in
“group dynamics” emerged from a postwar era where research into social problems
was of urgent interest at a time of great societal upheaval. What distinguished this
perspective, from the predominant focus on the application of research results to prac-
tice, was the unification of theory and action. As Carr and Kemmis (1986, p. 44) put
it, it was a view that “regards theory and practice as dialectically related, with theory
being developed and tested by application in and reflection on practice.” Lewin was
above all else “a practical theorist” (Marrow, 1969) whose interests lay in theories of
the facilitation of AR.
 14. ACTION RESEARCH 243

SHIFTS IN CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF AR

McTaggart (1991, p. v) characterizes the history of AR in education as a “struggle to

sustain action research practice.” The story of its development from the initial impetus
of Lewin’s work is perhaps best portrayed as three broad movements (cf. McKernan,
1996), during which its fortunes as a recognized research position have risen and
declined: the technical-scientific, the practical-deliberative, and the critical-emancipatory.
Elements of all three approaches still exist in current interpretations of AR (cf. Crookes,
1993).

Technical-Scientific
Corey’s (1949, 1952, 1953) work with teachers in the United States represented the
first attempts to define and popularize educational AR. However, paradoxically, his
aims to make it scientifically “respectable”—by arguing for its capacity to generate
“hypotheses to be tested” (1949, p. 512), and by contrasting it with “fundamental re-
search” seeking to “generalize” and “discover the ‘truth”’ (1949, p. 509)—were also
the seeds of its demise. His case for AR portrayed it as essentially a technical ac-
tivity through which teachers could seek improvements to their practice. Although
proposals for AR were also developed by advocates such as Taba and Noel, they
had, according to Kemmis (1982), lost the cyclical interactions among reconnaissance,
problem-identification, and evaluation proposed by Lewin, and turned into a se-
quence of steps “which it is wise not to reverse” (Taba & Noel, 1957, p. 12).
The critiques of AR by Hodgkinson’s (1957) and others as “amateur,” “unsophis-
ticated,” and “ungeneralizable,” and the advent in the United States, and later in
Britain, of large-scale Research, Development, and Diffusion models of educational
research meant that by the late 1950s AR was effectively marginalized in the United
States.

Practical-Deliberative
The resurgence in educational AR in the 1960s and 1970s was motivated by the emer-
gence of curriculum as a field of inquiry. In particular Schwab’s (e.g., 1969) work in
the United States and Stenhouse’s (e.g., 1971) in Britain put practical deliberation (Reid,
1978) at the heart of the curriculum enterprise:

Practical deliberation responds to the immediate situation which is deemed problematic

from a moral perspective—there is a sense in which curriculum action must be taken to
put things right. The practical is also connected with the process rather than the products
of enquiry. (McKernan, 1996, pp. 20–21)

Stenhouse’s work in the Humanities Curriculum Project (1967–72), extended by

that of his colleagues, Elliott and Adelman in the Ford Teaching Project (1972–74),
placed localized, school-based cycles of action and inquiry by teachers at the core of
curriculum development, together with the hermeneutic aspects of inquiry for un-
derstanding. “The idea is that of an educational science in which each classroom is a
laboratory, each teacher a member of the scientific community” (Stenhouse, 1975,
p. 143). Elliott (1985, 1991) argued that teaching is a moral and theoretical activ-
ity defined in terms of the realization of practitioners’ context-bound values. The
subsequent publication of Schön’s concepts of the Reflective Practitioner (1983) rein-
forced the centrality of the cognitive, the reflective, and the deliberative in processes
of curriculum practice. Signs of a renewed interest in action (van Manen, 1984) and
participatory (Hall, 1979) research in the United States also emerged at this time
244 BURNS

(see also Bissex & Bullock, 1987; Goswami & Stillman, 1987; Wallat, Green, Conlin, &
Haramis, 1983).

Critical-Emancipatory
From the mid-1980s, new ways of thinking about AR were developed by Kemmis and
his colleagues at Deakin University in Australia, influenced by the writings of critical
theorists including Habermas (1972), Freire (1982), and Fals Borda (1979).
Carr and Kemmis (1986, p. 203) argued that, in contrast to practical AR that focused
on individualistic judgments, “the form of action research which best embodies the
values of a critical educational science is emancipatory action research.” Individual
practice should be seen as socially constituted and reflective of broad social, educa-
tional, and political interactions within the school. Through AR, a collaborative and
dialectic relationship could be created between individual and group responsibility
toward the production and implementation of common educational policies and prac-
tices. This was a transformative, resistant, and activist form of AR where “the prac-
titioner group itself takes responsibility for its own emancipation from the dictates
of irrationality, injustice, alienation and unfulfillment” (p. 204). By examining taken-
for-granted habits, rituals, customs, and precedents, as well as bureaucratic control
structures and constraints, the group could empower itself to realize in practice its own
fundamental educational values (cf. Kincheloe, 1991; Whitehead and Lomax, 1987).
Kincheloe (1991) articulates the alternative position taken by critical-emancipatory
theorists:

When the critical dimension of teacher research is negated, the teacher-as-researcher

movement can become quite a trivial enterprise. Uncritical educational action research
seeks direct applications of information gleaned to specific situations—a cookbook style
of technological thinking is encouraged . . . Such thinking does not allow for complex
reconceptualizations of knowledge and as a result fails to understand the ambiguities
and the ideological structures of the classroom. [In this way] teacher research is co-opted,
its democratic edge is blunted. (p. 83)

Kemmis and McTaggart’s model, with its four “moments,” reinvigorated Lewin’s
theory of AR as a self-reflective spiral or loop:

r Plan—prospective to action, forward looking and critically informed in terms of the

recognition of real constraints, and the potential for more effective action.
r Action—deliberate and controlled, but critically informed in that it recognizes prac-
tice as ideas-in-action mediated by the material, social, and political “struggle”
toward improvement.
r Observation—responsive, but also forward looking in that it documents the critically
informed action, its effects, and its context of situation, using “open-eyed” and
“open-minded” observation plans, categories, and measurements.
r Reflection—evaluative and descriptive, in that it makes sense of the processes, prob-
lems, issues, and constraints of action and develops perspectives and comprehen-
sion of the issues and circumstances in which it arises.

(Based on Kemmis & McTaggart, 1986, pp. 11–14)

In carrying out AR, practitioners draw extensively on qualitative methods, such as

case studies, interviews, journals, and classroom observations. However, quantitative
procedures are not excluded; as Elliott and others point out, AR should not be defined
in terms of its methods (Elliott, in Introduction to McKernan, 1996, p. ix).
 14. ACTION RESEARCH 245

ACTION RESEARCH IN THE FIELD OF ELT/APPLIED

LINGUISTICS: MAIN RESEARCH FINDINGS

The burgeoning interest in AR in the field of ELT is essentially a phenomenon of the

1990s. Although the field was not immune to trends in educational research, by the
late 1980s, as van Lier (1988) notes, AR had “not so far received much serious atten-
tion as a distinct style of research in language teaching” (p. 67). Nevertheless, calls
for the participation of teachers in classroom-centered research (CCR) were mounting
(Allwright, 1988; Jarvis, 1983; Long, 1983; van Lier, 1988), whereas observational and
other features of AR were already evident in research related to the classroom (e.g.,
Allen, fröhlich, & Spada, 1984; Allwright, 1980; Brown, Anderson, Shillcock, & Yule,
1984; Long, Adams, Mclean, & Castanos, 1976). At the same time, the expansion of
AR activity was predicted in Breen and Candlin’s (1980) proposals that curriculum
evaluation should be an integral aspect of classroom teaching and learning; Breen’s
(1985) argument that the classroom was better considered not an “experimental lab-
oratory” for second language acquisition (SLA) research, but as a “social context for
language learning”; and van Lier’s (1988) call for “ethnographic monitoring” of class-
room curriculum processes.
Nunan’s publication, Understanding Language Classrooms (1989a), drew substan-
tially on this work, but explicitly generated an “an altered stance”(Candlin, in General
Editor’s Preface) toward AR. Subtitled A Guide for Teacher-Initiated Action, it projected
research by language teachers not just as a worthwhile recommendation, but as a
serious possibility by offering:

. . . a particular focus on ways and means whereby teachers might investigate their own
classrooms. The intention is to provide a serious introduction to classroom research to
language professionals who do not have specialist training in research methods . . . it is
aimed specifically at the classroom teacher and teachers in preparation. (p. xi)

Nunan’s endorsement of teacher research was underpinned by the recognition

from the late 1970s that communicative language teaching significantly altered the
role of the teacher in the curriculum process (cf. Connelly & Clandinin, 1988). The
concepts of “the learner-centered curriculum” (Burton, 1987; Nunan, 1988) and “the
teacher as curriculum developer” (Nunan, 1987) and “course designer”(Nunan, 1985)
were perhaps then most strongly articulated in the Australian Adult Migrant English
Program (AMEP; cf. Tudor, 1996, p. 21), where AR became from the late 1980s a by-
word for integrating a research orientation into the work of practitioners (Brindley,
1990; Burton, 1998; Burns, 1999; Nunan, 1990).
A further impetus to the ethos of teacher research in the ELT field came from the
distinctions made between teacher training and teacher education (Larsen-Freeman,
1983; Richards, 1987/90). Teaching as “discrete and trainable skills, such as setting
up small-group activities, using strategies for correcting pronunciation errors, using
referential questions . . . ” reflected a low-inference, micro-perspective, in contrast to
a holistic, macro-approach of the autonomous professional capable of “clarifying and
elucidating the concepts and thinking processes that guide the effective second lan-
guage teacher” (Richards, 1990, p. 14). The reflective and research-oriented proposals
for teacher professional development contained in the collection edited by Richards
and Nunan, (1990; e.g., Pennington, 1990) were echoed by Wallace (1991), drawing
on the work of Schön (1983). Wallace drew a distinction among (1) a craft model of
teaching, where novices learn by imitating master teachers; (2) an applied science
model based on a separation of research and practice, where teachers are assumed
to implement the findings of scientific research; and (3) a reflective model, which is
246 BURNS

a combination of “received” and “experiential” knowledge, where professional com-

petence is mediated through cycles of practice and reflection. Wallace aimed to build
a coherent framework for reflective practice, of which AR could be “an extension”
(p. 57). The notion of the reflective language practitioner is now strongly endorsed
(if not universally practiced) in most discussions of language teacher development
(cf. Gebhard, 1996; Richards & Lockhart, 1994), whereas related branches of research
have focused on teacher learning (Freeman & Richards, 1996), knowledge (Freeman,
1996), and cognition (Woods, 1996).

CURRENT DEBATES: ACTION RESEARCH IN ELT

In a significant and frequently cited article, Crookes (1993) argues that two kinds of
AR are of import to the second language field. The first, underpinned by “the teacher
as researcher “ movement in education (cf. Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1990; Strickland,
1988), is a (nominally) value-free and conservative version; the second follows a more
radically progressive, critical, and emancipatory line (Carr & Kemmis, 1986; Gore &
Zeichner, 1991). Research of the second kind, Crookes states, “has gone almost without
representation in SL [second language] discussions of this topic” (p. 133).
An analysis of much of the published literature on AR over the last decade con-
firms Crookes’ argument. Although this is perhaps a facet of the newness of action
research in the field and uncertainty, or even rejection, of its viability as a valid re-
search approach (cf. the discussions on the status of qualitative research in general in
the field of SLA, e.g. Lazaraton, 1995; McCarthy, 2001), the majority of publications are
concerned with outlining various versions of the AR process and/or providing (usu-
ally individually based) illustrative case studies (e.g., Bailey & Nunan, 1996; Edge
& Richards, 1993; Nunan, 1989b; Wallace, 1998). Where collaboration between re-
searchers and teachers takes place, there is a tendency for it to be of the “flying visit”
(Breen, Candlin, Dam, & Gabrielsen, 1989) variety. Also, despite the arguments that
action research provides a “voice” for teachers, collective accounts of AR written by
classroom teachers, who would not also consider themselves academics or teacher
educators, do not yet figure prominently, with some exceptions (e.g. the reports in
Burns & Hood, 1995, 1998; Burns & de Silva Joyce, 2000; Edge, 2001; Richards, 1998).
Allwright (1993, p. 125), for example, has argued for “exploratory teaching”
(cf. Allwright & Bailey, 1991) as an alternative to action research. He suggests that
in the rush to advocate AR, “teachers face the risk of discovering the hard way that
research can be an unacceptable burden to add to those they are already suffering
from in their daily lives as classroom teachers” (p. 25). He argues that exploratory
teaching is capable of greater sustainability than AR. Exploratory teaching differs by
exploiting normal pedagogical activities to explore issues that “puzzle” teachers and
learners. The focus is on understanding to promote more effective teaching, rather than
on problem-solving. His work with teachers in Brazil (Allwright & Lenzuen, 1997) gen-
erated a series of procedures: 1) identify a puzzle area, 2) refine your thinking about
that puzzle area, 3) select a particular topic to focus on, 4) find appropriate classroom
procedures to explore it, 5) adapt them to the particular puzzle you want to explore, 6)
use them in class, 7) interpret the outcomes, 8) decide on their implications and plan
accordingly. However, Allwright’s model appears to follow fairly closely some of the
major processes of action research, while at the same time apparently disallowing the
status of research to teachers’ investigative activities.
Freeman’s (1998, p. ix) discussion of teacher research is also influenced by his
work in Brazil, as well as in Masters’ programs he taught in the United States. Like
Allwright, he examines how research can fit within the work of teaching and transform
it through increased understanding. His aim is to “connect the ‘doing’ of teaching with
 14. ACTION RESEARCH 247

the ‘questioning’ of research” (p.ix). Although he raises the possibility that “teachers
will redefine the territory of their work,” Freeman’s interest presents as essentially
individualist—the “presentation of how teacher-research can be done, and . . . the
assertion that teacher-research has a fundamental role in redefining the knowledge-
base of teaching” (pp. ix–x). Nevertheless, the publication is among one of the first
full-length treatments of the topic to be interspersed with a series of accounts of action
research written by teachers (see also Wallace, 1998).
Publications by Wallace (1998) and Burns (1999) are the first book-length treatments
in ELT to explicitly foreground the term “action research” in their titles. Wallace’s
discussion builds from his earlier theme (1991) of “reflection on our professional
practice” (p. 1), but its focus is on providing concrete procedures for the individual
teacher-researcher:

If you are a practicing teacher with a keen interest in professional development you might
like to consider the action research approach presented here. If you do, hopefully you
will find certain of the techniques described to be of some practical use. (Wallace, 1991,
p. 1)

In line with Crookes’ argument, there are strong echoes here of the technicist and
practical versions of teacher research. Burns attempts to depart from this approach
and to shift toward a more critical stance by illustrating how AR can be integrated into
ongoing collaborative teacher development processes that can create the conditions
to support and influence institutional change. It also departs from other versions
of researcher–teacher collaboration in that the participating researchers can be said
to share “member’s competence” (Linde, personal communication, cited in Woods,
1996) with the teachers, since they all work within the same Australian educational
system. Roberts (1998), commenting on earlier work (Burns & Hood, 1995) that led to
this publication, notes that:

. . . it shows the need for teachers’ curriculum inquiry to be a genuine part of their work,
and for their insights to be seen to contribute to larger-scale change. It would seem to
be highly consistent with our preferred framework for [language teacher education] . . .
in that it highlights the exchange between individual development and its social con-
text; positive relationships and opportunities for critical dialogue; and a consistent link
between a person’s work and the landscape in which it takes place. (p. 288)

Nevertheless, this work—in common with other examples, such as the AR car-
ried out with Indian teachers investigating pedagogical change within moves to a
communicative curriculum (Mathew & Lalitha Eapen, 1996), with Australian foreign
language teachers’ researching their classroom practice (Mickan, 1996), and with sec-
ondary teachers in Hong Kong aiming to develop greater professional competence
and status (Tinker Sachs, 2000)—is probably closer to what Kemmis (1993) describes
as co-operative AR.
According to Kemmis it is possible to identify a continuum of types of collaboration:
co-option relationships, where the research is owned by the researchers; co-operative,
where teachers work with researchers who share an interest in and facilitate their
practice and often report it collaboratively; and collaborative, where researchers and
teachers (or teachers working together) participate equally in the research agenda and
are both the agents and the objects of the research. The latter type is still rare in cur-
rent activities in the ELT field, although participatory research of the type conducted
by Auerbach, Arnaud, Chandler, & Zambrano (1998), where researchers worked in
a university–community collaboration with immigrants and refugees who became
adult ESL and native language literacy instructors in their own communities, offers
248 BURNS

an example (see also Auerbach, 1994). While not explicitly called AR, this exam-
ple perhaps comes closest to what could be considered both fully collaborative and
critical-emancipatory in orientation in the language teaching field.
Elements of a more critical orientation to AR, located within a holistic and ecological
interpretation of language education, are also to be found in van Lier’s (1996) discus-
sion of awareness, autonomy, and authenticity in the language curriculum. Van Lier
argues that actions in the cyclical stages of action research and the purposes for which
they were developed:

. . . beg large questions which are likely to take action research in critical directions,
particularly if the teacher researcher moves from a problem-solving . . . to a problem-
posing approach, which looks at the classroom as a historically evolving and culturally
embedded system. (p. 34)

Advocating a critical rather than a technical approach, Van Lier aligns his position
with that of Candlin (1993), who distinguishes between “weak” and “strong” ver-
sions of AR, and Crookes (1993). He views supportive collaboration between teacher
researchers as central, together with an interactive interpretation of the cyclical nature
of AR where cycles and steps are “simultaneous strands that are braided together as
one goes along” (p. 34; cf. Burns, 1999). A further conceptual point is that reflection
is not a one-off event but a process that pervades AR activity—a “way of working”
(Kemmis & McTaggart, 1986) rather than a time-bound project.
As this brief description implies, current interpretations of action research vary
along a practical–critical continuum. Both types are valuable to the field of language
teaching, but it is arguable that the radical and collaborative forms of action re-
search are likely to have the greater impact on renewing practice at its “grass-roots”
(cf. Crookes, 1989; van Lier, 1996). This point will be further elaborated in the final
section of this chapter.

The Scope of Action Research Studies

Published studies of AR in ELT are still relatively small in number. In general two types
of accounts are the most common: those written by academic researchers who have
introduced action research as a component of BATESOL/MATESOL (Bachelor’s and
Master’s in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and other university
programs and who sometimes report on action research on behalf of their students
or colleagues; and those written by individual teacher-researchers, sometimes as the
result of projects carried out for tertiary qualifications. A third, and less common type,
is the reporting by teachers of AR conducted for their own professional development
within a larger collaborative grouping.
Tsui (1996) exemplifies the first type. Tsui worked with 38 practising ESL teachers
enrolled in the Postgraduate Certificate in Education program at the University of
Hong Kong. The teachers video or audio recorded their lessons and reviewed the
tapes to identify their own problem areas for investigation. More than 70% identified
student reticence and anxiety about responding in English in the classroom as a major
issue. The teachers tried out different strategies, kept a diary of their observations
and reflections, and wrote evaluative reports. Other examples of this type of AR are
Thorne and Qiang (1996), Markee (1997), and Crookes and Chandler (1999).
A study conducted by Cowie (2001) illustrates the second category of reporting.
Cowie describes a 3-year process during which he investigated the most effective ways
to teach writing in his undergraduate classes in the liberal arts faculty of a Japanese
public university. His investigations led him to revise his teaching approaches, but also
to deepen his knowledge about conducting research. Calling his approach “not action
 14. ACTION RESEARCH 249

research, but I’m getting there,” his account highlights the nature of the processes and
insights that can become significant for teacher researchers. Brousseau (1996) and
Gersten and Tlusty (1998) also exemplify studies of this second type.
McPherson’s (1997) study illustrates action research carried out as part of a large-
scale collaborative AR process on disparate learner groups involving 26 Australian
teachers. She traces the evolution of her understanding of the social dynamics oper-
ating in the classroom that initially impeded effective communicative teaching and
learning. Through three successive cycles of AR, the intervention strategies she intro-
duced enabled more effective student–teacher relationships and classroom activities.
McPherson points out that the collaborative elements of the research were a crucial
factor in its cyclical development. Mathew (2000) and Tinker Sachs (2002) provide
further examples of this type.
While not specifically drawing on the conceptual frameworks of AR or labeling
themselves as such, many other studies published over the last decade in more ped-
agogically oriented journals, such as the English Language Teaching Journal, English
Language Forum or TESOL Journal, could be classified as action research, as could
several of the studies regularly reported in collections of papers, such as the Hong
Kong Working Papers in ELT or Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German. Many of
the short teacher-research studies published in Richards (1998) that illustrate how
teachers identify and resolve a teaching issue reflect a very strong action research ori-
entation. The latter publication is of interest in that it is unlikely that these localized
and small-scale studies would have seen the light of day had they not been solicited
for publication by the editor (through the International TESOL Association).

CRITIQUES OF ACTION RESEARCH (AND SOME

POSSIBLE RESPONSES)

I have portrayed AR in positive terms and, indeed, evidence of the positive effects
of action research in teachers’ professional lives is growing, as exemplified in the
following:

The collaborative approach to the project provided regular contact with peers and oppor-
tunities to share idea and experiences. This aspect of the project cannot be undervalued.
The project provided me with an opportunity to examine my teaching practices and re-
visit some to the practices I used in the past whose value I had forgotten. (O’Keeffe, 2001,
p. 57)

However, as a form of research it is not without critics. Jarvis (1981) voiced early
doubts about the capacity of teachers to do research, arguing that it was an activity
best left to specialists and that, in any case, action research was without academic
prestige. The latter argument still dogs AR, although its more recent prominence in
the field is causing a gradual reevaluation of its status (cf. Richards, 2001). Part of the
reason for lack of prestige are doubts about its rigor:

Certainly research by teachers, for teachers, on their processes of teaching can only be
a good thing. But if obtaining a clearer understanding of teaching processes requires
care and rigour in other modes of research, there is no good argument for action research
producing less care and rigour unless it is less concerned with clear understanding, which
it is not. (Brumfit & Mitchell, 1989, p. 9)

Brumfit and Mitchell’s points provoke a number of key questions: What are the stan-
dards by which AR is to be judged and should these be the same as for other forms of
research? Should it conform to existing academic criteria? What ethical considerations
250 BURNS

need to be brought to bear on research that is highly contextualized in practice? How

should action research be reported? What tensions exist between the quality of action
research and its sustainability by practitioners? (See Allwright, 1997 and Nunan, 1997
for recent discussion of these issues.)
Even promoters of action research, sometimes seem to have doubts about its status.
Wallace (1991) states, “‘Research’ of this kind is simply an extension of the normal
reflective practices of many teachers, but it is slightly more rigorous and might con-
ceivably lead to more effective outcomes (p. 17).”
Although it might be unintended, the use of scare quotes positions AR in contrast
to “real” research, albeit as preferable to more usual unstructured forms of thinking
about teaching. Wallace’s more recent account (1998) situates action research in re-
lation to the reflective cycle as a component of “professional development strategies
(excluding ‘conventional research’)” (p. 14). As with case study and other forms of
qualitative research, issues of the legitimacy (cf. Bourdieu, 1991) of action and practi-
tioner research are likely to go on being contested for some time.
A possible response to some of these questions is provided by Crookes (1993)
and Freeman (1998), who argue that accurate and fair ways of representing what
teachers find in their research will require unconventional new discourses and genres.
In developing them, it will be the meaningfulness and trustworthiness (Mishler, 1990)
of the research that becomes paramount. A central question will be: To what extent
does this research resonate with my understandings of practice and have meaning
in my context? Similarly, Bailey (1998) suggests that AR should not be judged by the
traditional criteria of random selection, generalizability, and replicability, as its goals
are to establish local understandings. In short, it is likely that AR practitioners will
need to confront the challenge “to define and meet standards of appropriate rigor
without sacrificing relevance” (Argyris & Schön, 1978, p. 85).
Other concerns and critiques relate to the over-involvement of the action researcher,
leading to personal bias; the time constraints posed by longitudinal research; the
double burden of teaching and research; the lack of models and procedures for data
analysis (cf. Winter, 1989); and question marks over accountability in experimentation
with learner subjects (cf. Hitchcock & Hughes, 1995; Tinker Sachs, 2000).
Perhaps one of the strongest features of action research that can contribute to en-
hancing rigor is its iterative, or cyclical, nature. Iterations in the cycle, where initial
insights and findings give way to new, but related, questions and data collection can
serve to (a) build on evidence from previous cycles; (b) expand the scope of the study;
(c) triangulate the data across different episodes, sites, and subjects through multi-
ple data sources; (d) test new findings against previous iterations of the cycle; and
(e) avoid the bias inherent in cross-sectional research. The iterative aspect becomes
particularly powerful when research is conducted collaboratively, as findings and
outcomes can be cross-referenced across multiple activities.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Second language acquisition studies have been a major force in the field of ELT.
However, over the last few decades the focus of SLA research has been predominantly
on theoretical concerns (see the discussions in the thematic issues of Applied Linguistics,
1993). More recently, calls have been made from those both within and outside the
SLA field for a shift to research generated from the classroom and from the perspective
of practitioners. This, it is argued, will raise “the silent voices” of teachers and shape
SLA research more realistically in the direction of actual practice (Zephir, 2000). Ellis,
himself a major figure in SLA research, has recently stated the case for AR, describing
his own shifts in thinking:
 14. ACTION RESEARCH 251

As I left the classroom . . . I began to treat SLA as an object of enquiry in its own right.
That is I began to pay less attention to how the results of research . . . might aid lan-
guage pedagogy and more attention to trying to produce good research . . . Increasingly,
though, I have had to recognize that the gap between what second language acquisition
researchers do and what teachers do has grown wider and that the former spend an in-
creasing amount of time talking to each other in a language only they understand. (Ellis,
1997, pp. vii–viii)

There are two major ways in which AR can potentially invigorate the field of ELT:
the first can be termed socioconstructivist and the second sociopolitical.
Action research offers a means for teachers to become agents rather than recipients
of knowledge about second language teaching and learning, and thus to contribute
toward the building of educational theories of practice (Bourdieu, 1990). Changes in
the cultures of teaching and learning English, themselves the subject of global changes
in industrialized societies, means that, in the near future at least, the relevance of
AR is set to expand. The nature of knowledge as abstract, decontextualized, and
propositional is increasingly being questioned in this field as elsewhere. Illustrations
of collaborative AR as a process of literate knowledge building within a collaborative
“community of inquiry” have been offered by Wells & Chang-Wells (1992), whose
work with school teachers in Canada over a period of 3 years led to significant changes
in teachers’ practices. Thinking about teaching as communal, inquiry-oriented action
rather than as individual classroom practice represents a significant shift for current
models of teacher education.
In the future, professional knowledge building in teacher education is also likely
to connect the practical and theoretical skills needed by teachers with their underpin-
ning morals and values. AR allows for a social-constructivist approach, that is, one that
integrates the individual development of teachers’ knowledge with the specific social
situations and local contexts in which they work. This is an approach embedded in
an ecological perspective (see van Lier, e.g. 1997) where close attention is paid to con-
textual analysis, the actions, discourses, and perceptions of the people in the context
and the patterns that connect them, as well as the “nested ecosystems” (Bronfonbren-
ner, 1979) that move analysis from the micro contexts of the classroom to the macro
contexts beyond.
Aligned with these broadened contextual perspectives are the political possibilities
for AR, (although it would be naı̈ve in the extreme not to acknowledge the potential for
AR to be co-opted for bureaucratic or political purposes). As teacher researchers gain
a voice, the socio-political and critical aspects of their work may also be strengthened.
McNiff (1988, p. 72) sees this as an inevitable consequence—“politics will intrude.”
Although this development may well set action researchers at odds with established
educational systems, it could also be a powerful force for changing and improving
existing unsatisfactory language teaching situations. For example, Ferguson (1998) de-
scribes how she lobbied for continuation of her adult ESL class in the face of previously
unrevealed bureaucratic decisions to cut funds. Although not specifically termed crit-
ical AR, her comments on her newly gained political insights might well be:

We, as ESL practitioners, can look at our field of work and easily say, “It’s hopeless!” The
inadequacies in the field are great: in recognition of the need for ESL service for adults, in
funding for service delivery, in amount of services available, in employment opportunities
for teachers and so on and on. However, we can just as easily say, “It’s wide open!” There is
so much room for improvement that small actions towards building political visibility can
be significant. Any expertise we gain is valuable. Any progress we make is laudable. (p. 13)

To whatever extent future trends in AR incorporate some of the directions fore-

shadowed here, it seems inevitable that it will become instrumental in forging new
252 BURNS

relationships between academic researchers and teachers in our field, and in giving
rise to new paradigms for research in which practitioners will have a much greater
role to play.

CONCLUSION

This brief overview of the philosophical and theoretical antecedents, developments,

and central characteristics of AR inevitably covers only some of the ground. As an
approach that appears to excite and stimulate teachers and teacher educators alike,
it will be of great interest to the field of ELT to see how AR contributes to profes-
sional development and research in the coming decades. It is hoped that, we can look
forward to stronger and more genuinely collaborative partnerships between teachers
and researchers, and as teachers gain confidence in their research skills, to a greater
number of accounts of practitioner research in the ELT literature.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am very grateful to Kathi Bailey, Graham Crookes, and Leo van Lier for their invalu-
able comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this chapter.

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III

Applied Linguistics and

Second Language Research

257
258
Introduction

Applied linguistics emerged as a separate discipline in the 1950s when, as some lin-
guists believe, language teachers wanted to separate themselves from the teachers of
literature, who had little to do with language learning and pedagogy. At the time,
however, the study of linguistics was devoted to theoretical and formal features and
models of language, and applied linguistics arrived on the scene with the goal of
applying the findings of linguistics research to language use, development, and prac-
tice in the contexts of real-life communication. However, the research and findings of
formal linguistics, which are by their very nature theoretical and abstract, cannot be
easily applied to the enormous universe of language-related aspects of human func-
tioning. Thus, at the outset, applied linguistics was established as a interdisciplinary
study that necessarily draws on the experience, knowledge, and findings in sociology,
anthropology, psychology, education, information sciences, and even political theory,
in addition to those associated with formal linguistics.
Historically and to this day, a great proportion of applied linguistics research has
dealt with and has been closely tied to language teaching and learning. It is impor-
tant to note here, however, that stating so explicitly can be dangerous and somewhat
tactless because there is a large number of applied linguists who believe that applied
linguistics is a proper academic discipline of applied language study and that it should
not and does not have to be associated with language learning and teaching. Nonethe-
less, the historical and contemporary reasons for the emergence and proliferation of
applied linguistics research cannot be denied.
Over the years, applied linguistics has made an enormous contribution to second
language (L2) pedagogy. A hypothesis based on the formal linguistic theories of first
language acquisition stipulates that all language acquisition is innate and that the
capacity of humans to acquire language is biological in nature. This innate ability
is linked to physiological maturation that reaches its peak during puberty and then
begins to decline. Researchers who study how second language is acquired set out
to explore the applications of generative linguistic theories to the psychological and
cognitive processes that permit children and adults to acquire second languages.
To date, studies in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) have demonstrated that for
adults the learning of a second language is dramatically distinct from the ways in
which children learn the first language.

r Chapter 15, by Teresa Pica, examines the major findings and directions in second
language acquisition (SLA) research. One of its objectives is to outline the aspects
of theories that are based on its original applied and linguistic interests and clarify
them by addressing questions about language acquisition processes. The findings
of SLA research can find many applications to educational theories and shed light
on the role of the learner’s consciousness in the SLA process. The chapter also pro-
vides an overview of the nature of the learner’s input needs and requirements with
259
260 PART III: APPLIED LINGUISTICS

the goal of contributing to instructional decisions and informing the pedagogical

practice.

Unlike the research in theoretical linguistics and SLA that are primarily concerned
with psychological and behavioral processes in language acquisition, the study of
sociolinguistics emphasizes that practically all language use and human communica-
tion are social in nature. To this end, the findings of research in sociolinguistics and
its subdomains, such as language socialization, pragmatics, or sociocultural theory,
have found many direct applications to the L2 teaching and learning.
r Chapter 16, by Sandra McKay, provides an overview of some of the major is-
sues in Language and Society and relates these to L2 teaching and learning. Much
sociolinguistics research deals with bilingualism and multilingualism, which have
a great impact on language change and language use. In addition, the chapter dis-
cusses how variation in the use of linguistic forms across geographical locations, social
classes, genders, and ethnic groups in English-speaking countries affect the teaching
and learning of English.

Sociolinguistics is the study of language as a social and cultural phenomenon, and

the research on language socialization and the development of L2 sociopragmatic and
pragmatic competence are solidly rooted in its applications of the social and linguistic
constructs to L2 teaching and learning.
r Chapter 17, by Jane Zuengler and KimMarie Cole, examines the processes of
language socialization of children and novices to the linguistic forms and, through
the use of language, to the values, beliefs, behaviors, and practices of a community.
The fundamental principle of language socialization is that language practices are the
means through which linguistic and sociocultural knowledge is created and main-
tained in social activities. The research on language use establishes important links
between interactions among speakers and the broader cultural contexts in which this
language use is situated.
r Chapter 18, by Gabriel Kasper and Carsten Roever, looks at pragmatics as a
domain of sociolinguistic research that determines how context affects meaning. In
research on L2 teaching and learning, pragmatics is defined as the ability to act and
interact by means of language. For L2 and foreign language (FL) learners, this is a
necessary and frequently daunting learning task because the contextual meaning of
an utterance or an expression can be and often is dramatically different from its literal
meaning. Kasper and Roever review central issues and findings in L2 developmental
pragmatics, discuss the effects of instruction on L2 sociopragmatic and pragmatic
competence, and provide an overview of data collection methods.

Other venues in applied linguistics research that have had a great deal of influence
on what is known about second language teaching and learning include such areas
of study as Sociocultural Theory, Conversational Analysis, Contrastive Rhetoric, and
Corpus-based Studies of spoken and written text in English. Chapters 19 through 22
discuss these domains of applied linguistics inquiry and explain how the findings in
each can be used and useful in enhancing second language teaching and elucidating
learning.
r Chapter 19, by James Lantolf, explains the sociocultural theoretic approach to
L2 development and its major premise that SLA and L2 learning are by definition
a social and cultural enterprise. Sociocultural Theory proposes that humans attain
the capacity to voluntarily control or regulate their memory, attention, perception,
 PART III: APPLIED LINGUISTICS 261

planning, learning, and development as they appropriate culture and its attendant
norms, as well as language. Furthermore, as people learn language, they are brought
into culturally specified and organized activities that are in effect the essential features
of human functioning.
r Chapter 20, by Numa Markee, approaches Conversational Analysis as an area of
research in the connections between language, social interaction, and micro-features
of conversational discourse. Markee’s examination briefly takes a look at the eth-
nomethodological approach to conversation analysis to highlight the main issues and
questions investigated by means of conversation analysts. This overview is followed
by an explication of how conversational transcripts that are prepared according to the
widely adopted analytical conventions can be used in SLA and classroom research to
develop useful microanalyses of second language learning activity.
r Chapter 21, by Robert Kaplan, is devoted to the conceptual framework devel-
oped in the research on Contrastive Rhetoric. The foundational premise of Contrastive
Rhetoric rests on the assumption that naturally occurring spoken and written dis-
courses differ among communities and sociocultural paradigms, even though most
Contrastive Rhetoric research has focused on written varieties. Contrastive Rhetoric is
also concerned with divergent rhetorical constructs and discourse structuring as they
are directly connected to literacy. Contrastive Rhetoric represents the first serious con-
temporary study of L2 writing and the only early paradigm that gave prominence to
cross cultural research.
r Chapter 22, by Susan Conrad, discusses corpus linguistics as an approach to re-
search and teaching that relies on the computer-assisted analyses of language as it
is used in real life. Central to the corpus-based research is the philosophical tenet
that language study is primarily an empirical endeavor, and, thus, descriptions of
language and theories about language should be developed on the foundation of
real language behavior. Conrad points out that the contributions of corpus linguis-
tics to L2 teaching deal with three descriptions of language that lead to principled
pedagogical decisions about what to teach in second language classes, uses of corpus
linguistics methods in the classroom for L2, and studies of language produced by
learners.

A Caveat Emptor: Applied linguistics research has addressed a vast number of

language-related issues, language uses in an immense number of contexts, and lan-
guage features of practically any variety. In fact, as has been mentioned, although
many applied linguists believe that applied linguistics as a discipline dedicated to
language analysis has little to do with L2 teaching and learning, equally many (if not
more) are convinced that virtually all facets of the L2 business are derived from or
benefited by research in applied linguistics, which originally led to the emergence of
applied linguistics per se.
The chapters in Part III do not include a range of studies in applied linguistics
research because many of these have found direct applications to L2 teaching and
learning and have evolved from research in applied linguistics to that in the second
language enterprise.
The following areas of applied linguistics research have NOT been covered in Part
III. However, the direct applications of research findings are located in other Parts of
this book in their related L2 incarnations.

1. Phonetics and pronunciation. See Chapter 27 on L2 speaking and the attendant

language skills in Part IV.
2. Psycholinguistics (predominantly concerned with how children learn their first
languages). See Chapter 15 in this section, as well as Chapters 23 and 24 on age
in L2 development and cognitive considerations in L2 learning in Part IV.
262 PICA

3. Discourse analysis. See Chapter 40 on applications of the findings and methods

of discourse analysis to L2 teaching in Part V.
4. Text linguistics. See Chapter 22 on corpus studies in this Part and Chapter 34 in
Part IV on applications of text linguistics to L2 research and teaching
5. Ethnography of communication. See Chapter 10 on ethnography in L2 teaching
and learning in Part II, as well as Chapter 18 on pragmatics in this section.
6. Language attitudes. See Chapters 49 and 50 on identity in L2 learning and inter-
cultural competence in Part VII.
7. Second language testing and assessment and language policy and planning oc-
cupy their own separate sections of the book—see Parts VI and VIII, respectively.
15

Second Language Acquisition

Research and Applied
Linguistics
Teresa Pica
University of Pennsylvania

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of second language acquisition

(SLA) research over the past several decades and to highlight the ways in which it has
retained its original applied and linguistic interests, and enhanced them by address-
ing questions about acquisition processes. As the chapter will illustrate, SLA research
has become increasingly bidirectional and multifaceted in its applications. As new
theories and research have emerged on language, and even more so, on learning,
their application to the study of SLA has been fruitful. It has led to long-needed expla-
nations about developmental regularities and persistent difficulties and has opened
up new lines of research on the processes and sequences of second language (L2)
development.
The application of newer findings from the study of SLA to educational concerns
has both informed and sustained long standing debates about the role of the learner’s
consciousness in the SLA process and about the nature of the learner’s input needs
and requirements. A modest, but increasing, number of SLA research findings have
had direct application to instructional decisions. Most other findings have served as a
resource to inform teaching practice. These many applications to and from the study
of SLA reflect the robustness and vitality of the field.

DISCIPLINARY CONTEXTS

SLA Research and Applied Linguistics

The study SLA is a rich and varied enterprise, carried out by researchers, whose inter-
ests and training often lie in broader disciplines of linguistics, psychology, sociology,
and education. Yet the field is most commonly associated with the domain of applied
linguistics, reflecting a time when this latter field focused on practical problems and
concerns in language teaching and attempted to resolve them through the application
263
264 PICA

of linguistic theories. Both fields have expanded over the years. Their internal growth
has enriched and elaborated their relationship.
Defining and describing research on SLA within the field of applied linguistics
was once a straightforward task. Questions focused on practical concerns in language
teaching and were addressed through linguistic principles and psychological theories
of learning. At the time of its inception, the field of applied linguistics was guided
by theories from linguistic structuralism and behaviorist psychology. Language was
characterized as a system that could be classified into sounds and structures. Lan-
guage acquisition was seen as habit formation, best served as students imitated and
practiced these sounds and structures and were given positive reinforcement or cor-
rective feedback as needed.
Very much an applied enterprise, this research followed an approach that came
to be called “contrastive analysis” (Lado, 1957). Typically, a comparison would be
made between the L2 to be learned and the first language (L1) of the learner. Drill,
practice, and correction would follow on those areas of the L2 that differed from
those of the L1 so that L1 “interference” could be avoided, and L2 habits could be
formed. Unfortunately, this approach seldom worked, as learners did not appear to be
developmentally ready to imitate many L2 structures they were given, and as linguists
found it impossible to perform contrastive analyses on a feature-by-feature basis. Even
after many years of practice, learners would wind up with little understanding of the
L2 and limited ability to use it as a means of communication.
Both fields have broadened considerably over the years, as new views of language,
the learner, and the learning process have inspired further research. Many of the
issues that arose regarding L1 interference, drill, practice, and correction can now be
viewed in light of later work in the field. Recent research findings have pointed to L1
contributions as downplayed L1 interference. They have redefined practice as learner-
centered, knowledge-based activity, and revitalized the role of corrective feedback by
identifying contexts in which it can be effective, possibly even vital, to success. (See
respectively, research by Eckman, 1977; studies by DeKeyser, 1997; deGraff, 1997; and
theoretical articles by Doughty, 2002; Long, 1996; Schmidt, 1990, 1992, 1995 and later
parts of this chapter). This work has enriched the field of applied linguistics, and shed
further light on the process of SLA.

SLA Research and Language Acquisition Studies

SLA research can also be placed within the domain of language acquisition studies,
together with studies on bilingualism, as it relates to the acquisition of two languages
within the course of primary language development. Also found in this domain is
work on foreign language acquisition. Often referred to as foreign language learning,
it is distinguished by a lack of access to the L2 outside the classroom and by factors
surrounding an individual learner’s motivation and goals.
The largest body of work in the domain of language acquisition studies focuses
on child L1 acquisition (FLA) and developmental psycholinguistics. The studies on
FLA that have had a major impact on SLA research are those that were carried out
as views advanced by Chomsky (1965) on language, the learner, and the learning
process supplanted those framed by theories of structuralism and behaviorism. Their
application to the study of SLA influenced its initial research questions and provided
it with data collection instruments and analytical categories. This work focused on
the extent to which SLA was like FLA in its processes and developmental sequences.
A great deal of descriptive data was thereby made available to the field. These data
provide basic details on the systematicity, sequences, and processes of SLA, which
have inspired future research and informed teaching practice.
 15. APPLIED LINGUISTICS 265

The study of SLA is believed to provide a particularly fruitful area for insight into
the process of language learning compared to the study of children acquiring their
L1. This is because the cognitive, conceptual, and affective processes that characterize
L1 development are not required of their older, L2 learning counterparts (see Gass &
Ard, 1984). On the other hand, the L2 learner’s cultural background, personality, and
identity are unique resources that make the process of SLA an ever-present challenge to
researchers. Fortunately, each of the fields has found a niche in the research endeavor,
so there is little concern about whether the study of SLA or FLA is more central
to questions on language acquisition. In the United States, this friendly coexistence
seems especially confirmed by academic placement: Much of the academic study and
research on FLA takes place in departments of psychology, whereas the study of SLA
finds its place in departments of linguistics, applied linguistics, English as a Second
Language, and education.

TRADITIONS, TRENDS, CONCERNS, AND CONTROVERSIES

Introduction
Studies of SLA have existed for as long as parents have been keeping diaries of their
children’s language development (see Leopold, 1939–1949, as an example, and Hatch,
1978 for an overview). However, many SLA researchers would argue that the formal
study of SLA was launched in 1967, with Corder’s publication, “The Significance of
Learners Errors” (Corder, 1967). Its construct of “transitional competence,” together
with research on “interlanguage” (Selinker, 1972) and data description through “error
analysis” (Richards, 1974), laid the groundwork for most of the early studies in the
field and has had an impact that is felt to date.
Since that time, moreover, the field of SLA has grown at a remarkable pace, so
much so that in the course of a single chapter, it is difficult to cover the enormous
number of topics addressed, findings revealed, and factors considered in SLA research.
Fortunately, many of these concerns and contributions are handled in other chapters
throughout the volume and are detailed in a wide range of textbooks (see, for example,
R. Ellis, 1994; Gass & Selinker, 1994; Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991; Lightbown &
Spada, 1999). Therefore, in the interest of observing a bidirectional perspective on
the applications to and from SLA research and other fields, the chapter will focus on
those areas in which such a perspective is clearly apparent: the “linguistic” and the
“learning” dimensions of SLA. The chapter begins with a review of research on the
linguistic sequences of interlanguage development.

Research on Interlanguage Development

Much of SLA research has focused on describing the learner’s interlanguage and iden-
tifying sequences and patterns of development. The focus has been primarily on gram-
matical development. Because interlanguages are systematic, they follow rules and
patterns that change over the course of L2 development, but do so in patterned ways.
When describing interlanguage development, researchers often cluster its patterns
into interim grammars, which they refer to as developmental sequences or stages.
Thus, learners are likely to omit grammatical morpheme endings in the early stages
of learning, but overuse them at a later stage. For example, We play baseball yesterday.
We win. might develop into We played baseball yesterday. We winned before past regu-
lar and irregular forms are sorted out. Learners are likely to utter I don’t understand
and she don’t understand before they work through a negation system that includes
266 PICA

don’t, doesn’t, and didn’t. Although initial descriptions of interlanguage suggested that
these errors were primarily, if not totally, developmental, there is now a great deal of
support for the role of L1 transfer in error formation, as well as for the contributions
made by universal strategies of communication and learning. Among the sentences
above, for example, the learner’s use of play in a context for played, are suggestive of
processes of reduction or simplification, often used to manage emergent grammar or
to communicate message content in the absence of morphosyntactic resources. Played
and winned might reflect the learner’s regularization of an emergent grammar, again
for the purpose of its management or for communicating message meaning.
A great deal of the research on interlanguage development has focused on the
learning of English, but there are also large bodies of work on French and German.
Most interlanguage patterns are not language specific. Often they are referred to as
“errors,” but they are not isolated mistakes. Many reflect the learner’s attempts at
communication and learning or at managing and processing L2 input. Others reflect
grammatical complexities or input frequencies that transcend individual L2s.
The most widely studied and reported developmental sequences are the accuracy
order identified in English grammatical morphology, the developmental sequences
of English verb and phrase negation and the formation of questions and relative
clauses. Much of this work has been carried out through methods and perspectives
of FLA research. In addition, there is a large database on developmental sequences
for German L2. Its focus on the invariant sequence that German L2 learners follow
in managing sentence constituent movement has lent considerable insight into the
cognitive operations that underlie much of SLA. The sequences of L2 development,
which will be described briefly in this section, provide a useful resource for teachers
to apply to their attempts to understand their students’ struggles, successes, and
progress with respect to SLA. (See discussions by Lightbown, 1985, 2000; Pica, 1994a)
Attempts to explain the sequences from the perspectives of linguistic and cognitive
theories will follow in a later section.

Morpheme Accuracy Order. Drawing on the work of Brown on morpheme or-

ders in children learning English as their first language, Dulay and Burt (1973, 1974)
asked to what extent L2 children reflected this sequence. Children from different L1
backgrounds, who were learning English in a variety of classrooms, were asked to de-
scribe pictures that provided contexts for their suppliance of grammatical morphemes
such as plural -s endings and verb functors. As learners described their pictures, they
revealed an “accuracy order,” characterized by percentage of morpheme suppliance.
In follow-up studies, this order, which came to be known as an “average” or “nat-
ural” order (Krashen, 1977), held across spoken and written samples of children,
adolescents, and adults, regardless of L1, whether or not formal instruction had been
part of the learning experience. The “average” order was thus:

progressive -ing
noun plural -s
copula
article
progressive auxiliary
past irregular
past regular
3rd person singular
noun possessive -s

The grouping of morphemes reflects the variability within the order. For example,
accuracy for progressive -ing was found to be somewhat higher than that for noun
 15. APPLIED LINGUISTICS 267

plural -s for some learners, whereas other learners were more accurate in their sup-
pliance of copula compared to plural -s. Still, on average, all three morphemes were
supplied more accurately than article or progressive auxiliary.
The consistency of the morpheme accuracy order led to the view that SLA was a
matter of “creative construction,” and therefore much like FLA. SLA was seen as an
implicit learning experience, based not on rule knowledge, but rather, on an innate
capacity for L2 learning. Controversies ensued over whether such consistency in the
order was a function of the statistics used to correlate the data. Explanations were
advanced for the kinds of errors revealed in the morpheme data. For many learners,
omission of L2 copula could be attributed to the absence of this morpheme in their
L1, or its lack of salience and semantic transparency in the L2. As later research would
reveal, the errors could be attributed to each of these factors, and for many learners,
focused input and intervention were required for their correction. This work has
helped to offset the view that SLA is exclusively a creative, implicit process.

Verb and Phrasal Negatives. Widely studied across many languages, negative
structures appear to follow a similar sequence of development, which involves nega-
tive particle placement as well as verb tense and number marking. Initially, a negative
particle, usually no or not, is placed next to the item it negates, as in no like or I no like.
This juxtaposition reflects universal strategies of communication and grammar man-
agement. Thus, all learners exhibit this stage. Those whose L1 negation is consistent
with the stage, for example, L1 Spanish or Italian learners, usually remain there longer
than those whose L1 does not encode negation in this way (See Zobl, 1980, 1982). The
next stage entails the use of an all-purpose, more target-like negator. In the case of
English, this is usually don’t. Later, the learner restructures don’t for tense and number,
so that didn’t and doesn’t appear.

Question Formation. Learning to form questions involves multiple stages as well.

As described in early case studies of children by Huang and Hatch (1978) and Ravem
(1968), and in more recent work of Pienemann, Johnston, and Brindley (1988), the
stages involve the acquisition of question type (yes/no and wh questions) as well
as formation (inversion and fronting movements). Stage 1 is characterized by the
use of single words and formulaic expressions, such as a store?, what’s that? Many
of these seem perfectly well formed, but they actually reflect learners’ attempts to
communicate or to manage their still developing grammar. In stage 2, the learner uses
declarative word order. In Stage 3, fronting of wh- words and do begin to appear (who
you are?, do she like the movie?), and by Stage 4, inversion of wh in copular questions
(who are you?) and of copula and auxiliary in yes–no questions (are you a student? was
she driving the car?) is seen. Stage 5 is characterized by the appearance of inversion in
questions that require do-support to lexical verbs (do you like movies? who is driving the
car?). Stage 6 is characterized by the appearance of complex or less frequently used
question forms such as tags (she’s French, isn’t she?), negative questions (didn’t you like
the movie?), and embedded questions (do you know what the answer is?).

Relativization. The acquisition of relative clause structures relates to both the

different sentence positions in which relativization can occur as well as the way in
which it is encoded through the use of relative pronouns such as who, which, that,
in substitution for their referent pronouns. These operations are seen in The woman
helps me with my English. The woman is my neighbor. Together, they can relativize into
The woman who helps me with my English is my neighbor. Developmental sequences for
relative clause formation follow a hierarchical order in which learners show greater
accuracy for subject relativization (seen in the sentence just mentioned), than for direct
object relativization (The man bought a new car. The car has a sunroof. The car that the man
268 PICA

bought has a sunroof). This is followed by indirect object and object of preposition
relativization (respectively, The woman to whom I gave the money was grateful and
The man from whom I borrowed the book has moved away). This sequence has been
shown to reflect language typology and instructional sensitivity. Both topics will be
discussed shortly.

Word Order. Finally, one of the most detailed and insightful studies of develop-
mental sequences has been carried out on constituent movement and word order in
German. Meisel, Clahsen, and Pienemann (1981) studied the untutored, non-instructed
acquisition of German L2 by Gasterbeiter or guest workers, who had migrated to
Germany from Eastern and Central Europe for short-term employment. They were
native speakers predominantly of Romance languages and Turkish. Drawing from
both longitudinal case studies and cross-sectional group data, Meisel et al. identified
6 stages:
Initially, the learners used individual words, phrases, unanalyzed formulas, and
chunks. In stage 2, they moved on to simple sentence strings of sentence elements,
usually subject-verb-object structures. In stage 3, they began to manipulate sentence
constituents, seen mainly in adverbial movement from sentence final to sentence
initial position. (She could read the book yesterday became Yesterday she could read the
book).
Next the learners separated sentence elements. In keeping with standard German
word order, they moved nonfinite lexical verbs from sentence internal to sentence
final position. (Yesterday she could read the book became Yesterday she could the book read).
The next stage was characterized by inversion, a more complex internal movement,
as learners complied with German rules for verb initial placement in questions and
adverbial phrases. (Yesterday she could the book read became Yesterday could she the book
read?) In their final stage, the focus was on subordinate clauses, for which learners
moved the finite verb to final position Yesterday she could the book read became Although
yesterday she the book could read). Notably absent from the sequences are grammatical
morphemes, as these appeared to vary according to a learner’s age, contact with native
speakers of the L2, and opportunities for L2 use. This invariant sequence of stages,
together with the variability of accuracy and appearance of other features, have been
referred to as the Multidimensional Model.
R. Ellis (1989) studied instructed learners of German L2 and found the same se-
quence of development. Pienemann and Johnston (1986) applied the sequence to
English and cited the following stages: In stage 1, learners use single words and for-
mulas. In stage 2, they use canonical word order. Stage 3 is characterized by fronting
of “do” for questions and appearance of negative particles in verb constructions. In
stage 4, inversion appears in yes–no questions. In stage 5, third person singular and
do-support appear, motivated by the need for noun–verb agreement. Pienemann and
Johnston have claimed that this is a sentence internal movement as it reflects the
learner’s management of both subject and verb structures. Complex structures such
as question tags are seen in stage 6.
The Multidimensional Model has also been the focus of Pienemann’s Teachability
Hypothesis (Pienemann, 1989). He was able to show that learners could accelerate
their rate of L2 learning if presented with rules for constituent movement that corre-
sponded with their next stage of development. If taught the rules of stages beyond
their current level, the learners would not be able to internalize what they were taught.
This finding has tremendous implications and applications to teaching decisions. Yet,
as Cook (2001) has noted, even the most widely used, up-to-date textbooks, fail to
follow the sequences that Pienemann has identified.
In more recent research, the Multidimensional Model has come to be known as
the Processibility Model. This model is so named because it provides an explanation
 15. APPLIED LINGUISTICS 269

for stage progression and teachability predictions based on cognitive processing con-
straints. These are related to the complexity of production required for each move-
ment across the stages. In developing the Processibility Model, Pienemann has drawn
from Slobin’s work on “operating principles” (Slobin, 1973, 1985), and from research
on child FLA and bilingualism by Clahsen (1984). Recently, Pienemann has linked
these processing strategies with Lexicalist-Functional grammar in a study of Swedish
L2 developmental sequences (Pienemann & Haakenson, 1999). Pienemann’s newer
perspective on SLA is much more cognitive in its undergirding than his Multidimen-
sional Model. Other cognitively oriented research on SLA will be addressed later in
this chapter.

Research on Second Language Acquisition Processes: Overview

This introductory section will review current theories in linguistics and psychology
that have been applied to questions on the SLA process. Later sections will highlight
their application to data on the sequences of interlanguage development, discuss some
of the new questions and studies that the theories have motivated, and attempt to sort
out the controversies that have been created by their presence in the field.
As an applied enterprise, SLA research has looked to linguistics and psychology
to guide its questions, shape its hypotheses, and explain its findings. As often noted
and lamented, SLA has not been grounded in its own comprehensive theory that
can account for its sequences and processes, predict its outcomes, single out its most
influential factors (see Long, 1990, for a compelling discussion of this issue). As was
discussed in the introduction to this chapter, early research on SLA was guided by the-
ories from structural linguistics and behaviorist psychology. As generative theories of
language and psycholinguistic theories of learning came to the forefront of linguistics
and psychology, their research methods made it possible for SLA researchers to collect
a great deal of the interlanguage data described in the previous section.
More recently, newer theoretical perspectives on language and learning have been
applied to the study of SLA. From linguistics, theories on universal properties and
principles of language have shed light on the regularities and constraints that charac-
terize interlanguage grammars and have led to more principled research on the role
of the L1 in the learning process. The nativist perspective on language acquisition that
undergirds much of this research has served to invigorate the long-standing debate
in the field as to the role of explicit rule learning in the SLA process and the need for
explicit rule teaching in the classroom.
From psychology, cognitive theories have had a highly productive impact on SLA
research and its applications. Cognitively informed studies have revealed the ways in
which learners process L2 input and use it to build and restructure their interlanguage
grammar. New findings on cognitive processes of attention, awareness, and practice
have been used to explain the results of older studies. In addition, the interactions
shown to promote these processes have revealed connections and applications to
classroom practice.

Research on Linguistic Processes in Second Language Acquisition

The Role of Language Universals in SLA. The notion of a “universal” is not new to the
field of linguistics but has provided both explanations of SLA sequences and predic-
tions of SLA outcomes. Language universals reflect consistencies in the typological
or surface properties of world languages. Surface features that are commonly found
across languages, are perceptually salient in a language, and are transparent in their
encoding of meaning or function are considered “unmarked.” Those that are rare,
difficult to perceive and to relate to meaning or function are considered “marked.”
270 PICA

For example, voiceless alveolar stops such as (t) are considered “unmarked” as they
are found among most languages, whereas interdental (th) is less commonly found
and is therefore considered “marked.”
The underlying assumption of language universals theory is that features that are
less marked in a language are learned earlier than those that are marked. Thus, English
L2 learners would be expected to acquire the unmarked (t) before the less common
(th), and the -s that conveys plural meaning before the -s required for the more opaque
third person singular.
Language universals also enter into implicational relationships. Thus, the presence
of voiced alveolar stops such as (d) in a language implies the presence of voiceless
alveolar stops, for example, (t). The voicing on (d) makes it more complex and marked
than (t). Because more languages have unmarked than marked features, the presence
of a marked feature implies the presence of its unmarked counterpart.
The typological universal that has had the strongest role in explaining SLA se-
quences of development is the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH), in
which relative clauses formation follows an order that is consistent with principles of
markedness. Thus, across languages of the world, subject noun phrases are more ac-
cessible to relativization than are direct object noun phrases, which are more accessible
than indirect object, object of preposition, and comparative noun phrases. These are
implicationally ordered, so that if a language allows relativization of indirect objects,
it also allows relativization of direct objects.
English allows relativization of all noun phrases on the NPAH. Other languages
such as Chinese, allow relativization of fewer phrases, but they still observe the order-
ing implications. This relationship across languages of the world also holds within
interlanguages of learners and can account for the order of acquisition of relative
clause formation described in the previous section. As was shown, English L2 learners
acquire the ability to form subject relatives before direct and indirect object relatives.
In addition to the explanatory role that the study of language universals has played
in SLA research, it also has revealed predictive power. Several studies have shown
that targeted instruction in relative clause formation at lower levels on the hierarchy,
such as object of preposition, can generalize to acquisition at higher levels such as di-
rect object (See Doughty, 1991; Eckman, Bell, & Nelson, 1988; Gass, 1982) This finding
has not found its way into language curricula, despite its clear application to teaching
practice.
The impact of the study of language universals on SLA research has also been seen
in question formation. Again, Eckman (Eckman, Moravcsik, & Wirth, 1989) identified
two typological universals that Wh-inversion (who are you?) implies Wh-fronting (who
you are?) and that yes/no inversion (do you like movies?) implies Wh inversion. This
implicational order revealed in typological studies is reflected in the developmental
data on question formation at stages 3, 4, and 5, that was also described in the previous
section.
The explanations and predictions offered through the perspective of language uni-
versals and the notion of markedness have given SLA researchers a fresh look at the
role of transfer in SLA. As Eckman (1977) and Hyltenstam (1987) have shown, an L2
feature will be difficult if it is more marked linguistically in an absolute sense and
even more so if it is more marked than its L1 counterpart. Thus, indirect object rel-
ativization or voiced stops would be more difficult to learn than subject relatives or
voiceless stops, but would be even more difficult for those learners whose L1 was
more limited in its scope of relativization or had only voiceless consonants. On the
other hand, if the L2 feature were marked in the learner’s L1, or even absent from
it, its acquisition would not pose as much of a problem as long as the feature were
unmarked in the L2. Thus, English learners of Chinese are able to suppress their L1
relative clause formation for objects of prepositions. English learners of German are
 15. APPLIED LINGUISTICS 271

able to suppress L1 voicing of final consonants in favor of unmarked, voiceless ones

in German L2.
Principles of the construct of markedness, applied to interlanguage data devel-
opment, can also explain why certain linguistic features are more difficult to notice
than others, are less available in conversational input, and might qualify for focused
instruction. These possibilities will be further explored in the discussion of cognitive
processes.

The Role of Linguistic Universals in SLA. Linguistic Universals reflect constraints

on the form of human languages. The linguistic universals that have had the most
impact on SLA research are the innate principles of Universal Grammar (UG) that are
viewed as a genetic endowment or property of mind, and a binary system of options,
known as parameters, each with marked and unmarked settings that configure into
a “core” grammar. The construct of markedness, which is central to the work on
universals of language typology, described in the preceding section, also plays a role
in the study of linguistic universals. However, whereas language universals had to
do with surface feature frequency across languages, linguistic universals have to do
with underlying rules.
Everyone who has fully acquired an L1 has constructed a core grammar and has
set the parameters of the core grammar in accordance with the L1. For example,
individuals whose L1 is a “pro-drop” language must set this parameter into its simpler,
unmarked setting. Thus, they might say I have three cats . . . are nice because they have set
the pro-drop parameter so that pronoun referents are not needed in subject position.
Those individuals whose L1 is a non-pro-drop language need to set their parameter in
a marked setting so that a subject pronoun is always needed, as in I have three cats . . .
They are nice. The marked parameter setting might be observed even in sentences
where the subject pronoun held no meaning, as in It is snowing or There are 24 hours in
a day. It is claimed that children begin learning their L1 as though the pro-drop and
other parameters were in unmarked settings. Once confronted with marked input,
they switch the parameters to marked settings.
There are three theoretical views on linguistic universals that have been addressed
in studies of SLA. Many of these studies have focused on the principle of “subjacency,”
which has to do with wh- movement within sentences. Some languages allow more
movement than others, and some do not observe the principle at all. Thus, studies of
L2 learners whose L1 follows subjacency rules that are different from the L2 provide
a good basis for determining the role of UG in SLA.
The strongest view is that SLA is like FLA, and learners have access to the prin-
ciples and unmarked parameters of UG in much the same way that they did during
FLA. They therefore begin interlanguage development through unmarked parameter
settings, not through their parameterized core grammar. There is evidence in sup-
port of this view in research by Bley-Vroman, Felix, and Ioup (1988), who found that
Korean L1 learners of English were able to recognize English sentences that followed
the principle of subjacency for wh-movement, even though this principle is not ob-
served in Korean. This finding illustrated that L2 learners are sensitive to universal
principles, even when those principles have not been realized in their L1.
Another view is that L2 learners fall back on the parameterized core grammar of
their L1 but are able to reset it for the L2, even when confronted with marked data
that conflicts with their L1. Support for this position comes from White (1985). She
found that Spanish L1 learners of English L2 relied initially on their L1 setting for pro-
drop when making grammaticality judgments of English sentences, whereas French
L1 learners of English did not appear to do so. In Spanish, the pro-drop parameter
has an unmarked setting, but in English and French the setting is marked. Over time,
however, the Spanish learners’ grammaticality judgments were as accurate as those
272 PICA

of the French learners. This result suggested that they were able to reset their L1
parameter for the marked English L2 setting.
Yet another view is that L2 learners are not able to draw on UG principles to reset the
parameters of their core grammar, but instead rely on cognitive principles of learning
and apply them to their L2 development. SLA is thus experienced as a conscious,
problem-solving activity. Such a view accounts for the errors produced by L2 learners
as they attempt to manage and control interlanguage grammar.
One of the most compelling reasons for application of linguistic universals to ques-
tions about SLA is that the principles and parameters represent constituents and
operations that transcend individual languages. This offers excellent opportunities
to further explore the role of transfer in L2 learning, to see how it affects aspects of
grammar that are considered to be outside the UG core. Findings from such research
can shed further light on current assumptions as to which principles and parameters
are actually universal and which are subject to L1 constraints. Even more important
is the fact that perspectives on linguistic universals provide SLA with both a theory
of language and a theory of language learning.
However compelling they appear, though, theoretical views on linguistic universals
pose several difficulties with respect to their application to SLA research. One difficulty
is methodological. Most of the research involved with linguistic universals has asked
learners to judge the grammaticality of sentences that reflect the linguistic principle or
parameter under study. Usually they are asked to read or listen to sentences and give a
yes or no judgment. Such an approach is in keeping with assumptions used throughout
theoretical linguistics on the validity of native speaker intuition as a reflection of
language competence. However, results of studies that use grammaticality judgment
data are difficult to compare with those based on descriptive, interlanguage samples.
A second difficulty with linguistic universals lies in their perceived relevance to the
study of SLA. Most consumers of SLA research are used to discussing it with reference
to transcribed samples of interlanguage speech or frequency tables of interlanguage
features. When they read about research findings on interlanguage, they expect ref-
erence to functional and inflectional features such as articles or tense markers. Yet,
these are the very features considered peripheral to the core grammar. Further, when
core grammar parameters are addressed, this is done through terms such as “subja-
cency” rather than through familiar terminology on wh-questions. This further limits
comparison with data from other research.
A further difficulty with the application of perspectives on linguistic universals to
SLA research relates to explanation of findings. Learner forms attributed to unmarked
parameter settings can often be explained with reference to universal processes of
simplification that have long held a place in interlanguage analysis. Thus, the question
remains as to whether the learners who say is raining are doing so because they are
observing the unmarked setting of the pro-drop parameter, have chosen to omit the
semantically empty it as an agent in their message, or have not yet perceived it in the
L2 input around them.
Many questions remain regarding linguistic universals as a driving force behind
SLA questions and as an explanation of SLA data. Some of these pertain to competing
findings within this perspective on SLA; others are related to terminological incon-
sistencies with studies across the field. Over time, and with persistence, these matters
can open up opportunities for further study and new lines of research, which will
lead to greater understanding of the SLA process.

Research on Cognitive Processes in Second Language Acquisition

The Role of Cognitive Processes in SLA. Cognitive theories are concerned with
mental processes used for skill building and skill learning. Thus, when SLA research
 15. APPLIED LINGUISTICS 273

is carried out within a cognitive perspective, the L2 is viewed as a skill, and its acqui-
sition as a linguistic system is assumed to be built up gradually through processes of
attention, conscious awareness, and practice.
To some researchers, a view of SLA that includes cognitive processes such as
attention, awareness, and practice is inconsistent with theoretical assumptions of
interlanguage research and with universal perspectives on language acquisition. This
is because most researchers have viewed SLA as an implicit experience, guided by
the learner’s interaction with L2 input. To them, the cognitive process of attention is
important, but mainly because it promotes understanding of meaning not because it
facilitates skill learning. They associate cognitive constructs such as conscious aware-
ness and practice with behaviorist theories of learning, dismissed from the field several
decades ago.
Yet most SLA researchers who apply cognitive theories to inform their questions
and methods do so under the assumption that SLA is indeed a largely implicit process.
For them, cognitive theories are not alternate views on SLA. Instead, they are applied
to research in order to better understand and to possibly explain why it is that, for many
learners, an implicit experience of transacting L2 message meaning is not sufficient
for achieving L2 grammatical competence.
Many L2 learners, for example, struggle with linguistic features that are difficult to
notice in the messages they hear. These are often outside the scope of UG principles
and parameters, and therefore can be affected by any number of internal and external
factors, or never acquired at all. Other learners report that they can understand the
meaning of a message without the need to focus on the many forms that encode it.
Even young learners have been shown to have strong L2 comprehension, but lack
grammatical proficiency. Some learners have internalized versions of the L2 that are
functionally adequate for communicative purposes, but developmentally incomplete
in form and structure. The consequences of this are nonstandard, stable, immutable,
“fossilized” interlanguage varieties. These varieties were introduced to the field by
Selinker in 1974, and have continued to challenge researchers, teachers, and, of course,
fossilized L2 learners, to date. Fossilized learners of English, for example, might con-
tinue to position a negative particle next to the item it negates, as in no like or I no like,
or he don’t like, which reflects a developmental stage of negation learning, as well as a
strategy of communication and grammar management.
Many of these concerns about SLA have been expressed as research questions
about the quality and accessibility of L2 input that can best serve learners as data for
their learning. Therefore, the remaining discussion of cognitive processes will focus
primarily on research about their role in assisting learners to notice L2 input and apply
it to their learning.

Comprehension, Input and Interaction. That samples of L2 are needed by learners

as a source of input for their learning has long been a basic assumption of SLA re-
search. Corder (1967) distinguished between the input that is available to L2 learners
and that which individual learners can actually use as intake for building interlan-
guage grammar, given their stage of development. Decades ago, Krashen argued that
“comprehensible input” was necessary and sufficient for successful SLA (see, for ex-
ample, Krashen, 1977). He described such input as understandable in its meaning, but
slightly beyond the learner’s current level of development with respect to its linguistic
form. Both “intake” and “comprehensible input” were conceptually intriguing, but
they did not lend themselves to testable hypotheses about SLA processes.
Long (1981, 1985) also argued that comprehensible input was crucial to SLA, but his
research revealed that it was the learners’ interaction with interlocutors that mattered
as much as the input directed to them. Thus, when input was no longer comprehen-
sible during interaction between L2 learners and interlocutors, they would modify
274 PICA

the flow of the interaction and repeat, rephrase, or request help with the input until
comprehension was achieved. It was claimed that the modified input directed toward
the learners could assist their comprehension as well as their L2 learning.
Follow-up studies of such interaction, which Long referred to as the “negotia-
tion of meaning,” were carried out by Long and others (for example, Gass & Varo-
nis, 1994; Mackey, 1999; Pica, Holliday, Lewis, & Morgenthaler, 1989; Pica, Holliday,
Lewis, Berducci, & Newman, 1991). Their analyses revealed that as learners and inter-
locutors attempted to achieve comprehensibility, they repeated and rephrased initial
messages, and extracted and highlighted words and phrases in patterned ways that
often had developmental consequences. Pica et al. (1989, 1991) showed that the extent
to which learners worked at these manipulations was directly related to the open
endedness of the questions they were asked. Gass and Varonis (1994) showed that in-
terlanguage items negotiated in an initial conversation would be accurately encoded
in the learner’s later production. Mackey (1999) revealed that learners’ active par-
ticipation in negotiation was closely connected to their development of L2 English
question forms.
An analysis by Pica (1994b) showed that these extractions often revealed L2 gram-
matical relationships as they encoded message meaning. For example, in response to
the learner’s initial utterance that encoded a noun phrase in subject position (the stu-
dents watch the movie), a listener might extract the noun phrase, topicalize and repeat it
in object position (the students? what did you say about the students?). Such modifications
appeared to give learners repeated access to L2 form as it encoded message meaning.
This was the very kind of L2 input that could be used as intake for grammar building,
restructuring, and internalization.
Because SLA was considered to be a subconscious, implicit process in terms of
the learner’s mental involvement, there did not seem to be a push to explore the
cognitive side of the input–intake–internalization progression. SLA models based on
information processing theory and cognitive processes (see, for example McLaughlin,
1978) were rejected by Krashen for their emphasis on the role of consciousness, which
Krashen considered unnecessary for SLA, and possibly detrimental to the learner’s
progress.

Consciousness and Attention. Increasingly, researchers have come to observe that

L2 learning is a much more conscious experience than was heretofore believed. Draw-
ing on his own experience as a Portuguese L2 learner in and out of classrooms in Brazil,
Schmidt and Frota (1986) found that cognitive processes such as attention and noticing
were crucial to his L2 learning. The frequency with which he heard complex features
of Portuguese and the salience of their form or position in input were two factors
that helped Schmidt to notice them. Schmidt also found that in order to incorporate
many features of Portuguese into his developing L2 grammar, he needed to “notice
the gap” between such features as they were used by other speakers, and his own
interlanguage production of these features. Here, too, his noticing was aided by the
frequency and saliency of a feature, the communicative and cognitive demands of the
situation in which he found himself, and his readiness to “notice the gap.”
Schmidt’s observations, along with findings on communicative, content-based
classroom contexts considered rich in L2 input (Pica, 2002; Swain, 1985), have revealed
that comprehensible input, however modified, might not be efficient, or even suffi-
cient, for SLA. Thus, new questions have emerged about the kinds of input learners
need to achieve a successful L2 outcome. Long addressed these questions in several
publications, including Long (1996) and Long, Inagaki, & Ortega (1998). Drawing
from not only Schmidt’s arguments and findings, but also from FLA theory and re-
search, and from studies of L2 form-focused instruction (such as those of Spada &
Lightbown, 1993; White, 1991; White, Spada, Lightbown, & Ranta, 1991) and exper-
imental intervention (Oliver, 1995), Long distinguished between input that provides
 15. APPLIED LINGUISTICS 275

positive evidence of relationships of L2 form, function, and meaning, and input that
supplies negative evidence on forms and structures that are used by learners, but are
not consistent with the L2 they are learning.
According to Long, sources of positive evidence include spoken and written texts
that are in their authentic state, as well as those that have been modified for com-
prehensibility in ways previously described. Learners can access negative evidence
through explicit corrective feedback or implicit feedback. Included among this latter
are requests for learners to clarify or repeat utterances that can’t be understood (for
example, Could you say that again? or Huh?) and “recasts,” which essentially repeat
what a learner has just said (I need pencil) in a more accurate way (You need a pencil). The
most effective recasts appear to be those that focus on only one grammatical feature
over the course of a conversation or lesson (Doughty & Varela, 1998). When teachers
recast a range of student misproductions, the students fail to distinguish them from
other follow-up moves that teachers use to conduct their lessons. (Lyster, 1998).
Among the cognitively oriented interventions that appear to heighten the learner’s
access to L2 input for both positive and negative evidence are instruction on how best
to process input for form and meaning (Van Patten & Oikkenon, 1996; Van Patten
& Sanz, 1995), the learner’s interaction with meaningful materials, enhanced both
graphically and linguistically to highlight form and meaning relationships (Doughty,
1991), problem solving, information exchange and other goal-oriented, task-based
activities (Pica et al., 2001; Pica, Kanagy, & Falodun, 1993), and activities that foster
learners’ communication about grammar (Fotos 1994; Fotos & Ellis, 1991; Loschsky &
Bley-Vroman, 1993; Pica et al., 2001).
In addition to the positive and negative evidence that comes from modified input,
feedback, and formal instruction, Swain has argued that learners’ own production can
provide a basis for learning of L2 relationships of form and meaning (Swain, 1985,
1995, 1998). Based on extensive observational data of learner exchanges, she has found
that when asked to modify their message production toward greater comprehensibil-
ity or precision, they move from their rudimentary interlanguage grammar, in which
relationships among sentence elements are often characterized by simple juxtaposi-
tion of relevant words (Philadelphia live) to more advanced, syntactic processing and
message organization (I live in Philadelphia). Often their conversation engages them in
discussion of the linguistic dimensions of their interaction, a process Swain refers to
as “metatalk.” Swain claims that learners’ production also helps them to “notice the
gap” between their output and input. Swain has placed her work within a collabora-
tive, sociocultural perspective, whereas other output-focused researchers have found
results consistent with hers and have been able to explain them in terms of cognitive
processes (see, for example, deBot, 1996). Thus, there is strong support for the role of
production in SLA, across social and cognitive perspectives.

L2 Knowledge. Theoretical claims that L2 learning is a much more conscious pro-

cess than was heretofore believed and an experience that can benefit from both input
and feedback, have reactivated the long-standing debate in the field regarding L2
learning and its relation to L2 knowledge. This debate, once known almost exclu-
sively as Krashen’s “acquisition” vs. “learning” distinction (see again, Krashen, 1977,
1981, as well as Krashen’s recent writings, for example, Krashen, 1994), centers on
three positions regarding the interface of implicit and explicit L2 learning and resul-
tant L2 knowledge.
The first position is a noninterface position, that is, that SLA is an altogether im-
plicit activity. Although explicit L2 learning and explicit L2 knowledge are possible,
they remain separate from the L2 competence that learners come to acquire. This po-
sition is consistent with nativist perspectives drawn from theories on linguistic uni-
versals (for example, Schwartz, 1993) and with Krashen’s Monitor Theory (Krashen
1977, 1981), which have been used to account for the regularities of L2 development.
276 PICA

However, it does not account for the incomplete acquisition experienced by fossilized
learners.
A very different position is the strong interface position, supported through stud-
ies by DeKeyser (1997), N. Ellis (1993, 1994), and Robinson (1997). This position,
motivated by information processing theory (see McLaughlin 1978, 1996; O’Malley,
Chamot, & Walker, 1987), holds that explicit L2 knowledge, attained through explicit
learning, can become implicit L2 knowledge. This is generally achieved through prac-
tice in which learners deliberately focus their attention on L2 form as it encodes mes-
sage meaning and work toward understanding and internalization. Many studies
have shown support for this view. Carefully controlled in design, they tend to focus
on very specific features and highly experimental conditions. Additional support has
come from the meta-analysis and comparison or experimental and quasi-experimental
studies on the effect of L2 instruction (Norris & Ortega 2001) on L2 learning. Together,
individual studies and the meta-analysis of different kinds of studies indicate that
the strong interface position is indeed a valid one, but might apply to context-specific
dimensions of SLA.
Finally, there is a position known as the “weak” interface position, although it is
much more robust than the other two positions in its number of supporters and sup-
portive studies. Here, SLA is viewed as a predominantly implicit activity. However,
it is believed that L2 knowledge can be built up through both explicit instruction
and other interventions that enable learners to notice crucial relationships of L2 form
and meaning that are difficult, if not impossible, for them to learn without such in-
tervention. This is a view held by not only those who carry out research strictly
within the cognitive perspective, but also among researchers associated with strate-
gies of consciousness raising (Rutherford & Sharwood Smith, 1985) and those who
work within a perspective that has come to be known as “focus on form.” This work
was initiated by Long (1991), and has been sustained by studies gathered in a vol-
ume edited by Doughty and Williams (1998; see, for example, chapters by DeKeyser,
Harley; Lightbown; Long & Robinson; Swain; Doughty & Varela; and Williams &
Evans).
The evidence in support of this “weak” position illustrates ways in which all three
positions are correct, as each is conditioned by factors that are learner-related, stage-
specific, language-related factors. Many of these factors need further exploration.
Others have yet to be identified. Together with other needs across the field, they
augur well for a solid future for SLA research. The chapter will therefore close with a
brief look toward that future.

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

This chapter has aimed to highlight the ways in which SLA research, across the past
3 decades, has retained its original applied and linguistic interests and enhanced
them through greater attention to questions on acquisition processes. New research,
carried out from the perspectives of linguistic and language universals and cognitive
activities, has shed much light on the complexities of L2 development and the input
and interactional needs of L2 learners. Application of findings from this research has
rekindled old debates on the role of consciousness in L2 learning and uncovered new
and necessary ways to study corrective feedback and L2 practice, beyond a behaviorist
point of view.
Many questions remain unanswered. Others are in need of more complete answers.
The three positions on the role of UG remain unresolved. Is each correct, according to
the linguistic feature studied? Is one more relevant to UG; the others, more reflective of
 15. APPLIED LINGUISTICS 277

peripheral grammars? Continued research along these lines can contribute to a theory
of L2 learning and inform theoretical linguistics as well. The study of the learner’s
L1 in relation to markedness and language universals has shown much promise. The
classroom relevance of this research is already apparent, and that, in itself, should
motivate additional studies.
Researchers need to continue to identify form-meaning relationships that defy the
learner’s grasp and yet are outside of UG and, therefore, not learnable from unmod-
ified input or positive evidence alone. The construct of markedness can play a role
in their identification. Those forms whose encodings of meaning are not salient, are
infrequent or highly complex, or are embedded in specialized registers such as aca-
demic or professional discourse, are likely to require focused practice and repeated
positive evidence, or various kinds of negative evidence to stimulate their learning.
Future studies will need not only to identify the forms whose meaningful encodings
are difficult to acquire, but also to design activities that help learners to notice them
through focused input and negative evidence.
Researchers must also develop ways to operationalize and study processes of re-
structuring and internalization that occur after learners have noticed input and pro-
cessed it as intake. The interventions designed to stimulate these processes will not
only provide data on the input–intake–restructuring–internalization progression, but
will serve as a basis for materials and activities that can be applied to classroom needs.
As new findings emerge on the role of consciousness and attention in the learning
process, their relevance to the classroom is evident. However, there is an urgent need
to operationally define these processes, lest they be misapplied to classroom practice
in behaviorist rather than cognitive terms.
A consistent theme throughout SLA research has been the need for longitudinal
data. The handful of longitudinal studies that have been carried out have made an
impressive impact on the field. The most recent that of Schmidt and Frota (1986).
The kind of longitudinal research needed at present must take the form of follow-up
studies that check retention of features learned through instructional intervention and
practice. Although it is clear that feedback and focused input can make a difference in
the short term, their trusted application to classroom practice will require confidence
in their long-term impact.
The relevance of classroom practice in informing SLA research and in being in-
formed by its results will find SLA researchers and SLA practitioners working to-
gether to design studies and interpret their findings. This has already become appar-
ent among classroom studies. Lingering linguistic questions, as previously described,
suggest a need for teamwork with linguists as well. Opportunities for such research
teams to collaborate, sharing and exchanging roles and responsibilities, as well as to
work together in complementary roles, will bring greater efficiency as well as theo-
retical and pedagogical relevance to SLA research.
The field has increased in size and scope, yet it is still sufficiently focused on ques-
tions of learning and teaching for many voices and perspectives to be acknowledged.
The fact that corrective feedback and focused practice are now viewed as cognitive
processes and are at the forefront of research interest, suggests that the field is still
open for a fresh look at processes once discarded or nearly forgotten, as long as the
evidence to support them is abundant and convincing. That is how learner errors
came to be seen as learning processes rather than as bad habits, and how communica-
tion and comprehension came to be acknowledged as insufficient for L2 competence.
Lingering questions and concerns at present will continue to lead the way to future
studies. New and currently unforseen directions will be taken. The richness and com-
plexity of SLA as an learning process and a field of study suggest that there are many
perspectives to apply and many more applications to be found.
278 PICA

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16

Sociolinguistics and Second

Language Learning
Sandra Lee McKay
San Francisco State University

Countless decisions that L2 teachers make depend on sociolinguistic knowledge.

When teachers decide which grammatical, pragmatic, and discourse standards to pro-
mote in their classroom, they need an awareness of the social dimensions of language
use. When teachers grapple with how to productively use their students’ mother
tongue in the classroom, they must draw on sociolinguistic expertise. When teachers
deal with students’ attitudes toward language variation, they need sociolinguistic
knowledge. This chapter highlights the importance of sociolinguistics for L2 peda-
gogy. In order to accomplish this goal, it is necessary to first examine the various ways
in which sociolinguistics is defined.

TOWARD A DEFINITION OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Sociolinguistics is concerned with the relationship between language use and so-
cial factors. One of the major debates of sociolinguistics is whether to take social
or linguistic factors as primary in investigations of this relationship. As evidence of
this debate, Wardhaugh (1992) and others make a distinction between sociolinguis-
tics and the sociology of language. Whereas sociolinguistics takes linguistic factors as
primary in its investigations of language and society, the sociology of language inves-
tigates the manner in which social and political forces influence language use. Trauth
and Kazzazi (1996), in the Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, make a
similar distinction, noting that socolinguistics can have either a sociological or lin-
guistic orientation. The dictionary, however, adds a third possibility, namely, an eth-
nomethodological orientation. Hence, three areas of sociolinguistic investigation are
delineated:

(a) A primarily sociologically oriented approach concerned predominately with the

norms of language use (When and for what purpose does somebody speak what kind
of language or what variety with whom?). . . . (b) A primarily linguistically oriented

281
282 MCKAY

approach that presumes linguistic systems to be in principle heterogeneous, though

structured, when viewed within sociological parameters. . . . . (c) An ethnomethodolically
oriented approach with linguistic interaction as the focal point, which studies the ways
in which members of a society create social reality and rule-ordered behaviour. (p. 439)

In our discussion of sociolinguistics (McKay & Hornberger, 1996), we examine

the field of sociolinguistics by differentiating a macrolevel and microlevel of social
and linguistic analysis. Thus, in terms of the social context, sociolinguists can focus
on larger social contexts like nations and communities or on more limited contexts
like classrooms, restaurants, or medical offices. In reference to language, researchers
can examine larger issues like the choice of one language over another or narrower
concerns like the choice of one phonological feature over another. A macro and micro
distinction then results in the following areas of sociolinguistic analysis.

Levels of Social Analysis

Macro Micro
Levels of Macro Language and Society Language and Culture
Linguistic
Analysis
Micro Language and Variation Language and Interaction

Each of the four areas supports a specific type of sociolinguisitic research. For ex-
ample, in the area of Language and Society, sociolinguists examine the manner in
which the social and political context influences a macrolevel of language use, inves-
tigating, for example, which language is used in which domains in a particular society
or how social factors affect attitudes toward particular language varieties or language
standards. Topics in this area include societal multilingualism, language planning
and policy (see Part VIII, this volume), and language attitudes and motivation. In the
area of Language and Variation, sociolinguists consider how social factors influence
the choice of particular linguistic forms, considering, for instance, how geographical
region, social class, or gender affect an individual’s use of particular phonological,
structural, or lexical features of a language. Topics that are considered in this area
include regional, social, gender, and ethnic linguistic variation.
In the area of Language and Interaction, sociolinguists adopt a microlevel of social
and linguistic analysis exploring, for example, how a specific social situation or role
relationship affects the verbal and nonverbal communication of the participants. This
area of sociolinguistics includes fields like conversational analysis (see Markee, this
volume) and pragmatics (see Kasper, this volume). Finally in the area of Language
and Culture, there is a microlevel of social analysis so that specific social situations,
role relationships, or texts are examined, but a macrolevel of linguistic analysis is
employed so that researchers make generalizations about how particular cultures
and communities use language. This area of sociolinguistics includes the ethnography
of communication and contrastive rhetoric (see Kaplan, this volume). Because other
chapters in this book are devoted to an examination of Language and Interaction and
Language and Culture, this chapter focuses on topics relevant to the area of Language
and Society and Language and Variation. However, one major concern of Language
and Society, namely, language planning and policy, will not be dealt with here because
this topic is explored in depth in another section of the book.
To begin, we examine some of the major issues dealt with in the area of Language
and Society and consider how these topics are related to second language (L2) teaching
and learning. Because many English language learners today are acquiring English as
an additional language rather than as a replacement for their first language, we will
devote a good deal of attention to how bilingualism and multilingualism influence
 16. SOCIOLINGUISTICS 283

language change and language use. We will be particularly concerned with how the
use of several languages in multilingual contexts can result in language loss, language
change, code-switching, and the development of new codes. In the second section of
the chapter we discuss major concerns of Language and Variation and examine how
linguistic variation in the use of English in English-speaking countries can reflect the
geographical region, social class, gender, and ethnicity of the speaker.
Two important sociolinguistic concerns will not be dealt with as separate sections
but rather will be examined throughout the chapter because they are so central to L2
teaching and learning. The first is the issue of standards. Language change and lan-
guage variation naturally raise questions of standards. Hence, as we deal with these
topics, we will examine which standards to promote in English language learning
and teaching. As we discuss the question of standards, we will emphasize the close
relationship that exists between the promotion of standards and issues of power. A
second concern that will be examined throughout the chapter is the issue of language
attitudes. Frequently, particular linguistic variations engender positive or negative
attitudes on the part of the listener. These attitudes can be significant in how indi-
viduals judge one another. Hence, it is important to address the question of attitudes
in English language learning and teaching and to recognize how language attitudes,
as with linguistic standards, are often related to issues of power. We turn now to
discussion of multilingualism and its influence on language change and language
use.

LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY

Multilingualism/Bilingualism
For some sociolinguists, multilingualism describes the use of two or more languages
by a nation or by an individual. For other sociolinguists, however, the term multilin-
gualism is used to refer specifically to nations and states, whereas the term bilingualism
is used to refer to individuals. In this chapter we will adhere to the latter use of these
terms.
Central to an understanding of multilingualism and bilingualism is the notion of
a speech community. A speech community must share at least one code, that is, one
language or one variety of a language. However, in addition to sharing a code, the
members of a speech community must share a set of norms as to how to use this code.
An individual can belong to a speech community based on a variety of factors such
as gender, religion, ethnicity, or social class. Because an individual can belong to a
variety of speech communities, the speech community one chooses to identify with
can shift from one context to another. Hence, at one moment, an individual might
wish to identify with members of his or her ethnic background, and at another time
with members of his or her profession. The fact that an individual belongs to shifting
and intersecting speech communities is especially significant for multilingual com-
munities. Whereas monolinguals signal their shift in speech community by selecting
the appropriate level of formality, lexical item, pronunciation, and so on, a bilingual
can indicate a shift of speech community by selecting to use a particular language.
We will return to this matter later when we consider code-switching.
Most language demographers agree that today there are more bilingual than mono-
lingual speakers. Bilingualism may in fact become even more common as individuals
acquire a language of wider communication, or lingua franca, to use in today’s global
culture. Today English appears to be the lingua franca of choice, leading many individ-
uals to acquire English and become one of the growing number of bilingual speakers
of English. In fact, the growth of bilingual speakers of English is so significant that
284 MCKAY

Graddol (1999) contends that in the next 50 years, the balance between native and
non-native speakers of English will shift significantly. He maintains that:

Based solely on expected population changes, the number of people using English as
their second language will grow from 235 million to around 462 million during the next
50 years. This indicates that the balance between L1 [first language] and L2 speakers will
critically change, with L2 speakers eventually overtaking L1 speakers. (p. 62)

The growth of bilingual speakers of English is significant for L2 pedagogy because it

suggests that many learners of English today will be acquiring English as an additional
language for use in their total linguistic repertoire. Hence, they exemplify what is
referred to as additive bilingualism in which individuals add a second language to
their repertoire. This situation is in contrast to many immigrants to English-speaking
countries who undergo first language loss or subtractive bilingualism.
Given the tremendous interest that exists today in the learning of English, one may
well ask, what are some reasons for the historical and present-day spread of English?
One reason has been speaker migration; historically many individuals left their homes
and migrated to English-speaking countries because of economic necessity, ethnic
strife, and religious persecution. Such speaker migration, of course, continues today,
but it is no longer the major reason for the spread of English. British and American
colonialism has been another factor in the spread of English. Indeed, if one considers
the many nations of the world today that give English some official recognition, many
are former British or American colonies. Kachru (1989) refers to such countries as outer
circle countries in contrast to inner circle countries like the United Kingdom and the
United States in which most individuals are monolinguals speakers of English. A third
reason for the spread of English has been annexation as, for example, when the United
States annexed the Spanish-speaking areas of the southwest. Today, however, most
individuals are acquiring English within their own country for economic, educational,
and political reasons. This means that many users of English today will be making
use of English within their own country for specific purposes or as a medium of
international communication.
When most individuals in a country are bilingual, as exists in many outer circle
countries, like the Philippines and Singapore, a situation of diglossia can develop. The
term diglossia was first coined by Ferguson (1959) to describe a context in which two
varieties of the same language are used by people of that community for different
purposes. Normally one variety, termed the high or H variety, is acquired in an ed-
ucational context and used by the community in more formal domains such as in
churches or universities. The other variety, termed the low or L variety, is acquired in
the home and used in informal domains like the home or social center to communicate
with family and friends. As examples of diglossia, Ferguson points to situations like
the use of classical and colloquial Arabic in Egypt or the use of Standard German
and Swiss German in Switzerland. Later, Fishman (1972) generalized the meaning of
diglossia to include the use of two separate languages within one country in which
one language is used primarily for formal purposes and the other for more informal
purposes. For example, in Singapore, English is generally used in education and gov-
ernment, whereas Hokkien, Malay, and Tamil are frequently used in the home and
community.
In contexts like Singapore, India, and the Philippines in which English is the high
variety in a multilingual country, there often exists a cline of bilingualism (Kachru, 1986)
so that whereas some bilinguals in the country speak a standard variety of English,
others speak a nonstandard variety. One can also speak of an individual’s cline of
bilingualism ranging from the variety he or she generally uses in the marketplace to
the variety he or she typically uses in educational or business contexts. In some cases,
 16. SOCIOLINGUISTICS 285

an individual may have access to all the varieties spoken in a country from the most
standard variety to the most colloquial variety. In other cases, however, an individual
may have much more limited access to these varieties, often speaking only what
is considered the L variety. Sridhar (1996) notes that many bilinguals have selective
functionality in the languages they speak, that is, they develop competence in each of
the languages to the level that they need it. What degree of competence in a language
is necessary to be considered bilingual is, of course, difficult to determine. Hence, the
term bilingual is often very loosely defined to describe an individual who makes use
of more than one language (Clyne, 1997).
The fact that in many instances today bilingual speakers of English use English in
multilingual contexts in which English is just one language in their total linguistic
repertoire has important implications for English language pedagogy and research.
It has often been assumed that the ultimate goal for English language learners is to
achieve nativelike competence. Yet as more and more users of English come to use
English alongside one or more other languages, their use of English will be signifi-
cantly different from those bilinguals who learn English as a replacement for their L1,
as is the case with many immigrants to English-speaking countries.
As Sridhar and Sridhar (1994) point out, for those bilingual users of English who
make use of English in multilingual contexts, achieving nativelike competence in
English can appear to some in the local community to be “distasteful and pedantic”
and “affected or even snobbish” (p. 45). Furthermore, often English bilinguals in
multilingual contexts are not exposed to a full range of styles, structures, and speech
acts, which a good deal of L2 pedagogy assumes is necessary to acquire nativelike
proficiency. Rather such individuals get “exposed to a subset of registers, styles, speech
event types—mainly academic, bureaucratic, and literary” (pp. 46–47). Hence, in order
to be most effective, L2 pedagogy in multilingual contexts needs to examine how
English contributes to the overall communication pattern of the individual and the
society. In many multilingual contexts in which English is used today, acquiring a
formal register of English and in some cases developing reading and writing ability
rather than listening and speaking may be the most appropriate language learning
goals.

Language Contact and Language Loss

When a society has many individuals who are bilingual, two or more languages are
often in daily in contact. One potential effect of this language contact is language
displacement and potentially language loss. Language displacement frequently oc-
curs in the case of speakers of minority languages abandoning their L1 language and
replacing it with a language of wider communication. As Brenzinger (1997) points out:

In all parts of the world, we observe an increasing tendency among members of ethno-
linguistic minorities to bring up their children in a language other than their own mother
tongue, thereby abandoning their former ethnic languages. These changes in language
use by individuals might ultimately lead to the irreversible disappearance of the minor-
ity’s original language. The new one, that is the replacing language, is in many cases
one of the few fast-spreading languages such as English, Mandarin (Chinese), Russian,
Hindi-Urdu, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, French, Swahili, and Hausa. (p. 273)

Brenzinger continues that there is no consensus as to how many languages are be-
ing lost today although several spectacular estimates have been made, with some
contending that in the last 500 years at least half of the languages of the world
have disappeared and others maintaining that only 10% of the present languages
in the world today are not threatened by extinction.
286 MCKAY

Today, in many cases, English is the replacing language of minority languages.

Brenzinger (1997), for example, points out that English is the replacing language for
many Australian aboriginal languages, Indian languages in North America, and Celtic
languages in Great Britain. In their investigation of local languages in rural, south-
ern Nigeria, Schaefer and Egbokhare (1999) conclude that in this area, the spread of
English is causing the abandonment of several indigenous, minority languages. In
some instances, English is even replacing nonminority languages. Gopinathan (1998),
for example, points to the increasing number of households in Singapore in which
English is the principal household language, raising the possibility that the next gen-
eration of such households will be monolingual English speakers rather than bilingual
Mandarin–English or Malay–English speakers.
Some argue that one of the primary reasons for English replacing other languages
is due to the extensive promotion of English by English-speaking countries. One of the
major exponents of this view is Phillipson (1992), who argues that the spread of English
is a matter of deliberate policy on the part of English-speaking countries to maintain
dominance. He has coined the term linguistic imperialism to describe a situation in
which “the dominance of English is asserted and maintained by the establishment
and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English
and other languages” (p. 47).
However, to assume that English itself or even the active promotion of English is
the sole cause of a shift to English is to oversimplify the complexity of the spread of
English. Many individuals are learning English today not because they have a love
of the language nor because English is promoted by a growing private industry, but
rather because they want access to such things as scientific and technological informa-
tion, international relations, global economic trade, and higher education. Knowing
English makes such access possible. Indeed Kachru (1986) in a book entitled, The
Alchemy of English, contends that “knowing English is like possessing the fabled Al-
addin’s lamp, which permits one to open, as it were, the linguistic gates to international
business, technology, science and travel. In short, English provides linguistic power”
(p. 1).

Language Contact and Language Change

A second possible effect of language contact is language change. In this case the vari-
ous languages used within the language contact context may undergo phonological,
lexical, and grammatical changes as bilingual individuals make use of two or more
languages on a regular basis. As a way of illustrating the type and extent of such
changes, we will examine some of the changes that have occurred in the use of En-
glish in multilingual contexts.

Linguistic Varieties. As was mentioned earlier, when English is used in multi-

lingual contexts, there is a cline of bilingualism with some individuals speaking a
standard variety of the region and others having much less proficiency in English.
Tay (1982) and others refer to this cline of bilingualism as consisting of a basilect,
mesolect, and acrolect. Although these terms were first used by Bickerton (1975) to
describe variation within creoles, Tay uses the terms to discuss the range of English
that is used in Singapore. In reference to Singapore, Tay points out that the acrolect
has no significant grammatical differences from British English, differing primarily in
terms of lexical innovation. The mesolect, on the other hand, has a number of unique
grammatical features such as the dropping of some indefinite articles and the lack of
plural markings on some count nouns. The basilect has more significant grammatical
differences such as copula deletion and do-deletion in direct questions, along with
more use of slang and colloquialisms.
 16. SOCIOLINGUISTICS 287

In analyzing the varieties of English spoken in Singapore, Lick and Alsagoff (1998)
point out that varieties of any language are associated with particular social groups
and can be characterized by a specific set of linguistic variation. All of these varieties
also exhibit regularity in their grammatical systems. From a linguist’s point of view,
all varieties of English are equal because they all are fully systematic and regulated by
a set of rules. As an example, they point to a sentence from what is termed Singlish, a
particular variety of English spoken in informal contexts in Singapore. The sentence,
“She kena sabo by them,” is equivalent to the standard English sentence, “She was
sabotaged by them.”
Lick and Alsagoff point out that this Singlish sentence is grammatical in a linguis-
tic sense in that the sentence conforms to the grammatical rules of Singlish. If these
words were arranged in any other order, they would not be considered grammatical
by speakers of Singlish. In a linguistic sense, then, Singlish is a valid grammatical
variety of English, linguistically equal to any other variety of English. When, how-
ever, Singlish was used on a local Singaporean television entertainment program, the
use of Singlish led to tremendous controversy, with some Singaporeans urging the
authorities to step in and regulate the use of Singlish on television so that children
would not speak what they termed “bad English.” Others, however, defended the use
of Singlish, claiming that this variety of English was part of the Singaporean identity
and that ordinary people could relate to this variety of English.
A controversy such as this highlights the fact that whereas all varieties of English
are linguistically equal, they are not considered to be socially equal. The variety with
the most prestige is typically referred to as standard English, with all other varieties
generally labeled with pejorative terms such as substandard or nonstandard. As Lick
and Alsagoff note:

Generally, the variety spoken by the socially dominant group, which normally includes
the rich and powerful, as well as the educated elite, has the most prestige. This variety
is then institutionalized as the standard: it is used for governmental administration and
on all formal occasions. It is taught in schools and used in the mass media (on television,
radio, and in the press) and it serves as the model for those who wish to master the
language. In contrast, the varieties used by people of lower social status, such as the poor
and the uneducated, are tagged as nonstandard, sometimes derogatorily as substandard,
synonymous with words such as bad, corrupt, and offensive. Such a standard–nonstandard
division is basically a reflection of social inequality. (p. 282)

How then does a linguistic change come to be recognized as standard? Bamgbose

(1998) delineates five factors that can be used to determine whether or not an innova-
tion has become standardized. They are:

r Demographic (How many people use the innovation?)

r Geographical (How widely is the innovation used within the country?)
r Authoritative (Who uses the innovation?)
r Codification (Where is the usage sanctioned?)
r Acceptability (What is the attitude of users and nonusers toward the innovation?)

Bamgbose contends that the most important factors in determining if an innovation

has become standardized is whether or not the innovation is codified in such things as
dictionaries, coursebooks, or other manuals, and whether or not it is widely accepted.

Lexical Innovation. Perhaps the most interesting changes that have occurred
in the use of English in multilingual contexts are lexical innovations. Because it is
sometimes difficult to ascertain how widely used and accepted a lexical item is in a
288 MCKAY

particular location, some lexicographers have begun to rely on corpus materials to de-
termine the acceptability of particular lexical items. One project on lexical innovation
that has taken this approach is the Macquarie Dictionary (Butler, 1999). The purpose
of this dictionary project was to compile a dictionary of English that included gener-
ally accepted unique lexical items for various countries in southeast Asia. In order to
reach this goal, the editors gathered a written corpus from representative countries
that included fiction, nonfiction, and newspapers in English. This corpus was then
checked against the words in an earlier edition of The Macquarie Dictionary that in-
cluded essentially Australian English words. Words that did not exist in the earlier
version were considered as possible items of a local variety of English.
Brown (1999) has compiled a dictionary of lexical innovation for the English used
in Singapore. As is typical with lexical innovation for languages in contact situations,
the lexical changes that are occurring in Singapore exemplify certain processes. First,
there is semantic extension—when an English word takes on additional meanings in a
local context. For example, the word auntie when used in Singapore has the traditional
meaning of your mother’s sister or your father’s sister or an uncle’s wife. However, it is
also used to refer to any female friend of the family who is at least one generation older
than the speaker. The use of the term auntie in this context is a way of demonstrating
respect. A second common process of lexical innovation of languages in contact is the
borrowing of a word from one language into another. For example, Malay words like
barang-barang (meaning things) and Hokkien words like chim (meaning deep) are used
by speakers of English in Singapore. Such borrowed items are not examples of code
switching because these words are used by speakers of English in Singapore regardless
of their first language. Furthermore, these items are generally single lexical items, often
nouns, rather than a full range of lexical and syntactic structures as occurs in code
switching. In addition, phonological changes can occur in the borrowed lexical item
to reflect the phonological features of the language that incorporates the new word.
Although it is clear that lexical innovation is a vital part of the changes that are
occurring in the spread of English, attitudes toward these changes differ significantly.
Butler (1999), for example, in her survey of Filipino and Thai attitudes toward lexi-
cal innovation, found that most of the Filipino participants believed that local lexical
items should take their place in a dictionary of Asian English. The primary concern
of the Filipino participants was which words to include in the dictionary. The Thai
participants, on the other hand, were much less likely to want to include any lo-
cal English words in a dictionary of Asian English. Brown (1999) maintains that in
Singapore attitudes toward lexical innovation form a continuum. For some, such lex-
ical innovation suggests that Singapore has its own legitimate variety of English. For
others, such changes reflect a deficiency in the speakers’ use of English. The coining
of new words, however, is not the only type of innovation that can occur in language
contact situations. Grammatical changes are also developing, and it is this innovation
that tends to cause the greatest concern among some educators in terms of preserving
standards and intelligibility.

Grammatical Innovation. A great many studies have been undertaken to deter-

mine the types of grammatical changes that are occurring in various multilingual
contexts in which English plays a significant role. Frequently researchers begin by ex-
amining a written corpus of English of a particular multilingual context to determine
what kinds of grammatical innovations exist and how acceptable these structures are
to both native speakers of English and local speakers of English. In general, when in-
vestigations of language change use a written corpus of published English, only very
minor grammatical differences are found. Shastri (1996), for example, found that there
were no significant differences in the use of complementation in three comparable
corpora—an American corpus, a British corpus, and an Indian corpus.
 16. SOCIOLINGUISTICS 289

Lowenberg (1986) suggests that in many multilingual contexts, the kinds of gram-
matical changes that occur in published discourse tend to be minor differences such
as variation in what is considered to be a countable noun (e.g., the standard use of lug-
gages in the use of English in the Philippines and the use of furnitures in Nigeria) and
the creation of new phrasal verbs (e.g., the use of dismissing off in the use of English in
India and discuss about in Nigeria). Furthermore, even in the unpublished written dis-
course of educated bilingual speakers of English only very minor grammatical differ-
ences generally appear. Parasher, (1994), for example, found wide agreement among
British, American, and Indian standard English speakers in judging the correctness
of the written correspondence of educated professionals. However, there were some
minor differences. Indian English speakers, for example, unlike American and British
speakers, accepted as standard verbal patterns like the following: We would appreciate
if you could, I would not be able to revise the draft, and Funds have been received last year.
What is perhaps most puzzling in the development of alternate grammatical stan-
dards in the use of English in multilingual contexts is that fact that whereas many
accept lexical innovation as part of language change and recognize the legitimacy
of such innovation, this tolerance is often not extended to grammatical innovation.
In Widdowson’s (1994) view, the reason for this lack of tolerance for grammatical
variation is because grammar takes on another value, namely, that of expressing a
social identity. As he puts it, “The mastery of a particular grammatical system, es-
pecially perhaps those features which are redundant, marks you as a member of the
community which has developed that system for its own social purpose” (p. 381).
Hence, when grammatical standards are challenged, they challenge the security of
the community and institutions that support these standards.
It is also puzzling that whereas grammatical differences in the use of English among
inner circle countries, like the United States and Britain, are generally accepted, with
no one suggesting that this will lead to incomprehensibility, grammatical variation in
multilingual contexts is often seen as a threat. Brutt-Griffler (1998), argues that such
tolerance must be extended to all users of English. As she puts it, most inner circle
countries:

appear willing to meet on a common linguistic plane, accept the diversity of their
Englishes, and do not require of one another to prove competence in English, despite the
considerable differences in the varieties of English they speak and the cross-communication
problems entailed thereby. . . . this situation must be extended to all English-using com-
munities. (p. 389)

Presently, however, such tolerance is not extended to innovations that occur in the
English used in multilingual contexts; rather some linguists argue that one variety of
English must be promoted and a concerted effort must be made to teach standards.
(See Quirk, 1990, for one example of this position.)

Language Contact and Language Use

As was demonstrated in the previous section, the fact that bilinguals make regular
use of two or more languages can lead to linguistic changes in the languages they use.
In addition, in language contact situations, bilinguals can shift from one language
to another in what is termed code switching. Some sociolinguists make a distinction
between code switching (i.e., switching languages at sentence boundaries) and code
mixing (i.e., switching language within a sentence). However, we will use the term
code switching to cover both situations.
One of the main questions addressed in research on code switching is what leads a
bilingual individual to shift from one language to another. In answer to this question,
290 MCKAY

Blom and Gumperz (1972) posit two types of code switching. The first is situational
code switching in which the speaker changes codes in response to a change in the
situation such as a change in the setting or the speakers involved in the conversation.
The second type is metaphorical code switching in which the shift in languages has a
stylistic or textual function to mark a change in emphasis or tone. Some, like Poplack
(1980) and Singh (1996), maintain that code switching is closely related to language
proficiency. Singh, in fact, argues that this relationship can be summarized in the
following aphorism: “A strong bilingual switches only when he wants to and a weak
one when he has to” (p. 73).
One of the most comprehensive theories of code switching is Myers-Scotton (1993).
She explains code switching in terms of a theory of rights and obligations. She proposes
a markedness model of code switching that assumes that speakers in a multilingual
context have a sense of which code is the expected code to use in a particular situation.
Hence, for example, in an informal encounter in Singapore, two Chinese Hokkien
speakers would in general greet one another in Hokkien. This then would be the
unmarked code for informal contexts. In choosing to use Hokkien, the speakers would
be signaling to one another that they belong to a common speech community of
Chinese Singaporeans who share the Hokkien dialect. However, it is possible that
one of the speakers could choose to use the marked code, in this case English. Myers-
Scotton suggests several reasons why a speaker might make this choice as, for example,
to increase social distance, to avoid an overt display of ethnicity, or for an aesthetic
effect.
Myers-Scotton also points out that it is possible that code switching itself can be the
unmarked code between individuals. Hence, again in Singapore, university students
often regularly use code switching to signal their dual identity as English speakers and
Malay, Hokkien, or Tamil speakers. Myers-Scotton contends that certain conditions
need to exist for code switching to be the unmarked code. The speakers must be peers
and relatively proficient in the two languages. They must also want to signal their
dual membership in two communities.
Myers-Scotton’s theory has several implications for L2 pedagogy. The first has to
do with the use of the L1 in L2 classrooms. In natural language use, a particular code
is generally viewed as the unmarked choice. For learners of English who share the
same first language, the unmarked code to use with one another is typically the L1.
Hence, language classrooms that encourage the exclusive use of English and in some
instances even penalize the use of the first language are asking students to engage
in a very unnatural type of language interaction. A more productive approach to
learners use of English and their mother tongue would be for language teachers and
researchers to examine how the two languages can best be used in the classroom to
encourage language learning.
One study that attempts to do this is Hancock (1997). In his study of the use of the
first language and the target language in an L2 classroom, Hancock argues that in the
context of role playing, two types of discourse occur. One is the on-record discourse
that is part of the role that the learner takes on in the activity. In on-record discourse,
the target language is the unmarked code. The other is the off-record discourse that
is not intended as part of the role play and generally is in the first language of the
participants. In such instance the learners use their first language to accomplish such
tasks as asking a language question (e.g., asking in the first language how you say
something in the target language) or asking task-related questions (e.g., asking in the
first language what the participants are supposed to do in the activity). Thus, such
studies demonstrate that the first language can be productively used in language
classrooms to aid in the practice of the target language.
A second implication of Myers-Scotton’s theory for L2 pedagogy is that it is im-
portant for teachers to consider in which social situations in the community English
 16. SOCIOLINGUISTICS 291

typically serves as the unmarked code and select teaching objectives with this in mind.
Hence, in multilingual contexts where English is often the unmarked code in more
formal situations, it makes sense to focus on increasing students’ proficiency in formal
rather than informal registers of English use.

Language Contact and the Development of New Codes

Code switching can occur in language contact situations only in cases where speakers
share two or more languages. In language contact situations in which speakers have no
common language, one possibility, as was noted earlier, is for one individual to learn
the language of the other speaker either through additive bilingualism or subtractive
bilingualism. This is often the case in instances of speaker migration or colonialism.
However, another option that can occur, particularly in contexts where individuals
need to communicate for relatively limited purposes, is the development of a new
linguistic code or pidgin. As Nichols (1996) points out, pidgins:

come into being through the interaction of large numbers of people who speak several
different languages and who have little reason or opportunity to learn another one of
the many languages spoken in the contact situation. Typically, pidgins arise when people
of many language backgrounds engage in extensive trading or forced labor, often in
coastal areas near major seaports. They appear when massive population dislocation
and movement take place. In these dynamic situations, there is too much going on for
the small number of interpreters to cope with. (p. 98)

Because pidgins are used for limited communication between speakers, they typi-
cally have a simple vocabulary and uncomplicated morphological and syntactic struc-
ture. In general the language of the economically and politically more powerful group
provides the lexicon (the superstrate language) and the less powerful (the substrate
language) the syntactic and phonological structure. Technically, a creole is a pidgin
that has native speakers, namely, children of pidgin speakers who grow up using
the pidgin as their first language. Because the code is now the only language the
speaker has available, the lexicon expands and the syntactic structure becomes more
complex. However, as Rickford and McWhorter (1997) point out, creoles may also
develop when adults who use the pidgin begin to use the code for more purposes
and, thus, coin new words and develop more complex syntactic structures. In this
way, the development of a pidgin into a creole is perhaps more accurately described
not by the fact it has native speakers but that it comes to be used in a wider variety of
contexts.
Why are sociolinguists interested in pidgins and creoles? Rickford and McWhorter
(1997) provide several reasons. First, pidgins and creoles demonstrate the manner in
which sociohistorical issues such as trade and enslavement can influence language
development. Secondly, pidgins and creoles provide important data for investigat-
ing sociolinguistic variation and change in that they illustrate the manner in which
language variation is related to social class, power, and identity. Third, pidgins and
creoles raise important issues of applied sociolinguistics and language planning such
as the feasibility and desirability of using them as languages of instruction. Finally,
investigations of pidgins and creoles often produce what Rickford and McWhorter
term “fractious energy” in that creolists are consistently arguing about theories and
subtheories to account for the origin and development of pidgins and creoles.
One of the major debates undertaken by creolists is the origins of creoles. Originally
the debate was between polygenetic theories, which assumed that individual creoles
arose independently at different locations and times, and monogenetic theories, which
assumed that most creoles developed from a small number of creoles that spread
292 MCKAY

to other locations. However, more recently these theories have been replaced by a
bioprogram theory of origin, instigated by Bickerton (1984), who argues that creoles
develop from pidgins according to the demands of an innate human bioprogram that
is relatively unaffected by conditions of the contact situations. For Bickerton, this is
what accounts for the lexical and syntactic similarities that exist in many creoles of
the world.
One of the major pedagogical issues surrounding the use of pidgins and creoles is
to what extent they should be used in a classroom. In some contexts, creoles are used in
initial literacy instruction under the assumption that early education is most successful
if it is conducted in the child’s first language. However, there is great resistance to this
option particularly when a standardized version of the superstrate language exists in
the same regions, as, it does, for example, in Hawaii. Often this resistance develops
from negative attitudes toward the pidgin and creole rather than from any linguistic
basis.

LANGUAGE AND VARIATION

Whereas in the previous section we focused on the ways in which multilingualism

and bilingualism influence language use, in this section we will focus on the rela-
tionship between various factors of an individual’s identity (e.g., gender, economic
class, ethnicity, etc.) and the linguistic features of their language. Linguistic variation
is central to the study of sociolinguistics. As Fasold (1984) notes:

The essence of sociolinguistics, in my view, depends on two facts about language that are
often ignored in the field of linguistics. First language varies—speakers have more than
one way to say more or less the same thing. . . . Second, there is a critical purpose that
language serves for its users that is just as important as the obvious one. It is obvious
that language is supposed to be used for transmitting information and thoughts from
one person to another. At the same time, however, the speaker is using language to
make statements about who she is, what her group loyalties are, how she perceives her
relationship to her hearer, and what sort of speech event she considers herself to be
engaged in. (p. ix.)

As will be evident from the following discussion, this variation is often a factor of
geographical region, social class, ethnicity, and gender.

Language Variation and Geographical Region

The study of regional variation has the longest history of investigation, beginning in
the 19th century with historical-comparative linguistics. One of the earliest and most
intensive investigations of regional dialects in the United States was Kurath, Hanley,
Bloch, and Lowman (1939–1943), whose fieldwork resulted in a comprehensive lin-
guistic atlas of New England. More recently, a comprehensive fieldwork project of
American regional dialects led by Cassidy (1985) resulted in a Dictionary of American
Regional Dialects. In both projects, many fieldworkers were employed to interview in-
dividuals of various communities and age groups in order to map out specific features
of dialect regions.
In the case of Cassidy’s project, 2,777 individuals were interviewed in 1,002 com-
munities using a standardized questionnaire. In order to not bias the responses of the
subjects, the fieldworkers used indirect questions such as “What do you call the time
early in the day before the sun comes into sight?” Various responses to this question
are then plotted on a map so that sunrise would be plotted by one symbol and dawn by
another. Next, lines are drawn on the map to separate the location of different variants.
 16. SOCIOLINGUISTICS 293

The lines that separate lexical differences are called isoglosses and those that separate
phonological differences are termed isophones Frequently, such plotting results in a
combination of phonological, lexical, and grammatical differences that suggests a di-
alect area. Research has shown that dialects typically differ not only qualitatively, that
is, dialect A uses skillet whereas dialect B uses frying pan, but also quantitatively in
that one dialect may use a particular feature more frequently than another dialect.
There are several factors that can contribute to the development of a regional di-
alect. One is the settlement history of a particular area. For example, because many
Dutch settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan, some features of this dialect area reflect a
Dutch influence. A second factor that can contribute to the development of a regional
dialect is migration pattern. Because the United States population shift has generally
been from east to west, dialect boundaries in the United States are more likely to run
horizontally than vertically. Finally, geographical and political boundaries can con-
tribute to the development of regional differences. For example, in the United States,
the Connecticut River parallels the boundary for some dialect differences.
What are the implications of regional variation for L2 pedagogy? To begin, if L2
learners are studying or living in an English-speaking country, it will be useful for them
to have a receptive knowledge of some of the regional dialect differences that exist
within the country. This knowledge can be developed by using listening materials that
include a variety of regional dialects. In addition, learners need to be aware that, as
with all linguistic variation, certain varieties will have more social prestige than others.

LANGUAGE VARIATION AND SOCIAL CLASS

The study of linguistic variation based on social class is a relatively recent phe-
nomenon. The impetus for this focus came largely from the seminal work of Labov
(1966a). In his study, Labov worked with a random sample of New Yorkers from the
Lower East Side stratified into four socioeconomic classes based on occupation, in-
come, and education. He investigated to what extent variables like ing vary in how
they are pronounced based on an individual’s socioeconomic class. Using interview
data, Labov mapped the percentage of time that speakers dropped their gs (using
“in” rather than “ing”) in casual speech, careful speech, and reading style. What he
found was a consistent pattern of the lower-working class using the reduced form
more than the upper-middle class. However, like the upper-middle class, the lower-
working class had a lower frequency in their use of the reduced form in the reading
style than in the casual speech.
The methodology employed by Labov was significant in that he used naturalistic
speech to make generalizations regarding linguistic variation. Even more important,
the generalizations he made from this data demonstrated the relative frequency of a
particular linguistic feature rather than the mere presence or absence of this feature. It
is important to emphasize, however, that Labov’s investigations illustrate a correlation
and not a causal relationship. As Milroy and Milroy (1997) point out:

It should not be assumed that to relate language variation to a social variable, such as
social class, is to explain language variation as being caused by social class variation.
There are several reasons for this caution, the chief of which is that there may be many
aspects of social behavior that are not accounted for in a single social variable, and also
underlying social factors that are subsumed under such a label as “social class” (such as
educational level) which may sometimes yield more precise correlations than the main
composite variable (in this case social class). (pp. 53–54)

The significance of social variation for L2 pedagogy is that once again there is a need
for L2 learners to be aware that certain linguistic features will have more prestige than
294 MCKAY

others and that, furthermore, both social and regional variants provide a mechanism
for monolingual speakers of English to signal their membership in a particular speech
community.

Language Variation and Gender

Research on the relationship between linguistic variation and gender demonstrates
how language use is closely related to issues of power and prestige. Labov (1966b), for
example, demonstrated that women of all classes and ages tend to use more standard
variants than men (e.g., the use of “ing” rather than “in” in all styles of speech). Labov
contends that women use prestigious forms to gain a better social position, reflecting
their own linguistic insecurity. In contrast, Trudgill (1972) found that working-class
men tend to use low-prestige nonstandard forms. To explain this phenomenon, Trudg-
ill argued that the male use of these nonstandard forms is a type of covert prestige in
which the use of nonstandard forms serve as a marker of masculinity and a way of
signaling membership in a particular speech community.
In general, the early studies of language and gender in the 1970s supported what is
termed a dominance model (Freeman & McElhinny, 1996) in that female language use
was compared with male language use, which was considered to be more prestigious
and desirable. This model is evident in Lakoff’s (1975) book, Language and Woman’s
Place. Based solely on her own intuitions, Lakoff contended that women’s speech has
the following characteristics:
r Women use weaker expletives than men.
r Women’s speech is more polite than men’s.
r Women talk about more trivial topics than men.
r Women use more empty adjectives than men such as charming and nice.
r Women use more tag questions than men.
r Women often use rising intonation in statements signaling their uncertainty.
r Women use more intensifiers than men.
r Women use more hedges (e.g., “it’s sort of) than men.
r Women use more correct grammar than men.
r Women don’t tell jokes.

One of the major problem with Lakoff’s characterization is that it links the use of
these forms with an exclusively female identity. One early challenge to this assertion
was a study by O’Barr (1982), who investigated the existence of Lakoff’s features of
women’s language in the speech of courtroom witnesses. His study suggests that
the use of these features is related to power and prestige rather than gender because
females with high social status (e.g., doctors) used few of these features, whereas
individuals with less status, whether male or female, made more use of the features
of so-called women’s language outlined by Lakoff.
Other research on language and gender supports what can be termed a difference
model. Many of these studies focus primarily on the interactional style of women,
contending that women tend to be more cooperative in their interactional style than
men. (See Coates, 1991 and Troemel-Ploetz, 1992.) A recent popular account of this
difference model is evident in Tannen’s best-selling book, You Just Don’t Understand:
Women and Men in Conversation, in which she argues that men view the world as
hierarchal so that in their conversations, they try to achieve the upper hand and
not be put down; hence, in their conversation, they are often competitive. Women,
on the other hand, approach the world as a network of connections so that they
approach conversation as a cooperative endeavor in which they attempt to obtain
intimacy.
 16. SOCIOLINGUISTICS 295

Wodak and Benke (1997) critique most studies on gender and language use on two
counts. First, they contend that frequently gender studies “have neglected the context
of language behavior and have often analyzed gender by looking at the speaker’s
biological sex” (p. 128). They propose that instead studies of gender differences should
employ a context-sensitive approach that regards gender as a social construct. In
addition, they criticize the methodology of most existing studies on language and
gender. They argue that a thorough investigation of language and gender necessitates
a multimethod approach. They maintain that:

Quantitative studies tend to simplify many phenomena; qualitative analyses, on the other
hand, often rely on samples which are too small to draw general conclusions. Many cate-
gories are defined in a male-oriented way, male linguistic behavior is seen as unmarked,
female linguistic behavior as deviating from the male norm. Most studies are undertaken
in English-speaking countries, thus general explanations suffer from Anglo-European
ethnocentrism. We would like to suggest a combination of methods, a multimethod. . . in
which different aspects of the object under investigation are grasped by different quan-
titative and qualitative methods which complement and do not exclude each other.
(p. 148)

Studies on gender variation support many of the generalizations made throughout

the chapter, namely, that the use of specific linguistic features provide a mechanism
for individuals to identify with a particular speech community. In addition, the atti-
tudes that surround the use of particular features are frequently related to issues of
power. For those learners who are studying English in English-speaking contexts, it
is important for L2 classrooms to highlight the manner in which particular linguistic
forms, such as the use of hedges and rising intonation in statements, can reduce the
credibility and prestige of the speaker.

Language Variation and Ethnicity

A final important area of investigation of linguistic variation has been in reference to
ethnicity. As Fishman (1997) notes, ethnicity is not an exact scientific term like “race,”
or “nationality,” yet it has gained recent prominence. He defines it as signifying “the
macro-group ‘belongingness’ or identificational dimension of culture, whether that of
individuals or of aggregates per se. Ethnicity is both narrower than culture and more
perspectival than culture” (p. 329). This perspectival attribute of ethnicity means that
what constitutes a particular ethnicity tends to be subjective and variable.
In the United States, the most investigated relationship between language and
ethnicity is that of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). Not all African
Americans speak AAVE and those who do, do not use the common features of the
dialect all of the time. However, specific phonological and grammatical features tend
to occur in the speech of many African Americans. For example, on a phonological
level, there is often a simplification of word-final consonant clusters and stress on the
first syllable rather than the second on words like police and motel. On a grammatical
level, there is often an absence of the copula is and are and an absence of the third person
present tense –s. The use of these features is often related to the gender of the speaker
(males tend to use the features more frequently), the age of the speaker (younger
individuals seem to use the features more frequently), the listener (the features are
less frequently used with individuals of another ethnic background), and the linguistic
environment of the feature (e.g., the copula deletion is more common with a pronoun
subject than a noun phrase subject). (See Rickford, 1996, for a listing of various studies
that document such variation.)
One debate that surrounds AAVE is the source of the dialect. Some contend that
it developed from a creole, arising out of the conditions of slavery. Others maintain
296 MCKAY

that AAVE is not unique because it shares many features with the speech of southern
Whites in the United States (see Trudgill, 1974, for a full discussion of this debate).
Another debate and one more relevant to L2 pedagogy is what is an appropriate ped-
agogy for speakers of AAVE. Some (e.g., Baratz, 1969; Stewart, 1969) have suggested
that AAVE speakers should receive initial literacy instruction using dialect readers
that include the spoken English forms of AAVE. Others (e.g., Stewart, 1964) have
suggested that L2 teaching drills be used to help AAVE speakers recognize the dif-
ferences between AAVE and standard American English and to acquire a standard
variety. Perhaps the most reasonable alternative is that suggested by Rickford (1996)
who argues that:

The overarching need is that teachers recognize the regularity and integrity of the social
dialects which children and adolescents employ in the classroom and in the schoolyard,
that they appreciate the powerful attachment to such dialects which students often have—
sometimes as a vital part of their social identity—and that they build on such dialects,
where possible, in language arts and second language and foreign language instruction.
(p. 184)

The instructional issues that arise out of AAVE are quite similar to those that sur-
round the teaching of English in multilingual contexts in which children come to the
classroom speaking a variety of English that is quite different from a standard variety
of English. In such contexts, as Rickford points out, it is important for L2 teachers to
recognize the regularity and integrity of these varieties and the manner in which the
use of these varieties is often linked to social identity.

IMPLICATIONS FOR L2 PEDAGOGY AND RESEARCH

If we consider the four major domains of sociolinguistics delineated at the opening

of the chapter, it is clear that some domains have yielded far more research that is
relevant to L2 teaching and learning than others. As has been demonstrated in this
chapter, in the area of Language and Society there has been a good deal of research
regarding language attitudes, particularly in reference to varieties of English used
by second language speakers of English. In contrast, the domain of Language and
Variation has yielded far less research that is relevant to L2 teaching and learning.
This is because such research typically investigates variation in English as exemplified
by native speakers of English. On the other hand, as is evident from the Markee
and Kasper chapters in this volume, the domain of Language and Interaction has
produced a great deal of L2 research in discourse and conversational analysis as
well as pragmatics. Finally, perhaps in response to the current spread of English to
a great variety of social and cultural contexts, the domain of Language and Culture
has recently produced a good deal of research on contrastive rhetoric (see Kaplan,
this volume) as well as on the relationship between culture, identity, and language
learning (see Lantolf; Ricento; and McCarty, this volume).
In closing, let me suggest three major implications of the sociolinguistic issues
discussed in this chapter for L2 pedagogy and for needed L2 research. First, there is a
need to recognize the social context in which many L2 learners are currently acquiring
English. Because more and more learners of English will be acquiring English in
multilingual contexts as one of several languages in their linguistic repertoire, more
research is needed regarding how these learners make use of English in reference to the
other languages they speak. Such research will be valuable in establishing classroom
objectives that complement the students’ use of English within their own speech
community. In addition, in classrooms in multilingual contexts where teachers share
 16. SOCIOLINGUISTICS 297

a first language with their students, teachers need to carefully consider how they can
best make use of their students’ first language to further their competency in English.
Second, the teaching of standards should be based on sociolinguistic insights re-
garding language contact and language change. As was demonstrated in this chapter,
language contact will inevitably result in language change. Because today many indi-
viduals are using English daily in contact with other languages, their use of English is
changing, and they are in the process of establishing their own standards of English
grammar and pronunciation. In general the research on these emerging varieties of
English indicates that the codified and accepted standard of English that exists in these
communities has few differences with other standard varieties of English. Hence, it
is important for teachers to recognize the integrity and regularity of these varieties,
to realize that they are important sources of personal identity, and to not promote
negative attitudes toward such varieties.
Finally, L2 pedagogy should be informed by sociolinguistic research on linguistic
variation. As was demonstrated earlier, the manner in which individuals use English
will often vary based on geographical region, social class, gender, and ethnicity. For L2
learners who are studying English within English-speaking contexts, it is particularly
important for teachers to develop materials that will raise students’ awareness of such
differences and to help them understand the manner in which these differences serve
to indicate membership in a particular speech community. Although it is useful for
students to have a receptive knowledge of linguistic variation, the productive target
should in general be the variety that is the most standard and neutral variety of the
community.
As was pointed out at the beginning of the chapter, many of the decisions that
teachers make require sociolinguistic knowledge. In this chapter, we have focused
primarily on the complexity of language use in multilingual contexts and the signif-
icance of linguistic variation for personal identity. We have done so in the belief that
an understanding of these sociolinguistic concepts will contribute to teachers making
informed classroom decisions regarding such important issues as the effective use of
students’ first language in the L2 classroom, the teaching of linguistic standards, and
the promotion of linguistic attitudes that recognize the integrity of different varieties
of English.

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17

Language Socialization and

Second Language Learning
Jane Zuengler
University of Wisconsin–Madison
KimMarie Cole
State University of New York at Fredonia

INTRODUCTION

In a recent review of language acquisition work, Roberts (1998) points out that al-
though there have been calls for and attempts made to incorporate social and contex-
tual issues into research in language acquisition, those elements have, in her words
“a marginal role in language development” (p. 31). Roberts feels that it is not enough
to simply label a context or identify features of a social setting. Instead, she argues
that the social realm must be investigated as part of the way that learners are intro-
duced to language, come to understand what it means, and learn how it can be part of
their repertoire of communicative tools. She says, “Language socialisation rather than
language acquisition better describes how learners come to produce and interpret dis-
course and how such learning is supported (or not) by assumptions of society at large
about multilingualism and second language learners” (p. 31). Language socialization
then becomes a useful framework for understanding the interactions that take place
in classrooms and workplaces as second language learners enter into new discourse
communities and gain expertise in their new languages and contexts of language use.

OVERVIEW OF FIRST LANGUAGE (L1)

SOCIALIZATION RESEARCH

Language socialization is the practice by which children or novices to a community

are socialized both to the language forms and, through language, to adopt the values,
behaviors, and practices of that community (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). This central
premise of language socialization is cited in almost all of the work that uses the
framework, and often in these very terms, “socialization through the use of language
and socialization to use language” (p. 163). This simple phrase works as a kind of
301
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theoretical shorthand, allowing those who use this perspective to succinctly express
the value of this work in almost “sound bite” fashion. The lexical simplicity belies,
however, the depth and breadth of what language socialization attempts to account for.
As Ochs (1988) explains, “participants in verbal activities/practices draw on linguistic
and sociocultural knowledge to create and define what is taking place. On the other
hand, these verbal activities/practices are means through which aspects of linguistic
and sociocultural knowledge are created and/or maintained” (p. 128). Ely and Berko
Gleason (1996), in a review of language socialization in Western society, echo the
need for a sociocultural or constructivist view in studying the ways that children
learn language. This perspective embeds language and its use in the midst of social
activities, offers important insights into the links between local moments of interaction
and the broader “cultural” events in which this language use is situated, and provides
a way to consider how talk works both as a method and a means to communicate and
transmit the activities, values, and beliefs of a group.
Research into language socialization within applied linguistics has most often been
used in the study of young children with their primary caregivers (see Schieffelin &
Ochs, 1986a), where the traits and values of a given cultural group are described
through the social practices participants engage in. These studies have looked at a
variety of language features and contexts of use to develop an understanding of dif-
ferences in socialization practices in different cultures. Ochs (1986), in her introduction
to the volume, describes how the different studies work to demonstrate three different
aspects of language socialization: the use of interactional routines; the role of language
in helping children develop awareness of status, and how emotional language is ap-
propriately used.
The insights made available by adopting a language socialization framework ex-
tend beyond the initial, domestic setting to “secondary” socialization settings as well,
because the symbolic and tool-like features of language, which are the object of analy-
sis in socialization work, are also used in the creation and maintenance of institutional
social structures. Many of the studies that consider the language socialization of chil-
dren in secondary settings have demonstrated the difficulties that some children have
when home socialization is in conflict with the new expectations of school. (See, e.g.,
Delpit, 1995; Heath, 1983; Phillips, 1983.)
In some ways, this research highlights the usefulness of a language socialization
perspective in uncovering the range of values and practices that can coexist within
communities and highlighting how they inform us about differences in the ways that
people gain expertise as they move through different communities. These studies also
set the stage for recent research that has examined the language socialization prac-
tices for second language learners in schools and in the workplace. Understanding
that language socialization is not only an experience of childhood opens the door
to investigations of novices of different ages in a variety of settings as they are ap-
prenticed to different facets of community membership. As Ochs (1988) reminds us,
“socialization is a lifespan experience . . . Throughout our lives, we are socializing and
being socialized by those we encounter (including by our own children)” (p. 6). It is
perhaps logical then that researchers would turn their attention to other questions of
language socialization.

RESEARCH ON SECOND LANGUAGE (L2) SOCIALIZATION

The recognition that language socialization extends through one’s life (Ochs, 1988;
see also Bayley & Schecter, 2003) underscores the importance of understanding the
processes that children, adolescents, and adults experience in settings outside the
home, in places such as the school, the community, and the workplace.
 17. LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION 303

Increasingly in the world, such settings are linguistically and culturally hetero-
geneous, involving multi-or bilingualism, and for many, the acquisition of a second
language.1 In the review that follows, we draw from this more recent area of research to
discuss, in particular, published studies that explicitly foreground the language social-
ization framework in second language learning—that is, that they position themselves
as L2 socialization research. In so doing, we focus this chapter on research in which the
participants are neither monolingual nor proficient bilinguals, but who, implicitly or
explicitly, are still in the process of acquiring a second language. However, this is not
to imply that language socialization studies involving continuing acquisition can be
easily distinguished from studies of proficient bi- or multilingual use. It is primarily a
matter of degree as well as of representation. Drawing the boundary between one and
the other focus of study proved to be a challenging and ultimately subjective decision
in our effort to determine what work was relevant for review under the chapter theme,
and what was not. As such, we recognize that other authors may draw the boundary
differently.
Using our criteria of selection, we found 17 studies for discussion, the overwhelm-
ing majority of which (i.e., 15) concern L2 socialization in educational settings. The
other two are of workplace L2 socialization. In the review that follows, we will first con-
sider the studies set in educational contexts, followed by the two studies of language
socialization in the workplace. To the extent possible, findings will be summarized
within and across sections of studies, highlighting outcomes of correspondence or
contrast. It must be recognized, though, that language socialization theory considers
the distinctive context and setting crucial for interpreting research findings, and much
of this work has been ethnographic. That implies that comparisons across studies of
differing contexts are potentially problematic. However, because all of the research
is similar to some extent—that is, in having L2 in their settings, we offer cautious
summaries that should illuminate both similarities and differences in focus, as well
as findings regarding L2 socialization. In a final section of the chapter, we discuss
issues that have been raised about language socialization in this literature; through-
out the discussion, we offer recommendations for the direction of future research on
L2 socialization.

SECOND LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION IN

EDUCATIONAL SETTINGS

It is perhaps not surprising that the large majority of studies of language socialization
and second language learning, which we will review here, have examined the process
in educational settings. It is well acknowledged that after the primary socialization
of home and family, it is educational institutions that for many represent the major
domain of “secondary” socialization. We organize the discussion of research following
its educational age range, starting with a study of kindergartners and ending with
one involving graduate students.

L2 Socialization in Kindergarten and Elementary/Primary School

Four of the five studies discussed in this section address elementary or primary school
students, whereas only one focuses on children in kindergarten. There are a variety of
L2s considered across a diverse range of educational settings. These studies examine,
with a close or broader research lens, the language socialization dynamics in the class-
room interactions between teachers and learners. In two of the studies, the classroom
socialization is contrasted with the language socialization process as it takes place in
the home or community.
304 ZUENGLER AND COLE

The sole study of language socialization of L2 kindergartners, Kanagy’s (1999) re-

search followed a class of American English-speaking kindergartners through
1 year as they were beginning Japanese as a foreign language through enrollment in a
Japanese immersion school. Kanagy chose three classroom routines to study in exam-
ining the children’s socialization toward “L2 interactional competence.” In choosing
interactional routines, Kanagy joins five other studies to be reviewed, namely, Ohta
(1999), Poole, (1992), Rymes (1997), Watson-Gegeo (1992), and Willett (1995). Similar to
L1 socialization research, interactional routines serve as a rich site for L2 socialization.
Routines are repetitive, with predictable behavior, and can serve as good locations for
observing how socialization takes place (Kanagy, 1999). Given their predictability,
learners are able to participate almost from the beginning. Researchers can document
learners’ development over time, because routines have relatively fixed patterns of
participation and they frequently reoccur (Willett, 1995).
Employing an ethnographic method, Kanagy studied three routines over the course
of the school year, what she called “greeting,” “attendance,” and “personal introduc-
tion.” The children began by imitating what the teacher modeled and repeating in
chorus, with more spontaneous performance emerging as time went on, displaying
socialization “into interactional competence beyond their initial L2 ability” in Japanese
(Kanagy, 1999, p. 1489). Kanagy points out, however, that the children did not appear
to show L2 development in other respects such as word use. That they remained at the
one-word level in their L2 Japanese is not necessarily a problem, according to Kanagy,
as a single word is often appropriate in Japanese discourse (or for that matter, in other
languages).
Socialization into interactional routines is not always successful or unproblematic,
however. Willett (1995), one of four studies examining socialization at the elemen-
tary/primary school level, reports that for at least one of the children studied, his
efforts to reshape or resist some aspects of classroom socialization led to his being
negatively positioned, as (problematically) dependent, needy of more L2 instruction
than others. Willett offers a case study of four English As a Second Language (ESL)
learners in a mainstream U.S. first-grade class, focusing on routines and strategies.
Taking a more general approach than Kanagy (who identified and named three inter-
actional routines), Willett considered the learners’ participation roles, their identities,
and the ideologies that emerged in the classroom interactions, emphasizing with the
last that social and political dynamics outside the classroom affect interactions within.
Willett argues that children do not simply absorb knowledge and skills. They are agen-
tive, because language socialization is a reciprocal, not an unilateral, process. Three
of the focal students, all girls, appeared to develop strategies—for example, working
together quietly at the back of the room—that rather than marginalizing them, led to
their being considered positively by both teachers and other girls. (Whether remain-
ing quietly at the back is ideologically and pedagogically unproblematic is outside the
scope of this review; Willett does address this briefly.) For the one boy studied, social-
ization proved more immediately problematic. Although he appeared to have status
with the other boys, the teachers constructed him as difficult and in need. Deciding
that he required special ESL help, teachers arranged for him to leave the class for
assistance. Because this meant he would be separated from the other boys, “Xavier”
resisted the decision, but the more he did, the more the teachers saw his behavior
as illustrative of his problems. Willett’s study underscores that the complexity and
reciprocity of socialization can lead to very different experiences for children in the
same classroom. Willett makes the point that classroom communities are complex;
individuals have multiple memberships whose agendas may be in conflict.
In her study of four classrooms in which children ages 41/2 to 9 were learning Chi-
nese as their heritage language, He (2003) echoes Willett to some extent in emphasizing
that socialization requires collaboration and cooperation by the participants. Though
 17. LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION 305

she does not refer to resistance, as does Willett, He reminds the reader that confu-
sion and differing expectations can occur in the process of socialization. He draws
on Goffman (1981) in examining participation structures, which includes consider-
ation of how and what interactional statuses are constructed, whether participants’
contributions are ratified or not, and the coconstruction of hearer and speaker roles.
In contrast to other language socialization studies (e.g., Willett, 1995; Kanagy, 1999)
that take an ethnographic and/or longitudinal look at development over the school
year, He undertakes a very close analysis of some classroom discourse, looking at
“micro-interactional details.” The data reveal how, in the socialization process, the
teacher sometimes appropriates the students’ contributions, preventing them from
taking authorship. And on occasion, the teacher ignores what students say as a means
of disciplining them. The common participation pattern constructed is one “in which
the teacher makes sure that classroom interaction remains between two parties: the
teacher and the class” (p. 12). Considering these findings, He questions whether the
socialization patterns observed are a cultural dynamic in this Chinese heritage lan-
guage classroom, or whether they are instead a classroom phenomenon. Given the lack
of studies with data for comparison, He concludes that this cannot be answered.
The next two, elementary/primary level studies, use a broader lens than the preced-
ing studies in considering whether and how L2 classroom socialization practices con-
flict with learners’ home/community socialization in their L1. Watson-Gegeo’s (1992)
study is drawn from longitudinal, ethnographic research she conducted to address
why Kwara’ae children in the Solomon Islands have had problems with achievement
in L2 English-medium schools. Concentrated study of several families’ L1 socializa-
tion practices revealed similarities with what is known about American middle-class
caregiver interactions. That is, Kwara’ae adults often instructed their children orally,
directly teaching certain skills, and actively, energetically drawing the children into
interactional routines adjusted to their level of development. The L2 classroom dis-
course practices, however, were sites of difference and tension. In the language arts
classes, practices appeared very formulaic, with unnatural, decontextualized English
used to make a grammar or vocabulary point. Themes and topics were often alien to
the children (e.g., “Ken is playing with ice cream” [p. 60] read to children who have
not ever had ice cream). Though the children had developed strategies for memoriz-
ing and repeating the material, their engagement was superficial and comprehension
questionable. An additional problem was the teacher’s inadequate L2 proficiency due
to insufficient language training. Such problematic L2 socialization practices for chil-
dren who are used to stimulating L1 practices are a function of macrolevel forces,
Watson-Gegeo argues, serving to reproduce the social order, ensuring that the rural
poor, in particular, will remain so.
Documenting similar problems, Moore (1999) conducted an ethnographic study
of L2 French classroom practices in the primary educational system in Cameroon.
Moore was concerned to discover why many children leave school after attending
for only several years. A great contrast existed between the home and community
language norms and those of the L2 French-medium primary school classes. For ex-
ample, although multilingualism and code-switching were supported and common
outside of school, such language use was proscribed (and in fact, punished) within
the classroom. Only French was permitted. Moore learned that the teacher imposed
the French-only rule because he did not share any other language with the students
and was afraid of losing classroom control otherwise. Another home–school con-
flict concerned expected and accepted interlocutors. In the community, children were
expected to primarily interact with each other rather than with adults, whereas in
the classroom, they were prohibited from speaking to each other. LikeWatson-Gegeo
(1992), Moore found that school practices involved heavy emphasis on form-focused,
decontextualized, and unnatural L2 use. Unlike Watson-Gegeo, Moore does not point
306 ZUENGLER AND COLE

to social and political forces influencing school practice, but implies that a failure to
understand the “communicative competencies” that students have already been so-
cialized into in their communities can lead to classroom practices that not only fail
to ratify the skills they possess but are obstructive to students’ language socialization
into the L2.
What emerges in four of these five studies is a profile of classroom language so-
cialization as potentially problematic, tension producing, and unsuccessful. Students
and teacher may have different and contrasting expectations (He); classroom prac-
tices may ignore or contradict students’ home socialization (Watson-Gegeo, Moore);
the method of socialization may be unengaging (Moore); or the teacher might not have
the necessary competence to be viewed as an expert guide (Watson-Gegeo). Moreover,
outcomes of socialization can differ from child to child in the same classroom (Willett).
At the same time, some of these studies argue that learners have agency in the
socialization process. As the Willet and He research makes clear, socialization is a
cooperative, reciprocal, and complex process. Learners can reshape, or resist, the so-
cialization. Although the kindergarteners in Kanagy appeared to imitate and repeat
in a one-way process directed by their teacher, other studies document learners more
actively involved in coconstructing (or resisting) their socialization.

L2 Socialization in Secondary/High School

The reciprocity of socialization and agentive role of novices is even more salient in the
research done at the high school level. Though the specific items of investigation or the
units of analysis in these socialization studies differ—routines, in Rymes’1997 study;
changing practices in Duff’s 1996 research; varying participation in Duff and Early
(1999) and Duff (2002); and representations of the immigrant students in Harklau
(2003)—almost all of them consider societal dynamics and beliefs as infusing the
local socialization processes in the classroom. Of the five studies to be reviewed,
four examine North American settings, whereas one is conducted in Hungary. Duff,
arguably the most prominent researcher in the area of second language socialization,
has authored or coauthored three of the studies.
Duff’s 1996 study in Hungary investigated how classroom discourse socialization
changed—in L2 as well as L1—as a result of changes that the education system and
the larger society underwent as they entered the post-Communist era. Duff conducted
an ethnographic study of discourse practices in dual-language (Hungarian–English)
schools that were in the process of moving away from traditional educational practices
such as the felelés, a common, rather formal oral recitation by individual students that
served as a means of knowledge assessment that also enforced conformity and disci-
pline. Newer practices were implemented that engendered a more shared discourse,
including small group work and discussions. Duff found that although the direction
of change was consistent—newer practices were emerging in both the Hungarian-
medium and English-medium classes, the role of the felelés was diminishing across
the curriculum—one model of discourse socialization did not simply, entirely replace
another. Instead, Duff found variation in the relationships between traditional and
new practices; even in classrooms where the felelés had officially been discarded, it
appeared in other activities such as lectures. Perhaps in tandem with the larger so-
ciety, there was, in the classes observed, “a slipping and sliding along a continuum
from highly controlled to more democratically distributed leadership and discourse”
(p. 430). This was the case for the L1 Hungarian practices as well as those in the
L2 English-medium classrooms.
Shifting to study of ESL students in mainstream classes in a Canadian high school,
Duff and Early (1999) report research on how perspective-taking is socialized in En-
glish literature and social studies classes. In a classroom where the taking of multiple
 17. LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION 307

perspectives and supporting one’s assertions were encouraged and supported, some
students in each class engaged in active participation whereas many, on the other
hand, remained on the periphery. The authors report that the ESL students remained
largely silent, explaining that some of them chose not to participate in the style of argu-
ment that was being socialized, affiliating instead with their silent peers. However, the
situation could not simply be explained as more complete socialization by the active
participants and insufficient socialization for the silent ones (the ESL learners) who
would remain “novices” on the margins. Duff and Early argue for a more complex
interpretation, pointing out that the active participants did not necessarily display
competence in the kind of supported reasoning or type of argumentation that were
the intended goals. And though the ESL students may not have participated in the
discussion, they could not simply be judged less competent, because many displayed
academic success in their high achievement on tests, grade point averages, etc.
The difficulty of applying labels of “expert” and “novice” led Duff and Early to ask,
“Who, then was socializing whom, and into what?” (p. 29). The authors conclude that
language socialization is often a fluid, negotiated goal, rather than the officially stated
and static goals of the curriculum. Moreover, for the culturally and linguistically
diverse classes of their study, there appeared to be multiple, rather than just one
classroom community.
Another study of ESL students in Canadian mainstream high school classes is Duff‘s
(2002) examination of interactional participation in social studies discussions in which
the teacher endeavors to construct respect for cultural difference. Using language
socialization theory in conducting an ethnography of communication, Duff considers
turn-taking and other manifestations of participation in classroom discussions of cul-
tural difference. What she found is that although the ESL students, all of whom were
ethnically Chinese, were not entirely silent, their contributions tended to be shorter,
more cautious, and less audible than the turns taken by the “local” students (i.e., those
who had been in Canada longer, some of whom were native English speakers). The
ESL students did not offer much information to the others about themselves or their
cultural allegiance; in fact, on some occasions, the local students were heard to speak
for them when the teacher encouraged discussion of Chinese culture. Duff learned of
multiple reasons for their reticence, due not simply to second language limitations,
but including students’ prior socialization, their discomfort at attention being directed
to them, and their perceptions of outsiders and insiders.
The ESL students’ relative silence was received negatively by the other students,
who interpreted their behavior as showing a lack of interest or agency. Yet, these
ESL students exhibited high academic achievement in other respects (as also reported
in Duff & Early, 1999). Duff again raises the question of how to interpret variable
participation in socialization practices, and relatedly, who the competent and the less
competent are in these classrooms.
Harklau (2003) echoes Duff in asserting that socialization goals or targets must be
recognized as fluid, multiple, and negotiable. In such a poststructural view, learners
have agency, and the local and macro levels have a two-way relationship. Focusing
on four L2 students in a case study within a larger ethnography, Harklau exam-
ines two aspects of socialization: how the immigrant students are represented in the
classroom discourse and how students are socialized into the kind of multimodal
language use that is common in high schools—that is, not just the face-to-face inter-
action that much of the language socialization research has focused on, but the mul-
tiple modes of writing, listening, and speaking that are required of students. Harklau
found three representations of immigration to predominate in the classroom. One she
referred to as a “colorblind” representation, in which ethnicity was discussed as a
theory rather than with regard to the specific identities and backgrounds of the actual
students in the class. A second and competing representation was a romanticized
308 ZUENGLER AND COLE

notion of immigration that Harklau calls the “Ellis Island” representation, whereas a
third foregrounded the immigrant students as linguistically and perhaps cognitively
challenged. As Harklau clarifies, all three representations circulate in the larger U.S.
society’s discourses about immigration and issues of multilingualism.
When Harklau considered the multiple modes of discourse, she found that there
were often several representations constructed simultaneously, for example, the “col-
orblind” representation in face-to-face interactions but an “Ellis Island” representation
encouraged in students’ written work. It is necessary, Harklau concludes, to recognize
that socialization is often complex not just with regard to language mode, but to the
multiple and possibly conflicting messages that it conveys.
Although her study is also set in a U.S. high school, Rymes’ (1997) is distinctive in its
analysis of socialization routines in which L2 Spanish is used. However, it joins other
studies (e.g., Duff, 2002; Duff & Early, 1999; Moore, 1999; Watson-Gegeo, 1992; Willett,
1995) in revealing how socialization processes can in fact have negative ramifications
for second language use. Rymes takes a language socialization approach to illus-
trate how, in two conversations, routines conducted between native and non-native
speakers of Spanish socialize negative attitudes about Spanish use. One conversation
involves students talking to each other, whereas in the second, L1 Spanish-speaking
students interact with school security guards who are L2 learners of Spanish. In each
of the short interactions reported, the use of Spanish by the L1 Spanish-speaking stu-
dents is turned into a metalinguistic/pedagogical focus by the L2 learners who ask for
a translation of a Spanish word, or ask the L1 Spanish speakers to confirm something
they have said in Spanish. Rymes describes the L2 learners’ use of Spanish with the
L1 Spanish speakers as primarily a display of their knowledge (rather than revealing
an interest in communicating), with the result that the communicative potential of
Spanish is undermined and, she argues, the L1 Spanish speakers are inhibited from
further first-language use. In turn, the L2 learners have limited use of their Spanish.
Though different in orientation, the five studies just discussed are similar to the
primary level studies by Watson-Gegeo (1992) and Moore (1999) in the ways they
reveal how socialization in educational institutions is related to—or exists in tension
with—values and beliefs outside the school, whether in the home, community, or
society at large. Studies of L2 socialization are important sites for discoveries about
the complex ways that identities and social setting influence and are influenced by
language use and development. The likely endpoint of socialization is necessarily
called into question when the L2 target of socialization is constructed as a denigrated
variety (Rymes), or when the learners are constructed as immigrants in conflicting
ways that represent societal rather than their own beliefs about themselves (Harklau).
These high school studies also add more evidence for a complex view of the social-
ization process. The very notion of an endpoint for socialization, for example, which
is often assumed in L1 language socialization research, cannot be taken for granted.
And in Duff and Early (1999), we discover that the socialization that the teacher in-
tends can be different from the actual socialization that unfolds. In a focus different
from the primary level studies, several of the high school studies seek to understand
variable participation (i.e., Duff, 2002; Duff & Early, 1999), pointing out, for example,
that the central participants in language socialization are not necessarily those whom
the community would consider the most competent, whereas the more competent are
actually those choosing to remain on the margins.

L2 Socialization at Post-Secondary Level

The five studies that are discussed in this section are similar in considering university
or college students, but are quite heterogeneous with regard to geographical context,
including Japan, Canada, the United States, and India. These differences continue to
 17. LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION 309

add richness to our understanding of the ways that language socialization can explain
L2 development.
In focusing on two classes of ESL beginners in a U.S. university, Poole (1992) stud-
ied classroom routines to discover how they convey culture. At the same time, Poole
emphasized (like Willett, 1995, among others) that cultural conveyance through so-
cialization is not deterministic and that students, therefore, have the ability to reshape
or resist the process. However, in this study, Poole primarily focused on the teacher’s
talk. Poole found accommodation toward the students, mitigation of the status im-
balance between teacher and students, etc., which leads her to conclude that the class-
room socialization process is similar to that found by Ochs for American middle-class
caregivers and young children in their primary language socialization. In both cases,
cultural information is being conveyed.
The next three studies, in focusing specifically on the socialization of pragmatic
elements in the L2, examine language socialization within a narrower scope than
the preceding studies. Yoshimi (1999) investigated the possible role of L1 (English)
socialization in the pragmatic production of L2 learners of Japanese. The specific
pragmatic element studied was the interactional use of ne, which conveys empathy
and the “sharedness” of knowledge between the interlocutors. Employing a method
quite different from the previously reviewed studies, Yoshimi conducted a qualita-
tive discourse analysis of talk in quasi-experimental-like pairs created for the study.2
Five L1 American English-speaking learners of Japanese in Japan were each paired
with an L1 Japanese-speaking acquaintance and asked to have several conversations.
The analysis specifically focused on the learners’ nontargetlike (i.e., errorful) use of
ne, to determine whether the learners’ use reflected their L1-socialized assumptions
about shared knowledge. The findings revealed that the majority of the learners’ use
of ne was considered appropriate in the L2. However, Yoshimi argues that the one
third who were judged to be nontargetlike were reflective of L1 socialization to some
extent. Yoshimi concludes with a call for examining L2 practices with a view to L1
socialization as a potential influence.
Matsumura (2001) looked at the socialization of L2 pragmatics by L1 Japanese
learners of English, comparing one group of university students who were in Canada
as L2 English learners and another group who remained in Japan learning English as
a foreign language. Matsumura’s is the only study of those reviewed that was quasi-
experimental with quantitative analysis of language socialization effects.3 Matsumura
sought to determine, among the 340 participants, whether the L2 group in Canada
showed more evidence of L2 socialization compared to the group remaining in Japan.
This study looked at targetlike perceptions of social status and whether there was a
corresponding growth in their ability to appropriately give advice to interlocutors of
various statuses. Outcomes revealed that whereas the group in Japan only showed
appropriate advice-giving language in English when hypothetically interacting with
higher status persons, the students in Canada were more targetlike both in recogniz-
ing social status and in conveying advice appropriately to all three relative statuses.
Matsumura concluded that their stay in Canada clearly socialized the learners toward
more pragmatically targetlike use of English with respect to both perception of status
and advice-giving.
Another study that looks at the socialization into L2 pragmatic use by univer-
sity students is Ohta’s (1999) research on a native-English-speaking learner over the
course of a year in a Japanese as a foreign language class in the United States. Ohta
focused on the learner’s development in her ability to express conversational align-
ment via language socialization into two classroom routines—the initiation–response–
feedback/follow-up (IRF) or initiation–response–equation (IRE; see Mehan, 1979; Sin-
clair & Coulthard, 1975) and a routine Ohta called “extended assessment activity.”
Ohta reports that the learner displayed, through her participation in the routines with
310 ZUENGLER AND COLE

the teacher and with her peers, a gradual linear increase in her ability to offer as-
sessments and use other kinds of follow-up expressions in a targetlike manner in the
foreign language. Such a smooth path certainly stands in contrast to the rather rocky
road of socialization as unearthed in Duff (2002), Moore (1999), and the final study
under review.
Atkinson (2003) is an ethnography of the language socialization of students at an
English-medium college in southern India. The study reveals the effects of the formerly
elite school’s opening up to a broader cross-section of students, including those of
Tamil rather than English-speaking backgrounds. Although the school has become
more accessible to these students, the college’s socialization process enforces norms
that marginalize them, maintaining the centrality of the elite background “traditional”
students. Coining the term “dys-socialization,” Atkinson documents how instead of
being successfully socialized into L2 English, the “nontraditional” students are, in fact,
socialized toward feelings of inferiority and identitities as “non-English learners.” The
socialization serves as an anti-acquisitional process for L2 English and, at the same
time, denigrates the students’ Tamil language and culture. The result is a low degree
of academic achievement by the “nontraditional” learners.
This set of studies of post-secondary learners builds on some of the previously
discussed findings of research on L2 language socialization. The denigration of stu-
dents’ culture in their L1 that Atkinson documented echoes what Watson-Gegeos
(1992) and Moore (1999) found in their studies. Perhaps due to their orientation, the
other post-secondary studies do not portray problematic L2 language socialization
processes. Yoshimi’s, like Atkinson’s, shares a connection to both Watson-Gegeo’s
(1992) and Moore’s (1999) studies in his consideration of the impact of students’ L1
socialization on their L2 socialization. Like Kanagy (1999), Ohta studied the acquisi-
tion of several routines in the L2 classroom, and like Kanagy, found that the routines
were indeed successfully socialized. The two remaining post-secondary studies are
to some extent distinctive from the others previously discussed—that is, Poole’s re-
search, in contrast to the others, focuses primarily on the teacher’s discourse in social-
ization. And Matsumura’s study was not only distinctive in using quantitative, quasi-
experimental methodology, but in comparing an L1 with an L2 setting for socialization
of L2.

LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION IN THE WORKPLACE

Though there are a number of studies of language in the workplace (and especially of
L1 use; see, e.g., Candlin & Candlin, 2002; Drew & Heritage, 1992; Katz, 2001, a study
of L2 use; and Sarangi & Roberts, 1999), very few workplace-oriented studies have
invoked language socialization as their primary theoretical framework. Two studies
that adopt this framework are set in the United States and Canada. Each reports on
the process by which L2 speakers, whether or not they received prior L2 language
socialization, undergo informal language socialization on the job.
Li’s (2000) ethnographic research reports an 18-month case study of a Chinese-
speaking woman, “Ming,” working in a filing department at a U.S. medical equipment
company. Immigrants who are beginning a new job experience are experiencing what
Li refers to as “double” socialization; besides being novices in their work environment,
they are novices to the culture of the larger society. Additionally, there are several
kinds of socialization that are germane to workplaces; citing Scollon and Scollon
(1995), Li mentions the “formal” socialization of employment training, followed by
the employee’s more informal socialization through observation of others and their
advice to the newcomer. It is the latter, informal socialization, which Li’s study focuses
 17. LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION 311

on, in particular, Ming’s socialization with regard to her L2 pragmatic development

in making more targetlike requests.
Li documents Ming’s growth in L2 competence toward more directness in requests,
guided by watching how her colleagues interacted as well as by receiving explicit
suggestions from them (e.g., “If you feel there is something, talk!” [p. 73]). Rather
than simply following her colleagues’ conduct, however, Ming made choices in her
socialization. Faced with several American coworkers who Ming and several other
non-native speakers felt were acting rudely to them (e.g., throwing rather than hand-
ing them items and using swear words when addressing them), Ming is reported to
have helped organize a meeting with the coworkers and their boss, where she re-
quested better treatment. After that, Ming enforced what she considered more polite
behavior for her American colleagues; for example, if they continued to throw paper
her way, she would respond, “Could you please, give me, you know, in the polite
way? I don’t think it’s nice to do this” (p. 74). Ming’s socialization experiences re-
veal not only that people have choices and can exhibit agency in the process, but can
sometimes become the “experts” themselves.
In the second study of L2 socialization in the workplace, Duff, Wong, and Early
(2000) followed 20 non-native English-speaking immigrants (primarily women) who
were training to be healthcare aides in Canadian nursing homes, private homes, and
hospitals. The trainees had completed their ESL and nursing preparation and were
going into a first and then a second practicum experience. The researchers’ primary
orientation was on the trainees’ informal, practicum-situated socialization experi-
ences.
The two practica turned out to be very different sites of socialization. The trainees’
first practicum took them to a city hospital where almost all of the residents were
speakers of a Chinese dialect rather than of English. Though some were Chinese-
speaking, none of the trainees spoke the dialect of the residents, and as a result,
communication became very challenging. Trainees were surprised to discover that
their nursing and medical English training were less important resources than the
ability, urgently needed, to develop a means of communication with their patients.
Throughout their practicum, trainees struggled to find ways of accommodating, by
learning some words in the patients’ language, and in many cases observing body
language cues and using gestures.
Their second practicum, at a suburban residential facility in which residents were
described as being financially comfortable, White English speakers, was one in which
the trainees reported much more satisfaction. Rather than feeling that they pri-
marily had to accommodate to the patients, they experienced more reciprocity of
adjustment—a blurring, in socialization terms, of the functions of “experts” and
“novices.” Trainees were very positive about how much English they learned and
practiced. Patients offered explicit advice on how to talk—what speech acts were ap-
propriate, etc.—and trainees also took the opportunity to ask patients the meanings
of words and unfamiliar expressions.
Each of these studies indicates that socialization occurs, often informally, in the
workplace, and that job training does not necessarily provide sufficient, or relevant,
socialization. Socialization on the job can take different shapes, and often, there are no
clear or predicable expert–novice roles. In the Li (2000) study, Ming showed that she
had agency, and, in fact, became the expert in socializing her L1 colleagues into what
she considered appropriate workplace behavior. In the Duff et al. (2000) study, the
L2 speakers encountered very different socialization experiences in each of their two
employment sites. Discovering that many of the patients whom they needed to care
for at the hospital were not English speakers, the L2-speaking caregivers made efforts
to accommodate the patients. In this experience, neither was expert, but both were
312 ZUENGLER AND COLE

novices. At the nursing home, the patients were English-speaking; what developed
was a reciprocal socialization. Although the caregivers’ responsibilities were to care
for the patients, the patients in turn helped the caregivers improve their English. Here,
each was guided in some way by the other.

ISSUES IN AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR RESEARCH

ON L2 SOCIALIZATION

Recently, language socialization theory has received strong support in the field of ap-
plied linguistics. In a plenary talk at the Pacific Second Language Research Forum in
2001, Karen Watson-Gegeo argued that language socialization should become one of
the major paradigms for research on second language acquisition, replacing the tradi-
tional cognitive-oriented models (see also Watson-Gegeo & Nielsen, 2003). And within
the specific area of interlanguage pragmatics, Kasper (2001) considers language social-
ization to be one of four major approaches. Because language socialization concerns
itself with natural, appropriate language use, Kasper finds the approach “eminently
capable of examining how L2 pragmatic ability is acquired” (p. 519). And several of
the L2 socialization studies we have reviewed, namely, Yoshimi (1999), Matsumura
(2001), and Ohta (1999), focus on L2 pragmatic development. However, Schieffelin and
Ochs (1986a) may disagree with Kasper, because they state that language socialization
is concerned with a different (i.e., broader) scope of explanation than is interlanguage
pragmatics.
Although the studies summarized in this chapter focus on different populations
and arrive at somewhat different findings, they share a common feature in that they
all draw on a language socialization perspective to frame their studies. This wealth of
information leads us to pick up questions that have been asked before of language so-
cialization work. The first is: what methodology or methodologies can best illuminate
the “socialization to and socialization through language” that the researchers hope
to account for? Turning back to Schieffelin and Ochs (1986a; 1986b), the answer is, at
least in part, ethnography. In their discussions and Watson-Gegeo and Nielsen’s (2003)
more recent exploration of methodology, the authors point to the need for research
tools that allow a consideration of both micro and macro structures in the research.
(In fact, the issue of macro–micro is germane to the field of applied linguistics as a
whole; see Pennycook, 2001.)4 From a language socialization perspective, close in-
vestigation of actual talk and interaction is needed to see the socialization process in
action. And, because larger cultural dynamics shape what is socialized and what it
means within the community, there must be a way to account for the larger structures
as well. van Lier (1996), using visual representation, emphasizes the multiple, inter-
connected layers of societal and institutional forces that can influence interaction in
the classroom, and as the research we have reviewed here demonstrates, a variety of
forces come into play in the discussions of language socialization in the schools. And
certainly, a similar construct is also relevant for the workplace studies. Many of the
researchers whose studies we have discussed do seem to address, in some way or
another, these small and large (for lack of a better term) issues in their work.
Before declaring ethnography the sole way to conduct these studies, however, it is
important to consider how one defines “micro” and “macro” and where one believes
they can be located. As such, this becomes an epistemological question. Therefore,
we must be careful about automatically dismissing research that does not include
the kind of macro–micro linking as defined within ethnographic traditions. In fact, in
mentioning a macro and a micro link or connection between them (e.g., Watson-Gegeo &
Nielsen, 2003), one is assuming that they are separable components. There is, certainly,
microanalytic research through which, it is argued, one can see the macro. Most notable
 17. LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION 313

is that of Conversational Analysis (CA), and in particular, the approach referred to

as “applied CA” (Heap, 1997). One of the most prominent researchers using this
approach, Kitzinger (e.g., Frith & Kitzinger, 1998; Kitzinger, 2000a, 2000b; Kitzinger
& Frith, 1999), who does feminist/lesbian CA, argues that where “the political” is
found is in the unfolding of mundane conversations. Similarly, He, whose study we
discussed earlier, does not use longitudinal or large-scale ethnographic tools in her
work, instead drawing on literature and a perspective that indicates that for any
“macro” features to be relevant, they must be evident in the local interactions.
The language socialization work we present in this review offers important insights
about language use and the socialization process. We recognize, along with Schief-
felin and Ochs (1986a), the rationale for looking at both small and larger moments
of cultural practice. Rather than calling for one research methodology and imposing
a singular framework, though, we suggest instead that researchers must account for
how they are addressing both aspects in their work. In so doing, their epistemological
positions and corresponding assumptions about language learning and use will be
made more transparent and accessible to critical consideration and may continue to
expand our understanding of language socialization and its applications. Although
we acknowledge, as Watson-Gegeo and Nielsen (2003) do, the difficulty in report-
ing qualitative findings within the structural limitations of journal articles, we still
encourage authors to highlight the ways that their work can account for the entire
socialization process and contribute to discussions of their epistemological positions
in arriving at their conclusions.
A second issue to bring to a consideration of language socialization in L2 learning is
a critique raised in several recent papers by Roberts (1998; 1999), namely, the question
of whether the theory sufficiently accounts for power, ideologies, and positioning in
the socialization process. As Roberts (1998) points out, understanding language to be
social practice (as language socialization does) is a recognition that “practices” are not
simply activities:

In the case of literacy practices for example, they [literacy practices] include both the
literacy event and the knowledge and assumptions about what this event is and what
gives it meaning. For example, what counts as literacy in a subgroup is determined by
those in dominant positions in a society. Literacy practices, therefore, are profoundly
associated with identity and social position. (p. 36)

The critical linguistic literature has also argued that practices come with ideologies
(Roberts, 1998, cites Fairclough, 1992; see also Gee, 1996, 1999, on “Discourses”). How-
ever, Roberts (1998; 1999) argues, early language socialization theory has not suffi-
ciently accounted for the complex dynamics at play when people encounter, reshape,
resist, etc, ideologies and take (and are given) certain positions within the interactions.
The extension of language socialization to studying L2/minority language speakers,
who, having already gone through primary language socialization, are now in com-
plex, second language institutional settings such as education and the workplace,
requires more problematizing of the process.
The issue of the recognition of power and ideology, as raised by Roberts, is without
question a significant one for the theory to address. Several of the studies reviewed
here, in fact, have in drawing on language socialization, foregrounded dynamics of
power, ideology, identity, and positioning in the research they report (e.g., Atkinson,
2003; Duff, 2002; Duff & Early, 1999; Harklau, 2003; Rymes, 1997; Watson-Gegeo, 1992;
Willett, 1995). Their results raise questions about power and ideology as well as show
how these issues come into play even in defining the communities to which learn-
ers are being socialized. Language socialization is a framework that allows for these
kinds of questions to be posed, considered, and deliberated alongside concerns with
314 ZUENGLER AND COLE

language forms and targetlike development. Because of the richness of this perspec-
tive, we encourage those who adopt this perspective to follow this lead in future
research on language socialization and L2 learning. These concerns will undoubtedly
cause researchers to question fundamental concepts of past language socialization
work, as many of these studies have done. The questions and their answers will allow
language socialization to become a more flexible tool for the study of second language
development.
There is a third important issue that current language socialization research must
consider. When research on language socialization focuses on children learning the
practices, values, and beliefs of their homes, there are some questions that may not
be posed because they are not relevant in those settings. When, however, the scope of
this research is extended into institutional settings or to the socialization of multilin-
guals, these questions arise and provide a test for the explanatory power of language
socialization. Roberts (1998), for example, questions to what extent the apprenticeship
aspect of the language socialization model applies to workplace settings, because she
has found that it is not possible for many immigrant workers to get into the interac-
tions that lead to full membership in those communities. Without access to experts
who engage learners in an extensive range of interactions in the second language,
their language development will likely be limited as well. Such settings may be even
more complex. This was documented in the Chinese-speaking hospital practicum
for the ESL trainees in Duff et al. (2000). Duff et al., in fact, predict that shortly,
such multilingual/multicultural workplace settings will be the norm rather than the
exception.
Relatedly, we must question the assumption of a presumed end point of language
socialization. In some cases, there may be multiple communities that are the targets of
socialization or communities that discourage learners from seeking full membership.
An additional concern is the assumption of neatly bounded categories of “expert”
and “novice.” As this group of studies demonstrated, these questions do not exist
only for adults, but for the ways in which young “novices” contribute to and shape
the socialization experience of those around them as well.
As it has been presented by Schieffelin and Ochs (1986a), language socialization
certainly leaves room for these considerations. That is, members of a community are
in fact socialized to different roles and statuses over their lifetimes as they enter or
are denied entrance into particular interactions. In some ways, the investigation of
institutional settings brings these lesser-studied aspects of the model into the light
and provides ways for them to be analyzed in a manner that had been previously
overlooked.
Shortly after we had written this discussion, Patricia Duff delivered a plenary
address at the 2003 American Association of Applied Linguistics Conference in which
she argued for a similar reconsideration of language acquisition theory. It is time, Duff
said, that our field takes on a more complex consideration of language socialization
in L2, one which recognizes that learners have agency, among other things, but that
socialization for them is not always accessible, acceptable, or successful. We join Duff
in looking forward to research that will further illuminate the complex processes and
outcomes of L2 socialization.

NOTES

1. In using the term “second language,” we follow much of the acquisition literature in considering it an
umbrella term for both “second” and “foreign” language. When distinctions are relevant, they will be
specified.
2. Such manipulated creation of and assignment into pairs, although supported in quasi-experimental
paradigms, could be criticized as not embodying the need of language socialization research to examine
 17. LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION 315

natural language within its context of socialization. We address the question of relevant methodology
for language socialization theory in our discussion of issues later in the chapter. Because this study
presented itself as one of language socialization, and because it met our other criteria for selection, we
include it here.
3. This study contains both the same issue and the same reason for inclusion as in our preceding note.
4. According to Pennycook, “A central task for critical applied linguistics. . . is not only to find ways of
thinking about relations between the micro contexts of everyday language use and the macro concerns
of society, culture, politics, and power but also to go beyond this kind of dialectical two-tiered model”
(2001, p. 172).

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18

Pragmatics in Second
Language Learning
Gabriele Kasper
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Carsten Roever
University of Melbourne

Pragmatics, the ability to act and interact by means of language, is a necessary and
sometimes daunting learning task for second and foreign language learners. This
chapter will review central issues and findings in second language (L2) developmen-
tal pragmatics, examine the effects of instruction, and provide an overview of data
collection methods.

DEVELOPING PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE

Sociopragmatic and Pragmalinguistic Competence

The challenge that learners face in acquiring the pragmatics of a second language is
considerable because they have to learn (to paraphrase Austin, 1962) not only how to
do things with target language words but also how communicative actions and the
“words” that implement them are both responsive to and shape situations, activities,
and social relationships. Following Leech (1983), these two intersecting domains of
pragmatic competence are referred to as sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic com-
petence.
Sociopragmatic competence encompasses knowledge of the relationships between
communicative action and power, social distance, and the imposition associated with
a past or future event (Brown & Levinson, 1987), knowledge of mutual rights and
obligations, taboos, and conventional practices (Thomas, 1983), or quite generally, the
social conditions and consequences of “what you do, when and to whom” (Fraser,
Rintell & Walters, 1981). Whereas sociopragmatics describes the interface between
pragmatics and social organization, pragmalinguistics focuses on the intersection
of pragmatics and linguistic forms (Leech, 1983). Hence, pragmalinguistic compe-
tence comprises the knowledge and ability for use of conventions of means (such
317
318 KASPER AND ROEVER

as the strategies for realizing speech acts) and conventions of form (such as the lin-
guistic forms implementing speech act strategies; Clark, 1979; Thomas, 1983). Be-
coming pragmatically competent can be understood as the process of establishing
sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic competence and the increasing ability to un-
derstand and produce sociopragmatic meanings with pragmalinguistic conventions.
From cognitive-psychological and social-psychological perspectives, interlanguage
pragmatics research has investigated how the process of becoming pragmatically
competent in a second or foreign language is influenced by such factors as input,
noticing and understanding, L2 proficiency, transfer, and individual differences. In
contrast, theories of L2 (pragmatic) learning as social practice explore the interrela-
tionship of sociopolitical contexts, social identities, and participation opportunities in
L2 pragmatic learning (cf. Kasper, 2001b; Kasper & Rose, 2002).

Input
Analogous to other areas of second language learning, input is a necessary condition
for developing L2 pragmatic knowledge. The importance of input has been shown in
various studies. In a longitudinal study of international students’ suggestions and re-
jections in academic advising sessions at a North American university, the students’ so-
ciopragmatic performance became increasingly more targetlike, whereas they showed
little pragmalinguistic development (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1993), a result that
the investigators attributed to the absence of modeling by peers (Bardovi-Harlig &
Hartford, 1996). Japanese English as a Second Language (ESL) learners who were
spending a year abroad in Canada consistently moved toward native speaker socio-
pragmatic norms, whereas the control group who stayed in Japan did not show any
development (Matsumura, 2001). German English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learn-
ers improved rapidly in their knowledge of situational routines after even a short stay
in a target language community, whereas learners who did not spend time abroad did
not make any gains in their knowledge of routines regardless of overall proficiency
or length of EFL instruction (Röver, 1996; Roever, in press). Korean ESL learners’ per-
formance of apologies and requests approximated native speaker performance more
closely the more informal input they received (Kim, 2000).
However, although input opportunities are necessary to develop pragmatic ability,
they are not sufficient. Despite extended time spent in the L2 speech community,
learners’ L2 pragmatics often remains distinctly nontargetlike (Bardovi-Harlig, 2001).
This well-attested fact strongly indicates that learners’ L2 pragmatic development
may profit from support through instruction, as will be discussed later in this chapter.

Noticing and Understanding

According to psycholinguistic theory and research on second language learning, for
input to be acquisitionally relevant, it has to be noticed, or detected under attention
(Schmidt, 2001). One explanation why targetlike pragmatic ability does not develop
despite ample input through exposure is that learners may not attend to relevant
input features. In order to acquire pragmatics, attention must be allocated to the ac-
tion that is being accomplished, the linguistic, paralinguistic, and nonverbal forms by
which the action is implemented, its immediate interactional or textual context, and
the dimensions of the situational context that are indexed by linguistic and pragmatic
choices. Attending simultaneously to an input complexity of this order exceeds work-
ing memory space by far. This is one reason why input frequency plays a particularly
important role in pragmatics. If attuned to these components of communicative action,
learners can attend to subsets of them as they encounter contextualized instances of
specific actions and, thus, build up pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic knowledge
 18. PRAGMATICS 319

incrementally and concurrently. But in addition to registering individual instances,

learners have to understand their pragmatic, interactional, contextual, and sociocul-
tural meanings and functions. As Schmidt (1995) proposes, understanding implies
“the recognition of some general principle, rule, or pattern. Noticing refers to surface
level phenomena and item learning, while understanding refers to deeper level(s) of
abstraction related to (semantic, syntactic, or communicative) meaning, system learn-
ing” (p. 29). Registering that speakers of Indonesian use different address terms is a
matter of noticing; figuring out how speakers index social relationships, define sit-
uations, and manage interaction by choosing particular address terms in particular
discourse environments are all matters of understanding (DuFon, 1999).

Proficiency
Many studies relate learners’ pragmatic ability to their overall grammatical (mor-
phosyntactic and lexical) L2 knowledge. Some evidence suggests that learners’ L2
pragmatic ability—both receptive and productive—progresses concurrently with their
general L2 proficiency. In an early study, Carrell (1981) reported that comprehension of
syntactically complex requests was proficiency-related, indicating a rather strong link
between grammatical knowledge and request comprehension. Kerekes (1992) found
increasingly nativelike perceptions of qualifiers in troubles talk as learners’ ESL pro-
ficiency increased, and according to Koike (1996), advanced learners of L2 Spanish
understood speech acts more successfully, produced more targetlike responses, and
assigned different personal attributes to the speakers of stimulus material than lower
level learners. Similarly, Cook (2001) reported that fourth year students of Japanese
as a foreign language (JFL) were superior to second year JFL students in recognizing
an inappropriate speech style in Japanese. Roever (in press) observed that ESL and
EFL learners’ comprehension of implicature was only negligibly affected by expo-
sure to the L2 environment, whereas their implicature comprehension improved with
increasing proficiency.
Several studies document that learners’ production of speech acts improves with
increasing L2 proficiency as well. Higher proficiency learners supplied more adjuncts
and supportive moves in apologies and requests (Rose, 2000; Trosborg, 1995), sug-
gesting that processing load decreases with higher proficiency. In terms of Bialystok’s
(1993) two-dimensional model of second language learning and use, the learners’
increasing facility to produce longer and more complex realizations of speech act
strategies indicates more effective control of processing. Similarly, as learners acquire
more extensive knowledge of and control over conventions of form, targetlike real-
izations of refusals (Takahashi & Beebe, 1987) and conventionally indirect requests
also occur more frequently (see Kasper & Rose, 2002).
But developmental trajectories do not necessarily evolve in a smooth and linear
fashion. Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1986) reported that in relation to L2 proficiency,
learners’ use of supportive moves in requests described a bell-shaped curve. Com-
pared to native speakers of Hebrew, low-proficiency learners undersupplied sup-
portive moves, intermediate-level proficiency learners oversupplied them, and high-
proficiency learners’ use resembled that of native speakers. Hassall (1997) observed a
similar tendency in the production of requests by first language (L1) English speak-
ing learners of Indonesian. Elided imperatives, a structurally simple request strategy,
were only employed by the high-proficiency learners in Hassall’s sample. Blum-Kulka
and Olshtain (1986) and Hassall’s (1997) findings are consistent with a well-attested
tendency in less than advanced learners to design their speech acts in an overly ex-
plicit fashion (Kasper, 1981; Edmondson & House, 1991). Psycholinguistic and so-
ciolinguistic explanations have been suggested to account for learners’ verbosity or
propositional explicitness; however, such explanations remain tentative at this point.
320 KASPER AND ROEVER

Studies demonstrating that pragmatic ability increases with formal L2 proficiency

isolate grammar as a strong constraint on pragmatic development. But this does not
imply that pragmatic ability emerges from grammar. Because adult L2 learners are
fully pragmatically competent in at least one language, they can draw on pragmatic
universals and L1 transfer of discourse, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic knowledge
from the initial stages of L2 acquisition, long before their L2 grammar reaches the com-
plexity and variability that are necessary in order to perform communicative action
with target forms (Blum-Kulka, 1991; Koike, 1989). Research documenting how learn-
ers’ pragmatics outperforms their grammar includes learners at beginning (Koike,
1989; Schmidt, 1983; Walters, 1980) and advanced proficiency levels (Eisenstein &
Bodman, 1986, 1993). Conversely, it has also been shown that learners underutilize
the pragmatic potential of available grammatical knowledge. For instance, Salsbury
and Bardovi-Harlig (2000) identified a sequence for the emergence of modal verbs
in interviews involving L2 learners, but when performing disagreements, the same
learners relied on lexical expressions rather than modal verbs even though the gram-
maticalized forms were demonstrably available to them. The complex relationships
between the development of specific grammatical and pragmatic knowledge are first
beginning to be explored (Bardovi-Harlig, 1999; Kasper, 2001b; Kasper & Rose, 2002).

Pragmatic Transfer
Likewise, the interaction of proficiency and negative pragmatic transfer is far from
straightforward. Consistent with research findings in second language acquisition
generally, most interlanguage pragmatics studies have found an inverse relationship
between negative pragmatic transfer and proficiency. In a study of apology production
by Japanese ESL learners, intermediate proficiency learners showed more evidence
of negative transfer than high-proficiency learners (Maeshiba, Yoshinaga, Kasper, &
Ross, 1996). On the other hand, the reverse has also been noted: lower grammatical
proficiency can work against pragmatic transfer (Cohen, 1997), whereas higher gram-
matical proficiency can enable it (Blum-Kulka, 1982, 1991; Hill, 1997; Olshtain & Co-
hen, 1989). Takahashi (1996) identified a proficiency effect on pragmatic transferability,
defined as how functionally similar learners perceived L1 (Japanese) and L2 (English)
request strategies to be. However, the direction of the effect could not be clearly de-
termined. Probably because of its possible—though by no means inevitable—links
to pragmatic misunderstandings, most studies have focused on negative rather than
positive pragmatic transfer. But it is equally important to understand what aspects of
learners’ prior pragmatic knowledge that converge with L2 pragmatic practices are
in fact transferred, what factors encourage or work against positive transfer, and how
patterns of positive transfer change as L2 learning progresses.

Individual Differences
Many aspects of pragmatics are inseparable from sociocultural practices and values
and may therefore involve learners more personally than grammar and morphology,
which in turn may have an impact on how L2 pragmatics is learned. An early
“individual difference” study found just that. In an investigation designed to test
the Acculturation Model (Schumann, 1978), Schmidt (1983) observed how an adult
L1 speaker of Japanese developed communicative competence in L2 English over a
3-year period. The learner exhibited low social and psychological distance to the host
community, which appeared to be beneficial for his progress in discourse-pragmatic
and strategic competence. But these factors did not influence his grammar, which
showed little change toward target usage. A positive correlation between affiliation
with the host community and pragmatic ability was also reported by Kim (2000),
 18. PRAGMATICS 321

who found that the more strongly Korean ESL learners identified themselves as “very
American,” the higher the ratings of their apology and request performance. Japanese
students at an international university in Japan indicated instrumental motivation to
learn English and general willingness to accommodate to native speaker (NS) prag-
matic practices, but their self-reports were not related to performance data (LoCastro,
2001). In a study examining how motivation may influence Japanese university stu-
dents’ learning of selected request strategies in English, Takahashi (2000, reported in
Kasper & Rose, 2002) found that highly motivated students were more likely to notice
discourse lubricants, idiomatic expressions, and discourse strategies than less strongly
motivated students. Advanced EFL students whose exposure to the target language
was limited to the educational setting displayed high sociopragmatic awareness, a
finding that Niezgoda and Röver (2001) tentatively explained by referring to these
students’ strong (instrumental) motivation. In identity-theoretical perspective, it has
been argued that learners’ investment in learning the target language is shaped by
their position in the target community, the activities they engage in, their stances to
target community practices, and experiences in interactions with target community
members (Norton, 2000; Siegal, 1996). An example of how learner subjectivity can in-
fluence learners’ acquisition of L2 linguistic politeness was reported by DuFon (1999),
who found that one learner of Indonesian purposefully continued to employ address
terms that were too informal and not respectful enough to higher status interlocutors
but whose use made the learner feel at ease. Conversely, another learner commented
that paying proper respect to coparticipants was a great concern of hers, and she,
therefore, took care to choose address terms according to Indonesian politeness con-
ventions.

Research Design
Following investigative practices in first and second language acquisition research,
studies of pragmatic development have adopted cross-sectional or longitudinal de-
signs. Cross-sectional studies have typically examined how learners at different pro-
ficiency levels use speech act realization strategies. These studies have been rather
narrowly focused on (one or more) speech acts, investigated by means of elicited
data. A welcome development in a number of the more recent cross-sectional speech
act studies is their considerably improved methodology. It is now standard procedure
to develop the instrument for the main investigation on the basis of preliminary stud-
ies in order to choose relevant contexts, control and vary context variables, and select
linguistic material in the case of comprehension and assessment studies (see Taka-
hashi, 1995, and Tokuda, 2001, for examples). Although much remains to be done
in order to further develop valid and reliable research methods for interlanguage
pragmatics, the general direction toward more sophisticated designs and procedures
promises well for future cross-sectional studies based on elicited data.
Compared to the cross-sectional research, longitudinal studies on pragmatic devel-
opment span a much wider range. The pragmatic features examined include not only
speech acts but also pragmatic routines, discourse markers, pragmatic fluency, and
conversational ability—features that require study in a full discourse context. Most
longitudinal studies examine learners at the beginning stages of pragmatic develop-
ment, often (but not only) in second and foreign language classrooms. The wide scope
of the longitudinal studies is reflected in a larger variety of research approaches and
data types (see the following). Because most of them rely on data collected in authen-
tic settings of language use, they have the potential to shed light on the relationship
between social and institutional contexts and pragmatic development. Although the
interaction of pragmatic and grammatical learning can be examined through differ-
ent kinds of research approaches, longitudinal studies of socially situated authentic
322 KASPER AND ROEVER

interaction provide privileged access to the relationship of social contexts and L2

pragmatic learning.

INSTRUCTED LEARNING OF PRAGMATICS

In educational perspective, a prime concern is whether pragmatics is teachable, and

what instructional options are most effective for L2 learners’ pragmatic development.
Studies that have addressed these issues (Rose & Kasper, 2001) strongly suggest that
most aspects of L2 pragmatics are indeed amenable to instruction, that instructional in-
tervention is more beneficial than no instructional arrangements specifically targeted
to pragmatic learning, and that for the most part, explicit instruction combined with
ample practice opportunities results in the greatest gains. Interventional classroom-
based research has examined a fairly broad range of instructional targets, a much
narrower band of target language populations, and adopted a variety of teaching ap-
proaches and theoretical frameworks. Another line of classroom-based research has
been observational, focusing on interaction processes in authentic classrooms and ex-
amining opportunities for and outcomes of pragmatic learning in different classroom
arrangements and activities (Kasper, 2001a; Rose & Kasper, 2001). This chapter will
report on interventional studies.

Teaching Goals
Interventional classroom research has targeted a fair variety of discursive, pragmatic,
and sociolinguistic goals, such as discourse markers and strategies in English (House
& Kasper, 1981; Wildner-Bassett, 1984), German (Wildner-Bassett, 1994), and Japanese
(Yoshimi, 2001), pragmatic routines such as apologetic and attention getting routines
in Japanese (Tateyama, Kasper, Mui, Tay, & Thananart, 1997; Tateyama, 2001), or miti-
gation in academic writing and computer-mediated discourse (Wishnoff, 2000). Many
studies have focused on specific speech acts and their realization strategies, including
apologies (Olshtain & Cohen, 1990), complaints (Morrow, 1996), compliments and
compliment responses (Billmyer, 1990; Rose & Ng, 2001), refusals (Morrow, 1996),
and requests (Takahashi, 2001). Fewer studies have examined instruction in overall
discourse characteristics, such as sociostylistic variation in French (Lyster, 1994) and
pragmatic fluency in English (House, 1996), and extended interaction, such as ex-
changes prompted by the “weekend question” in French (“t’as passé un bon weekend?”,
Liddicoat & Crozet, 2001). Whereas most studies have concentrated on the produc-
tion of the target features or their use in interaction, instruction specifically aiming
at improving learners’ pragmatic comprehension has received far less attention. An
exception is a series of studies conducted by Bouton (1994, 1999) on ESL learners’
comprehension of implicature in indirect responses.

Target Language and Students’ L2 Proficiency

Reflecting the dominance of English as a target language in second language classroom-
based research generally, by a wide margin, English has been the most frequently cho-
sen target language in studies on instruction in pragmatics. Other target languages,
such as Japanese, French, German, and Spanish, are only represented with less than
a handful of studies each at the time of writing. There is an urgent need to expand
the range of target languages, not least in order to better assess whether and to what
extent findings from research on a particular target language may be transferable to
other languages. It is noteworthy that the majority of studies were conducted in a for-
eign language rather than a second language environment, that is, in contexts where
students had little benefit of L2 input and interaction outside the classroom.
 18. PRAGMATICS 323

One concern raised by language educators is whether pragmatics is teachable to

beginning L2 learners. Studies by Wildner-Bassett (1994), Tateyama et al. (1997), and
Tateyama (2001) demonstrate that short pragmatic routines are teachable to absolute
beginners, indicating that such material can be learned before students develop ana-
lyzed L2 knowledge. This finding is consistent with research on the role of unanalyzed
chunks in L1 and L2 acquisition, showing that routines allow learners to participate in
conversation from early on and, thus, enable further opportunities for input, output,
and interaction. For advanced learners, the question is whether instruction is at all
necessary or at least facilitative. A solid body of research findings documents that
advanced learners often do not successfully acquire particular L2 pragmatic practices
without support through targeted instruction (Bardovi-Harlig, 2001). For the most
part, pragmatic practices that appear difficult for advanced learners to acquire with-
out instruction prove learnable through interventional measures (Bouton, 1994, 1999;
House, 1996; House & Kasper, 1981; Olshtain & Cohen, 1990). The majority of stud-
ies have included learners of intermediate L2 proficiency. It is interesting that these
studies have also produced the most mixed results: In some, students clearly profited
from the offered instruction (Billmyer, 1990; Morrow, 1996; Wildner-Bassett, 1984),
whereas in others, pre- and posttest results differed on only a few of several measures
(Rose & Ng, 2001), no differences were found between treatment and control groups
(Fukuya & Clark, 2001), only one of several treatments made a difference (Takahashi,
2001), or initial gains had disappeared at the time of a delayed posttest (Kubota, 1995).
However, it is doubtful that the small or absent treatment effects were causally related
to participants’ L2 proficiency; rather, students’ educational background and issues
of research design and procedures appear to have contributed to these outcomes.

Teaching Approaches
Interventional research examines how effective approaches to instruction in prag-
matics are, but it does so with varying specificity. Studies have sought to establish the
following:

1. Whether the targeted pragmatic feature is teachable at all (Liddicoat & Crozet,
2001; Morrow, 1996; Olshtain & Cohen, 1990; Wildner-Bassett, 1994).
2. Whether instruction in the targeted feature is more effective than no instruction
(Billmyer, 1990; Bouton, 1994, 1999; Lyster, 1994; Yoshimi, 2001).
3. Whether different teaching approaches are differentially effective.

Without exception, the teachability studies show that the targeted features are
indeed teachable, that is, on the adopted postinstruction measures, students’ per-
formance improved appreciably. Likewise, the instruction vs. no-instruction studies
demonstrate a clear advantage for instruction. The most revealing is the third group,
studies comparing different approaches or treatment conditions. A number of studies
have addressed the efficacy of metapragmatic instruction by comparing it to other
teaching strategies, sometimes under the labels “explicit” and “implicit” teaching.
Several investigations (House, 1996; House & Kasper, 1981; Pearson, 1998; Tateyama,
2001; Tateyama et al., 1997) have-compared metapragmatic instruction with input and
practice-only conditions. All of these studies (except for House, 1996, and Tateyama,
2001, each on one measure) found an advantage for explicit metapragmatic teaching.
On the other hand, Rose and Ng (2001) reported that an inductive approach proved
more effective for teaching pragmalinguistic aspects of complimenting, whereas a de-
ductive approach was superior for sociopragmatic aspects of compliment responses.
One study (Takahashi, 2001) compared as many as four different approaches to
teaching conventionally indirect request strategies to intermediate Japanese EFL
324 KASPER AND ROEVER

students: (a) explicit teaching, in which students received metapragmatic explanation

about form–function relationships of the target structures; (b) form–comparison, in
which students compared their own request realizations with those of native speak-
ers; (c) form–search, in which students identified the target strategies in provided
request scenarios; and (d) a meaning-focused condition, in which students listened
to aurally presented request events, read transcripts, and answered comprehension
questions. Unlike in Rose and Ng (2001), the explicit group learned all four request
strategies more successfully than the other three groups, who equally benefited lit-
tle from the intervention. But as the explicit teaching was more in accordance with
the instructional approach that the students usually experienced, it would be pre-
mature to conclude that the more inductive approaches are ineffective for teaching
pragmalinguistic aspects of speech act realization.

Theories and Research Methods

Studies on instruction in pragmatics rely on two types of theories and research: theo-
ries of the instructional object and of the process of L2 learning and teaching. Theories
of the teaching object include such approaches to discourse organization and man-
agement as Conversation Analysis and different types of discourse analysis, whereas
studies focusing on speech acts are based in speech act theory and empirical find-
ings on speech act realization. Theories of learning and teaching were initially lim-
ited to pedagogical approaches such as suggestopedia (Wildner-Bassett, 1984, 1986)
and “functional-analytic” teaching (Lyster, 1994). But by engaging an information-
processing model of skill acquisition to account for students’ tasks in acquiring so-
ciostylistically appropriate choices of French address pronouns, Lyster’s study was
also the first to draw on current cognitive approaches to second language learning.
Takahashi’s (2001) research on the effectiveness of different teaching approaches to
request realization in English was theoretically anchored in the noticing hypoth-
esis (Schmidt, 2001), a pragmatically adapted version of form-focused instruction
(Doughty & Williams, 1998), and the psycholinguistically based technique of input
enhancement (Sharwood Smith, 1993). Although observational studies on pragmatics
in L2 classrooms have also engaged sociocultural theory and language socialization
theory (e.g., Ohta, 1999, 2001), social practice theories of second language learning
have not yet informed interventional studies. Effect-of-instruction research has ap-
parently been viewed as most compatible with psycholinguistic theory and (quasi-,
pre-) experimental design; however, interventional research on instruction in prag-
matics could also be conducted under a social practice theory and engage different
qualitative methodologies, including participatory methods such as action research.
In fact, innovative instructional approaches to pragmatics may well be most effective
when they are cooperatively developed in local teaching contexts.
Another methodological practice that interventional studies would be well advised
to borrow from their observational counterparts is to conduct regular classroom ob-
servation, preferably including periods before, during, and after the intervention.
Audio or video recordings, carefully transcribed and analyzed according to a speci-
fied discourse-pragmatic approach, provide essential documentation of how students
and teachers implement the interventional agenda in classroom interaction and afford
insights into the acquisitional potential of different classroom activities for learning
the designated pragmatic practices.

COLLECTING DATA ON PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENT

Data types in interlanguage pragmatics research can be categorized into three main
groups (Kasper, 2000; Kasper & Rose, in press):
 18. PRAGMATICS 325
r Observational data of spoken interaction: authentic discourse, elicited conversa-
tion, and role plays.
r Self-reported questionnaire data: discourse completion, multiple-choice, and
scaled-response.
r Oral and/or narrative self-reports: interviews, diaries, and think-aloud protocols.

All of these data types can be—and most of them have been—deployed in research
on the development and instructed learning of L2 pragmatics. Studies illustrating
these methods will be drawn from the literature in these subfields of interlanguage
pragmatics.

Observational Data of Spoken Interaction

Data collection approaches in this category allow observing how participants produce
and understand pragmatic information and how they interact in various settings. The
three approaches we distinguish differ in the degree to which the researcher controls
contextual parameters. In recording authentic discourse, the researcher attempts to
avoid any manipulation of the natural setting. In elicited conversations, the researcher
either sets a task for participants to accomplish but then lets the interaction run its
course, or she or he assumes the role of an interviewer but does not require the partic-
ipant to assume a pretended role. In role-plays, the researcher determines the setting
of the interaction and asks participants to take on predefined roles in a pretense play.

Authentic Discourse. One reason for choosing authentic discourse as data for
the study of pragmatic development is the well-taken assumption that to a signifi-
cant extent, pragmatic learning occurs through interaction and collaboration. Another
reason is that much, though clearly not all, pragmatic learning is geared toward inter-
action; hence, it is crucial to obtain valid records of learners’ progressing interactional
ability. Spoken discourse in any authentic setting involves micro-designed and coor-
dinated action, too complex and fleeting to commit to participants’ or observer’s
memory, yet essential for the unfolding interaction and its outcomes. Therefore,
audio- or videotaped records are crucial to collect valid and reliable interactional data
(Peräkylä, 1997; Psathas, 1990). Although field notes may provide useful ethnographic
information that can be desirable or necessary as a supplementary data source, elec-
tronic records and carefully prepared transcripts constitute the mainstay of pragmatic
research based on authentic discourse data (Golato, 2003).
Authentic discourse has been observed to study pragmatic development in or-
dinary conversation (Achiba, 2002) and institutional encounters inside and outside
of language classrooms. Classroom-based research includes longitudinal studies on
learning how to request by two adolescent ESL learners (Ellis, 1992), on the (non)-
development of interactional ability in Spanish as a foreign language (Hall, 1995),
and on students’ progress in using acknowledgment and alignment expressions in
Japanese as a foreign language (Ohta, 2001). An example of institutional discourse out-
side of language classrooms is the academic advising sessions examined by Bardovi-
Harlig and Hartford (1993, 1996) in a longitudinal study on students’ performance
of suggestions and rejections. Although access to institutions can be difficult to ob-
tain and is sometimes subject to repeated renegotiation, institutional discourse has
some clear advantages for the study of pragmatic development. Although institu-
tional interaction is in large measure (although not entirely) prestructured by the
goals of the activity and participants assume rather fixed roles in it, actions that are
mandated by the activity occur repeatedly, such as question–answer sequences in
interviews or suggestions–acceptances/rejections in the academic advising session.
The relatively stable organization of institutional interaction allows comparisons of
the same action sequences carried out by the same participants in one session and
326 KASPER AND ROEVER

over time, and between different participants. Compared to ordinary conversation,

institutional interactions provide a more stable environment that lends itself partic-
ularly well to examine pragmatic development in authentic contexts. However, how
learners develop conversational ability in ordinary interaction is an equally important
research interest. Because authentic ordinary conversation is usually not prestructured
by preset goals and its participation structure is negotiated in situ, comparing specific
pragmatic practices within and across recordings can be a difficult proposition. In or-
der to gain more control over the interaction, researchers therefore resort to different
forms of elicited data.

Elicited Conversation. In elicited conversations, informants are asked to carry

out a conversation task or participate in an interview, but they do not assume a dif-
ferent identity as they might in a role-play. Studies involving conversation tasks have
investigated discourse transfer in conversational management (Scarcella, 1983) and
backchanneling (White, 1989), and proficiency effects on expressions of advice or
sympathy (Kerekes, 1992). Interviews as a vehicle for obtaining data on learners’
L2 pragmatics are modeled on the sociolinguistic interview (Labov, 1972; Schiffrin,
1987; Kasper & Rose, in press). Interview-based studies have examined proficiency-
related changes in repair organization (Færch & Kasper, 1982), retroactive transfer in
backchanneling (Tao & Thompson, 1991), and the learners’ acquisition of the Japanese
sentence final particle ne (Sawyer, 1992). Salsbury and Bardovi-Harlig (2001) con-
ducted a longitudinal interview study aimed at tracing ESL learners’ development
of modal expressions and disagreements. In order to offset the inherent asymmetry
of interview interaction, this study included three participants, two learners and the
native English speaking interviewer. In this way, learners engaged in different sta-
tus relationships during the interview interaction (see Schiffrin, 1987, for a model of
multiparty sociolinguistic interviews).
Often, researchers are interested in pragmatic actions and practices that are unlikely
to come up in elicited conversation. Here, role-play provides an alternative.

Role-play. Role-plays of various types are widely used for diagnostic, training,
learning, testing, and research purposes throughout the social sciences. Closed role-
plays consist of a single informant turn in response to a situational prompt and pos-
sibly an opening turn by the interlocutor. This type of role-play has been used to
elicit requests (Rintell, 1981; Rintell & Mitchell, 1989), apologies (Cohen & Olshtain,
1981; Rintell & Mitchell, 1989), and suggestions (Rintell, 1981). Open role-plays, on the
other hand, can stretch over numerous turns, elicit a variety of speech acts, and allow
the observation of a large number of discourse features. The researcher can struc-
ture the role-play loosely by giving participants role-play instructions that define
their roles and tasks, or it can be structured more tightly if a “confederate” follows a
more or less detailed script. Because of the rich and varied discourse they elicit, open
role-plays have been deployed frequently in interlanguage pragmatics research to
investigate such actions and practices as requests (Hassall, 1997), expressions of grat-
itude (Eisenstein & Bodman, 1993), refusals (Gass & Houck, 1999), apologies (Garcı́a,
1989), complaints (Trosborg, 1995), face-threatening acts (Piirainen-Marsh, 1995), con-
versational openings and closings (Kasper, 1981), discourse markers and strategies
(Wildner-Bassett, 1984, 1994), pragmatic routines (Tateyama, 2001), and pragmatic
fluency (House, 1996). Hudson, Detmer, and Brown (1995) used role-plays as an as-
sessment instrument for the speech acts of apology, request, and refusal by Japanese
ESL learners. The test takers’ performance was assessed by raters watching a video
recording of the role-plays. Yoshitake (1997) replicated this study with L1 Japanese
learners of EFL and Yamashita (1996) with L1 English learners of Japanese as a Second
Language (JSL).
 18. PRAGMATICS 327

Compared to authentic discourse, some speech events elicited through role-play

have been found to be less complex and varied (Eisenstein & Bodman, 1993, Margalef-
Boada, 1993). Role-plays also rank low on practicality (Brown, 2001a): They require
(usually) dyadic interaction; they may elicit few instances of the desired pragmatic
action or practice; the spoken discourse data must be transcribed and requires some
form of discourse analysis. As role-play participants have to create a fictional world
through their interaction rather than being engaged in a social activity embedded
in, and consequential for, their lives outside of the simulation, the relationship of
role-played interaction to authentic discourse remains an unresolved validity issue.
On the positive side, open role-plays supply rich interactional data under controlled
conditions; however, when practicality is a concern or a study requires quantitative
treatment of a large body of data rather than an in-depth discourse analysis of a
smaller data set, open role-play would not be an advisable choice.

Questionnaires
Questionnaires are a versatile type of instrument. Open-ended production (discourse
completion) questionnaires serve to collect learner-produced pragmatic data in re-
sponse to situation prompts; multiple-choice questionnaires elicit preferences for
pragmatic options or interpretations of utterances; and scaled-response formats ask
respondents to assess situational contexts and instances of speech acts or discourse
according to predetermined variables. All types of questionnaires probe into “offline,”
self-reported states of knowledge or beliefs as respondents do not produce and un-
derstand linguistic and other vocal action under the time pressure and stimulus load
of real-world interaction. Consequently, questionnaire data cannot provide valid rep-
resentations of situated linguistic action in authentic activities, although it may bear
some resemblance. But each questionnaire type imposes its own cognitive task de-
mands. Discourse completion questionnaires, in which respondents have to actively
construct responses, require free recall; choosing from presented stimuli in multiple-
choice instruments involves recognition; and assessing characteristics of situational
context or linguistic material by means of rating scales presents respondents with a
judgment task.
Compared to role-plays, the administration and analysis of questionnaire data is far
less resource demanding, especially when no analysis of production data is involved.
But that does not mean that questionnaires are easy instruments that allow conduct-
ing a study fast. What is saved in time commitment at the data collection and analysis
stage has to be invested prior to the data collection. Questionnaire design is a highly
complex affair and requires that the researcher be well versed in the social research
literature on the topic (e.g., Babbie, 2004; also Brown, 2001b, for an excellent practical
guide to questionnaire design in language program surveys). Unless an already ex-
isting, well-developed questionnaire is an appropriate instrument for the purposes,
population, and context of the study at hand, a new instrument has to be developed,
which takes several cycles of piloting and pretesting. Existing instruments have to be
validated for the population(s) participating in the new study. Because the quality of
the data depends on the validity and reliability of the instrument, careful questionnaire
development is as essential in pragmatics research as elsewhere in the social sciences.

Discourse Completion Questionnaires. In cross-sectional studies of pragmatic

development (e.g., Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1986; Maeshiba et al., 1996; Rose, 2000;
Takahashi & Beebe, 1987) and as assessment instruments in pre- and posttests in inter-
ventional classroom research (Olshtain & Cohen, 1990; Rose & Ng, 2001; Takahashi,
2001), discourse completion tasks or tests (DCTs) have been a frequently employed
instrument. They have mostly been used to elicit productions of a specific speech
328 KASPER AND ROEVER

act, usually as a one-turn response to a situational prompt. DCTs provide self-reports

about past or hypothetical action, but they do not have the potential to represent sit-
uated (inter)action in its sequential development (Golato, 2003). However, DCTs are
a useful format to provide knowledge displays of speech act strategies and linguistic
forms. A number of DCT design issues have been examined, including the effect of re-
joinders (Johnston, Kasper, & Ross, 1998) and their presentation (Kuha, 1999; Roever,
in press), and the length of the situational prompt (Billmyer & Varghese, 2000).

Multiple Choice. In interlanguage pragmatics, multiple choice (MC) formats have

occasionally been employed as a research tool, for instance to study the appropriate-
ness of advice (Hinkel, 1997; Matsumura, 2001) and learners’ progress in understand-
ing implicature in English (Bouton, 1992). More frequently, MC has been deployed
for pragmatic assessment, including tests of implicature comprehension and rou-
tines (Roever, in press) and the contextual appropriateness of speech act realizations
(Hudson, Detmer, & Brown, 1995; Yamashita, 1996; Yoshitake, 1997), and as pre- and
posttests in interventional classroom research (Bouton, 1994, 1999; Tateyama et al.,
1997; Fukuya & Clark, 2001; Tateyama, 2001). Because MC presents respondents with
a recognition task, the design of the response options is crucial and must be closely
tied to the overall purpose of the MC. In MC questionnaires used for research, the re-
sponse options are designed to represent possible respondent preferences from which
they select the most preferred option. Consequently, all response options must be pos-
sible; whereas in a MC test used for assessment, all but one response option must be
impossible, that is, except for one option, all others must be incorrect or inappropri-
ate beyond a reasonable doubt. This differentiation has major consequences for task
design: MC instruments for research purposes should be based on studies of natu-
rally occurring language use; whereas for assessment purposes, they must contain
distractors that are attractive to at least some members of the test-taker population.
The extent to which these requirements can be fulfilled depends largely on the tar-
geted pragmatic feature. Whereas MCs probing into learner preferences of alternative
speech act realization strategies tend to achieve notoriously poor reliability scores
(Brown, 2001a; Roever, in press), MCs for situational routines and implicatures can
be constructed with satisfactory degrees of consistency (Roever, in press).

Rating Scales
Rating scales are well known as measures of “attitudinal objects” in social research
and as elicitation formats for acceptability judgments in linguistics. In interlanguage
pragmatics research, they have been deployed to investigate such issues as the use and
placement of supportive moves in requests (Shimamura, 1993), the transferability of
request strategies (Takahashi, 1996), or learners’ perceptions of pragmatic and gram-
matical errors (Bardovi-Harlig & Dörnyei, 1998; replicated by Niezgoda & Röver,
2001). In a language testing context, Hudson et al. (1995) utilized rating scales to
assess test-takers’ pragmatic performance by external raters and for test-takers’ self-
assessment of their own pragmatic ability. Rating scales are suitable for sociopragmatic
and pragmalinguistic assessment. One study that combined both assessment types is
Shimamura (1993). For principles and practices to follow in the design of scaled re-
sponse instruments, the sociometric and psychometric literature should be consulted
(e.g., Bernard, 2000; Miller & Salkind, 2002).

Oral and Narrative Forms of Self-report

Compared to the data collection methods discussed earlier, forms of self-report that
are not questionnaire-elicited have only been used sporadically in interlanguage
 18. PRAGMATICS 329

pragmatics. Interviews, next to observation the most frequently employed data gath-
ering procedure in the social sciences, have figured as one of several data sources in
ethnographic studies of L2 pragmatic learning (DuFon, 1999; Siegal, 1994), but the
research reports make only cursory mention of the interview data. In some studies of
native speakers’ pragmatic practices, interviews were the main data collection format
(Boxer, 1996, on “indirect complaints”) or were accorded equal weight as observations
of pragmatic practices (Miles, 1994, on compliments). Interviews have a large and yet
unexplored potential for shedding light on pragmatic development. As in the case of
other research approaches, in order to conduct and analyze interviews effectively, it
is essential to consult the (very large and theoretically diverse) literature on research
interviews (e.g., Gubrium & Holstein, 2002; Silverman, 2001; Wengraf, 2001).

Diaries
Diaries have been imported into research on pragmatic development from second lan-
guage acquisition research, where this format of narrative self-report has provided
useful insights on learners’ and teachers’ experiences with using, acquiring, and teach-
ing the target language. Apart from an early study by Schmidt and Frota (1986), in
which journals served as one data source to trace Schmidt’s learning of Brazilian Por-
tuguese, diaries have not been employed much in interlanguage pragmatics research.
In the only published diary study, Cohen (1997) describes his rather unsuccessful
learning of Japanese pragmatics through a university course. For her study of the
acquisition of politeness in L2 Indonesian by six sojourning learners during a study
abroad program, DuFon (1999) asked her participants to keep a semi-prestructured
diary journal. Comparing several data sources in her ethnographic study, DuFon re-
ported that some pragmatic events were more recordable through particular methods
than others. For instance, all learners commented in their journal entries on the use of
address terms, but none provided any observations on experience questions. Cohen’s
and DuFon’s studies illustrate two forms of diary: the self-study diary, in which the
diarist and the researcher are the same person, and the commissioned diary, in which
the researcher requests participants (often language learners or teachers) to keep a
journal that is then submitted to and analyzed by the researcher. Both forms of diary
produce narratives that shed light on the process of learning L2 pragmatics from the
diarists’ perspectives, and in case of multiple participants, they are also a valuable
source of information about individual differences in pragmatic development, as the
example from DuFon’s study earlier in this chapter illustrates.

Verbal Protocols
Verbal protocols (Ericsson & Simon, 1993), also known as “think-aloud protocols,”
are respondents’ reports of internal cognitive processes that occur as they are work-
ing on a task (concurrent verbal protocols) or their recollections of processes after
the task has been completed (consecutive verbal protocols). Concurrent verbal pro-
tocols have the advantage of eliciting online reports, and they thereby synchronize
task performance and reporting, but they may also produce reactivity, that is, they
can interfere with doing the task. A further limitation, specific to verbal protocols of
oral production, is that they exclude spoken tasks because participants cannot pro-
duce task-related talk and verbal protocol talk at the same time. Retrospective verbal
protocols do not suffer from such conflicts but, because of memory limitations, they
may reveal participants’ recollections of their thoughts during task completion rather
than what they actually were thinking. In interlanguage pragmatics research, concur-
rent verbal protocols have been collected by Robinson (1992) in conjunction with a
DCT eliciting refusals and by Roever (in press) as a validation instrument in a study
330 KASPER AND ROEVER

on pragmatic assessment. Cohen and Olshtain (1993) and Widjadja (1997) gathered
retrospective protocols after participants engaged in role-plays (see Gass & Mackey,
2000, for retrospective protocols in second language research).
A particular concern about verbal protocols in interlanguage pragmatics is the
language of reporting. The native speakers of Japanese in Robinson’s (1992) study
delivered their protocols in English, probably in deference to the English-speaking
researcher. Roever (in press) instructed his participants explicitly that they should
speak whatever language they felt most at ease with, and that protocols supplied in
another language than the target language (English) would be translated. In response,
participants conducted most of their reports in their L1, resulting in more complete,
and presumably more valid, verbalizations especially in the case of the less profi-
cient L2 speakers, but it also required that participants be limited to L1 groups for
which translators were at hand. Verbal reports are particularly useful for instrument
development because they provide researchers with valuable information about re-
spondents’ understanding of and interaction with stimulus material. They should,
therefore, be used more regularly in interlanguage pragmatics research, especially for
questionnaire design. At the same time, recent reconceptualizations of verbal reports
from a sociocognitive perspective (Smagorinsky, 1998) strongly recommend a more
critical understanding of verbal reports than the information-processing view sub-
scribes to (for discussion with a view to interlanguage pragmatics, cf. Kasper & Rose,
in press).

Conclusion
Research methods, and especially methods of data collection, potentially influence
research outcomes in any area of study. But in an inherently context-sensitive domain
of language use, possible method effects are a particular concern. In some investiga-
tive approaches, such as ethnographic studies and multitrait multimethod studies
in quantitative research, engaging several methods of data collection is mandated.
Examples of ethnographic studies in developmental L2 pragmatics are the work by
Siegal (1994) and DuFon (1999); in the testing of pragmatics, the framework devel-
oped by Hudson, et al. (1995) and subsequent applications (Brown, 2001a; Hudson,
2001; Yamashita, 1996; Yoshitake, 1997) as well as Roever (in press); and several in-
terventional classroom studies include multiple measures in their pre- and posttests
(e.g., Lyster, 1994; Rose & Ng, 2001; Takahashi, 2001, Tateyama, 2001; Tateyama et al.,
1997). Such studies not only enable investigators to triangulate research findings but
also bring to the fore the potential and limitations of different research methods in the
study of pragmatic development.

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19

Sociocultural and Second

Language Learning Research:
An Exegesis1
James P. Lantolf
Pennsylvania State University

INTRODUCTION

Since the publication of Frawley and Lantolf (1985), there has been growing interest
in the sociocultural theoretic approach to second language (L2) development (e.g.,
Lantolf & Appel, 1994; Lantolf, 2000c). The theory proposes that humans attain the
capacity to voluntarily control or regulate their memory, attention, perception, plan-
ning, learning, and development, as they appropriate mediating artifacts, including
language, as they are brought into culturally specified and organized activities.
Instead of reviewing yet again the literature on sociocultural theory and L2 research
(see Lantolf & Pavlenko, 1995; Lantolf, 2000b; Lantolf, 2002), this chapter will focus
on how the theory and its affiliated research have been interpreted and critiqued by
scholars in the mainstream of second language acquisition (SLA). To do this, I will rely
on several sources as representative of mainstream work that has addressed Sociocul-
tural Theory (SCT) informed research—Atkinson (2002), Ellis (1997, 2003), Lightbown
and Spada (1999), and Mitchell and Myles (1998). Although some of the criticisms of
SCT research on L2 learning are on the mark and merit serious consideration by those
working within this framework, others reflect a misunderstanding of the theory, and
for this reason an exegesis is needed. The topics I will deal with here include the
following: the zone of proximal development; SCT—a theory of language use or a
theory of cognition; internalization and the autonomous learner; SCT and linguistic
theory; rate and route of L2 acquisition; SCT and other social theories of SLA.
Some, such as Schinke-Llano (1995, p. 25) have remarked that “grappling with Vy-
gotskian theory can sometimes be frustrating, much like dealing with a video camera
that slips in and out of focus.” I don’t believe, however, that theory is as slippery as
some might think. Its constructs and principles have not changed since they were
originally laid down by Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev; but as with any theory worth
its salt, the details have been debated and sharpened over the course of time. Indeed,

335
336 LANTOLF

Vygotsky’s collected works must be read as a struggle to clarify, modify, and develop
the theory through the very activity of writing, which as Vygotsky argued, was a form
of development.

ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT

I will begin with the most well known construct of Vygotsky’s theory, the zone of prox-
imal development (ZPD). The ZPD emerged from Vygotsky’s observation that for some
children, schooling significantly increased their mental development, as measured by
IQ tests (van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991). Briefly, the ZPD is a projection of a person’s
developmental future in the sense that what one can do in cooperation with others
today one can do alone tomorrow (Vygotsky 1986, p. 188). Counter to Piaget’s stance
in which development lays down the pathway for teaching and learning to follow,
for Vygotsky, “the only good kind of instruction is that which marches ahead of de-
velopment and leads it” (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 188), and this is instruction that occurs in
the ZPD. Learning, for Vygotsky, is assisted performance, whereas development is the
ability to regulate mental and social activity as a consequence of having appropriated,
or internalized, that assistance. This allows the individual to engage in activity that is
independent of specific material circumstances (e.g., the language classroom).
Lightbown and Spada (1999, p. 44) point out that according to SCT, L2 “learners
advance to higher levels of linguistic knowledge when they collaborate and interact
with speakers of the second language who are more knowledgeable than they are.” To
be sure, this claim has indeed been made in the SCT L2 literature, but others, including
Donato (1994), Swain and Lapkin (1998), and Ohta (2001) have shown that learners
are able to collaboratively construct knowledge of an L2 in the absence of an expert
knower. It is interesting to note that Lightbown and Spada present data from Donato
(1994) as an illustration of how learning occurs in the ZPD. Moreover, missing from
Lightbown and Spada’s characterization of the ZPD is its orientation toward future
development. At two different points in their text (p. 23 and p. 44) they essentially
represent the ZPD as entailing assisted performance only, and although this is not
inaccurate, it excludes the critical idea that what an individual (child or adult) can
achieve with assistance, he or she will be able to achieve without assistance in the
future.
According to Lightbown and Spada (1999) SCT differs from other interactionist
perspectives in its assumption that “language acquisition takes place in the interac-
tions of learner and interlocutor,” instead of “internally and invisibly” as learners
operate with the “linguistic raw material” offered by modified input (p. 44). Indeed,
most L2 researchers seem to assume that SLA is “not directly observable” and can
only be inferred on the basis of learner performance, including the production and
comprehension of utterances and written texts (Carroll, 2001, pp. 16–17). As I will
discuss later, I believe that it may very well be possible to observe L2 learning, at least
in part, through analysis of private speech.

ZPD and Krashen’s i + 1

Perhaps the most persistent and problematic aspect affiliated with the ZPD in L2
research is the mistaken assumption that it somehow equates to Krashen’s notion
of i + 1. Several recent papers have clearly demonstrated the incommensurability
of these two constructs (de Guerrero, 1996; Dunn & Lantolf, 1998; Kinginger, 2001,
2002); therefore, I will forgo a detailed examination of the matter here. Nevertheless,
it bears repeating, as Dunn and Lantolf (1998) argue, that the constructs are incom-
mensurable because the underlying theoretical frameworks from which each emerges
 19. SOCIOCULTURAL RESEARCH 337

are themselves incommensurable. Krashen’s theory is anchored in the information-

processing model of cognition and communication and its underlying computational
metaphor—a metaphor that privileges input—output relationships and abstract (un-
conscious) symbol manipulation along with the notion of an idealized autonomous
knower. Vygotsky’s theory rejects the notion of the autonomous individual (see the
following) as well as the assumption that cognition is something that goes on ex-
clusively, and invisibly, inside the head. Moreover, Krashen’s hypothesis assumes
a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) that is responsible for learning, whereas Vy-
gotsky’s theory insists that humans, not some LAD, are constantly developing the
capacity to control/regulate their own mental activity. As Vygotsky put it “man [sic]
controls his brain and not the brain the man . . . that without man his behaviour cannot
be explained, that psychology cannot be expounded in terms of processes but only
in terms of drama” (cited in Yaroshevsky, 1989 p. 230).2 By drama, here, Vygotsky
is referring to mediated social activity, which by its very nature is unpredictable; in
essence, development is a drama without a definitive conclusion.
Krashen’s is a model of language acquisition; Vygotsky’s is a theory of human
development. In fact, from Vygotsky’s perspective it is inappropriate to speak of
language acquisition, if it is assumed, as Krashen’s model does, to be a sequential
and predictable process. Vygotsky rejected this view of development in favor of a
revolutionary perspective. Acquisition models see things as a “continuous, steady,
and linear” flow without ruptures, regressions, and that result in predictable outcomes
(Newman & Holzman, 1996, p. 134). Vygotksy sees development as a historical process
with breaks, innovation, and unpredictability as the norm (see Belz in press; and
Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000).
The key to understanding the developmental activity that is the ZPD resides in
Vygotsky’s notion of imitation. Despite its unfortunate behaviorist baggage, “imita-
tion is a critically important developmental activity, because it is the chief means by
which children are related to as other than, and in advance of, who they are,” as in the
case of linguistic interaction where “adults relate to young children not as parrots,
but as speakers” (Newman & Holzman, 1993, p. 151). For Vygotsky imitation is not a
“mechanical activity” in which “anyone can imitate almost anything if shown how”
(Vygotsky, 1986, p. 187); on the contrary, “to imitate, it is necessary to possess the
means of stepping from something one knows to something new” and this can be
accomplished with someone else’s assistance (p. 187). It is here that Vygotsky saw the
influence of instruction on development in the ZPD.
According to Tomasello (1999, p. 84), in imitative learning, children “attempt to
place themselves in the ‘intentional space’ of the user—discerning the user’s goal,
what she is using the artifact [e.g., hammer, pencil, language] ‘for’.” Thus, through
imitation in the ZPD, the child comes to see the “intentional affordances” of culturally
constructed artifacts as well as the “intentional relations that other persons have with
that object or artifact—that is, the intentional relations that other persons have to the
world through the artifact” (Tomasello, 1999, pp. 84–85). Swain and Lapkin (in press)
show that when interacting with others, L2 learners are intentionally able to imitate
features of a second language that they do not yet understand, because the interlocutor
gives meaning to the features, and in this way the learners come to understand what
they initially did not.
Imitation is not simply mimicking, repeating, or parroting; it is a creative, transfor-
mative activity that only humans are genuinely capable of (Vygotsky, 1987; Tomasello,
1999). In symbolic play, for example, children “extract the intentional affordances of
different objects and play with them” which often entails free interchange of their
culturally intended use, such as when they use pencils as hammers, while at the
same time “smiling at the adult in the process to signal that this is not stupidity but
playfulness” (Tomasello, 1999, p. 85).
338 LANTOLF

Although imitation is, especially in early childhood, transformative and revolu-

tionary, once children enter school, it is frequently construed as cheating, and when
it is encouraged, it is often construed as repetition and not transformation (Newman
& Holzman, 1993, p. 152). This may not show up overtly, of course, but, for example,
when taking tests, students are normally expected to (re)produce the correct answer,
which usually has been previously supplied by the teacher or the textbook.
Some L2 researchers have argued SCT research concerned with the ZPD has failed
to adequately distinguish unassisted learner performance from that which occurs with
scaffolded assistance. In other words, if the ZPD is to be a useful construct in explain-
ing L2 development, it must be clearly shown that although learners are unable to
deploy specific linguistic forms and meanings independently, they are indeed able to
do so with help from someone else (Ellis, 2003, p. 200). Moreover, to demonstrate that
learners are capable of assisted performance in and of itself does not make the case
for the relevance of the ZPD (p. 200). This is clearly a reasonable observation. How-
ever, the study by Aljaafreh and Lantolf (1994) shows precisely the kind of evidence
required to illustrate the usefulness of the theoretical construct. The study examined
the use of high frequency features of English (tense morphology, articles, model verbs,
and prepositions) in the written performance of three English as a Second Language
(ESL) learners. Each learner met individually with an expert tutor outside of her reg-
ular class meeting (the tutor was not the course instructor) once a week for an 8-week
period. During each session the tutor would help the learner correct the grammar
in her written assignment. The initial composition was not corrected as it served to
develop a base profile of each learner’s unassisted performance with regard to the
four grammatical features under consideration. The researchers examined the kind of
assistance offered by the tutor (e.g., explicit help in which the learner was provided
with the correct form; or implicit clues, as when the learner was asked if she noticed
anything wrong with a particular form) and the learners’ uptake of that assistance.
Development through the ZPD was documented over time as learners manifested
greater independence from the tutor’s guidance and enhanced accuracy in their use
of the relevant forms. However, as Lantolf and Aljaafreh (1995) observed, learner de-
velopment was not a smooth linear process; instead, it followed the type of irregular
trajectory captured by Vygotsky’s description of development as a revolutionary pro-
cess. This showed up in either of two ways: from one tutorial session to the next a
given learner required more instead of less explicit assistance to locate and correct
an error; or a learner who produced the correct form for a particular feature (e.g.,
irregular past tense form, “took”) for two or three compositions in a row, produced
the form with regular past tense morphology (i.e., “taked”).
Nassaji and Swain (2000), in a small-scale study of two learners, provide additional
support for Aljaafreh and Lantolf’s (1994) findings. They confirmed that other regu-
lation that is sensitive to a learner’s ZPD has a greater effect on learning than does
randomly provided implicit or explicit assistance. In a somewhat different, but rele-
vant study, Swain and Lapkin (2002) report that learners of French were able to use
formal differences they noticed between their own written text and a version of the
same text reformulated by a native speaker of the language. Although the learners
noticed a high percentage of the reformulations, they frequently rejected those they
had not noticed when pointed out to them on the grounds that the features did not jibe
with their own rules of French grammar. The interesting finding was that the learners
moved from unassisted performance (i.e., their original text) to performance medi-
ated by the reformulated text to improve their future performance (i.e., their revised
text). Thus, as Swain and Lapkin argue, the learners appropriated forms available in
the reformulated text because they were within the learner’s ZPD.
Mitchell and Myles (1998) note that SCT research on the ZPD has focused on con-
scious performance as when learners either produce written texts, as in the studies just
 19. SOCIOCULTURAL RESEARCH 339

considered, or when they formulate written scripts to prompt oral performance (e.g.,
Donato, 1994). Recently, however, Ohta (2001) has examined scaffolded performance
in spontaneous speech. In what she calls “assisted performance in action,” Ohta an-
alyzes the ways in which adult classroom learners of Japanese scaffold each other
through a variety of classroom tasks and exercises, including spontaneous oral per-
formance. Included among the scaffolding strategies uncovered by Ohta are several
that parallel those provided by the expert tutor in Aljaafreh and Lantolf (1994), includ-
ing explicit correction and explanation as well as implicit prompts (elongation of a
final syllable or repetition of a word). Another frequently used form of assistance was
“waiting,” which, according to Ohta (p. 89), is important “because assistance is only
helpful when it is needed, not when it is redundant with the learner’s established abil-
ities.” In other words, holding off on feedback offers learners the opportunity to gain
fuller control of knowledge that immediate explicit assistance might not. Ohta also
found that peers engage in language play (p. 107), not reported in Aljaafreh and Lan-
tolf (1994), as a form of assistance. She notes that students carrying out joint tasks on
occasion playfully manipulated the sounds occurring in certain Japanese morphemes
(e.g., adjectival nouns) as a way of helping each other focus on the problematic aspects
of these forms (see also Broner & Tarone, 2001).
Two important questions relating to the ZPD need to be addressed: “Do people
who receive timely and effective scaffolding/means of mediation actually learn any
faster than those who get less help ? Does intervention in the ZPD merely scaffold peo-
ple more rapidly along common routes of interlanguage development, or can these
routes be by passed/altered, by skilled co-construction ?” (Mitchell and Myles, 1998,
p. 162). Although rate of learning is an important matter and clearly more research
needs to focus on answering this question, it is the second question that is more inter-
esting. Pienemann’s (1998) processing model and related teachability hypothesis, for
instance, claims that for certain sets of features in any given L2, a specific path must
be followed by all learners and although teaching may affect the rate at which acquisi-
tion occurs, it does not influence the developmental sequence. SCT, on the other hand,
because of its fundamental theoretical assumption that development is revolutionary
and therefore unpredictable, have a good deal of difficulty with claims of universal
predetermined developmental trajectories that are impervious to instructional inter-
vention (Newman & Holzman, 1997, p. 73).
The pedagogical theory of P. Gal’perin, based on Vygotsky’s principles, argues that
instruction indeed plays a central role in shaping the route and rate of any type of
mental development. Gal’perin and his associates have established a robust research
program on classroom learning, including first and additional languages (see Carpay,
1974; Gal’perin, 1992; Karpova, 1977; Komarova, 1988, 1991; Markova, 1979; Talyzina,
1981). The key factor in Gal’perin’s complex pedagogical model is the materialization
and internalization of the object of study. For instance, Karpova (1977) implemented
a successful program for teaching very young (2 to 3 years of age) Russian-speaking
children the concept of a word through use of material support provided by dif-
ferently colored plates, which enabled the children to easily perceive the individual
words comprising simple sentences in Russian where before they were unable to dis-
tinguish words from phrases or even entire sentences. Markova (1979) discusses a
10-year, large-scale pedagogical project carried out with some three-thousand Rus-
sian students that was designed to enhance high levels of writing and speaking ability
in their native language.
Carpay (1974) reports on a study designed to teach Russian speakers German adjec-
tive declensions and Dutch speakers Russian verbal aspect by first providing students
with material models illustrating the meaning of the concepts of case and aspect in
the respective languages. Following Gal’perin’s framework, the students then ver-
balized privately in whispered and subvocal speech the relevant concepts in order to
340 LANTOLF

internalize these concepts. Moving from materialization to verbalization “is the crucial
point in the passage from external to internal” (León, 2001, p. 274). Once internaliza-
tion occurs, the knowledge can then serve the functional needs of the individuals
independently of the particular circumstances in which it was appropriated. Swain
(2000) reports on a study conducted by her doctoral student, S. Holunga, that shows
that ESL learners instructed to verbalize specific metacognitive strategies such as pre-
dicting, planning, monitoring, and evaluating during collaborative tasks performed
better on a posttest than did learners who were taught the same strategies but were
not instructed to verbalize them.
Finally, a 15-week project by one of my own students, E. Negueruela (2003), im-
plemented a Gal’pernian syllabus in an intermediate, university-level, Spanish L2
classroom. Negueruela argues that teaching students to understand conceptually the
meaning of such grammatical features as tense/aspect, copula verbs, and clitic pro-
nouns, followed by procedures aimed at materializing (e.g., diagrams, Silent Way
rods), verbalizing, and internalizing these meanings, learners were able to perform at
a more advanced level of ability than generally happens as a result of instruction that
presents grammar as rules-of-thumb. In a rule-of-thumb presentation, found in vir-
tually all current language textbooks, such features as tense/aspect are “explained”
in the form of lists of unrelated surface descriptions: in Spanish for example—use the
imperfect for telling time, for actions that are on going in the past, for background
information in narratives, etc.; use the preterit for completed actions, for repeated
actions, for the beginning of some action, etc. According to Negueruela, conceptual
understanding, in Vygotsky’s view the key to development in the school setting, re-
quires instruction to present learners with coherent scientific knowledge of the type
found in linguistic research. Although this appears to fly in the face of the assumptions
of communicative language teaching where focus on form is to be backgrounded in
favor of meaning negotiation, SCT argues that form needs to be brought to the fore,
but with emphasis on the meaning of form in communication. Space does not permit
further discussion of this perhaps controversial claim; nevertheless, the point is that
when instruction makes it possible for learners to gain a conceptual understanding
of a feature of language, or indeed a feature of any subject matter, it has a profound
influence in shaping how development unfolds, both with regard to rate and route.

THE AUTONOMOUS KNOWER AND INTERNALIZATION

One of the basic assumptions of mainstream SLA theorizing is that despite the im-
portance of communicative interaction, learning ultimately happens in the mind of
the individual autonomous learner. This is not without its problems when it comes
to the classroom setting. Ellis (1997) points out that belief in the autonomous knower
and its affiliated “input metaphor” is that its asocial assumption “warrants the dis-
association of teaching from the social contexts that shape how and what learners
learn” (p. 242). In my view, the autonomous knower and input metaphors contribute
to the general claim that teaching can only affect the rate and not the route of learning.
These metaphors tend to deskill (my term) teachers because they reduce teaching to
the provision of optimal input that will, theoretically at least, promote learning for all
learners.
One of the reasons why the autonomous knower and input metaphors may be
difficult to abandon is the assumption that overgeneralizations such as ∗eated cannot
be explained through social interaction (Ellis 1997, p. 244). Thus, the dualism between
embedded individuals (that is, real people involved in concrete real world activ-
ity) and the homogenized IDEAL learner—a universal and “lonely” (Atkinson, 2002,
p. 536) being who is the same always and everywhere, must somehow be retained.
 19. SOCIOCULTURAL RESEARCH 341

However, SCT as a monistic theory of mind that argues for a necessary dialectic rela-
tionship between the individual and the social (in fact, according to Vygotsky there
can be no individuals independent of social and cultural circumstances) it is indeed
possible to account for overgeneralizations without recourse to the social-cognitive
split some, including Ellis (1997), Kasper (1997) and Atkinson (2002), want to sustain.
I want to make it clear, because there does seem to be a good deal of misunderstanding
among mainstream researchers, that SCT is not a sociolinguistic theory of language
use; it is a psychological/psycholinguistic theory (see Leontiev, 1981) that explains hu-
man mental functioning on the basis of situated sociocultural activity that is mediated
in large part by communicative practices.
According to Newman and Holzman (1996, p. 90) “to the extent that it [modern
psychology] has ignored and attempted to eliminate from its investigations the es-
sential sociality and historicality of human beings (including psychologists’own), it
has focused on the isolated individual it has constructed.” They note that despite
its apparent “obsession with and glorification of the individual” (p. 76), psychology
“has never been particularly concerned with individuals as individuals;” rather “its
concern has been methodological—the individual is a useful construct in making
knowledge claims about groups or formulating general laws of behavior” and has
shown little interest in real concrete individuals in all of their “human diversity and
uniqueness” (p. 74). Lave (1997, p. 64) suggests that although it might be possible to
see laboratory experiments as what occurs when individuals “are asked to solve new
problems in new circumstances,” the problem is that the lab setting is unlike most
mundane circumstances, usually requiring participants to perform tasks in a given
timeframe while following a predetermined procedure. Moreover, according to Lave,
“neither the experimenter nor the subject is likely to know how the situation is re-
lated to previous situations in which the subject has been routinely involved” and the
experimenter is unlikely to pay much attention to the potential differences between
the two circumstances (p. 65). SCT, on the other hand, recognizes the centrality of
human individuals, but not as abstract, autonomous entities; rather, as continually
active material and historical beings that dialectically emerge from, and at the same
time remain part of, sociocultural communities (see Tulviste 1991, p. 85).
In the case at hand, what is at issue is not the form ∗eated itself, but the (over)
generalization process that gives rise to this form. Vygotsky argued that the key to
overcoming the Cartesian dualism resides in the process of internalization. According
to Kozulin (1990, p. 116), “the essential element in the formation of higher mental
functions is the process of internalization.” It is through internalization in the ZPD
that activity between individuals or individuals and cultural artifacts is transformed
into intramental activity (Vygotsky, 1978). It is important to keep in mind that inter-
nalization does not literally mean “’within the individual’ or ‘in the brain”’(Stetsenko,
1999, p. 245), exclusively, although certainly the brain is implicated in thinking (see
the following). Rather it is a metaphor to capture the notion of the individual perform-
ing concrete and ideal activity “without the immediately present problem situation
‘in the mind”’ (Stetsenko, 1999, p. 245) and independently of others’ “thoughts and
understandings” (Ball, 2000, p. 250). It is in this process “of historically determined
and culturally organized ways of operating on information that the social nature of
people comes to be their psychological nature as well” (Luria, 1979, p. 45).
In L2 learning, learners construct mental representations of what was at one point
physically (acoustic or visual) present in external form. This representation, in turn,
enables them to free themselves from the sensory properties of a specific concrete situ-
ation. Again, to cite Stetsenko, the formation of intrapersonal processes “is explained
as the transition from a material object-dependent activity (such as the actual counting
of physical objects by pointing at them with a finger in the initial stages of acquiring
the counting operation) to a material object-independent activity (when a child comes to
342 LANTOLF

be able to count the objects without necessarily touching them or even seeing them)”
(1999, pp. 245–255).
Earlier I discussed the importance of imitation, a process, which for Vygotsky is the
key to understanding internalization. Vocate (1994) notes that, as with social talk, self-
talk is dialogic, but instead of an “I” talking to a “You,” intrapersonal communication
entails an “I” that makes choices on what to talk about and a “Me” that interprets and
critiques these choices. The selection and interpretation process “is accompanied by
entropic reduction and change” (Vocate, 1994, p.12). Importantly, it not only parallels,
but is, in fact, derived from social interaction. Clark (1998, p.178) argues that our
public language is ideally suited to be co-opted for intrapersonal functions, because,
as with social communication, we lay open to inspection, critique, and modification
ideas, concepts, and problems. Smith (1922, p. 84) writes that “when we think, we
discuss things with ourselves; when we speak, we discuss things with others.”
People, then, not only rely on others to mediate their learning and development,
they also rely on themselves (i.e., self-mediation), but they do so in ways that are
derived from their interpersonal experiences as sanctioned by their sociocultural
communities and the specific activities they promote (Tulviste, 1991). Essentially,
(over)generalization (i.e., prediction) is a process we internalize as we interact with
other members of our communities, including parents, siblings, teachers, classmates,
etc. It is normally a nonreflective process in the world of everyday activity. However,
it can, and often does, become visible as it is presented to us in its “scientific” form
during schooling (see Wells, 1999).

Internalization: Clarifying Some Issues

To further appreciate the claim that social interaction is the source of mental de-
velopment and that the autonomous learner metaphor is not needed to account for
psychological processes, I would like to consider in a bit more detail the process of
internalization. Fodor (1980) argues that internalization is unable to explain how a
less powerful mental state, represented by a child’s current developmental level, can
develop into a more powerful state, represented by some future mental, and possibly
the adult steady, state. For Fodor the only way to account for a less to more powerful
developmental trajectory is for the end state to be specified in the brain from the out-
set. In responding to Fodor’s critique of Vygotsky, Newman, Griffin and Cole (1989)
remind us that Fodor’s conundrum is only a problem in the world of the autonomous,
ideal knower. In the real world where people reside, the world of the social, a more
powerful cognitive system can indeed develop from a less powerful one because of
the assistance provided by other members of a community.
Recently, Atkinson (2002), in making a cogent case for a sociocognitive approach
to SLA, expressed discomfort with what he perceived as the neo-Vygotskian claim
that as a consequence of internalization, “language, is to some degree, gradually
loosened from its moorings in social life” (p. 533). In other words as it moves from the
inter- to the intramental plane, language “becomes substantially cognitive” (p. 537).
Atkinson contends that language at any stage of development “never takes on an
‘internal, truly mental function’” and is “always mutually, simultaneously, and co-
constitutively in the head and in the world” (p. 538). I agree. J. V. Wertsch (1998),
one of the leading contemporary SCT theoreticians, points out that many so-called
cognitive functions (e.g., complex arithmetical computations carried out with a paper
and pencil) are always distributed between the person and the world and as such
never are completely inside-of-the-head processes. Indeed, as previously mentioned,
internalization is not about something moving exclusively and completely inside of
the head but is about an individual’s ability to function independently of specific
concrete circumstances. Van Oers (1998) refers to this ability as recontextualization,
 19. SOCIOCULTURAL RESEARCH 343

in which individuals are able to transfer and transform what they have appropriated
in a specific social circumstance to other similar, though certainly not identical, social
circumstances. On this view, there can be no such thing as decontextualized thinking,
and by implication, decontextualized language activity. Rather, internalized forms
of communicative semiosis constantly co-evolve with externalized social-interactive
forms of languaging activity. Both are always and everywhere context-forming and
context-formed, or as Cole (1996) puts it, are mutually constitutive elements of a co-
weaving, distributed process.
Vygotsky, in my opinion, would most likely have been uneasy with the term “so-
ciocognitive” because even though it represents an attempt to bring the social and the
psychological into contact, it sustains the world/mind dualism that he saw as at the
heart of the crisis in psychology (see Vygotsky, 1997). Contributing to the confusion
over how SCT understands internalization is the fact that “cognitive” is normally con-
strued in psychology as a process that goes on exclusively inside of heads. Vygotsky
and other SCT researchers argued that cognition is not solely an inside-the-head pro-
cess. As I have said, the brain must be involved in cognition; however, Vygotskians
recognize the brain as a necessary, but not always a sufficient, condition for thinking
to occur. Wertsch (1991, p. 33), referencing the work of Gregory Bateson, suggests
that the concept of “mind goes beyond the skin” to encompass agents acting “with”
(but I would change this to “through”) mediational means. Vygotsky conceived of
development as a social and cultural process—a process in which the person and the
world are necessarily connected in a dialectic and inseparable relationship, and thus,
while heads are clearly implicated in thinking, they do not do their thinking alone;
rather they are part of what Luria (1973) refers to as a functional system formed by the
person and the world—a system in which cognition is at its core distributed between
brain(s), people, artifacts, and features of the environment (see Salomon, 1993). On
this view, then, although brains are inside of heads, minds extend beyond the head
and into the world of cultural artifacts and social relationships. It is not without rel-
evance that Vygotsky himself used the term “cultural development” to capture the
formation of uniquely human forms of thinking.

Internalization in L2 Learning
In a study of private speech among young (ages 3:3 to 8:3) ESL classroom learners,
Saville-Troike (1988) noticed that several of the children entered a “silent period”
in which they avoided speaking English socially, while at the same time privately
imitating the linguistic affordances available in the classroom environment. In the
following example, a 4-year-old Chinese L1 child privately3 responded to the teacher’s
request to the class:

Teacher: You guys go brush your teeth. And wipe your hands on the towel.
Child: Wipe your hand. Wipe your teeth.
(Saville-Troike, 1988, p. 584)

The child responds to the teacher’s utterance with what from a conversational per-
spective is an inappropriate move. The child’s utterance, however, is not intended as
an interpersonal turn, but as an imitation of the teacher’s language, resulting in an
overgeneralization of the collocation constraint on “wipe.” “Wipe your teeth” was
created by the child from the ingredients made available by others.
In a study of the private speech of an adult classroom learner of Spanish, Lantolf and
Yáñez-Prieto (2003) document a similar instance of overgeneralization. In explaining
passives, the teacher points out that in constructions such as “The road is covered by
snow” Spanish requires the copula verb estar (to be), an adjective derived from the
344 LANTOLF

past particle of cubrir (to cover) and the preposition de (of, with, by); hence, the correct
rendering of the English sentence isEl camino está cubierto de nieve. True passives in
Spanish, as the teacher had previously explained, are rendered with the copula ser
and the preposition por (by). In example (2), the teacher (T) presents the first part of
the sentence and asks the students(s) to complete it with the correct passive construc-
tion.

T: Mi pintura favorita . . . My favorite painting . . .

S: Fue pintada ∗de Monet ? Was painted ∗of/by Monet ?
T: Fue pintada . . .? Was painted (with rising intonation)
S: De Monet ? Of/by Monet (with rising intonation)
T: Por . . . By
S: POR, NO DE (privately, while overlapping T’s correction)
T: Mi pintura favorita fue pintada por Monet.
S: [while T moves on to work with other students] FROM, FROM, FROM

After telling herself that the correct preposition in passive constructions is por and not
de, the student produces an interesting semantic overgeneralization. She communi-
cates to herself privately that Spanish de means “from” in English, which of course it
does, in some cases, but not in the constructions at issue, since de is also equivalent to
“of,” as well as “with” or even “by.”4
SCT clearly is able to account for learning at the level of the individual without
surrendering the theoretical claim that the individual is a sociocultural entity. Thus, the
dualism, between the social and the cognitive that compels some SLA researchers to
support the autonomous knower metaphor can be overcome. Having said all this, the
burden remains for SCT researchers to empirically make the connection between L2
forms attested in private speech and the forms used by learners in their spontaneous
public performances, either in speech or in writing. If this link can be established, it
would mean that private speech provides, at least in part, access to L2 learning as it
unfolds in real time.5

LONGITUDINAL STUDIES AND THE GENETIC METHOD

SCT L2 research has been critiqued for its apparent “lack of longitudinal studies” and
for often “’rich’ and unsupported interpretations of data collected at a single point in
time” (Ellis 2003, p. 201). Mitchell and Myles (1998, p.162) also note that SCT research
on L2 learning has so far failed to provide “long-term follow-up data.” These critiques
are all the more surprising given that Vygotsky (1978) proposed what is known as the
“genetic method”—a method that privileges history (i.e., transformation)—to study
mental processes.
It is important to appreciate how Vygotsky (1978) understood the role of time psy-
chological research. He proposed four genetic domains as sites where psychologists
can observe mental functioning: phylogenesis of the species, sociocultural develop-
ment of specific cultures as well as human culture in general, ontogenesis of individ-
uals, and microgenesis of particular processes. The latter two are the most relevant
for L2 research (see Scribner, 1985, for a full discussion of Vygotsky’s use of history).
Whereas ontogenesis is concerned with the cultural development of the individual
through the internalization social relationships and cultural artifacts, microgenesis
focuses on “short-term formation of a psychological process” such as what occurs
“when an investigator is trying to train a subject to criterion before beginning the
‘real observations”’ (Wertsch, 1985, p. 55). Essentially, one can consider microgenetic
research a “very short-term longitudinal study” (p. 55). Thus, collecting data, at what
 19. SOCIOCULTURAL RESEARCH 345

appears to be a single point in time, from the traditional perspective of what consti-
tutes a longitudinal study, may in fact entail genesis or history.
Ohta’s (2001) previously mentioned study of L2 classroom learners of Japanese
clearly meets the criterion of what is traditionally understood in SLA research as a
longitudinal study. In her study, Ohta traces the social and private speech perfor-
mance of 7 students over the course of 8 months. Aljaafreh and Lantolf’s (1994) also
qualifies as a longitudinal study in that it traces the development of 3 learners over
approximately a 2-month time period. From the perspective of the individual learn-
ers, both of these studies fall within Vygotsky’s ontogenetic domain. The latter study
is also important for the way in which it characterizes development. Not only does it
consider changes in the formal accuracy of learner performance, but it also documents
with regard to the types of assistance the learners were able to utilize over the course
time. That is, even though at certain points the learners’ linguistic performance did
not change with respect to its accuracy, the type of help required to guide their per-
formance did. At some point, a given learner was only able to recognize and correct a
particular form through direct and explicit intervention from the tutor, but at a later
point, the same learner was able modify her production with minimal implicit assis-
tance (e.g., raising an eyebrow or clearing the throat). This is a very important finding,
which in my view, has not been adequately taken up by the field. It shows that learner
performance, despite its external manifestation, can have a very different underlying
psychological status that changes over time. In other words, an error corrected with
explicit assistance does not have the same status as one corrected with an implicit hint.
The latter clearly shows greater learner control over the feature than does the former.
In addition, a large percentage of the SCT studies on L2 learning is situated within the
microgenetic domain to the extent that they consider change in performance over very
short periods of time. To be sure, most SCT researchers have failed to acknowledge
this aspect of their work. Moreover, even though such changes in performance fall
within Vygotsky’s understanding of development as a revolutionary and therefore
irregular process, owing to its instability, most SLA researchers would be hesitant to
consider such change as genuine learning. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize
microgenesis as a significant domain for the observation of learning because in some
cases transformation is rapid and permanent, and because even when it isn’t, the fact
that learners are able to control the feature, if only briefly, indicates that it is within
their ZPD.

ACTIVITY THEORY AND TASK-BASED LEARNING

According to Wertsch (1998), psychological research has traditionally aimed at an-

swering two broad questions: Who does what ? Even so, the “who” question is often
assigned less saliency than the “what” question. SCT, because of its focus on people
engaged in concrete activity, seeks not only to answer who is doing what, but also
how, where, when, and above all why something is done. Although all six questions
are relevant, the most important, and at the same the most difficult to uncover, is why
people do what they do. This question, linked to the motives and goals of human
actions, comprises the primary focus of activity theory.
Activity theory, based on the theorizing of Vygotsky, holds that all higher forms of
human activity arise as a direct consequence of motives and goals. Activities, however,
are inherently unstable and “what begins as one activity can reshape itself into another
activity in the course of its unfolding” (Lantolf , 2000a, p. 11), as the motives and goals
shift. Cobb (1998), for example, discusses a study in which school children start out
playing shoe store, which required them to measure each other’s feet, and then shift
to an activity of measuring all kinds of objects in their environment (chairs, tables,
346 LANTOLF

blackboards, etc.); this, in turn, required them to discover a new set of measuring
tools. As activities shift their focus (i.e., their goal) individuals often experience the
need to seek out or develop new cultural artifacts (e.g., linguistic forms) to carry out
the new activity. SCT studies that deal with learners’ motives and goals (see Coughlan
& Duff, 1994; Roebuck, 1998; Donato, 2000; Platt & Brooks, 1994; Platt & Brooks, 2002;
Thorne, 2003) concur that learner performance on a given task is not predictable and
that tasks should be seen as blueprints for activity and not as guarantees that specific
types of activity will occur either at the same point in time by different people or even
by the same people at different points in time or in different sites.
Given the unstable nature of activities and the unpredictable nature of learning
outcomes, it seems that Activity Theory and task-based approaches to L2 research
and teaching are incommensurable at least with regard to the latter’s concern with
determining which features of a L2 will be learned and which will not during the
conduct of a particular task (see Ellis, 2003). This does not mean that tasks, as cultural
artifacts, do not exert influence on learners as they undertake to carry them out. In fact,
Ellis (2003), quite appropriately, in my view, critiques SCT researchers for not paying
sufficient attention to the potential impact of task features on L2 learning. The only SCT
study that I am aware of in which task features are taken account of is Thorne’s (1999)
dissertation on computer-mediated communication (cmc) in a French FL classroom.
I hasten to point out, however, that even though Thorne showed how CMC interaction
shapes learner behavior, his findings are not intended to be predicative, in the sense
that specific types of CMC will foster specific types of learning.
The reason we cannot predetermine what learners will and will not learn in a given
activity is that learning depends heavily on the significance individuals assign to the
various activities they participate in. In others words, there are reasons why people
learn (or not) what they learn, when they learn it, and how they will learn it (Lantolf &
Genung, 2002). We can only compose the circumstances and conditions that promote
learning. We cannot guarantee that it will happen at any given point in time or in any
given way.
D. A. Leontiev (unpublished manuscript) proposes six principles aimed at coming
to grips with the vagaries of human learning and development in activity. The first
three humans share with other animals and the final three are unique to our species.
Those that we share with animals include drive for gratification (e.g., the need to
consume calories and reproduce), response to a stimuli (e.g., presence of an intruder);
learned habits and dispositions (e.g., ring the bell and receive a food pellet; if you
eat all of your spinach, you can have ice cream). Those that are unique to humans
as cultural beings include social norms and expectations (e.g., everyone does it so I
should as well); a life-world and meaning (e.g., because it matters to me and fits into
my life story); free choice (e.g., why not ?). According to Leontiev, the last two princi-
ples are the most important in motivating human behavior. This is because humans
are able “to relate their activity to their entire life-world rather than to an actual situ-
ation; their activity is determined by the world at large, as opposed to the immediate
environment.” Hence, reasons for human action emerge not just from the immediate
circumstances, but from “far beyond the situation, including distant consequences
and complicated connections”. In essence, the final two principles reflect our ability
to imbue activities with significance. Thus, humans can transcend “behavior deter-
mined both by internal impulses and learned programs, as well as by actual external
stimulation. In other words, meaning offers a person a high degree of freedom from
what is determined”. In concrete human activity, it is rare that only one of the six
regulating principles is in play. Most often they “merge into more or less complicated
systems, where actual behavior is usually ‘multi’ controlled, except in some cases of
pathology”.
As I have said, although motives and goals are paramount in determining the out-
come and process of learning, we cannot overlook the fact that the specific material
 19. SOCIOCULTURAL RESEARCH 347

circumstances in which the activity takes place also shapes the activity. Whereas ac-
tivity carried out with material and symbolic tools not only imbues humans with
their unique transformative capacity, the tools themselves can have considerable in-
fluence on how the activity itself is carried out. Thus, a shovel, which allows us to
more easily dig bigger and better holes than our bare hands, at the same time compels
us to make particular movements with our bodies that a saw does not, and under
most circumstances we cannot substitute one set of motions for another (e.g., using
a digging motion to saw a log). On the face of it, this appears to contradict the point
I am trying to make about the unstable and unpredictable nature of activities and
that, therefore, it should be possible to design tasks that indeed promote learning
of specific target language features. After all, given the parallels between physical
and symbolic tools, we would expect artifacts used in regulating mental activity to
similarly influence the way that activity unfolds. I believe, however, that the work of
Slobin on thinking-for-speaking sheds light on the situation.
In his research Slobin (1996) proposes that the “language or languages we learn
in childhood are not neutral coding systems of an objective reality. Rather, each one
is a subject orientation to the world of human experience, and this orientation af-
fects the ways in which we think while we are speaking” (p. 91, bold in original).
Categories such as verbal aspect and definiteness are categories made available by
our language(s) that allow us, or said another way, constrain us, to adopt certain
“points of view for the purposes of speaking” (p. 91). As with physical tools, these
categories compel us to (symbolically) move in certain ways and not in others, and
“once our minds have been trained in taking particular points of view for the pur-
poses of speaking, it is exceptionally difficult for us to be retrained” (p. 91). Hence,
L2 English speakers of L1 Italian, both tense-prominent languages, are able to use En-
glish past-tense to construct narratives as a sequence of “past events as seen from the
present” (p. 90). In terms of the tool analogy, Italian speakers can carry out the same
or similar movements in both languages with regard to tense marking. On the other
hand, L1 speakers of Punjabi, an aspect-prominent language, deploy progressive to
narrate events from the protagonist’s point of view in L2 English, just as they would
use the Punjabi imperfective to narrate events from the inside (p. 90). Hence, if these
speakers want to narrate in English the same way as more experienced users of the
language do, they need to learn to carry out new (symbolic) movements. On the other
hand, they could opt to use the movements of their L1; however, such decisions are
not without consequences (e.g., not doing well in exams such as TOEFL or OPI).
Despite the above, it seems that speakers have ways of bending their symbolic tools
to meet their individual way of making sense of things (i.e., thinking-for-speaking).
For instance, German L1 speakers participating in Slobin’s “Frog Story” project tended
to mark the first event in a sequence of events as completed rather than the second as
continuing, as in the following example: Der ist vom Baum runtergefallen und der Hund
läuft schell weg—‘He [the little boy chasing his frog] has fallen down from the tree
and the dog runs away quickly’ [because a swarm of wasps were chasing it] (p. 81).
Interestingly, one of the adult speakers in Slobin’s study decided to mark the second
event as continuing (i.e., aspect), even though German grammar supposedly does
not allow for this option, through use of iteration: Der Hund rennt rennt rennt—“The
dog runs runs runs” (p. 81). One might argue that the speaker was able to shape the
language in a way that allowed him to talk about the event in an unbounded way;
that is, he was able to mold the language tool to fit his way of making sense of the
event. Even though language compels us to symbolically move in preferred ways,
we are nevertheless able to shape the tool to meet our personal way of making sense
of events—in essence, using a saw to dig a hole, which, of course, is difficult, but
not impossible. Indeed, Markova (1979, p. 85), echoing Newman and Holzman (1993)
when they decry the failure of schools to foment creative transformative learning,
argues that development is not about learning the norms of speech activity; it is
348 LANTOLF

rather about “conscious (emphatic) infraction of received norms for the purpose of
enhancing ones’ effect; creation of new linguistic devices and their use in speech
(speech creativity).”
It seems clear that the interaction between learner and task is not a one-way but a
two-way street. Tasks as cultural artifacts should indeed have an effect on how learning
activity emerges, but at the same time we should fully anticipate that learners will
also shape the tasks in unexpected and creative ways to in order to make sense of
their own learning activity.

SCT AND A THEORY OF LANGUAGE

As a final topic I would like to address the concern that SCT research on L2 has failed
to “offer any very thorough or detailed view of the nature of language as a formal
system” (Mitchell & Myles, 1998, p. 161). The concern that it has not situated “itself
more explicitly with respect to linguistic theory” and has preferred instead to deal
with “fragments of language” (p. 162). In many ways this is a legitimate critique and
in what follows I will suggest a theory of language, which, in my view, at least, is
quite compatible with SCT—Hopper’s (1998, 2002) notion of emergent grammar.
Vygotsky proposed that the unit of analysis for a unified psychological theory of
mind had to be a unit that was simultaneously mental and social (Minick, 1997, p. 122)
and proposed that word meaning “is at one and the same time a unit of abstraction or
thinking (i.e., a unit of mind) and a unit of communication or social interaction (i.e., a
unit of behavior)” (Minick, 1997, p. 122). Although most contemporary SCT scholars
argue that word meaning is too restricted a unit for understanding the mind, they
nevertheless accept Vygotsky’s principle claim that the appropriate unit of analysis
must be linked to humans’ meaning-making activity.
Hopper (2002) points out that the notion of grammar, the sine qua non of most
linguistic theorizing, arose, in an interesting irony, from the pedagogical efforts of the
Greeks to make “their language known to outsiders” as well as to impose “a degree of
uniformity among its diverse users.” In essence, grammar represented the Greeks’ at-
tempt to simplify for foreigners the complex process that native speakers go through
as they learn the forms of their language “one by one, in specific contexts.” Over
the course of centuries, according to Hopper, the addition of layers of terminology
(e.g., syntax, morphology, morphophonemics) has “successfully disguised the fact
that rules and paradigms are in origin nothing but short cuts to language learning.”
For Hopper the grammar of theoretical linguistics is not the aprioristic construct that
necessarily underlies communicative performance, but is “a by-product” of commu-
nication, an epiphenomenon; it is, in other words, “the name for certain categories of
observed repetitions in discourse” (Hopper, 1998, p. 156). This, Hopper’s calls, “emer-
gent grammar,” defined as a “perpetual process in which movement toward [italics in
original] a complete structure of some kind is constant but completion is always de-
ferred” (Hopper, 2002). On this view, “linguistic structure is intrinsically incomplete,
a work in progress, a site under construction” (Hopper, 2002). Hopper’s perspective
on grammar is compatible with the general notion of process ontology, which claims
that process “is fundamental, and entities [including structures of any kind, my inser-
tion] are derivative or based in process” (Sawyer, 2002, p. 286). In Hopper’s theory, the
process is communication and the entity derived from this, by researchers, is grammar.
Hopper opposes emergent grammar to the so-called “fixed code” theory, which
views language as a stable and complete linguistic system shared by everyone in a
particular speech community. Hopper is careful to distinguish emergent from emerg-
ing. The former is “never fixed, never determined, but is constantly open and in flux”
(Hopper, 1998, p. 157). The latter is understood as moving toward completion. Along
 19. SOCIOCULTURAL RESEARCH 349

similar lines, Vološinov (1973, p. 81) states that language “endures, but it endures as
a continuous process of becoming,” it flows and rather than being tossed like a ball
from one generation to the next, each new generation enters into the stream of inces-
sant communication. It is important to note that an a priori or fixed-code theory of
grammar is necessarily monologic in that it postulates an ideal perfect knower in a ho-
mogeneous speech community (Hopper, 1998, p. 161). Vološinov (1973, p. 81), argues
that the monologic tradition in linguistics reifies language and treats it as “if it were
dead and alien” and, thus, moves it outside of “the stream of verbal communication.”
Hopper situates his theorizing squarely within the dialogic communicative perspec-
tive and, thus, stipulates that emergent grammar is not “a general abstract possession
that is uniform across the community, but is an emergent fact having its source in each
individual’s experience and life history and in the struggle to accomplish successful
communication” (Hopper, 1998, p. 164).
Emergent grammar is “a set of sedimented conventions that have been routinized
out of the more frequently occurring ways of saying things” (Hopper, 1998, p. 163), and
is assembled “fragment by fragment” as we increasingly participate more extensively
and intensively in social activities. This does not mean that grammar is not systematic;
however, its systematicity arises from memory of things past—a “collection of pre-
fabricated particulars, available for use in appropriate contexts and language games”
(p. 164). Development is constant and potentially unending. It is important to note
that we mold and shape the language (as with Slobin’s German speaker) as we move
through various discursive activities, “relying on similarities to previous occasions of
talk to keep us going, and accumulating stores of experience to be used the next time a
similar occasion presents itself” (Hopper, 2002). Conceiving of language as emergent
parallels closely Vygotsky’s thinking on higher forms of consciousness. It is never
complete, always (potentially) developing as we move into new activities.
As an example of emergent grammar, consider the pseudocleft structure. Accord-
ing to linguistic theory, pseudoclefts canonically use the following formula: WHAT +
NP − subject (if what is not the subject) + verb + NP − object, as in “what this country
needs is a good five-cents cigar” or “what they do in the afternoon is take long walks.”
Based on his analysis of a corpus of spoken English, Hopper (2002) notes that so-called
canonical pseudoclefts are rarel in actual communicative encounters. Pseudoclefts are not
derived from rules, but instead are formulaic and fragmentary. The verb in the WH
clause is almost always do and happen, with say as a much less likely possibility. When
other verbs are selected, they usually appear in fixed phrases such as “what I suppose
is . . . ” or “what I mean is . . . ” In communication, the WH phrase is often followed by
an entire sequence of phrases and clauses rather than an NP. Moreover, pseudoclefts
may be listener- or speaker-centered, in that they may alert the listener to attend to
the next piece of discourse, and frequently, impart an air of authority about what
follows, and speakers often throw them in to gain processing time to construct an
idea while staving off interruption from the interlocutor (Hopper, 2002). According to
Hopper, the standard account of pseudocleft as a focusing feature is not sustained in
corpora of spoken English. From the perspective of emergent grammar, then, learning
an additional language is about enhancing one’s repertoire of fragments and patterns
that enables participation in a wider array of communicative activities. It is not about
building up a complete and perfect grammar as a precondition for producing well-
formed sentences.
Hopper’s notion of emergent grammar is clearly situated within the broader view
of language emanating from what Hanks (1996) refers to as the linguistics of speak-
ing (see Lantolf & Thorne, in press for a fuller discussion). I encourage SCT re-
searchers to explore the implications of the interface between Vygotsky’s theory of
mind and language theories such as Hopper’s. It has the potential to change our under-
standing of language learning and teaching in profound ways.
350 LANTOLF

CONCLUSION

In this chapter I have considered some, although not all, of the mainstream interpre-
tations and critiques of SCT research on L2 learning and have attempted to explicate
those areas in which there has been either misinterpretation or less than complete
understanding of the relevant theoretical constructs. I have also pointed out areas
where I believe SCT researchers need to consider seriously the critiques. In my view,
the most important of these relates to the need for SCT informed research to pay closer
attention to Hopper’s theory of emergent grammar.
As the exegesis unfolded, several important differences between SCT and main-
stream approaches to SLA emerged. To summarize these differences:. Mainstream
researchers define language as a formal set of structures comprising an a priori gram-
mar that must be acquired for speakers to be communicatively effective. Their primary
research objective is to uncover the cause(s) of L2 learning. They posit an invariant
route and rate of learning for all learners. Although learning happens in social envi-
ronments, the autonomous knower is at the core of the learning process and therefore
constitutes the primary focus of attention along with methodological individualism
that privileges the experimental laboratory and its concern with defining and control-
ling variables. SCT, on the other hand, does not see language as a formal system with
an a priori grammar but is instead an emergent system comprised of fragments that
emerge and are shaped in the maelstrom of communicative interaction. It rejects the
conduit metaphor that sees language not as the expression of thought and proposes
that language is the symbolic artifact par excellence through which people complete
thought, consequently, participating in a new sense-making system may potentially
allow the person to develop new ways of mediating one’s relationship to the world
and to the self. The objective of SCT is not to discover the cause(s) of SLA but to
uncover the reasons why people learn or do not learn a new language; as such it does
not assume that learning does not follow the same route and rate for all people; these
are shaped by the person’s motives and goals and their ZPD; hence, human agency is
highlighted. Finally, it rejects the individual/social dualism and argues instead that
the individual and social form a dialectical unity.

NOTES

1. I would like to thank Merrill Swain and Steve Thorne for their invaluable comments and criticisms on
earlier versions of this chapter.
2. According to Kozulin (personal communication, January 25, 2002), ‘man’ here is an inappropriate trans-
lation of the original Russian chelovek ‘human being.’
3. Saville-Troike’s (1988) criteria for distinguishing private from social utterances included the following:
produced at a low volume that was likely “inaudible to anyone present without access to recording
equipment,” lack of eye contact lack of expectation of a response from an interlocutor (p. 573).
4. See Ohta (2001) for similar overgeneralizations among L2 classroom learners of Japanese.
5. According to Swain (personal communication, August 29, 2002), collaborative dialogue also provides
real time access to learning.

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20

Conversation Analysis for

Second Language Acquisition
Numa Markee
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

INTRODUCTION

This chapter briefly reviews what an ethnomethodological approach to conversation

analysis1 (CA) is and outlines the main issues and questions that are of interest to con-
versation analysts. I then show how the use of transcripts that are prepared according
to the transcription conventions of CA permit second language acquisition (SLA) and
classroom researchers to develop highly detailed microanalyses of second language
learning activity.
More specifically, using a fragment of talk drawn from a larger data set already pub-
lished in Markee (1994, 2000), I show that CA transcription is a tool that potentially
allows the emerging approach of conversation analysis for second language acquisi-
tion (CA-for-SLA; Kasper, 2002; Markee, 2003a) to explicate how learning activity is
organized on a moment-by-moment basis. In addition, I demonstrate that when the
same fragment of talk is retranscribed to yield an even more fine-grained transcript of
the interaction, not only do we develop a more detailed analysis of the organizational
structure of the learning activity under study, but we also develop a deeper substan-
tive understanding of the socially distributed nature of human cognition and SLA.
The chapter concludes with a discussion of how insights from such analyses may be
incorporated into applied linguistics and SLA research and teaching.

CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

CA is a methodology for analyzing talk-in-interaction that seeks to develop empiri-

cally based accounts of the observable conversational behaviors of participants that
are both minutely detailed and unmotivated by a priori, etic theories of social ac-
tion (Heritage, 1988; Psathas, 1995; Schegloff, 1987). More specifically, CA aims to
explicate how members orient (that is, observably pay attention) to certain behavioral
practices as they co-construct talk-in-interaction in real time. These practices include
the sequential organization of talk, turn taking, and repair (Markee, 2003b; Schegloff,
355
356 MARKEE

Koshik, Jacoby, & Olsher, 2002). Within these broad parameters, conversation analysts
may focus more specifically on issues such as the sequential organization of various
speech acts (Davidson, 1984; Drew, 1984; Pomerantz, 1975; 1978a; 1978b; 1984a; 1984b;
Psathas, 1986; Schegloff, 1972), the construction of syntax-for-conversation (Goodwin,
1979; Lerner, 1991; Schegloff, 1979, 1996), reference (Sacks & Schegloff, 1979), and the
structure of joke and story telling (Goodwin, 1984; Sacks, 1974; Stubbs, 1983).
There are two main types of talk-in-interaction that are studied by conversation
analysts: ordinary, mundane conversation and institutional talk. Ordinary conversation,
which is the default speech exchange system in all talk-in-interaction (Sacks, Sche-
gloff, & Jefferson, 1974), may be thought of as the kind of everyday chitchat that
occurs between friends and acquaintances, either face-to-face or on the telephone.
Other speech exchange systems all involve various structural modifications to the
sequential, turn-taking and repair practices of ordinary conversation. It is these mod-
ifications to the default practices of ordinary conversation that constitute a whole con-
tinuum of institutional varieties of talk (for example, debates, classroom talk, broadcast
news interviews, press conferences, doctor–patient interactions, courtroom interac-
tions, emergency calls on the telephone, etc.). Note that, the more distant from the
bedrock of ordinary conversation they are (see, for example, the turn taking practices
of debates), the more formalized and ritualized these institutional varieties become
(Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974).
In ordinary conversation, talk is locally managed, meaning that turn size, con-
tent, and type are all free to vary, as is turn taking. Thus, who gets to speak how,
when, and about what is not predetermined, and there is a preference for a mini-
mization of turn length (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). Ordinary conversation
is also characterized by a preference for self-initiated, self-completed repair (Sche-
gloff, Jefferson & Sacks, 1977). In contrast, although institutional talk uses the same
basic mechanisms that are available to participants to do ordinary conversation, the
distribution of these practices and the purposes for which they are deployed in insti-
tutional talk differ markedly from those found in ordinary conversation. For example,
teacher-fronted classroom talk is characterized by the preallocation of turns and turn
types in favor of teachers (McHoul 1978; Mehan, 1979), who also typically initiate
repairs (Gaskill, 1980; McHoul, 1990). This preference organization is directly observ-
able in the recurrent use of Question-Answer-Comment (QAC) sequences in such
talk.2
This QAC sequential organization is a members’ resource for achieving the educa-
tional purposes and agendas of classroom talk. More specifically, teachers prototypi-
cally do being teachers by asserting in and through their talk the right to select the next
speaker, to nominate topics, to ask questions, and to evaluate learners. Conversely,
students do being students by orienting to the institutionally specified obligation of
answering teachers’ questions in a satisfactory manner.
For example, as shown in Fragment 1 (see Appendix 1 for the transcription con-
ventions used here), T initially selects L63 through the simultaneous use of a question
at line 02 and eye gaze at line 01. However, L1 then looks up and happens to catch T’s
eye at line 05, which prompts T to reallocate next turn to L1 via two more questions
at lines 06 and 09, respectively. L1 duly provides an extended answer in next turn at
lines 10–36 (not reproduced here to conserve space). L1 finishes his answering turn at
line 37, which is briefly evaluated by T when she says “ok” at line 38. This acknowl-
edgement token constitutes the commenting part of this turn. T then immediately
self-selects as next speaker and follows up with another question in the remainder of
her turn at lines 38–39, which functions as a follow-up request for more information
from the students. More specifically, following the 0.3 second pause at line 40, T opens
up the floor to all students at line 41. This last question turn is overlapped by L1’s
answer turn at line 42, who continues as next speaker:
 20. CONVERSATION ANALYSIS 357

Fragment 1
01 T1: [X
02 T1: → U::HM (0.6) ARTURO ((L1 turns to look at T))
03 L6 [X
04 L6: → [yes
05 T1: [. . . X
06 T1: → [OR GONZALO ((As T reallocates next turn to L1. L6 turns his gaze away
07 from T and turns back to face front))
08 T1:
09 T1: → ?H WHY: D’YOU THINK GERMAN . . . .
.
.
37 L1: → AND THEY’RE THE NEIGHBORS
38 T1: → OK:, (0.6) SO WHAT KIND OF PROBLEMS MIGHT GER- GERMAN
39 UNIFICATION BRING?
40 (0.3)
41 T1: → > A[NYBODY THINK,]<
42 L1: → [it would bring] u:h . . .
(Class 1, phase 2)

This QAC organizational structure has the concomitant effect of constraining when
and how repair may be carried out, and by whom. More specifically, this struc-
ture makes Comment turns the sequentially relevant slot from which teachers (and
only teachers) may other-initiate repairs in this institutional speech exchange system
(McHoul, 1978; 1990). Finally, members’ orientation to this sequential organization is
collaboratively achieved. If deviations from this sequential organization occur, they
become noticeable or even sanctionable.

CONVERSATION ANALYSIS FOR SECOND

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

CA-for-SLA is an emerging approach in applied linguistics and SLA studies that use
the transcription procedures and microanalytic techniques of classic CA and apply
these resources to the analysis of second language learning or teaching activity (see, for
example, Firth & Wagner, 1997; He, 2003; Kasper, 2002, 2003; Markee, 1994, 1995, 2000;
2003a; Mori, 2002, 2003; Seedhouse, 1997, 1999). CA is also used to various degrees by
writers who treat it as one of several methodological tools that are available to them,
but who do not necessarily claim to be doing CA per se (see, for example, van Lier, 1988,
and, more recently, Lazaraton, 2003, 2004, who simply calls her work a microanalytic
approach to classroom research). In addition, it is also used by researchers whose
a priori theoretical point of departure is a specific learning theory, such as sociocultural
theory (Ohta, 2001, Ohta and Nakaone, n.d.), systemic grammar (Young & Nguyen,
2002), or, potentially, a variationist approach to SLA (Tarone & Liu, 1995).
Let us now examine what the central methodological and substantive concerns of
CA-for-SLA are. In previous work, I have proposed that a CA-for-SLA methodology
should be:

1. Based on empirically motivated, emic accounts of members’ interactional com-

petence in different speech exchange systems.
2. Based on collections of relevant data that are themselves excerpted from com-
plete transcriptions of communicative events.
358 MARKEE

3. Capable of exploiting the analytical potential of fine-grained transcripts.

4. Capable of identifying both successful and unsuccessful learning behaviors, at
least in the short term.
5. Capable of showing how meaning is constructed as a socially distributed phe-
nomenon, thereby critiquing and recasting cognitive notions of comprehension
and learning. (Markee, 2000, page 45)

For present purposes, I wish to revisit points 3 and 5 in greater detail. Let me begin
with point 3. It is a basic methodological tenet of CA that no detail of interaction,
however small or seemingly insignificant, may be discounted a priori by analysts as
not pertinent or meaningful to the participants who produce this interaction (Her-
itage, 1988). A natural consequence of this position is that CA transcripts do not just
set down the words that are said during a speech event. Rather, they are extremely
detailed qualitative records of how talk is co-constructed by members on a moment-
by-moment basis.
Minimally, CA transcripts also document how members hesitate, pause, or become
silent during talk, how they speed up or slow down their delivery, how they modu-
late the volume of their speech, how they emphasize certain words or sounds through
stress, and how they overlap each other’s talk. With the increasing availability and use
of video recordings as the primary sources of conversational data, it is now also possi-
ble (as illustrated by Fragment 1), indeed, highly preferred, to incorporate a great deal
of information about members’ gestures, embodied actions, and eye gaze behaviors
into transcripts (see, for example, Allen, 1995, 2000; Fox, 1999; Goodwin, 1979, 1981,
1994, 2000; Gullberg, 1998; Heath, 1984, 1986; Kellerman, 1992; Kendon, 1985, 1994;
Maynard & Marlaire, 1992; McCafferty, 1998, 2002; McIlvenney, 1995; McNeill, 1992;
McNeill & Levy, 1993; Neu, 1990; Ochs, Gonzales, & Jacoby, 1996; Roth & Lawless,
2002; Schegloff, 1984; Streeck, 1994).
For present purposes, I will not dwell on the technical aspects of transcription
in any detail (although this is certainly a matter of more than passing interest; see
DuBois, 1991; Edwards & Lampert, 1993; Preston, 1982, 1985; Roberts, 1997). Rather,
let me now relate these preliminary considerations to the substantive implications of
point 5 listed earlier. Following Ochs (1979), I wish to argue that transcription cannot
be viewed merely as a laborious, technical chore that has to be completed before
the real business of analysis can begin. It is a crucially important, substantive first
attempt at describing talk and co-occurring gestures, embodied actions, and eye gaze
phenomena as a unified, socially constituted context for second language learning
activity.
More specifically, CA transcripts provide an essential platform for respecifying
key psycholinguistic concepts in SLA—such as comprehensible input and output
(Krashen, 1980; Long 1981, 1996; Swain, 1985, 1995)—as micro moments of socially
distributed cognition (Markee, 2000). Indeed, as Lazaraton (in press, a) cogently argues
in the conclusion to her paper:

this article suggests that microanalysis provides unique insights into the complexity of
ESL [English as a Second Language] classroom talk and behavior. It is claimed that L2
[Second Language] learners receive considerable input in nonverbal form, which may
modify and make verbal input (more) comprehensible. Because the majority of data
collection procedures in SLA studies fail to capture nonverbal behavior, its contribution
to the language acquisition process remains unspecified. Specifically, classroom input
is not merely composed of teacher or other learner talk—classrooms are the locus of
embodied practice. It is hoped that the empirical, classroom discourse-based research
agenda that other SLA researchers are pursuing will take up analyzing, in a systematic
and microanalytic fashion, all aspects of classroom discourse. And it is not just the lexical
and gestural competence required of and displayed by the ESL teacher that deserves
 20. CONVERSATION ANALYSIS 359

further attention, but the many other fundamental aspects of pedagogical performance
which are implicated in the input to and the output from L2 learners in the second
language classroom (emphasis in the original).

In the empirical section that follows, I begin by recapitulating the original analysis
of a fragment of talk taken from the “Coral” collection (Markee, 2000).4 Although this
first transcript (which is reproduced here as Fragment 2) is considerably more detailed
than most transcripts used in the SLA literature, it does not include information about
members’ gestures, embodied actions, or eye gaze behaviors. It is, therefore, compar-
atively rough by current CA standards. I then reanalyze the same fragment, using a
much more fine-grained retranscription of the same data (see Fragment 3) to show
how the inclusion of gestures, embodied actions, and eye gaze behaviors into the
transcript results in substantively deeper insights into how learners use talk and ki-
nesic actions as integrated resources for getting comprehensible input and producing
comprehensible output.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

As already noted, Fragment 2 comes from the “Coral” data collection, which consists of
eight thematically related excerpts of talk that occurred in an intermediate university
ESL class in 1990. The learners were doing a task-based unit in small groups on the
theme of the greenhouse effect. One learner, L10, has realized that she does not know
the meaning of the word “coral,” which occurs in an article from the New Scientist
that her group was reading. L10 therefore engages her fellow group members, L9 and
L11, in multiple attempts to figure out what this word means. In the original data set,
Fragment 2 represents L10’s fifth attempt at understanding the meaning of this word.
It is in this excerpt that L10 experiences a breakthrough in understanding, which, as
we will now see, is partly the result of intensive negotiation between L10 and L9. Note
also that L10 and L11 orient to the fact that they are both native speakers of Mandarin
Chinese, while L9 is not a Mandarin speaker.

ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT OF THE DATA

Fragment 2
001 ((L10 is reading her article to herself)
002 L10: coral. what is corals
003 (4.0)
.
004 L9: hh do you know the under the sea, under the sea,
005 L10: un-
006 L9: there’s uh::
007 (0.2)
008 L9: [how do we call it]
009 L10: [have uh some coral]
010 L9: ah yeah (0.2) coral sometimes
011 (0.2)
012 L10: eh includ/e/s (0.2) uh includes some uh: somethings uh-
013 (1.0)
014 L10: [the corals,] is means uh: (0.2) s somethings at bottom of
015 L9: [((unintelligible))]
016 L10: [the] sea
360 MARKEE

017 L9: [yeah,]

018 L9: at the bottom of the sea,
019 L10: ok uh:m also is a food for is a food for fish uh and uh
020 (0.4)
021 L9: food?
022 (0.3)
023 L10: foo-
024 L9: no it is not a food it is (.)like a stone you know?
025 L10: oh I see I see I see I see I see I know I know . hh I see . h a whi- (0.4) a
026 kind of a (0.2) white stone . h [very beautiful]
027 L9: [yeah yeah] very big yeah
028 [sometimes very beautiful and] sometimes when the ship moves
029 L10: [I see I see I ok]
030 L9: [ship tries ((unintelligible)) I think it was the ((unintelligible; the final
031 part of this turn is overlapped by L10’s next turn))
032 L10: [oh I see (0.2) I see the chinese is uh (0.2)] sanku
033 (0.9)
034 L11: unh?
035 L10: sanku
036 (0.6)
037 L9: what
038 L10: c[orals]
039 L11: [corals]
040 L9: corals oh okay
041 L10: yeah
(Class 2, group 3)

ORIGINAL ANALYSIS

In the original analysis, I noted that after some preliminary attempts by L9 and L10
to gloss coral as “something that is under the sea,”5 at lines 004, 012, 014 and 018,
which are not particularly productive, we can observe the moment-by-moment, social
construction of a breakthrough in understanding in this fragment. More specifically,
at line 019, L10 states that coral is food for fish. L9 briefly pauses at line 020, thereby
potentially signaling an incipient disagreement, which duly occurs in next turn. At
this point, L9 initiates a second position repair at line 021 by repeating the word
“food” with a high rising intonation. After another short trouble-relevant pause at
line 022, which suggests that L10 is now orienting to L9’s previous turns as indicative
of potential trouble, L10 begins to repeat the word “food” at line 023. This repetition is
presumably done to buttress her claim at line 019 that coral is food for fish.6 However,
at line 024, L9 cuts L10 off with another second position repair. This time, the repair
is more direct than the first repair that she initiated at line 021, in that it is not only
other-initiated but also other-completed. Furthermore, L9 adds the information that
coral is like a stone.
This information is the trigger that promotes a key breakthrough in understanding
for L10. At line 025, L10 energetically makes the claim that she has understood what
“coral” means. The vehemence with which L10 makes this claim is quite noticeable, in
that it strongly suggests that not only is L10 quite confident that she has understood
the meaning of this word but that she is also willing to suffer a potential loss of face
if she later finds out that she is wrong.
I then claimed that L10 independently provides extra information at lines 025 and
026 that coral is white and very beautiful, which L9 accepts at line 027. At lines 028, 030
 20. CONVERSATION ANALYSIS 361

and 031, L9 elaborates further on some of the qualities of coral, while L10 overlaps L9’s
talk by again strongly claiming that she has understood the meaning of this word at
lines 029 and 032. Moreover, L10 provides the word “sanku” as the Mandarin transla-
tion equivalent of English “coral” in the last part of her turn at line 032 and also at line
035. When L9 indicates at line 037 that she does not understand these translations, L10
translates “sanku” back into English and says “corals” at line 038. Almost simultane-
ously, L11 overlaps L10 at line 039 by also saying “coral,” thereby possibly suggesting
that, although she had not participated in any of the interaction in this fragment up
to line 034, she too had known throughout all this talk what “coral” meant.
Thus, to conclude, this preliminary analysis used three types of converging cotex-
tual evidence to show that L10 has understood the meaning of the word “coral” by
the end of Fragment 2. These include:

1. The vehemence of L10’s claims of understanding at lines 025, 029 and 031 is
noticeable, in that she would have a hard time retracting her claims of under-
standing if she were proved wrong.
2. L10 independently providing new information at lines 025 and 026 about the
qualities of coral, showing that she is able to relate new information to her already
existing store of information about this material.
3. L10 using a two-way translation strategy into and from Chinese to help her fix
the meaning of coral.

Finally, from a technical CA perspective, note that the second position repairs that
L9, L10, and L11 deploy at lines 021, 023, 034, and 037 constitute the principal practice
to which members orient as they seek to achieve (or, in SLA terminology, to negotiate)
this breakthrough in understanding. Note that this minutely detailed conversation
analysis, which has up until now not been motivated by any extraneous, a priori
theoretical concerns (Psathas, 1995), in fact independently converges quite neatly
with the current theoretical interest in SLA studies in the role of repair as a catalyst
for second language learning (Krashen, 1980; Long, 1981; Swain, 1985, 1995).
Indeed, from an SLA perspective, the turns at lines 019–024 are of particular interest
because L9 and L10 coconstruct their talk as a sequence of embedded repairs, during
which L9 provides L10 with negative evidence about the semantic scope of the word
coral. Thus, to the extent that constructs such as comprehensible input and output,
positive and negative evidence, and negotiated interaction all have theoretical value in
SLA studies—-and there is a great deal of theoretical and empirical research to suggest
that they do7 —the talk reproduced in Fragment 2 can be seen as a rare example of how
comprehensible input is coconstructed by participants on a moment-by-moment basis.

RETRANSCRIBED VERSION OF THE DATA

Interesting though this original analysis is, the data on which these findings are based
may justifiably be criticized as an inadequate representation of the quality of the com-
munication that actually occurred. The lack of any information about gestures, em-
bodied actions, and eye gaze violates the ethnomethodological principle cited earlier
that no detail of interaction may be discounted a priori by analysts as not meaningful
to participants (Heritage, 1988). Fortunately, video data are available for this frag-
ment, so that we may compare Fragment 2 with the retranscribed version of the same
data, which is reproduced as Fragment 3. This retranscription, in which the talk is
reproduced in bold script, and kinesic actions are set off in italic script, allows us to
evaluate whether the more detailed transcription shown in Fragment 3 actually makes
any substantive difference to our understanding of the structural organization of this
362 MARKEE

talk and also to our understanding of the extent to which kinesic behaviors should be
viewed as an intrinsic part of comprehensible input and output.

Fragment 3
((L9, L10 and L11 are all looking down at their class materials, reading an article
on global warming. L9, who is facing the camera, is leaning her head on her left
hand. L10 has her back turned to the camera, and is facing L9. L11 is in profile,
but her hair hides her face))

001 L10: corals. what is corals.

002 (1.3)
003 L9: ((L9 moves her head slightly to her right to
004 look at the right-hand page of her materials.))
005 (1.3)
006 L?: hshhh
007 (1.3)
008 L9: [X ((L9 looks up at L10, holding
009 [. hh her chin in her left hand in
010 a thinking pose))
011 (1.3)
012 L9:
013 L9: do you know the under the sea : : , ((L9 leans
014 forward, and
015 drops her left
016 hand to her lap))
017 L9: . . . . . . . ((L9 looks down at L10’s article))
018 L9: under the sea : : ,
019 L10: un-
020 L9: there’s uh : :
021 (0.2)
022 L9: [o how do we call ito ]
023 L10: [have uh some co ]ral
024 L9: [X
025 L9: ah yeah (0.2)[corals
026 L9:
027 L9: (0.2) [sometimes]
028 [L9 nods]
029 (0.3) ((L9 clasps her hands))
030 L9: [. . ((L9 moves her hands sideways))]
031 L10: [gi- uh includ/e/s
032 L9: [X
033 L10: [(0.2)uh includ/e/s some uh: somethings uh-
034 (1.0)
035 L9:
036 L10: [some corals. ] ((L10 raises her hand as
037 L9: [((unintelligible))] she says “corals”))
038 L9:
039 L10: is means the: (0.2) s [somethings at bottom] of
040 [((L10 raises her hand and
041 marks the word “bottom”
042 with a downward beat of
043 her right hand))]
 20. CONVERSATION ANALYSIS 363

044 L9:
045 L10: [the ] sea.
046 L9: [yeah.] ((L9 nods once emphatically))
047 L9: [at the bottom of the sea,]
048 [((L9 hands briefly unclasps
049 and then clasps her hands again.
050 She points her clasped hands
051 toward L10 and then holds them
052 in front of her face in a thinking gesture,
053 and looks intently at L10.))]
054 L9:
055 L10: ok uh:m (0.3) also is a food for- is a food for
056 L9:
057 L10: fish/e/, and uh ((L10 makes a chopping motion
058 with her right hand, emphasizing
059 the words “food” and “food for
060 fish/e/”. L10 ends her turn
061 with her right hand held up
062 vertically, palm open))
063 (0.4) ((L9 raises her head slightly and withdraws
064 her right hand from her mouth))
065 L9: food?
066 (0.3)
067 L9:
068 L10: foo-
069 L9: no it is not a food.
070 [it is (.) like a: stone. you know,]
071 [((L9 mimics holding an object))]
072 L9:
073 L10: [oh I see I see I see I see I see]
074 [((L10 throws her hands outward and claps her
075 hands three times, inclining her head downward
076 as she does this))]
077 L9:
078 L10: I know I know [. hh I see . h a whi- ]
079 [((L10 lifts her head up))]
080 (0.4)
081 L9: ⎡ ⎤
082 L10: a kind of a (0.2) whi/d/e (.) stone
083 (((L10 emphasizes the words ⎢ ⎥
⎢ ⎥
084 “whi-“ and ”whi/d/e” with ⎢ ⎥
⎢ ⎥
085 her right hand. As she ⎢ ⎥
⎢ ⎥
086 says the word “stone” ⎢ ⎥
087 L10 raises her right hand ⎢ ⎥
⎢ ⎥
088 up to eye level)) ⎣ ⎦
089 L9: ((L9 nods twice))
090 L9:
091 L10: [. h]
092 L9: [yeah] yeah
093 L9:
094 L10: ve[ry beautiful]
095 L9: [very big ] [yeah yeah ]
096 [L10 brings her right hand
364 MARKEE

097 down to the desk and leans back,

098 looking at L9))]
099 [sometimes very beautiful] ((L9 unclasps and
100 L10: [oh I see I see I ok ] clasps her hands))
101 L9:
102 L10: oh [I see]
103 L9: [and som]etimes when the ship moves ((L9 moves
104 her hands back and forth as she says ”sometimes”,
105 ”ship” and ”moves”))
106 L9:
107 L10: oh [I see ]
108 L9: [ship tries] [((unintelligible)) ]
109 L10: [the chinese is uh (0.2)] sanku
110 ((As she says “oh I see” and proceeds to
111 translate “coral” into Chinese, L10 leans over
112 toward L11 and points at L11’s reading materials
113 with her pen. Simultaneously, L9 looks down at
114 L11’s paper))
115 (0.9) ((L9 raises her eyes to look at L10))
116 [L11 raises her head]
117 L11: [huh?]
118 L9: ((L9 raises her gaze to look at L10))
119 L10: sanku
120 (0.6) ((L10 withdraws her hand from L11’s desk
121 and looks down at her own reading materials))
122 L9: what?  ((L9 leans back on her chair))
123 L10: c[orals.]
124 L11: [coral]s.
125 L9: ⎡ ((L9 leans forward and looks down at her desk,
126 ⎣ unclasps her hands and picks up her reading
127 materials))
128 L9: corals. oh okay
129 [((L10 leans her head on her right hand))]
130 L10: [yeah.]
(Class 2, group 3)

It is immediately apparent that this transcript is much longer than the version
reproduced in Fragment 2 (130 lines of text, instead of the original 41 required to
capture 1 min 3 seconds of interaction). Reproducing this level of detail in the updated
transcript is also extremely onerous to transcribe, requiring at least 15 hours of extra
transcription for this fragment on top of the time already invested in producing the
original transcript. Last but not least, Fragment 3 is also more difficult to read than
Fragment 2, particularly for non-CA specialists, whose initial reaction may well be
that the level of detail that is included in Fragment 3 is overwhelming. Nonetheless, I
will demonstrate that the effort that is required to process this transcript is more than
offset by the substantive dividends that accrue to the patient reader.

UPDATED ANALYSIS

The new transcript shown in Fragment 3 allows us to confirm the overall conclu-
sions reached on the basis of the simpler transcript reproduced in Fragment 2, while
 20. CONVERSATION ANALYSIS 365

providing significantly more details that give greater nuance to the original analysis.
Let us begin with an analysis of the structural integration of talk and gesture that is
observable in the data reproduced in Fragments 3.1–3.3:

Fragment 3.1
055 L10: ok uh:m (0.3) also is a food for- is a food for
056 L9:
057 L10: fish/e/, and uh ((L10 makes a chopping motion
058 with her right hand, emphasizing
059 the words “food” and “food for
060 fish/e/”. L10 ends her turn
061 with her right hand held up
062 vertically, palm open))

In the gloss at lines 057–062, we can see that emphasis is not only carried out
through verbal stress on the words “food” and “food for fish/e/,” but that it is visually
conveyed by L10’s beating out the rhythm of this phrase with her right hand. Similarly,
the upward intonation with which the word the word “fish/e/,” is marked—a verbal
recipient design that suggests that L10 is looking for L9 to confirm her hypothesis at
lines 055–057—is confirmed by the way she holds the palm of her right hand open,
which visually suggests her openness to further feedback.
This close interaction between talk and hand gestures is also observable in Fragment
3.2:

Fragment 3.2
073 L10: [oh I see I see I see I see I see]
074 [((L10 throws her hands outward and claps her
075 hands three times, inclining her head downward))
076 as she does this))]

More specifically, we can see that L10 claps her hands at lines 074–076 at the same
time that she begins to make her first verbal claim of understanding. This clapping
motion, which we can interpret as a form of self-congratulation by L10, further con-
firms the original analysis that it is at this precise moment in the interaction that L10
first understands what “coral” means.
In Fragment 3.3, we may further observe how talk and gesture are again closely
coordinated as part of the turn-taking structure to which these participants visibly
orient:

Fragment 3.3
078 L10: I know I know [. hh I see . h a whi- ]
079 [((L10 lifts her head up))]
080 (0.4)
081 L9:
366 MARKEE

082 L10: a kind of a (0.2) whi/d/e (.) ⎡ stone ⎤

083 (((L10 emphasizes the words ⎢ ⎥
084 “whi-“ and ”whi/d/e” with ⎢ ⎢
⎥
⎥
085 her right hand. As she ⎢ ⎥
⎢ ⎥
086 says the word “stone” ⎢ ⎥
⎢ ⎥
087 L10 raises her right hand ⎢ ⎥
⎣ ⎦
088 up to eye level))
089 L9: ((L9 nods twice))
090 L9:
091 L10: [. h]
092 L9: [yeah] yeah
093 L9:
094 L10: ve[ry beautiful]
095 L9: [very big ] [yeah yeah ]
096 [L10 brings her right hand
097 down to the desk and leans back,
098 looking at L9))]
099 [sometimes very beautiful] ((L9 unclasps and
100 L10: [oh I see I see I ok ] clasps her hands))

As in Fragment 3.1, we see L10 using her hand to beat out the rhythm of the stressed
words “whi-“ and “whi/d/e” at lines 078 and 079. Furthermore, the first response
given by L9 that L10 is on the right track is her nodding actions at line 089, which
collaboratively overlaps L10 saying “stone” at line 082. L9 then adds the second,
verbal, part of this confirmation when she produces the turn “yeah yeah” at line 092.
Note also that it is L10’s hand gesture at lines 087–088 that gives us a clue as to
why L9 says “very big” at line 095. L10’s gesture seems to project that she is going
to say something about the large size of coral reefs. Indeed, this seems to be the
understanding of L10’s gesture that L9 is pursuing when she responds at lines 103–
105 and 108.8 However, the characteristic that L10 seems to be focusing on from line
094–100 (and briefly acknowledged by L9 at line 099) is the beauty of coral. We can tell
this not only from the verbal behavior that occurs at lines 091–095—specifically, L10
draws an in-breath at line 091, suggesting that she is about to say something, and she
also overlaps L9’s comment about the size of coral reefs with her own characterization
of coral as being “very beautiful”—but also from the way she leans back in her seat
at lines 096–098. This embodied action visually suggests that L10 has come to some
kind of conclusion about what “coral” means and, perhaps, that she is ready to move
the talk on to some other activity.
This interpretation is confirmed by L10’s translation of the word “coral” into Chi-
nese at line 109. Notice, however, that the extra information about L10’s embodied
actions given in the gloss at lines 110–114 of Fragment 3.4 provides key information
about what L10 is actually achieving through her translation at this particular moment
in this particular spate of talk:

Fragment 3.4
110 ((As she says “oh I see” and proceeds to
111 translate “coral” into Chinese, L10 leans over
112 toward L11 and points at L11’s reading materials
113 with her pen. Simultaneously, L9 looks down at
114 L11’s paper))
 20. CONVERSATION ANALYSIS 367

In the original analysis, it was not clear whether L10 was merely remarking to her-
self (or perhaps thinking aloud) that the Chinese translation of “coral” was “sanku,”
or whether she was performing another, more focused, action. The gloss at lines 110–
114 clarifies beyond doubt that L10 is specifically explaining the meaning of this word
to L11, who has demonstrated in prior talk that she does not understand the meaning
of this word either. In so doing, L10 further achieves the action of transforming herself
from a novice learning from L9 into an expert who is teaching L11 new material.
To conclude this conversation analysis of the structure of participants’ verbal prac-
tices and embodied actions in Fragments 3.1–3.4, note that in the original analysis, I
claimed that L10’s identification of coral as a white stone was new information and
that this was, therefore, evidence of understanding. In point of fact, this information
is contained in the original New Scientist article, which states: “When the water is too
warm, corals turn white as they expel the algae that live in their tissues and provide
them with nutrients” (“How the Heat Trap”, p. 22). This reinterpretation of why L10
says that coral is white at lines 078 and 082 does not negate the original conclusion
that L10 understands what “coral” means in this fragment. As we have seen, other
compelling evidence (both old and new) exists to support this analysis. However, this
example of the way that learners integrate written source texts into their talk provides
further support for the overall argument that descriptions of comprehensible input
and output that limit themselves to oral evidence only are likely to be limited.
Finally, let us look at these data again from an SLA perspective. We have already
seen from the original analysis that the catalyst for L10’s moment-by-moment break-
through in understanding in Fragment 3 is L9’s use of progressively stronger forms
of second position repair, which clarify the meaning of the word “coral” by limiting
its semantic scope. Here, I would like to make an observation about the importance of
including information about embodied actions and eye gaze behaviors in transcripts.
More specifically, I wish to claim that potentially crucial microanalytic information
about human cognition and second language learning may be embedded in transcripts
that include this type of information.
From a mainstream SLA perspective, it is clear that L10 allocates a considerable
amount of attention throughout Fragment 3 (and indeed in the fragments that precede
Fragment 3 in the original database) in order to understand the meaning of the word
“coral.” This noticing behavior is consistent with the findings of the psycholinguistic
literature concerning the important role that attention, awareness, and consciousness
all play in second language learning (Gass, 1997; Robinson, 1995; Schmidt, 1990, 1993a,
1993b, 1994).
However, for present purposes, it is also noticeable throughout Fragment 3 that L9
too devotes a great deal of attention to helping L10 understand what the word “coral”
means. For example, we can observe the “thinking gesture” (holding her chin in her
hand) that L9 adopts at lines 008–010 and at lines 052–064, the way she clasps hers
hands at key moments in the interaction (see lines 029, 049, and 100), thus projecting
an impression of concentration, and the intensity of her gaze throughout Fragment
3. These characteristic gestures are all explicitly noted in the gloss at lines 048–053 of
Fragment 3.5:

Fragment 3.5
048 [((L9 hands briefly unclasps
049 and then clasps her hands again.
050 She points her clasped hands
051 toward L10 and then holds them
052 in front of her face in a thinking gesture,
053 and looks intently at L10.))]
368 MARKEE

We can also observe how intently L9 gazes at L10 even more precisely by not-
ing the transcription details of L9’s eye gaze behaviors throughout the fragment
(X , where X marks the onset of gaze and the continuous line marks the contin-
uation of a participants’ gaze). Thus, at line 008, L9 begins to look at L10 and, apart
from two momentary breaks at lines 017 and 030, L9 looks almost continuously at
L10 until line 113, that is, for 45 out of the 65 seconds of interaction that constitute
Fragment 3.
This is an extraordinarily long time for a participant to look at an interlocutor. This
practice suggests that L9 is using eye gaze behaviors and the other embodied actions
previously described as interactional resources to “do noticing” (Schegloff, 1989) that
L10 is experiencing difficulty understanding the word “coral,” and that she therefore
requires L9’s undivided help and attention.
Now, we must be extremely careful to limit any claims about how L9 and L10
do being attentive in this fragment, and even more so about drawing any larger
implications about the nature of human cognition and SLA. After all, L10 has her
back turned to the video camera, so we cannot directly observe L10’s own eye gaze
behaviors. Nonetheless, I wish to argue that these data suggest that attention in talk-in-
interaction is as much an observable, socially distributed activity that is constructed by
two or more interlocutors on a moment-by-moment basis as it is an individual cognitive
phenomenon, whose inner workings are only accessible to researchers through post hoc,
personal introspection.
Of course, this is not to say that L10 is not the principal individual beneficiary of
L9 attending to her comprehension needs (although notice that L11 also incidentally
benefits as a result of L9’s and L10’s joint comprehension work). But the position I
am outlining here is significantly different from the one(s) espoused in mainstream,
psycholinguistically oriented approaches to SLA, namely, that language learning is
a manifestation of human cognition that is located in the mind/brain of individu-
als. Although this psycholinguistic account should certainly not be dismissed out of
hand—after all, CA itself assumes that competent speakers must have some (unspec-
ified) knowledge of clausal structure that enables them to parse the ongoing progress
of current turn, so that next speakers can appropriately make a bid for next turn
(Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974)—the CA perspective adopted here suggests that
language learning may also be productively understood as an interactional achieve-
ment that is negotiated in the collective, socially distributed space that constitutes
talk-in-interaction.

CONCLUSION

This chapter has briefly reviewed what mainstream CA is and has shown how the
transcription procedures and microanalytic techniques of this approach to analyzing
talk-in-interaction may be used to describe how second language learning unfolds
on a moment-by-moment basis. Following Kasper (2002) and Markee (2003a), I have
dubbed this approach CA-for-SLA. As shown by the comparative analyses of Frag-
ments 2 and 3, transcription is not merely an arcane, technical issue that is of interest
only to CA specialists. Very fine grained transcripts such as the one reproduced in
Fragment 3 lead to important, substantive improvements over analyses that are based
on less detailed transcripts. More specifically, as Ochs (1979) suggested, transcripts are
preliminary theorizations of members’ interactional competence. As such, the min-
utest details of both verbal and kinesic behavior that they contain must be recorded,
because they potentially hold vital clues to much larger questions that are of funda-
mental interest to SLA researchers. Not the least of these is the question: “How are
second languages learned through interactional activity?”
 20. CONVERSATION ANALYSIS 369

This and other issues raised in this chapter are obviously of most direct inter-
est to researchers working within the parameters of broadly sociolinguistic and/or
sociocultural approaches to SLA, to classroom researchers, and to applied linguists in
general who are interested in understanding how everyday classrooms function. In
addition, data such as these also potentially provide useful practical insights into the
micro details of classroom talk for teachers and teacher trainers, in that they docu-
ment what successful language learning activity in small group interaction looks like.
It is therefore clear that CA-for-SLA research has a large constituency of potential
consumers, who may not themselves be CA specialists. The challenge that now faces
CA-for-SLA researchers is to produce a coherent body of research that further de-
velops our understanding of the architecture of interactional activity and that shows
how the verbal and kinesic practices described here provide a coherent theoretical
and practical respecification of how second language learning in ordinary, everyday
communicative contexts actually works.

APPENDIX 1: Transcription Conventions

CA transcription conventions (based on Atkinson & Heritage, 1984).

IDENTITY OF SPEAKERS
T: teacher
L1: identified learner (Learner 1)
L: unidentified learner
L3?: probably Learner 3
LL: several or all learners speaking simultaneously

SIMULTANEOUS UTTERANCES
L1: [yes
L2: [yeh simultaneous, overlapping talk by two speakers
L1: [huh? [oh] I see]
L2: [what]
L3: [I dont get it ] simultaneous, overlapping talk by three (or more) speakers

CONTIGUOUS UTTERANCES
= a) turn continues at the next identical symbol on the next line
b) if inserted at the end of one speaker’s turn and the beginning of
the next speaker’s adjacent turn, it indicates that there is no gap at
all between the two turns

INTERVALS WITHIN AND BETWEEN UTTERANCES

(0.3) (1) (0.3) = a pause of between 0.3 second;
(1.0) = a pause of one second.

CHARACTERISTICS OF SPEECH DELIVERY

? rising intonation, not necessarily a question
! strong emphasis, with falling intonation
yes. a period indicates falling (final) intonation
so, a comma indicates low-rising intonation suggesting continuation
go:::d one or more colons indicate lengthening of the preceding sound;
each additional colon represents a lengthening of one beat
no- a hyphen indicates an abrupt cut-off, with level pitch
370 MARKEE

because underlined type indicates marked stress

SYLVIA capitals indicate increased volume
˚the next thing˚ degree sign indicates decreased volume
.
hhh in-drawn breath
hhh laughter tokens

COMMENTARY IN THE TRANSCRIPT

((coughs)) verbal description of actions noted in the transcript, including
non verbal actions
((unintelligible)) indicates a stretch of talk that is unintelligible to the analyst
. . . . (radio) single parentheses indicate unclear or probable item

EYE GAZE PHENOMENA

The moment at which eye gaze is coordinated with speech is marked by an X and
the duration of the eye gaze is indicated by a continuous line. Thus, in the example
below, the moment at which L11’s eye gaze falls on L9 in line 412 coincides with the
beginning of his turn at line 413.

[X ((L11’s eye gaze is now directed at L9))

412 L11: → ∼ [o you can call me and then [I can say you ] the the address
413 L9: → [((L9 nods 4 times]

Eye gaze transition is shown by commas

[X ,,
The moment at which there ceases to be eye contact (as when a participant looks
down or away from his/her interlocutor) is shown by periods
[X ...

OTHER TRANSCRIPTION SYMBOLS

co[l]al brackets indicate phonetic transcription
→ an arrow in the margin of a transcript draws attention to a
particular phenomenon the analyst wishes to discuss

NOTES

1. As I have noted elsewhere (Markee, 2000), Schiffrin (1991) suggests that there are at least six other types of
CA apart from the ethnomethodological approach discussed here. Within ethnomethodological CA, it is
customary to distinguish between conversation analysis that derives from and develops Garfinkel’s con-
cerns with developing a theory of social action (Garfinkel 1967, 1974) and other forms of conversational
analysis, which are primarily concerned with analyzing the content of talk rather than its observable
sequential and other structure (Schegloff, Koshik, & Jacoby Olsher, 2002).
2. See also Mehan (1979) and Sinclair & Coulthard (1975), who call such sequences Initiation-Response-
Feedback or Initiation-Response-Evaluation sequences, respectively.
3. The names that appear in this and all other fragments in this paper are pseudonyms.
4. The original transcript in Markee (2000) used slightly different transcription symbols from the ones used
here. In order to make the comparison between Fragments 2 and 3 as transparent as possible, I have
standardized the transcription symbols used so that they both conform to the standard conventions of
CA transcription shown in Appendix 1.
5. This phrase is actually recycled from some previous attempts by L9 in preceding excerpts to explain
what coral means to L10.
6. In point of fact, L10 is correct: some types of coral are indeed a source of food for fish. However, the two
learners do not pursue this possibility any further. Consequently, this piece of ethnographic information
is not utilized in the analysis.
7. See Caroll & Swain (1993); Lightbown & Spada (1990); Long (1996); Long, Inagaki, & Ortega (1998);
Lyster (1998); Lyster & Ranta (1997); Nicholas, Lightbown, & Spada (2001); Oliver (1995, 1998).
8. Although most of this talk is unintelligible, L9 is probably talking about the dangers that coral reefs pose
to shipping.
 20. CONVERSATION ANALYSIS 371

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21

Contrastive Rhetoric
Robert Kaplan
University of Southern California (Emeritus)

WHAT IS CONTRASTIVE RHETORIC?

Languages are multidimensional constructs that should be looked at simultaneously

from various perspectives. Autonomous linguists, especially in the United States, have
chosen to look at language from a particularly narrow perspective; they have isolated
specific problems by excluding from consideration a maximum number of messy
variables. Contrastive Rhetoric has, over the past 40 years, tried to look at language
from a more multidimensional perspective and also to look across languages.
If you ask an American composition teacher where contrastive rhetoric begins, you are
likely to get the answer “in Kaplan’s Doodles Paper of 1966.” . . . [T]he paper led to a lively
discussion which goes on even today . . . [W]hether we approve of its specific points or not,
its general approach did have a beneficial impact. It compelled students and teachers of
rhetoric to look at discoursal macro-patterns in the light of underlying cultural traditions
and not only in terms of syntactic features on the linguistic surface. (Enkvist, 1997, p. 190)1

Contrastive Rhetoric starts from the assumption that language occurs not in isolated
syntactic structures2 but rather in naturally occurring discourses, whether spoken or
written, although admittedly Contrastive Rhetoric has focused almost exclusively on
written varieties. The term has been used in two separate contexts—spoken discourse
(i.e., multiple-source dialogic) and written discourse (i.e., single-source monologic).
Such a distinction, however, oversimplifies the situation; although there are obvious
overlaps between the two, to some extent each has evolved in its own direction.
That Contrastive Rhetoric should have focused on written discourse seems entirely
appropriate because a major real-world problem (a problem of the sort that applied
linguists are supposed to recognize and address) lies at the heart of the matter; namely,
literacy. Literacy is not constituted of the ability to manipulate grammatical rules and
vocabulary, but rather is constituted of the ability to encode and decode discourses (see
Grabe & Kaplan, 1996, for further discussion). As the world has become increasingly
technologized, literacy has come to be recognized as a global issue.
Contrastive Rhetoric represents the first serious contemporary study of L2 writing, as
well as the only early paradigm where prominence was given to cross cultural research
(Poole, 2002, p. 76; see also Connor, 1996; Leki, 1991).

375
376 KAPLAN

Contrastive Rhetoric has been commonly confronted by three major obstacles. The
first of these implicates observation; this obstacle falls squarely into the emit/etic
problem in the sense that one cannot observe what one does not recognize as exist-
ing. Applied linguists, like any human beings, come at the process of analysis from
the point of view of whatever language(s) they happen to speak and recognize the
linguistic features evident in that language/those languages. They are impeded from
observing obvious features of another language simply because applied linguists do
not know the features are there.
The second obstacle lies in the need to categorize features—to systematize them
in a manner relevant to the objective. The absence of a convenient metric for such
categorization impedes the process. It is possible to say, in English, that Mary is wiser
than Jane, and so long as Mary and Jane are the only subjects for categorization, such an
observation is quite sufficient. However, as soon as the number of subjects increases, it
becomes necessary to devise some sort of metric that will permit comparison not only
between Mary and Jane as individuals but rather between two global populations
separable along the dimension of wisdom.
Ideally, it would be necessary to devise a “universal” metric capable of provid-
ing an apparatus for comparing any and all pertinent features that may be found in
human society. Such an exercise would require greater and greater specificity, analyz-
ing wisdom into its essential features. Thus, the third obstacle revolves around the
capability to specify the essential features necessary to potential comparison.
This chapter, however, is not concerned with the wisdom of individuals, but rather
with text—essentially with written text. The most obvious feature of text lies in its
syntactic and lexical dimensions because those features constitute the mechanisms
of coherence and cohesion. This implies that sentences are not autonomous; rather
they cohere logically and hang together cohesively in their syntactic structure, thus,
contributing to the flow of information through the text. If that is the situation, there
must be clear relationships between any particular clause and what comes before it
and what follows. The problem is to recognize, define, and categorize the various
techniques that mark such relationships across languages.

A DEFAULT MODEL FOR ENGLISH

In English, the default model presents given information before new information,
perhaps on the presumption that it is easier for the reader to start with something
known.3 What is given can be characterized in several ways:

1. Something may be given because it is simply part of the human condition—for

example, all human beings within the normative range have certain body parts
in common and certain common relationships among those parts; for example,
in English, Clear as the nose on your face.
2. Something may be given because it is common to some particular group—
a nation, a club, a family; for example, most contemporary residents of the
United States are likely to recognize names such as Abraham Lincoln and George
Washington.
3. Something may be given because it is physically present in the context; for
example, assuming that there is a door in the environment, one may say, in
English, please open the door without further specification.
4. Something may be given because it is named/discussed in the discourse; for
example, the term given in this paragraph.

This English language practice of “old information first” is by no means universal;

other languages may employ other practices.
 21. CONTRASTIVE RHETORIC 377

Recognizing and knowing how to use the default model is necessary for users
and learners of English, but even for English it is not in itself sufficient. One must
also recognize that there are syntactic means for varying the default model. Using
structures such as the passive, the cleft sentence, sentence openers like there is/it is
provides some means of varying the default model. It is not sufficient to know how
to construct the syntactic variations from the default model; it is also necessary to
understand when it may be appropriate to use such alternative means for example:

There is the door; please open it.

It’s warm in here.
That door needs to be opened.
Please wait outside.

All of these sentences may apply to the same physical door and may imply the need
to open it; it is pragmatics that determines the conditions under which each may be
spoken/written. Sometimes it is rhetorically necessary to put some critical informa-
tion ahead of given information. It is also necessary to recognize when ellipses are
appropriate—when it is permissible to omit what can readily be inferred; for example:

Where are you going next week? To Gallop. [or simply Gallop.]4

In this exchange, the response deletes I’m going [to]. . . because it can readily be inferred
from the context. For many residents of the United States, it is safe to omit New Mexico,
because many know where Gallop is, but the omission is determined by context; if
the questioner is a child or a recently arrived immigrant, it may not be possible to
omit New Mexico.
The mechanisms for identifying given and new information are language spe-
cific. These mechanisms are governed by such language-specific devices as word
order (in those languages in which word order is more critical than case endings—
English vs. Russian). Articles and demonstratives may serve particular purposes as
may such structures as English there is/there are when no suitable old-information
(or other opener) is readily available. (There is a rat in the room is not identical in mean-
ing with A rat is in the room.) Causality, using such clause-connectors as because or thus,
must reflect a conceivable causal relationship. The order selected must make sense
in terms of the writer’s and the reader’s perceptions of the phenomenological world.
The English song “Oh! Susannah”5 contains the text:

“. . . the day I left, it rained all night, the weather it was fine . . . .”

Such description violates normal perceptions of the physical universe—day and night
are not interchangeable, and it cannot both rain and be fine simultaneously. Such
discontinuities may be used with impunity for literary purposes, but ordinary text is
not permitted to violate basic expectations. For example, in the structure:

the horse was sick because it ran slow

as opposed to
the horse ran slow because it was sick

both structures are syntactically possible but the former structure is unlikely because
it violates reader expectations of cause/effect relations based on an understanding of
the physical world. Such syntactic markers regulate the form of sentences, adapting
them to serve the text strategy. Grammaticality alone is not the answer. So the text
is, as Enkvist suggests, “father to the sentence” (1997, p. 199). It is not grammatical
rules, but text strategy that determines the choice of syntactic and lexical structures.6
378 KAPLAN

Structures are not individually created out of individualized psychological reality or

through the application of the rules of a syntactic system. Rather, they are to some
extent a matter of appropriating the words of others (Bakhtin, 1981; Norton & Toohey,
2002, p. 117; Odlin, 2002, pp. 254–257).
Beyond the syntactic and lexical dimensions lies the dimension of discourse
pragmatics—the use of types and patterns of discourse in different communicative
situations or the comparison and contrast of types of text within and across languages
and social groups. Clearly, this dimension implicates genres. The genres of one lan-
guage may not occur in another or may occur but may serve an entirely different
rhetorical function. For example, the structure called the counter-factual conditional
constitutes an interesting case; in English the counter-factual condition may be repre-
sented by such a sentence as:

If Cleopatra’s nose had been longer, the history of the world would have been different.

In this sentence, both parts of the conditional structure are not true; Cleopatra’s nose
was not longer, and the history of the world is not different. Such structures are not
common in all genres in English, but in the genre of sports writing, the structure occurs
quite frequently; for example:

If he had just caught the ball, his team would have won.
If he had only not fallen, he would surely have won the gold [medal].

Thus, it occurs in a genre in which it is reasonable to speculate about what might have
happened. Such structures are not common in other languages. The counter-factual
conditional is rare in written Chinese, although the conventional conditional does
occur (Bloom, 1981), for example:

If there were no Communist Party, there would be no New China.

In this “slogan,” both clauses imply true conditions; that is, there is a Communist
Party, and there is a New China. It has been suggested to me that the counter-factual
conditional is rare in Chinese because the practically minded Chinese see no reason
to discuss what did not happen, but there is no empirical evidence to support this
suggestion. This is not to claim that the counter-factual condition cannot occur in
Chinese; in fact, it does occur, although it is used largely for humor, on the grounds,
I suppose, that arguing about something that did not happen is ludicrous.

SIX QUESTIONS: WHAT PHENOMENA CONTRASTIVE

RHETORIC STUDIES

Discourse pragmatics also includes matters of politeness and hedging (areas that have
been extensively studied elsewhere by a number of other scholars—for politeness, see,
for example, Brown and Levinson, 1988; Janney and Arndt, 1993; for hedging, see,
for example, Crismore and Vande Kopple, 1988; Grabe and Kaplan, 1996) and, in the
context of trying to compose text in an L2, it also raises a number of overwhelming
questions:

1a. Who has the authority to write?7

1b. Who may be addressed?
2a. What may be discussed?
2b. What form may the writing take?
 21. CONTRASTIVE RHETORIC 379

3a. What constitutes evidence?

3b. How can evidence be convincingly arranged?

These questions must be addressed by the incipient writer, because without some
sort of answers, it is impossible to construct text; although phrased in a different way,
these questions address the central issues of audience, genre, and rhetorical structure:

r Who writes what to whom,

r How,
r Under what circumstances, and
r To what end?

The first two questions—Who has the authority to write? and Who may be
addressed?—are reciprocal, culturally coded, and dependent on the in-culture distri-
bution of power. In any environment, the right to write and the right to be addressed
change as the power differential increases—writing to a superior is not always li-
censed, reading a message from a superior is always sanctioned. (In English, text
may be specifically marked “Secret” clearly limiting readership.) Of course, all of the
questions listed earlier? assume the existence of a fairly broad distribution of literacy
and the use of a common language.8 Authority to write may be vested in age, relative
fame, great attributed wisdom (though the criteria for measuring wisdom are fairly
vague), or gender. (See Yoshikawa, 1978, for a discussion of the criteria for licensure
to write in Japan.)
This assumption of fairly widespread literacy and of a common language is more
complex than it may seem on first thought. There is an additional assumption that the
performative ability of the writer and of the reader are reasonably well matched. The
writer must make clear (in one way or another) his or her intent, and the reader must
have a sufficient performative ability to perceive that intent as well as a willingness to
“go along with it” for the purposes of some particular textual event. Further, the writer
must have knowledge of his or her subject, and the reader must have at least an interest
in that subject, although that interest may be uninformed, and the reader’s motivation
to read may evolve out of a desire to gain information and/or understanding.
In addition to a reasonably matched performative ability, the writer must be aware
of (and must practice) the culturally bound conventions of text presentation—must
demonstrate a proper concern for the surface of the text–must practice acceptable
spelling, paragraphing, indentation, hyphenation, capitalization, and punctuation.
The reader, on the other hand, must be prepared to expect appropriate conventionality
in the text or must be made aware that certain conventions will be violated intention-
ally and purposefully. (See discussion of “ontological difficulty” later in this chapter.)
Given these constraints, the license to write may be exercised. In English, any
mother may address her children, and they may address their mother. In English,
this general license to write and to be addressed extends through all family members
and all close friends. Although this phenomenon is fairly universal, it may be heav-
ily impacted by culturally defined politeness rules (e.g., in some languages, an older
relative must be addressed in the subjunctive). Beyond this message level, things get
more complicated. One may write to the chief executive of a company, but one will
not be distressed if the response (assuming that a response does indeed materialize)
originates from some (perhaps unidentified) person in the customer relations depart-
ment. One may write to one’s legislative representative, but one will not be distressed
if the response, (assuming that a response does indeed materialize) arrives as a form
letter, composed by an anonymous employee but signed by the legislator. The right
to address a legislative representative is fairly well restricted to democratic societies
380 KAPLAN

in which legislators are elected by popular vote and are perceived to represent and
be responsible to their electorate. There are, however, whole sectors of society that
are shielded by cultural rules; the greater the power differential between any two
individuals, the smaller the probability that writing is licensed and that response may
be expected. The power differential may also be marked by politeness rules.
Where the power differential is great, one may employ a surrogate; one may initiate
a message through a tax accountant or an attorney, and one may expect a response
from the reader’s surrogate. In such cases, the originator of the message and the re-
cipient may not be directly involved at all. It is also possible, in cases of wide power
differential, that no response will be provided. In other situations, writing may be
elicited by an authority figure; for example, at any level of the educational system, a
teacher may require written exercises from his or her students such as class exercises,
an essay, a written examination paper.9 In cultures in which the press engages in such
activities, one may write a “letter to the editor” with the expectation that it will be
published (but not responded to by the editor), thus allowing ordinary persons to
address a wider audience, although the editor may refuse to publish or may revise
any given contribution prior to publication. Scholars who believe they have a contri-
bution to make to scholarship may write scholarly articles and books addressed to
their professional colleagues; in this case, the motivation springs from the author and,
to the extent colleagues read the pertinent literature, the readers constitutes a par-
tially captive audience—however, always with the right to refuse to read any given
contribution. (Of course, journal editors or editors in publishing houses may refuse
to publish.) In each of the illustrations sketched here, the writer is licensed to write;
however, in every case, the writer’s license is constrained by social forces, by the in-
tended audience, and by the topic. And the reader is licensed to be addressed. In each
of these illustrations except the teacher—student relationship, the motivation to write
normally arises from the writer; in the teacher–student relationship, the motivation
springs from the teacher (who is implicitly the only reader). There are other such cases
in which the more powerful member of the communicating group motivates writing;
for example, in the event that one receives a message from a governmental agency,
that message generally mandates a response.
What may be discussed? and What form may the writing take? also constitute a
reciprocal pair. What may be discussed is often determined by the membership of the
communicating group—writer and readers; one would perhaps discuss personal mat-
ters in a letter to a family member, but probably would not do so in a scholarly article
or in a letter to a legislator. However, possible topics are also culturally constrained.
In societies in which strong religious views are widely held, topics like abortion or al-
ternative life styles are generally not considered appropriate, although abortion may
be discussed in the medical literature in such a society; in other societies, such topics
may be considered appropriate to political discourse, or to the media in general, or
even to personal discourse; for example, it is conceivable that such a topic might occur
in correspondence between relatives or close friends. (See, e.g., Kaplan, 2000.)
What may be discussed is also, at least to some extent, constrained by available
genres. For example, it is unlikely that an English speaker would present a cooking
recipe in the form of a sonnet or that the content of a “romantic” sonnet would be
presented in the form of a cooking recipe. Genre restricts possible topic. It is important
to note that genres are not universal; sonnets (defined by content as well as by form)
do not occur in all cultures, and, where they may occur, they do not necessarily have
similar rhetorical purpose. For example, in academic fields:

. . . genre stability is partially maintained by the “experts” in any disciplinary discourse

community, thereby contributing to the community’s structuration process. The relatively
fully developed nature of the experts’ disciplinary selves exerts influence on what can
 21. CONTRASTIVE RHETORIC 381

be said and how, thus contributing to the stability and reproduction of certain systems.
These experts are people who, through their publications and research, have reached wide
audiences, whose opinions and views serve as authority sources, who have produced
some of the key touchstones of the community: [S. B.] Heath’s and [E.] Och’s work
on language socialization . . . , [W.] Labov’s analysis of narratives, [J.] Swales’ work on
genre, [D.] Tannen’s work in discourse analysis, among others . . . [R. B.] Kaplan’s (1966)
controversial “doodles” article would not have fueled as much research in contrastive
rhetoric if he had written it in the form of a memo, for instance. For one thing, Language
Learning [the journal in which it first appeared] would not have accepted it for publication.
(Ramanathan & Kaplan, 2000, p. 179)

Genres are not arbitrary; they represent communal solutions to discourse problems.
“People learn new genres through social contexts. In different communities, ways of
representing and presenting knowledge vary. Different communities value different
kinds of knowledge and display and package it in ways unfamiliar to those outside the
community” (Murray, 2001, p. 284). That being the case, any text exists in a complex
relationship with prior text and with co-text; a genre is used to solve a particular
communication problem because that genre has been used diachronically, and because
it is being used by others synchronically, to solve a similar problem. A text newly
brought into existence in a particular genre then becomes part of the textual tradition
existing in a vertical continuum from the past to the present and in a horizontal
continuum across a discourse community in the present.
The third set of questions—What constitutes evidence? and How can evidence
be convincingly arranged?—also constitutes a reciprocal pair. The arrangement of
evidence depends on the selection of evidence, and the selection of evidence depends
on the selected arrangement. Berkenkotter and Huckin suggest that research itself
“ . . . is carried out and codified largely through generic forms of writing: Lab reports,
working papers, reviews, grant proposals, technical reports, conference papers, jour-
nal articles, monographs, and so forth” (1993, p. 476). Each of these genres (and a
large number of others conventionally used in the West) define—and are defined
by—the nature of evidence acceptable to the discourse communities that use these
genres. These genres are common to English (and to Western) scientific and techni-
cal discourse communities; discourse communities centered in languages other than
English (LOTEs), although they may employ these genres, may employ them in dif-
ferent ways for different purposes, or may not employ them at all. Li, writing about
the teaching of writing in the PRC, points out the relative unimportance of data;
in China, over long historical time, “[n]atural science, an imported subject, . . . was
looked down upon as a bunch of ‘trivial tricks’” (1996, p. 3). She goes on to say that
“definite, specific, concrete language” constitutes a maxim followed with religious
zeal by writing teachers in the United States but “[t]he preference for multitudinous
specifics . . . is at odds with a Chinese literary tradition that prefers a densely selective
and suggestive . . . style “ (1996, p. 120).
Earlier, Norton and Toohey (2002, p. 117) were cited in conjunction with the idea
that utterances are not uniquely created out of individualized psychological reality or
through the application of the rules of a syntactic system. Rather, they are, at least to
some extent, a matter of appropriating the words of others. Assuming that to be true,
for L2 learners, of course, the “words of others” lie in the first language (L1), not in
the L2. Perhaps this may constitute a root cause of plagiarism, but whether or not it
implicates plagiarism, it helps to define a difference in the source of evidence. Using
evidence derived from the L1 necessarily implicates a set of genres not convention-
ally perceived to constitute solutions to communication problems in the L2 (i.e., the
Western tradition in this discussion).
Thus, three pairs of overwhelming questions interact to frame the context in which
writing in an L2 must occur. Beyond that, however, it is not merely the “words of
382 KAPLAN

others” that underlie text; the writer working in an L2 brings to the task exactly the
linguistic possibilities inherent in the L1. (See Berman & Slobin, 1994 p. 12 for an
extended discussion of this matter.)

. . . Most of what falls under “thinking for [writing] in an L2” is usually inaccessible to
meta-awareness. . . . We probably do not “notice” the way the L2 does its filtering, . . . and
we probably have no awareness of the language specific nature of our own options. . . .
Such knowledge may be very largely “unanalyzed”. . . . In the absence of such awareness,
the L2 does not provide loci for (mis)generalization of L1 material. . . . The blueprint estab-
lished for the verbal expression of experience continues to function regardless. . . . Coping
with new ways of “thinking for [writing]” . . . means attending to features of context that
are either not relevant or are defined differently in the native language. (Kellerman, 1995,
p. 141)

On a more practical level, Mauranen talks about the fall out of this problem on L2
learners in the context of trying to write text:

. . . [Writers] differ in some of their culturally determined rhetorical practices, and these
differences manifest themselves in typical textual features. The writers seem not to be
aware of these textual features, or the underlying rhetorical practices. This lack of aware-
ness is in part due to the fact that textlinguistic features have not been the concern
of traditional language teaching in schools. Sometimes text strategies are taught for
the mother tongue, but rarely if ever for foreign languages separately. Such phenom-
ena have therefore not been brought to the attention of [writers] struggling with writ-
ing. . . . Nevertheless, these sometimes subtle differences between writing cultures, often
precisely because they are subtle and not commonly observable to the non-linguist, tend
to put . . . [various] native language [writers] at a rhetorical disadvantage in the eyes of
[the L2] readers . . . This disadvantage is more than a difference in cultural tastes, since it
may not only strike readers as lack of rhetorical elegance, but as lack of coherent writ-
ing or even [coherent] thinking, which can seriously affect the credibility of non-native
writers (1993, pp. 1–2; emphasis added).

Such a consideration seems to lead naturally to a linguistic theory that gives careful
attention to awareness and noticing. Chomsky (1981) has advanced a theory of Uni-
versal Grammar (UG); it constitutes a mentalist claim that all human beings within
the normative range have a biological endowment consisting of an “innate language
faculty” permitting children to acquire the grammar of any particular language(s).
This faculty is unrelated to other cognitive abilities; it contains awareness of abstract
principles that organize language and an awareness of the parameters through which
those principles are instantiated in any given language. The trigger for the activity of
this faculty arises from minimal exposure to a language, and from only positive evi-
dence of the principles (thus eliminating any sort of error correction). This model has
strongly influenced second language acquisition (SLA) research. However, although
grammar may indeed be acquired through the “innate language faculty,” reading and
writing must be taught anew in every generation and seems to respond to negative ev-
idence. Text is not simply the sum of its morphosyntactic components. The UG theory
has been challenged and debate rages in the cognitive sciences.10 On the other hand,
a theory that intersects with what is known about literacy acquisition would need to
be based in noticing language features apart from grammar. There are a number of
competing theories—the competition model, the connectionist model, the emergenist
model, the noticing model, and so forth. The noticing model may be closest to what
is needed for both contrastive rhetoric and discourse analysis. (See, e.g., Gass, 2002,
pp. 178–179; Schmidt, 1990, 1993.)
Among the areas of noticing that a writer may (explicitly or implicitly) bring to
attention, and that a reader must struggle to perceive, are those impacted when a
writer creates difficulty by choosing to use arcane or technical vocabulary (“contingent
 21. CONTRASTIVE RHETORIC 383

difficulty”), or by allowing himself or herself to be understood only up to a point (“tac-

tical difficulty”). The reader may experience difficulty if the writer’s representation
of the human condition is simply inaccessible or alien (“modal difficulty”). Or the
writer may create difficulty by undertaking to bend the language—the text itself—
out of its conventional shape (“ontological difficulty”). (Terminology from Steiner,
1978.) Flaunting of the conventions is a perilous exercise, but English-language writ-
ers of nonsense verse, for example, have done it successfully (e.g., as in the published
verse of e e cummings or Lewis Caroll) as have such English-language novelists as
William Faulkner, James Joyce, or Amos Tutuola.11
In order for the basic process—the conveyance of ideas, information, and feelings
through the text from the generator of text to the receiver of text—to work, there must
be an agreement between the generator and the receiver—a compact—to participate in
the process. The generator (the writer) needs to have a perceivable intent, a perceivable
stance toward the text and the content of the text, a perceivable grasp of the text subject,
and a perceivable intent to convey something to some group of readers—the receivers
of the text. At the same time, the receiver of the text must come to the text with an
intent, with a stance toward the form and the content of a given text, with some interest
in the subject of that text, and with a willingness to “go along” with the text generator
at least for the duration that the receiver is in contact with the text. Should the reader
not choose to participate in such a compact, the reader has the license to ignore the
text—that is, simply NOT to read it.
The writer must be willing to participate in the compact, in part because the writer
wishes to have his or her text read but also, and perhaps more important, because the
writer is himself or herself a reader, and in that role must anticipate the acceptance of
the compact by other readers.

A MODEL OF TEXT-CONDITIONED INTERACTION

A glance at Fig. 21.1 shows how complex the process may be. If all of the conditions
implied in the bundles of discourse features in the model suggested in Fig. 21.1 are
not met, there will be no (or limited, or misapprehended) transfer of information, etc.,
from the text generator to the text receiver—from writer to reader—via the text. All
of the variables identified in the model will be simultaneously at work in the process
when generator and receiver share intimately a common language, but when the text
generator has the text language as a second or foreign language, the variables may
simply become too numerous to control. If the generator chooses a genre that does
not exist in the target language (the L2) or that serves a different unexpected purpose,
if the generator does not control the text conventions expected by the receiver, if the
generator lacks performative ability, if the generator does not know how to enter into a
compact with the receiver, if the generator does not understand the kinds of difficulty
she or he can inadvertently introduce, if the shared experience is relatively not in
fact shared, there will be no meaningful interaction between generator and receiver
through the text. As Schuchalter (in press) writes:

Our initial response in experiencing texts not belonging to our immediate cultural back-
ground is a feeling of strangeness, a lack of comprehension at that which cannot be
readily interpreted. . . . Our starting point then in the analysis of any cultural text must
be the awareness of a “deep equivocality.” Every word, every line, every image may
mean something totally different from what we expect.

It is even possible that the inadvertent shortcomings of the generator may annoy
the receiver, thereby producing an unexpected and unanticipated discontinuity—for
example, a simple refusal to read the text. (See, e.g., Kaplan, 1983.)
384 KAPLAN

FIG. 21.1. Model of concerns in Contrastive Rhetoric. (After Grabe & Kaplan 1996,
p. 215; Kaplan 2000, p. 90, 1983, p. 147.)

Figure 21.1 attempts to define the features involved in composing in any given
language. Obviously, there will be a similar figure for each language one wishes to
explore. Non-native speakers of Language A will have in their heads a figure per-
tinent to their first language (Language B); they will not possess a figure for the
language they are trying to learn and in which they are attempting to write. At every
point at which the discourse structure of their first language (Language B) conflicts
with the discourse structure of the language they are trying to master (Language A),
misapprehension will occur. Thus, the genres available in Language A may or may
not exist in Language B, or if they do exist in Language B they may serve differing
functions. The same problem occurs with respect to each category of features shown
in the diagram. Even such matters as the script used may constitute a problem; an
 21. CONTRASTIVE RHETORIC 385

individual experienced in dealing with a Roman alphabet will have difficulties with
a non-Roman orthography, and vice versa (Red, 2001). This comment assumes that
one is dealing with an alphabetic language; if one of the languages in the mix is a
language that uses logographic characters (e.g., Japanese Kanji, Chinese characters),
the discontinuity increases in scope. Certainly, this problem extends to the conven-
tions of writing—the appearance of the text on the page, as well as to the direction of
text flow—left to right/top to bottom; right to left/top to bottom; top to bottom/right
to left. Indeed, every feature bundle described in the figure may be the site of dis-
continuity, confusion, and potential ambiguity. In sum, in order to write in a second
language, a level of second-language linguistic ability must first be achieved; such a
linguistic ability is necessary but not sufficient. Research in writing has, in this context,
fallen somewhat behind research in reading; much of the empirical evidence avail-
able derives from reading research (see, e.g., Bernhardt & Kamil, 1995; Grabe, 1991;
Kintsch, 1994). The needed level of second-language linguistic ability, often conceived
as the primary problem (although such linguistic ability accounts for less than 50% of
the variance), leads to the substitution of grammar instruction for writing instruction
in real-world classrooms. Such an approach to the teaching of writing constitutes a
serious fallacy.
Figure 21.1 represents texts as the negotiated communicative achievements of the
participants (the writer and the reader); thus, the entity labeled TEXT appears in the
center of the figure. This representation is, in part, indebted to speech-act theory as
developed by Austin (1962) and Searle (1969, 1976); i.e., when text is used in specific
situational contexts, the writer’s intentions and his or her relationship with or to reader
must be considered as features of meaning. Such a perspective obviously implicates
the use of text genres and the development of specific discourse communities using
text for specific purposes (see, e.g., Van Dijk, 1983, 1997).
Several additional points need to be made:

1. Note that a situation like that depicted in Fig. 21.1 will also occur for specific
discourse communities—for example, academic chemists, pharmacists, etc.—
within any particular language; in other words, discontinuities do not only oc-
cur across languages but rather may occur across registers within any given
language; such registers may derive from social, economic, political, or histori-
cal factors.
2. Note that many of the arrows depicting direction of movement are two headed;
that implies that the generator doesn’t simply produce the text but rather repeat-
edly interacts with the text while producing it. By the same token, the receiver
does not simply read the text, but rather goes through repeated approaches to the
text—perhaps over repeated readings of the entire text, perhaps only through
repeated readings of interesting/provocative/difficult portions.
3. Note that both generator and receiver must participate in an informal “compact,”
agreeing to respect each other’s intent to communicate, stance toward the text,
and knowledge of the text subject. If the receiver does not wish to take part in the
process, he or she can simply lay the text aside. The generator is subject to what
is called “tactical difficulty”—when the generator wishes to be understood only
up to a point or not at all or wishes to obscure his text through the use of arcane
or technical lexicon (i.e., “contingent difficulty”). It is virtually impossible for
the receiver to penetrate these difficulties.
4. Note that the two sets of questions—”Who writes what to whom, when, how,
under what circumstances, to what end?” and “Who has the authority to write?
Who may be addressed?// What may be discussed? What form may the writ-
ing take?// What constitutes evidence? How can evidence be convincingly
arranged?”—intersect with the other dimensions of the model. It is the case
386 KAPLAN

that issues of audience, genre, and text conventions are a significant part of the
meaning of the text; the text does not exist in a vacuum, but rather is constrained
by the genre employed as well as by the performative ability of both text gen-
erator and text receiver. In short, the ability of the text generator to exploit the
resources of the language (or register) and the ability of the receiver to compre-
hend the way in which the generator exploits the resources of the language, and
the presentation of the text all constitute potential sources of discontinuity—of
misunderstanding.
5. Note that text exists in an environment of co-text and pre-text; that is, any
text constitutes a continuum with similar texts diachronically and synchroni-
cally.
6. Note that some level of more-or-less matched performative ability between gen-
erator and receiver, mutually shared, is assumed to exist; that is, knowledge
of grammar (one set of the resources of the language), knowledge of genres,
of spelling, of the text conventions, and of script are presumed as an essential,
necessary but not sufficient pre-condition for participation in the “compact”
between generator and receiver.
7. Note that meaning does not reside in the text but rather is a product of the interac-
tion among generator, receiver, and text as constrained by the several variables.

Contrastive Rhetoric undertakes to bring all of these variables into notice, to make
both parties to the writing compact aware of the problem sites that may disrupt the
message, and to help the learner of an L2 to understand the difficulties he or she may
face in undertaking to write in the L2.

WHAT IS THE VALUE OF CONTRASTIVE RHETORIC?

Contrastive Rhetoric had its inception in an attempt to facilitate pedagogy; whatever

additional qualities it has achieved are later developments (see, e.g., Kaplan, 1988).
It has never been a question whether or not the 1966 doodles were in some sense
“correct”; rather the value of the doodles, whatever it may be, arose from the notion
that, as Enkvist observed, “[they] compelled students and teachers of rhetoric to look
at discoursal macro-patterns in the light of underlying cultural traditions and not
only in terms of syntactic features on the linguistic surface” (Enkvist, 1997, p. 190). In
that context, it has played a role both in expanding discourse analysis as an academic
discipline and in creating change in the teaching of writing in second languages (in the
relatively rare instances that writing is actually taught in L2 contexts—see Mauranen
earlier in this chapter), in the training of writing teachers, and in the teaching of
trainers of teachers.
In short, Contrastive Rhetoric has never been seen as an ivory-tower vision of
discourse, either written and spoken. Rather, it has helped to create an environment in
which teachers of writing, in both L1 (see, e.g., Panetta, 2001) and L2 (see, e.g., Connor
& Kaplan, 1986), have had to take into consideration the structure of discourse above
the level of the sentence in given languages as well as the differences in the structure
of discourse across languages. As Poole notes, it was “the only early paradigm where
prominence was given to cross cultural research” (Poole, 2002, p. 76). It has inspired a
very large number of cross-linguistic studies of rhetorical patterns (see, e.g., Kaplan,
2000, especially note pp. 95–96.) As an outgrowth of those many studies, it has played
a role in altering the conception of how writing may be taught (although it is fair to
say that conventional, grammar-based approaches to teaching writing persist).
Additionally, Contrastive Rhetoric has played a role in other subdomains of re-
search into cross-linguistic discourse and text conventions in English and various
 21. CONTRASTIVE RHETORIC 387

other rhetorical traditions, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (Hinds, 1975, 1976,
1983, 1984, 1987), Arabic (Ostler, 1987; Sa’adeddin, 1989), or Thai (Bickner & Peyas-
antiwong, 1988). As an outgrowth of Contrastive Rhetoric, a large number of ethno-
graphic studies on contrastive discourse traditions have investigated how discourse
and text are developed in various cultures and languages. These studies have identi-
fied the ways in which rhetorical discourse patterns may differ widely across cultures
and languages. In effect, Contrastive Rhetoric has led to an increased cross-cultural
knowledge base that sheds light on the influence of L1 rhetorical paradigms on the
L2 academic writing of non-native students primarily in English-speaking countries.
Since the 1960s, Contrastive Rhetoric has also come to occupy an important place in
seeking a clearer understanding of literacy (and has helped to bring into question the
spurious dichotomous designation of literate/illiterate, suggesting that there may
be many levels of each). Further, it has helped to displace the notion that literacy
constitutes a divine state of grace attributed to those who have received the “right”
education in the “right” schools, in the “right” chronological times, in the “right”
polities (see, e.g., Clark, 2001) as well as the equally spurious notion that illiteracy is a
form of disease that can be stamped out by a sort of educational “magic bullet” similar
to those involved in the medical suppression of smallpox and diphtheria. It has even
contributed to research in translation (Burrough-Boenisch, 2002), for, as Nawwab,
(2002) suggests:

The translator of any literary text is faced with two immediate problems: rendering
the meaning of the original faithfully in language that is idiomatic and in a style that
resonates with the unique linguistic traits and flavor of the target language. In the case
of translation of Arabic into English the problems are greater because of the vast gap
between the different syntactical, rhetorical, and linguistic worlds of a Semitic language
and an Indo-European tongue. (p. 31; emphasis added).

Contrastive Rhetoric is not an educational cure all. There are problems in language
and in language education and in related areas that it does not address at all. But there
are problems which it has addressed and in which it has successfully mediated. Its
value has been underestimated by some, although its benefits have been exaggerated
by others. Its niche lies somewhere between the exaggeration and the underestimation.
Perhaps this overview may point to that niche.

APPENDIX A

When the Doodles were first published in 1966 (Kaplan, 1966), they were intended
to demonstrate a variety of paragraph movements that exist in writing in different
languages, such as English, Semitic (e.g. Arabic), Asian, Romance, or Russian. The
purpose of highlighting the various types of paragraph structures and movements
was to educate the teachers of L2 writing who have to be aware of the differences in
rhetoric in different languages in order to point out differences in English rhetoric to
their students.12

English Semitic Oriental Romance Russian

388 KAPLAN

The illustration of paragraph movements was intended to be graphically clear

rather than exhaustive, and as I stated then and have repeated on numerous occa-
sions since that time, much more detailed and accurate descriptions would be needed
before a meaningful contrastive rhetorical system could be developed. Since its orig-
inal publication, contrastive rhetoric has acquired both friends and foes, and today
much more is known about the movement of information in discourse than was in
1966, when the teaching of English largely focused on grammar and phonology. In
the past half a century, a number of studies have been published to show that rhetor-
ical organization of text does indeed differ across various languages. However, the
specifics of these differences diverge, depending on who conducted the studies and
where they conducted them.
Contrastive rhetoric has consumed much of my thought and much of my time over
the past 40 years. I have written about contrastive rhetoric some forty times over these
years (in pieces of varying length, but largely with the phrase contrastive rhetoric in
the title). I hope all that writing and thinking has reflected some growth on my part.
I do not deny that my thinking about contrastive rhetoric has become denser, and I
do not deny that I have changed my mind about some aspects of the notion but not
about the basic conceptualization. In fact, I would still contend that English is more
linear than many other languages, as least in the sense that English does not permit
the intrusion of quantities of unrelated (or vaguely related) tangential material into a
text. The “doodles,” however, probably misrepresent reality.
Whenever I have presented the “doodles” to audiences made up of speakers of
languages other than English, those speakers have pointed out that it is not English
which is linear; rather, their languages, they have claimed, were linear, and English
represented some other pattern. The real issue, however, is that there are perceptible
differences between languages in rhetorical preference; it hardly matters whether one
or another is defined as “linear” or “circular.” The perception of linearity represents a
classic playing out of the emic/etic variable; every speaker perceives his/her language
as linear and all others as non-linear. . . . Thus, every speaker perceives a difference
between what happens in his/her language and what happens in other languages.
That fact constitutes the central idea of CR (Kaplan, 2000, pp. 83–84; see also Kaplan,
1991, 2003).13

NOTES

1. See Appendix A for information about the Doodles Paper.

2. Isolated sentences rarely occur in human uses of language except in grammar textbooks.
3. Alternative terminology includes old/new, theme/rheme, topic/comment, focus/presupposition, and, because
subject also normally comes first in the default structure, subject/predicate.
4. Note that one may say I’m going to Gallop, New Mexico, but I’m gonna gallop the horse, so intonation in
spoken language is also a key to disambiguating lexical (or syntactic) items.
5. Composed by Stephen Foster and published in his Songs of the Sable Harmonists in 1848.
6. If one were asked to conjoin the two clauses It was/was not raining and We did/did not go swimming into a
single sentence, one could construct some 300 alternatives, of which the following are simply examples.
1. Although it was raining, we went swimming anyway.
2. Although it was not raining, we did not go swimming.
3. As it was raining we did not go swimming.
4. As it was not raining, we went swimming.
5. Because it was raining, we did not go swimming.
6. Because it was not raining, we went swimming.
6. Being that it was raining, we did not go swimming.
7. Being that it was not raining, we went swimming.
8. Considering that it was raining, we did not go swimming.
9. Considering that it was not raining, we did not go swimming.
10. Despite the fact that it was raining, we went swimming.
11. Despite the fact that it was not raining, we did not go swimming.
 21. CONTRASTIVE RHETORIC 389

12. Even though it was not raining, we did not go swimming.

13. Even though it was raining, we went swimming.
14. It was raining; consequently, we did not go swimming
16. It was not raining, so we went swimming.
17. It was not raining; Thus, we went swimming.
18. It was not raining; however, we did not go swimming.
19. Since it was raining, we did not go swimming.
20. Since it was not raining, we went swimming.
21. Though it was raining, we went swimming.
22. Though it was not raining, we did not go swimming.
23. We went swimming because it was not raining.
24. We did not go swimming because it was raining.
25. We did not go swimming since it was raining.
26. We did not go swimming as it was raining.
27. We went swimming as it was not raining.
28. We went swimming since it was not raining.
Obviously, these structures are not merely freely interchangeable; they would occur in different contexts
and would be addressed to different audiences in different circumstances; for example, the structures
beginning with Being. . . are probably more formal than those beginning with Because. . . .
7. The term write as used here implicates the construction of text, without reference to length. Fill-in-the
blank activities—form-filling—is not included in the definition of writing, nor is signing one’s name to
a preprinted card, e.g., a birthday card, a Christmas card, etc.
8. Both illiteracy and the absence of a common language may be circumvented. In the absence of literacy,
correspondents may employ a scribe to write and to read messages. In the absence of a common
language, translators may be employed. If one is an English-speaker, for example, and has relatives in,
say, Norway, one may write a message in English and give it to a translator to put into Norwegian, and
the recipient may write his or her message in Norwegian and have it translated into English.
9. It is relatively unusual for writers to write on command; generally, writers begin from some other
motivation.
10. A summary of that debate would be inappropriate in this chapter; for clear reviews, see Elman, 1993,
as well as the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, since 1998.
11. The mention of Tutuola is not intended to implicate the significant literature written by authors for
whom English is a second language (also known as “Contact literature”; e.g., Chinua Achebe, Raja
Rao) but rather to illustrate a kind of literature in which the culture-bound conventions are violated.
12. Reprinted from Kaplan, R. B. (1966). Cultural thought patterns in intercultural education, Language
Learning, 16, 1–20, with permission from Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, U.K.
13. The preceding text should, in any case, be allowed to speak for itself; it is not my intention to provide a
detailed history of every twist and turn in my thinking over almost half a century. Rather, the point of
this final note is to signal a cessation. This is the last piece on contrastive rhetoric that I will write. This
is not an announcement of my retirement from thinking and writing; on the contrary, I hope to continue
to think and write about a variety of matters that interest me for some time into the future. Rather, this
is an announcement that I firmly believe I have said everything I have to say about contrastive rhetoric.
I have nothing more to say on this topic. If the notion has validity, I hope others will pursue it.

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22

Corpus Linguistics and

L2 Teaching
Susan Conrad
Portland State University

Corpus linguistics is an approach to research and teaching that makes use of computer-
assisted analyses of language. The “corpus” is a collection of texts—written, tran-
scribed speech, or both—that is stored in electronic form and analyzed with the help
of computer software programs.
Some consider corpus linguistics “essentially a technology” (Simpson & Swales,
2001, p. 1), and the approach clearly is dependent on computer technology. How-
ever, work within corpus linguistics is also unified by certain philosophical tenets,
which make it an identifiable approach, not merely a technology. These tenets fol-
low from a Firthian tradition in language study (Firth, 1957; Palmer, 1968). Central
among them is that language study is considered primarily an empirical endeavor, so
that descriptions of language and theories about language should be developed from
observations of language behavior. As discussed in this chapter, this principle has
contributed to some of the controversies surrounding corpus linguistics. (See Stubbs,
1993, for more on the Firthian perspective in contrast to a more cognitive one, and
Tognini-Bonelli, 2001, chap. 1, for discussion of the status of corpus linguistics as a
theory or methodology.)
The contribution of corpus linguistics to second language (L2) teaching is related
to the importance that it puts on the empirical study of large databases of language.
The approach has made it possible to conduct studies with more data and more
variables than was previously feasible, and to design new kinds of classroom activities
that actively engage learners in the analysis of language. In this chapter, I review
the contributions of corpus linguistics to L2 teaching with respect to three major
areas:

1. Descriptions of language, with applications to pedagogical decisions about what

to teach in second language classes.
2. Use of corpus linguistics methods in the classroom with second language learn-
ers.
3. Studies of language produced by learners.
393
394 CONRAD

Throughout, most discussions and examples focus on English corpus linguistics

because the majority of work—and the major controveries—has been with English.
The principles apply equally to any second language, however.
In the next section, before covering the three areas, I begin by outlining the defining
characteristics of corpus linguistics work. These characteristics apply equally to a
study conducted by a team of established language reseachers or to a class activity
done by a group of second language learners.

CHARACTERISTICS OF WORK IN CORPUS LINGUISTICS

Four characteristics are shared by work within corpus linguistics. Although I describe
each briefly later in this chapter, more details can be found in book-length introductory
treatments of corpus linguistics, including Biber, Conrad, and Reppen (1998), Hunston
(2002), Kennedy (1998), McEnery and Wilson (1996), Meyer (2002), and Partington
(1998).

Use of a Corpus
A corpus is a large, principled collection of naturally occurring texts that is stored in
electronic form (on a computer hard drive or server). By “naturally occurring” I mean
that the texts were created by users of the language for a communicative purpose,
as opposed to being created for the study or teaching of the language. Corpora can
include both written and transcribed spoken texts (and see the following for discussion
of a new classroom corpus that includes video).
The corpus is meant to represent some variety or varieties of language. The varieties
can be very general, such as British English conversation, or quite specific, such as
the introduction sections of contemporary medical research articles focused on cancer
treatments. The design of the corpus is crucial for reliable and generalizable results,
whether the corpus is used on a large scale by researchers or on a smaller scale by learn-
ers in a class. A full discussion of issues in corpus design is beyond the scope of this
chapter, but it is important to note that good design is not simply a matter of number
of words. The types of texts included, the number of different types of texts, the num-
ber of different samples of each type of text, the sampling procedure, and the size of
each sample are all important considerations. Advances in computer technology have
made increasingly large corpora possible. In the 1970s, 1 million-word corpora were
considered large (e.g., the London/Oslo-Bergen or LOB corpus, see Johansson, Leech,
and Goodluck, 1978); today, the Bank of English contains about 415 million words and
is still growing (see current information at www.titania.cobuild.collins.co.uk). Unfor-
tunately, however, our knowledge of the best size and sampling to represent varieties
of a language has not kept pace with technological advances. In the early 1990s, Biber
(1990, 1993) found 1,000 word samples reliable for representing many grammatical
features, and 10 texts reliable for representing the genre categories in the LOB (e.g.,
press reportage, official documents, academic prose), but since then, little empirical
work has been published on corpus design with an eye to finding the most efficient and
effective sampling and sizing procedures. Nevertheless, corpus compilation projects
seek to make corpora as representative as possible, given what is currently known.
Discussions of the principles followed in recent corpus compilation projects can be
found in several sources, including Aston and Burnard, 1998; Biber, Johansson, Leech,
Conrad, and Finegan, 1999, chap. 1; Granger, 1998; chap. 1; Hennoste, Koit, Roosmaa,
and Saluveer, 1998; McCarthy, 1998; Simpson, Lucka, and Ovens, 2000. (See also
Kilgarriff, 2001, on the corpus design with reference to word frequencies.)
 22. CORPUS LINGUISTICS 395

Use of Computer-Assisted Analysis Techniques

As previously mentioned, corpus linguistics relies on computer-assisted techniques
in order to handle the large amount of data in a corpus. The earliest well-known
publications (e.g., Sinclair, 1991) and many publications today focus on the use of
concordancers. These software programs show all the occurrences of a word with
surrounding context, calculate frequencies of words, analyze collocates (words that
occur together), and often calculate statistical measures of the strength of word asso-
ciations (i.e., the likelihood of two words occurring near each other).
Despite the usefulness of concordancers, many areas of interest within language
do not lend themselves to analysis with them. For example, Conrad (1999) describes
an analysis of linking adverbials (transition words such as therefore and however) that
includes associations among several variables: register (conversation, newspaper
writing, and academic prose), semantic category (e.g., result, contrast), position in the
clause, grammatical structure (e.g., single adverb, prepositional phrase), and the exact
choice of adverbial. Such an analysis requires much more tailoring of the computer
processing than is possible with a concordancer. Instead, with knowledge of computer
programming, analysts can write specialized programs. For forms that are difficult
to analyze automatically, such as adverbials, the programs can be interactive. Similar
to a spellchecker in word processing programs, this type of program brings ambigu-
ous forms to the screen, asking the researcher to make judgments about how to code
them. Although coding is still a time-consuming process, it is faster and more thor-
ough than finding the forms and coding them by hand because the computer identifies
the forms consistently, without its attention wavering. Once the researcher confirms
or changes the codes, they are stored and another program can be written to count
the codes so that associations between many different characteristics can be analyzed.
(For another example of an interactive program, see Biber, Conrad, & Reppen, 1998,
chap. 5).

Emphasis on Empirical Analysis of Patterns in Language Use

Corpus linguistic studies often develop from research questions that grow out of in-
tuition or casual observations, and interpretations of analyses often include intuitive
impressions about the impact of particular language choices. Nevertheless, the pri-
mary focus of corpus linguistics is empirical, based on what is observed in the corpus.
Corpus linguists are concerned with the patterns within a language as it is used, de-
termining what is typical and unusual in given circumstances. McCarthy (1998) notes,
“The particular strength of computerised corpora is that they offer the researcher the
potential to check whether something observed in everyday language is a one-off
occurrence or a feature that is widespread across a broad sample of speakers” (p. 151).
The implications of this emphasis on empiricism, and the role of intuition in corpus
linguistics, is discussed further in the following.

Use of Quantitative and Qualitative/Interpretive Techniques

Work within corpus linguistics varies with respect to how much it emphasizes quan-
titative analysis and how much it provides descriptions and interpretations without
giving counts of features. Highlighting the contrast, a pair of research issue articles
in TESOL Quarterly addresses quantitative versus qualitative methodologies (Biber
& Conrad, 2001; McCarthy & Carter, 2001). However, all studies include both as-
pects of analysis to some extent. Recognizing patterns of language use necessarily
entails making a quantitative assessment because typical patterns must occur more
frequently than unusual uses of language. At the same time, numbers alone tell us
396 CONRAD

little about language. Even the most sophisticated quantitative analyses must be tied
to functional interpretations of the language patterns.
Corpus linguistics—like all approaches—has particular strengths and weaknesses.
The four characteristics noted here account for its primary strength—the capacity for
analyzing more variables and data than was previously possible. Corpus linguistics is
thus particularly helpful in providing “big picture” perspectives—determining pat-
terns of language behavior across many texts, identifying typical and unusual choices
by users, and describing the interactions among multiple variables. It provides a com-
plimentary perspective to (and has never been meant to replace) approaches that give
a more intensive analysis of particular situations, such as ethnographies (Harklau, this
volume) and case studies (van Lier, this volume) or particular texts, such as text lin-
guistics studies (see Renouf, 1997; Tognini-Bonelli, 2001, chap. 1. However, for emerg-
ing techniques in corpus analysis for tracking features in texts, see Conrad, 2002.)

DESCRIPTIONS OF LANGUAGE USE

One of the most notable contributions of corpus linguistics to language teaching thus
far has been studies that describe how language features are used. These descrip-
tions are especially important for language teaching because textbooks for second
language learners and teachers have commonly been shown to include incomplete or
misleading explanations. Tognini-Bonelli (2001, chap. 2), for example, demonstrates
that almost 50% of the occurrences of any in a corpus do not fit under the descrip-
tions given in pedagogical grammars. Similarly, Biber, Conrad, and Reppen (1998,
chap. 3) find that several popular English as a Second Language (ESL) textbooks do
not describe the discourse function of subject position that-clauses, whereas corpus
analysis clearly shows that they are used only in particular circumstances. (See also
comparisons of ESL textbooks and corpora by Kennedy, 1987, on quantification and
frequency; Holmes, 1988, on doubt and certainty; and Lawson, 2001, on the subjunc-
tive for French as a foreign language.)

Vocabulary
Corpus linguistics has increased our understanding of word use in several ways. The
first widespread use of corpus analysis applied to language teaching and learning
was with dictionaries for ESL students (see especially descriptions of the Cobuild
project in Sinclair, 1987). Numerous publishers in ESL now publish corpus-based
dictionaries, which include descriptions of words as they are most commonly used
and give examples from corpora to illustrate word use. Some of these dictionaries also
give some basic information about the frequency of words in different types of texts
and about the most common words or constructions that the words occur with. For
example, the entry for idea in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English contains
a bar graph that shows the most common words that occur with the noun idea in
a diverse corpus of English: good idea is almost four times more common than the
second most common pair, idea for, which is followed in frequency by some idea, new
idea, general/rough idea, right/wrong idea, and great idea.
The idea that words tend to appear in the company of other words—collocation—
was introduced by Firth, who noted, “You shall know a word by the company it
keeps” (cited in Stubbs, 1993, p. 14). However, it has only been with the advent of
corpus linguistics that dictionaries have regularly provided collocational information
to learners. Furthermore, concordancing software allows all users to analyze the col-
locates of a selected word for themselves. (See Church & Hanks, 1990; Clear, 1993; and
Stubbs, 1995; for more details on how to measure the strength of associations between
words.)
 22. CORPUS LINGUISTICS 397

Another characteristic of words that has emerged from corpus studies has been
called “semantic prosody” (Louw, 1993; Sinclair, 1991): some words are associated
with positive news or judgments, others with negative news or judgments. These are
not connotations of the word itself, but rather come from the words associated with
it. Sinclair (1991), for example, shows that the phrasal verb set in is used most often
when something bad is beginning—rot, decay, despair, and infection set in. In terms
of L2 teaching, then, the concept of semantic prosody can explain why a learner’s
construction such as happiness set in may sound “odd” even when it is grammatically
accurate. (See also Tognini-Bonelli, 2001, chap. 6, for examples of semantic prosody in
both English and Italian, and Stubbs, 1996, chap. 7, for further discussion of English.)
A different sort of application of corpus-based vocabulary studies concerns the
generation of word lists for vocabulary learning. Building a sufficiently large vocabu-
lary is a daunting task for most learners, and especially for learners wanting to pursue
academic studies in their second language. A particularly useful application of cor-
pus linguistics has been in enumerating the words that are common across a variety
of academic texts. They are often not as salient as obvious technical vocabulary, but
are crucial for comprehension. Coxhead (2000) presents an academic word list an-
alyzed from a corpus that covers 28 subject areas and numerous different types of
academic texts. Such an analysis provides a much more principled way of deciding
what vocabulary is important to cover in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) text-
books. Corpus-based frequency lists of other types of language—for example, idioms
(Moon, 1998) and vague language (Channell, 1994)—have also been useful for L2
teaching.
Finally, corpus-based lexical studies are very useful for disambiguating the uses of
related words or multifunctional words. To illustrate with just a few examples, studies
include a focus on actual and actually by Tognini-Bonelli (1993); between and through
(Kennedy, 1991); such (Altenberg, 1994); and get (Johansson & Oksefjell, 1996).

Descriptions of Grammar
Descriptions of grammar have changed considerably with the incorporation of corpus
linguistic techniques, now including much more information about the use of gram-
matical structures. One way to see the change is to compare the reference grammars
of English published by Longman in 1985 and 1999. The first (Quirk, Greenbaum,
Leech, & Svartvik, 1985) provided descriptions of structures with occasional mention
of corpus analyses of use. The second (Biber et al., 1999) presents results of corpus-
based studies for virtually every structure that is described. To take a simple example,
consider the presentations of passive constructions using get—for example, He got
caught. Both books describe the structure, discuss its relationship to get as a copular
verb showing result, explain why the get passive rarely includes a by prepositional
phrase telling the agent, and note that it is most often used with negative circum-
stances. The difference is that Quirk et al. (1985) give a more theoretical discussion
about differentiating the get-passives from get as a copular verb, whereas Biber et al.
(1999) present specific corpus results: for example, the get passive is more common
in conversation than in fiction, news, or academic prose, but still accounts for only
about 0.1% of all the verbs, and the most common verbs in the get passive are get
married, get hit, get involved, get left, get stuck (presumably the first is an exception to
the get-passive’s usual association with negative circumstances!).
Grammatical features of informal spoken language have also received considerable
attention in corpus studies. In particular, members of the CANCODE corpus group
(Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English) argue that one weakness
of ESL teaching materials has traditionally been their reliance on references and norms
that apply to written language, even when they sought to teach spoken language
skills (Carter, 1998a; Carter & McCarthy, 1995; Hughes & McCarthy, 1998; McCarthy,
398 CONRAD

1998; McCarthy & Carter, 1995). Many features of informal spoken language—for
example, interruptions, syntactically incomplete utterances, ellipsis, and tails—have
been neglected, even though these have important interactional purposes. Biber et
al. (1999, chap. 14) also cover numerous features specific to conversational language,
such as its linear (rather than hierarchical) syntactic structure and the frequency of
nonclausal units.
A host of other corpus-based studies have provided descriptions of the function
of specific grammatical features in various kinds of texts. A complete list is beyond
the scope of this chapter, but the diversity can be seen by referring to even just a
few examples: modals (Coates, 1983), complement clauses (Greenbaum, Nelson, &
Weitzman, 1996), certain aspects of existential sentences (Breivik, 1999), vocatives
(Leech, 1999), and themes (Gómez-González, 1998).

Lexico-Grammatical Associations
Another aspect of language use that has gained greater prominence through cor-
pus linguistics is the association between vocabulary and grammar. Conrad (2000)
provides a simple illustration of this concept with reference to the verbs know, say,
and think. These very common verbs are grammatical with both that-complement
clauses and to-complement clauses. However, a corpus-based analysis of their use
in conversation shows very distinct associations between the lexical items and gram-
matical constructions: all three are common only with that-complement clauses. Thus,
lexico-grammatical studies address not just what is possible in a language, but what
word+structure combinations are favored by users.
The most extensive work in this area has grown out of the Cobuild dictionary
project. As it extended into grammar, the Cobuild project focused on the patterns
between words and grammatical structures as a useful approach for learners of English
(Collins COBUILD English Grammar, 1990). Early work was criticized especially for
overwhelming students with lists that were not useful (Owen, 1993). However, later
work (Hunston, Francis, & Manning, 1997; Hunston & Francis, 1998, 2000; Hunston
& Sinclair, 1999) has emphasized that patterns share aspects of meaning. In other
words, the lexico-grammatical associations correspond to functions, so that students
can learn functional patterns, not seemingly random lists.
The ability of corpus linguistics to analyze lexico-grammatical and lexical patterns
in large corpora is applicable to the growing interest in the importance of formulaic
language. Wray (2002) argues that multiword formulaic chunks may play a greater
role in language processing and production than formerly believed. Corpus studies
show just how common formulaic chunks are. From work with the Cobuild project, in
the early 1990s Sinclair was already positing the Idiom Principle—that users have at
their disposal “a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single
choices, even though they might appear to be analyzable into segments” (Sinclair,
1991, p. 110). In addition to the types of patterns previously discussed, further empir-
ical support for the frequency of formulaic language is offered by Biber et al. (1999,
chap. 12). They present analyses showing that almost 30% of the words in a corpus of
conversation and about 20% in a corpus of academic prose are in three- or four-word
recurrent “lexical bundles” (used at least 10 times per million words, spread across at
least five different speakers or writers).

Descriptions for Language for Specific Purposes

Perhaps the most accepted contributions of corpus linguistics have been in descrip-
tions of language for specific purposes. Although teachers of more general English
may be unclear about the best target language (see the following discussion), teachers
 22. CORPUS LINGUISTICS 399

and students of a specialized variety want to know the characteristics of that variety
and, therefore, analysis of a corpus of that variety is clearly useful.
English for Academic Purposes has received a great deal of attention. Coxhead’s
(2000) previously mentioned academic word list has important implications for EAP
vocabulary materials development. In addition, numerous studies with the Michi-
gan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) have investigated a variety of
language features—from idiom use (Simpson & Mendis, in press) to the use of just
(Lindemann & Mauranen, 2001), and markers of discourse management (Swales
& Malczewski, 2001) (see also Simpson, Lucka, & Ovens, 2000, and the web site
www.hti.umich.edu/m/micase/ for more on MICASE). Biber, Conrad, Reppen, Byrd,
& Helt (2002) present an analysis of numerous spoken and written registers that occur
at American universities, examining the similarities and differences in groups of lin-
guistic features. One of their surprising findings is that classroom sessions—although
meant to provide information—actually have many more of the language features of
involved, interactional discourse (such as informal conversation), which usually does
not have a primary function of conveying information. It is easy to see how this mix
of an informational purpose with more typically conversational language features
could present challenges to international students. The work is applicable not only
to teaching but also to testing, because it is based on the TOEFL 2000 Spoken and
Written Academic Language Corpus, sponsored by Educational Testing Service, for
the purpose of making aspects of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL)
more consistent with the actual language used in universities in the United States.
More specialized varieties have been investigated in a host of other publications. A
small sampling includes conditionals in medical discourse (Ferguson, 2001), networks
of collocations in plant biology research articles (Williams, 1998), collocations in can-
cer research article introductions (Gledhill, 2000), and the co-occurrence patterns of
a variety of grammatical features in biology and history articles and textbooks (Con-
rad, 2001). The exact findings for every variety are impossible to cover here, but the
contribution of corpus linguistics is clear: Corpus-based studies are allowing more
thorough descriptions of these specialized types of discourse.

What Use Are Corpus-Based Descriptions for Language Teaching?

In the previous sections, I have described some of the work in corpus linguistics that
has implications for language teaching. However, descriptions of language do not tell
us what to teach or how to teach it, and at this juncture it may be useful to review
some of the controversies that have arisen concerning how to apply the findings of
descriptive corpus-based studies.
Widdowson has argued that corpus linguistics has no guaranteed relevance to
pedagogy because corpus-based studies describe use, whereas pedagogy is concerned
with “usefulness rather than use” (1991, p. 21). In a number of publications, he stresses
that characteristics of usefulness, rather than characteristics of use, should determine
what is taught, and that the most important characteristic of usefulness for pedagogy
is whether a feature is a catalyst for further learning (Widdowson, 1991, 1993, 2000).
He claims that, in contrast to his views, corpus linguists are arguing that only language
found in a corpus should be taught in language classrooms, and that frequency of use
in a native-speaker corpus can be used to design a syllabus for language teaching.
Despite Widdowson’s claims, however, caveats have been expressed by corpus
linguists as well. One caution was noted by Aarts in the early 1990s, arguing that
not only frequencies but also factors related to users’ attitudes toward language need
to be taken into account when interpreting corpus work (Aarts, 1991). Even more
important, the contribution of corpus linguistics is seen not as replacing other ped-
agogical considerations, but as adding to them with considerations about language
400 CONRAD

use, including information about lexico-grammatical associations, collocations, and

frequency in different contexts. For example, Aston (2000) notes that pedagogy needs
to consider difficulty and learnability, interlanguage sequences, and the range of con-
texts in which a feature is used, as well as other factors. He further argues, though,
that findings of corpus studies can now help us to see when language syllabi deserve
more consideration or more explicit rationales. For example, if a syllabus includes
a language item that is rare, while excluding or delaying a more frequent item, it is
reasonable to ask what other pedagogical considerations make this sequencing ap-
propriate (Aston, 2001a; Gavioli & Aston, 2001).
Another question raised about corpus work in English thus far is whether it has
focused on language that represents the target for most learners. For learners in the
United States or Great Britain, or those studying English with a clear goal of going to
one of these countries, analysis of language produced by native speakers of American
or British English is likely useful because they will come in contact with this variety.
However, for learners who are in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) situation,
who will rarely be around native English speakers, the situation is more controversial.
In response to McCarthy and Carter’s (1995) call for more attention to the features
of informal British conversation, as found in their analysis of the CANCODE corpus,
Prodromou (1996a, 1996b) argues that informal British conversation may be both un-
interesting and difficult to understand in an EFL setting. Cook (1997, 1998) similarly
argues that native speaker language is neither authentic nor natural for foreign lan-
guage students, and that it is too culture-bound for learners who do not have access
to the culture. Widdowson (1991, 1996) argues that the learner community is not the
native speaker community, and taken out of the context in which it occurred (even if
it remains in the same country), the corpus language is no longer authentic.
Corpus linguists counter these criticisms in a number of ways. Some argue that
introducing students to native speaker (NS) language provides them with choices,
and it would be patronizing for NS teachers or researchers to decide who can have
access to NS language (Carter & McCarthy, 1996). Gavioli and Aston (2001) argue
that a corpus is not being offered as a model for learners to imitate, and learners are
not expected to be members of the community; rather the learners can learn by being
observers and analysts of the native speaker corpora. Yet another approach is to look
to the development of other corpora that are more representative of learners’ targets.
Mauranen (2003) describes the development of ELFA, a corpus of Academic English
as a Lingua Franca, collected at the University of Tampere, Finland, in international
degree programs and other settings where university activities are regularly carried
out in English. The International Corpus of English (Meyer, 2001) will allow analyses
with approximately 20 varieties of English from regions of Africa, the South Pacific,
Asia, the Caribbean, North America, and Great Britain.
A third controversy over corpus linguistics concerns just what role intuition plays
in corpus analysis and how important intuition is to language study and pedagogy
generally. Occasionally corpus linguists are accused of claiming that they do not use
intuition, that intuition is not important for language teaching, or that corpus observa-
tions are privileged over others’ insights and interpretations of language (Cook, 1998;
Owen, 1993, 1996; Widdowson, 2000). Owen (1996) argues that corpus linguistics has
limited use for language teaching because language teaching needs intuitive prescrip-
tion: Students expect teachers to make decisions of what is correct and incorrect, and
“intuitive prescription is fundamental to the psychology of language teaching and
learning” (p. 224).
Most corpus linguists, however, acknowledge the important role that intuition
and interpretation play in corpus linguistics. In an early edited collection, Leech and
Candlin (1986) state that corpus data, like all data, is interpreted subjectively. Stubbs
(1995) notes the use of intuition even in measures of word relations—for deciding
 22. CORPUS LINGUISTICS 401

what is interesting to study, in designing procedures, and in making interpretations.

In an introductory text, Biber, Conrad and Reppen (1998, chap. 1) discuss intuition and
anecdotal evidence as two ways to develop research questions for corpus studies, and
note that any analysis requires human interpretation. Francis and Sinclair (1994) sum
up decisions about what information to include and how to include it in the Cobuild
Grammar: “Final decisions were made by human beings exercising their judgement”
(p. 194). The use of intuition and human interpretation and judgment is not kept
hidden in corpus linguistics.
As noted in the description of its characteristics, however, corpus linguistics does
give primacy to observed language phenomena over intuition. Those interested in cor-
pus linguistics see this as a strength. de Beaugrande (2001), in response to Widdowson
(2000), argues that corpus linguistics has reinstated observation to linguistics, result-
ing in more methodical and systematic observations and interpretations of language
than we get by relying solely on intuition or anecdotal observation. In responding to
Cook’s (1998) criticisms, Carter (1998b) raises the important point that giving primacy
to data analysis actually grants more power to second language speakers. He notes
that relying on intuition for interesting language information is actually an elitist en-
terprise in which native speakers have the power, because learners have less intuition
about the use of their second language. Finally, an argument such as Owen’s (1996)
that students expect teachers to exercise intuitive prescription ignores the major issue
that drives corpus linguistics: Many choices in language are made between equally
grammatical constructions. Of course teachers are expected to make judgments about
clear-cut cases of grammatical versus ungrammatical constructions. But what about
constructions that are equally correct and have more subtle differences—the use of big
versus the use of large, or the use of an extraposed versus subject-position that-clause?
In many cases, the factors used to make such language choices remain subconscious,
and teachers would, at best, offer an incomplete guess as an intuitive prescription.
The difference in use of seemingly synonymous words, conditions associated with
the use of relatively rare features, the association of grammatical structures and cer-
tain types of texts, the interactive features of spoken language, semantic prosodies,
collocations—all these areas that have been highlighted in corpus studies give infor-
mation about language choices beyond the accurate/inaccurate divide.
In general, at this point it is too early to assess the impact that descriptive corpus
studies will ultimately have on language pedagogy. Although some ESL teachers have
commented on the usefulness of ESL corpus-based references for designing materials
or reorganizing syllabi (e.g., Scovel, 2000, but see response by Mills, 2001), only a
few textbooks that are corpus-informed have thus far been marketed by worldwide
publishers (Carter, Hughes, & McCarthy, 2000; McCarthy & O’Dell, 1997). Yet, despite
this lack in the commercial market, numerous teachers have written about the effec-
tive use of corpus linguistics techniques with their own students. I turn to this area in
the next section.

USING CORPUS LINGUISTICS TECHNIQUES

IN THE CLASSROOM

One of the ways that corpus linguistics has been applied to L2 teaching is by using
corpus-based techniques in language classrooms. When the results of descriptive
studies are applied to teaching, the learners are still a step removed from the corpus—
teachers and/or researchers do the analyses of the data. When corpus linguistics
techniques are used in the classroom, in contrast, the learners are the language re-
searchers. Johns (1994) describes this as “data-driven learning.” Unfortunately, there is
little empirical research into the effectiveness of corpus-based techniques for language
402 CONRAD

learning, but there are a variety of theoretical reasons for using them and many reports
by teachers of student interest and improvement.
Activities that ask learners to analyze corpus data are consistent with a variety of
current principles in language learning theory, as has been pointed out by a num-
ber of corpus linguists (see, e.g., Aston, 1995; Bernardini, 2001; Gavioli, 2001; Gavioli
& Aston, 2001; Johns, 1994; Leech, 1997; Willis, 1998). First, learner autonomy is in-
creased as students are taught how to observe language and make generalizations,
rather than depending on a teacher. With the observations and generalizations, the
analysis of the corpus promotes hypothesis formation and testing, the pathway by
which interlanguage is thought to progress. Furthermore, corpus analysis activities are
easily designed to promote noticing and grammatical consciousness-raising (Ruther-
ford, 1987; Schmidt, 1990; Williams, this volume).
One exception to the lack of empirical studies of classroom concordancing activities
is work conducted by Cobb (1997, 1999). He examines the vocabulary learning of
students when using a concordancer to see words in context compared with using
other techniques. Cobb (1997) reports small but consistent gains by students using
concordancers for vocabulary learning over students who used the same software
without the concordancing feature. Cobb (1999) finds that both definitional knowledge
and transfer of comprehension to new texts—in both the short- and long-term—was
better for students who used a concordancer in addition to word lists and dictionaries
versus those who used only word lists and dictionaries.
There is no lack of publications in which teachers describe concordancing activities
that they have found to be effective with students. Useful edited collections include
Aston (2001b), Burnard and McEnery (2000) and Wichmann, Fligelstone, McEnery,
and Knowles (1997). Here I give just a brief sampling to show the diversity of classroom
contexts in which corpus linguistics has been applied.
In ESP applications, Weber (2001) argues that undergraduate writing of formal
legal essays improved when the course included the use of concordancing with a
corpus of professional essays. Students determined correlations between the generic
structure of the essays and the use of certain lexical and grammatical structures. This
form-focused activity succeeded in making the essay-writing process “more man-
ageable for the student,” Weber reports (p. 15). Similarly, Collins (2000) and Foucou
and Kubler (2000) find corpus-based activities useful for business and computer sci-
ence students, respectively. Donley and Reppen (2001) discuss the use of concordanc-
ing with EAP students, to teach general academic vocabulary that is used in many
disciplines.
For translation students, classroom uses of corpus linguistics have highlighted the
connection between language and culture (see, e.g., Betraccini & Aston, 2001; Botley &
Wilson, 2000; and Zanettin, 2001). Other applications have included sensitizing
German L2 students to language variation (Jones, 1997); facilitating literary analy-
sis by advanced non-native speakers, such as determining how irony is conveyed in
English (Louw, 1997); teaching the use of discourse markers in Italian (Zorzi, 2001);
and investigating metaphors (Partington, 1998, chap. 7).
Just as with the application of descriptive corpus-based studies, the use of corpus
linguistics techniques in the classroom comes with a number of caveats. The ability to
analyze language—as well as to handle computer technology—does not come without
training. A number of articles emphasize the need to train students of any level—from
low-level learners to in-service teachers. They need to learn a number of technological
and research skills: to use the computer, to handle what may at first appear to be an
overwhelming amount of data, to make observations, to generalize from observations,
and to assess the limitations of the generalizations they derive (e.g., see Bernardini,
2001; Gavioli, 1997; Johns, 1997; Renouf, 1997; Seidlhofer, 2000). Concerned especially
with meaningful content and texts whose context is known by students, Seidlhofer
 22. CORPUS LINGUISTICS 403

(2000) finds concordancing most useful with her students when they use a corpus
made of the students’ own papers.

STUDIES OF LEARNER LANGUAGE

The third useful component of corpus linguistics for L2 teaching and learning con-
cerns learner corpora—collections of language produced by L2 learners. These cor-
pora are developed on many scales: large, international projects with texts collected
at many sites; projects to develop a large collection of texts from just one site; and
smaller corpora compiled by individual researchers for specific research goals. For
example, the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger, 1998, 2003) has been
coordinated by Granger in Belgium but includes sub-corpora compiled in 17 different
countries (see www.fltr.ucl.ac.be/fltr/germ/etan/cecl/Cecl-Projects/Icle/icle.htm).
The HKUST Learner Corpus is an example of a large corpus consisting of a particular
type of text from one site, the writing of Cantonese-speaking undergraduates at the
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Milton & Chowdhury, 1994). An
example of an individual project is given in Reppen (2001), who describes a collection
of writing by fifth grade Navajo first language (L1) students and native speakers,
compiled by Reppen and Grabe, used as a component in the analysis of the discourse
of fifth-grade students.
Learner corpora are often used for studies that compare learners’ language with
that of native speakers. These studies can identify areas of difficulty for learners or
sources of misunderstandings between learners and native speakers. For example,
Cheng and Warren (2000) report preliminary findings comparing non-native speak-
ers and native speakers of English in interactions in Hong Kong. Among their findings
is that the non-native speakers and native speakers tend to use tag questions and dis-
course markers for different pragmatic functions, and that the non-native speakers
use vague language in inappropriate ways—inappropriate because the interlocutor
shows confusion over the vagueness. They, thus, identify areas contributing to misun-
derstanding and difficulty in the interactions between non-native and native speakers.
This is just one example in an area of study where, again, the variety of analyses is
great. For example, Hyland and Milton (1997) compare NS and learners’ use of ex-
pressions to convey doubt and certainty; Flowerdew (2003) analyzes lexical features of
Problem–Solution texts and their rhetorical associations; Virtanen (1998) investigates
the use of direct questions in argumentative student writing; and Petch-Tyson (2000)
concentrates on demonstrative expressions. The characteristics of the learners studied
varies, although most studies cover learners of at least an intermediate proficiency
level.
In addition to increasing our understanding of learners’ language use, the com-
parison between a learner corpus and native speaker corpus can also have useful
pedagogical applications. Flowerdew (1998) finds that such a comparison helps re-
fine teaching so that courses cover not just the most frequent items in a native-speaker
corpus, but those causing the most difficulty for students. She describes such as ap-
plication for EAP writing and the teaching of cause/effect markers.
Studies of learner corpora also often include comparisons of different learner
groups with different first languages, contributing to our ability to distinguish be-
tween more universal interlanguage developmental patterns and more L1-influenced
development. For example, Ringbom (1998) compares vocabulary use in essays by
seven Western European groups included in the International Corpus of Learner
English, and in general finds few L1 transfer errors. However, the underuse of multi-
functional prepositions by Finns (such as with, by, and at) may be attributable to the
fact that in Finnish these prepositions would be expressed by case endings.
404 CONRAD

Corpus studies also provide the means for replicating or expanding studies that
were done earlier with smaller data collections. An interesting example is a study by
Tono (2000). He analyzes morpheme accuracy in a 300,000-word corpus of written
texts by Japanese L1 ESL learners, comparing the results to those found in the early
morpheme studies with Chinese and Spanish L1 learners, based on the Bilingual
Syntax Measure (Dulay & Burt, 1974). He finds that articles and plural -s appear to be
later acquired and possessive -s earlier acquired than in the previous study. Certain
variables remain to be teased apart—most important, spoken versus written orders
of acquisition, in addition to the effect of the L1—but the potential for corpus-based
studies and computer-assisted analysis tools is clear: the ability to conduct studies
with new, naturalistic data from large numbers of learners and compare the results to
previous findings.
Finally, it is also important to note the emergence of what may be the next gen-
eration of corpora, which will expand our ability to study learner language in the
classroom: a multimedia corpus of language classrooms. The Multimedia Adult ESOL
Learner Corpus is a 5-year project videotaping four low-level, adult ESL classes (Reder,
Harris, & Setzler, in press). The final corpus will contain approximately 5,000 hours
of classroom language, involving roughly 1,000 learners. Video and audio for all the
hours of instruction will be stored digitally, with parts of the corpus transcribed and
coded for certain pedagogical criteria (for example, the type of participation pattern—
teacher-fronted, student-fronted, pairwork, groupwork, free movement, individual).
Although still in its early stages, the project will soon offer many opportunities for
studies of learner development over time and comparisons of language used during
different types of class activities. Unlike previous corpora, the transcribed data will
remain linked to the visual recordings of the classroom, making more contextualized
analyses possible. Already the corpus has proved useful for professional development
activities for teachers (Kurzet, 2000).

CONCLUSION

Corpus linguistics is a young specialization within applied linguistics. Although, as

I argue in this chapter, it has already begun to contribute to L2 teaching and our
understanding of L2 learning, I see several pressing needs if it is to meet its potential
usefulness. I conclude by considering the five most important needs.
First is the need for more empirical studies of the impact of using corpus materials
and techniques in the classroom. As noted in the previous description, much of the
published work on corpus linguistics has been by teachers describing activities that
they thought were helpful for their students. Although teachers’ experiences are not
to be disregarded, we need principled studies that seek to discover how best to exploit
corpus activities, to determine whether currently used activities are a greater aid to
acquisition than are more traditional activities, and even simply to describe what
learners do as they perform corpus analysis activities. (Many of the issues raised by
Chapelle, 2001, for the more general fields of computer-assisted language learning
and computer-assisted second language acquisition research also apply to corpus
linguistics.)
Second, we need more empirical studies of corpora themselves to determine how
to represent varieties of language. Larger and larger corpora are becoming possi-
ble with new computer technology, but time and money are still limited even when
computer storage space is not. Learning more about the most effective size and sam-
pling techniques will make results from corpus studies not only more generalizable,
but will also allow the compilers of corpora to use their time and resources most
efficiently.
 22. CORPUS LINGUISTICS 405

Third, more corpora—and especially corpora of different varieties—need to be com-

piled and made available widely. As previously noted, learners in different contexts
may well have different targets, and a more diverse collection of corpora from which
to choose is more likely to meet the needs of more teachers and learners through-
out the world. Because corpus compilation is a lengthy, often expensive process
(particularly with spoken and video corpora that must be transcribed and digitized),
it is sometimes sponsored by private, commercial companies. Such private ownership
can make the corpus inaccessible to those outside the company. This is not to say that
the development of privately owned corpora should not be maintained, but widely
available corpora are also crucial.
In addition to more corpora, there is a critical need for more computer program-
mers in corpus linguistics. Most of the work reviewed here relied on concordancing
because concordancers are the most widely available software. However, numerous
interesting features of language are too complex to analyze with a concordancer.
Many descriptions (for example, those in the reference grammar by Biber et al.,
1999) required other software, including interactive programs written by the research
team. Until more corpus linguists are programming for themselves or more versatile
programs are widely available, severe constraints on corpus studies are inevitable.
However, few courses in computer programming for applied linguistics are currently
offered.
Finally, within corpus linguistics, we need an increase in second language acqui-
sition studies. One of the limitations of many previous SLA studies has been a small
number of participants, a small number of language groups represented, or a short
time period for the study. Corpus linguistics, if fully exploited, can provide means to
get beyond these limitations. An increase in learner corpora and more individualized
software programs should facilitate corpus studies and make possible more complex
studies than were previously possible with large databases—including analyses such
as tracking learners’ development of form–function associations or comparing the de-
velopment of numerous learners over several years, as well as cross-sectional studies
with a large number of learners from numerous language groups.
If these developments take place, corpus linguistics will likely have an even greater
influence on L2 teaching in the future. Controversies over its applications will no
doubt continue as well and continue to serve a useful purpose in forcing corpus
linguists to clarify this approach and refine ideas and techniques. It seems likely that
corpus linguistics will continue to grow in popularity, given the tremendous increase
in publications and presentations over the past 15 years by both researchers and
teachers. Already corpus linguistics is providing new perspectives on language in
use and new techniques for teaching it.

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410
IV

Second Language Processes

and Development

411
412
Introduction

In the research on how second and foreign languages (L2/FL) are learned, the system-
atization of knowledge has resulted in relatively well-defined venues of investigation.
Although many, if not most, studies do not exclusively confine themselves to a par-
ticular area of L2/FL learning and acquisition, the great advancements in our current
understanding of language processes and development have led to increasingly nar-
rowing foci of research areas. For instance, while the study of vocabulary learning
has much to contribute to that of learning to read in an L2/FL, increasing knowledge
about L2 vocabulary development has resulted in a burgeoning body of research that
does not necessarily seek to establish direct connections between L2 vocabulary ac-
quisition and L2 reading. The progressively specialized foci of L2/FL research venues
are certainly not unique to the study of language learning processes, but rather, they
represent a hallmark of any maturing discipline that has progressed sufficiently to
move beyond the frontier.
A number of disadvantages can accompany a dramatic growth in the body of
knowledge: (1) If in the early days of L2/FL study it was possible to become well
versed in any domain of L2 development within a few years, at the present, the
amount of time it takes to attain expertise in L2 knowledge has extended beyond a
decade of active engagement in research and publishing. In this regard, the study of
L2 processes has merely become similar to other established data-driven disciplines
(Simon, 1981/1996). (2) The journals that publish L2/FL research can number in the
dozens, and a few dozen publishers in various countries produce over a hundred
books each year. The sheer amount of published research has made it work- and time-
consuming to stay current in the field. (3) The coverage of important areas in L2/FL
research or even making decisions about which domains are important has become a
difficult and highly subjective task.
Although the ever-expanding number of publications speaks to the advancements
of knowledge about L2/FL development, it is safe to say that at the present time
relatively little is known about exactly how second languages are learned. Researchers
and teachers alike have come to recognize that the processes of L2/FL learning and
acquisition are enormously complex, but it is not possible to say with any degree of
certainty what these processes are, how they singly or in combination influence the
rate or success of language learning, and what contributing roles particular factors
play in language development. The issues that confounded early L2/FL researchers
to a great extent have not been resolved, and many questions continue to remain
unanswered. For example:
r Why are some individuals better learners than others?
r What factors in effect describe “a good language learner” and what characteristics
do “good learners” share?
r What is the role of aptitude in L2 learning and what role does the motivation
play?
413
414 PART IV: L2 PROCESSES AND DEVELOPMENT
r What is the role of L1 literacy in L2 learning or in learning to become literate in
L2?
r Is explicit teaching more effective than implicit teaching or is it the other way
round?
r Does explicit L2 teaching lead to higher language proficiency?
r Why do some learners attain high proficiencies in particular L2/FL skills and
others do not?
r What types of learners are more likely to benefit from instruction in what specific
L2/FL skills?

In some sense, these and other similar questions cannot be answered indepen-
dently, and in order to find an answer to any one or two of them, a set of addi-
tional puzzles would need to be solved. For instance, some studies have shown that
intelligence plays a crucial role in aptitude for language (e.g., Carroll, 1981). How-
ever, research conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s was based on instructed
L2 learning that centered on the analytic teaching techniques different from those
in the audiolingual or naturalistic methods for L2 teaching. Hence, it was not pos-
sible to tell whether it was the learners’ intelligence or the teaching method that
led to substantial learning gains. Similarly, research has pointed to the connections
between extraversion or introversion and language learning aptitude and that ex-
traverts usually make good language learners due to their preferences for interac-
tion (e.g., Chastain, 1975). However, in light of the fact that anywhere between 75%
and 83% of the general population are extraverts (Nunnally, 1975; Perkins, 1985), it
seems unlikely that such a high proportion of people can have high language learning
abilities.
Over the past several decades, L2/FL research has made a large number of claims
regarding L2/FL learning processes and development, but most remain vague and to
a large extent unsubstantiated. Put simply, the study of L2/FL brings to mind the old
truism that the more we know, the more we realize how much we don’t know, and at
this point in time, we do not know a great deal (although many individual researchers
might adamantly dispute this).
A Caveat Emptor. The coverage of L2/FL processes and development in Part IV
is incomplete and idiosyncratic, as all similar overviews would be and probably are.
The chapters included here consist of two distinct and interconnected clusters: those
devoted to mental, cognitive, and learning processes and those that deal with the
research on the learning and acquisition of specific L2 skills. As far as the attainment
of incremental L2 skills is concerned, it may be difficult to consider, for example,
a learner’s age, cognitive abilities, and other language learning factors separately
from his or her success (or failure) in learning to speak, comprehend, read, and write
in L2. In addition, in recent decades many studies of L2/FL learning of what are
commonly known as “the four skills” (i.e., speaking, listening, reading, and writing)
have become far more cognitively oriented than they used to be in the days of the
disciplinary frontier, and research has made important inroads in identifying the role
of psychological factors in attaining proficiency in various facets of L2 learning.
The chapters in Part IV cover the following aspects of L2 learning:
r Chapter 23, by Georgette Ioup, reviews research that supports or refutes the
existence of the critical period in L2 learning and acquisition. This chapter discusses
the individual variables that deal with the source of age differences, such as the natu-
ral decline in learning ability with normal aging, environmental factors, the motiva-
tional/attitudinal disposition of the learner, crosslinguistic factors, and the learner’s
aptitude for language learning. Although these variables can influence the degree to
which late learners reach their full potential, they cannot fully explain why, given the
 PART IV: L2 PROCESSES AND DEVELOPMENT 415

same conditions for L2 acquisition, the amount of variability has been noted among
various learners, and why, in the best of circumstances, the full potential of most adult
acquisition falls short of nativelike attainment. The explanation may lie in the fact that
fundamental differences exist between child and adult language learning.
r Chapter 24, by Robert DeKeyser and Alan Juffs, reviews research on the role of
cognition (i.e., the acquisition and use of knowledge) in L2 learning. The main issues
examined in the chapter have to do with how people come to know elements of or
about L2 and how they use what they know. DeKeyser and Juffs explain that the
multiplicity of answers to both questions can be found in literature and that some
learners acquire some specific L2 knowledge explicitly and others implicitly. The
distinction between the two types of learners lie in such complex constructs as less
structured, formulaic knowledge specific to L2, knowledge transferred from L1, and
perhaps access to Universal Grammar (UG). When L2 learners use this knowledge,
their actual behavior is even more multifaceted. The discussion focuses on various
kinds of knowledge sources and uses in L2 to highlight what seems well established
and what remains unknown or controversial.
r Chapter 25, by ZhaoHong Han and Larry Selinker, examines the phenomenon
termed fossilization by Selinker in 1972. Research on fossilization represents an at-
tempt to account for the observation that the vast majority of adult second language
learners fail to achieve native-speaker target-language competence. Fossilization im-
plies that both a cognitive mechanism and performance-related structures and forms
in L2 production that remain in learner interlanguage over time. Han and Selinker
explain that fossilizable structures are persistent, resistant to external influences, and
independent of learners’ ages, that is, it affects both child and adult L2 learners alike.
These factors strongly imply that most L2 learners lack the ability to attain nativelike
competence, regardless of their effort. It is for this reason that this strong hypothesis
for all learners has caused much interest in fossilization and has drawn the attention
of many second language researchers and practitioners.
r Chapter 26, by Merrill Swain, explores the Output Hypothesis, which stipulates
that the act of producing language (speaking or writing) constitutes part of the process
of second language learning. In fact, the processes involved in producing language can
be quite different than those involved in comprehending language. The input hypoth-
esis has claimed that there was only one necessary and sufficient condition for second
language acquisition, and that was the presence of comprehensible input. However,
results of many studies of immersion students showed clearly that input alone was in-
sufficient for learners to attain nativelike L2 proficiency. Alternative explanations were
sought, and one explanation was the output hypothesis. Swain outlines three func-
tions of output in second language learning: 1) the noticing/triggering function, 2)
the hypothesis-testing function, and 3) the metalinguistic/reflective function. The
most significant new contribution of studying output and language production is its
importance as a cognitive tool in L2 learning and acquisition research.
r Chapter 27, by Elaine Tarone, reviews research on speaking in a second language.
Learner speech can be analyzed from the point of view of form or function. Formal
aspects of the second language that the learner must produce orally are described
in terms of the sounds of the language, morphology and syntax of the language,
discourse markers of the language, and lexis. However, when the learner speaks,
there is a system evidenced in the form of what is spoken: a system with its own
formal rules of phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and discourse patterns. This
system does not conform exactly to the rules of the target language as spoken by
native speakers of the target language, nor does it conform exactly to the rules of the
speaker’s native language. To communicate effectively, language learners must learn
more than just the linguistic form of the second language, but they must also learn
how to use those forms to fulfill a variety of functions. Learners’ production of oral
416 PART IV: L2 PROCESSES AND DEVELOPMENT

discourse for functions has identified interactional, transactional, and ludic speech
functions reviewed in the chapter.
r Chapter 28, by Mike Rost, reviews L2 listening as a complex cognitive process
that encompasses receptive, constructive, and interpretive aspects of cognition, which
are utilized in both first and second language listening. In L2 development, in many
cases, direct intervention is considered necessary because the learner is acquiring a
second language after cognitive processing skills in the L1 have been established. L2
listening constitutes not only a skill area in performance, but also a primary means of
acquiring a second language. As a goal-oriented activity, listening involves bottom-
up processing, in which the listener attends to data in the incoming speech signals
as well as top-down processing, in which the listener utilizes prior knowledge and
expectations to guide the process of understanding. While L1 and L2 listening utilize
the same basic underlying neurological processes that take place in the same parts of
the brain, there are important developmental and functional differences between L1
and L2 listening.
r Chapter 29, by Terence Wiley, discusses the numerous thorny issues in second
language literacy and biliteracy. Wiley foregrounds some of the major points and
ideological tensions in the broader field of literacy studies that are directly relevant to
the study of second language literacy and biliteracy. In the United States, as well as
in many other countries, there is often considerable confusion in popular discourse
regarding the extent of literacy and illiteracy among language minorities. Second
language literacy and biliteracy may be approached from individual, community,
societal, and crossnational perspectives. For language minorities, second language
literacy/biliteracy is vital to have access to employment and to the social, political,
and economic life of the prevailing society as well as in their local communities.
Understanding both the distribution of literacy and access to equitable educational
programs are particularly important because many language minorities do not have
immediate access to literacy and schooling in their own languages.
r Chapter 30, by Patricia Byrd, reviews the teaching of English grammar that
often bridges the foundations of theory and data about grammar, second language
acquisition (SLA), and classroom teachers’ beliefs and practices about teaching gram-
mar. Byrd’s broad-based approach shows how much shifting and change in grammar
teaching has already occurred and suggests that other more or less continuous shifts
can be certainly expected in the future. The two prevalent approaches in grammar
instruction remain, in the United States, variations on Chomskyan transformational-
generative grammar with its emphasis on underlying psychological processes and
systems and the “language-in-use” focus of corpus linguistics and of other approaches
to discourse analysis. The chapter discusses the forces that currently influence schol-
arship and practice in the teaching of grammar and the choices that can be made for
effective, principled integration of grammar into curricula and lessons.
r Chapter 31, by David Eskey, takes the view that for L2 learners, reading may be
both a means to the end of acquiring the language and an end in itself, as an essential
skill. While many EFL students may rarely speak the L2 in their day-to-day lives, they
may need to read it in order to access the wealth of information recorded exclusively
in the language. Eskey explores the differences between learning to read in an L1 or L2
to emphasize that, unlike speaking skills that can be acquired naturally in L2 settings,
literacy and reading must be taught because all writing systems are language-based
and share some fundamental characteristics. Research suggests that teaching reading
strategies can have positive effects on the reading performance of secondlanguage
learners. According to Eskey, the issue is not just what strategies can be used and
how to use them, but when to use them and for what purpose. In dealing with real
texts, the issue is always what problems the text is creating for the reader and what
strategies he or she might employ to address and solve these problems.
 PART IV: L2 PROCESSES AND DEVELOPMENT 417
r Chapter 32, by Paul Nation, explores L2 vocabulary learning and points out that
the task facing a learner is partly determined by the nature of vocabulary in general,
and by the particular nature of English vocabulary. A substantial part of the difficulty
of learning a word (its learning burden) depends on whether these aspects of an
L2 word are similar to its L1 translation or are regular and predictable from already
known L2 words of similar or related meaning. Vocabulary teaching is usually seen as
teaching words. A major aim of Nation’s chapter is to show that vocabulary teaching
should have different foci when learners move from high-frequency to low-frequency
vocabulary learning. In addition, vocabulary instruction must ensure that there is
a balance of opportunities to learn from meaning-focused input, language-focused
learning, meaning-focused output, and fluency development, and that vocabulary
learning occurs within a well-planned vocabulary program.
r Chapter 33, by John Hedgcock, explores a great deal of research on L2 writing,
which entails a spectrum of theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical developments.
Hedgcock examines two significant and related influences that are likely to affect the
focus of research and pedagogy as the L2 writing community shapes its future agenda.
The first of these involves social constructionism, whereas the second concerns an in-
creasingly critical approach to scholarship and pedagogy among the field’s experts.
Given the increasing influence of socioculturally oriented approaches to L2 literacy,
a number of research venues seem to be valuable and profitable, and a few of these
include: the L2 writer, the L2 writer’s texts, the contexts for L2 writing, and the dy-
namic interaction among these components in authentic contexts for writing. These
primary themes will provide the chapter framework that encompasses theoretical and
empirical strands, as well as the central pedagogical issues.
r Chapter 34, by Eli Hinkel, takes a look at the analyses of L2 text. Three large
domains of research focus on various properties of L2 written text: structuring of the
information flow; syntactic, lexical, and rhetorical features of L2 text; and L2 grammar
and lexical errors. Numerous studies have examined discoursal, lexical, syntactic, and
rhetorical properties of L2 writing of speakers of dozens of languages. Investigations
into L2 text have identified the important and significant differences that exist between
L1 and L2 writing. Some of these differences stem from divergent written discourse
paradigms valued in various rhetorical traditions and often transferred from L1 to
L2, for example, discourse organization and information structuring, cohesion, co-
herence, and clarity. Other crucial factors that confound L2 writing and text have to
do with shortfalls of writers’ language proficiencies and restricted linguistic repertoire
that significantly undermine L2 writers’ ability to produce high-quality texts. Many
researchers of L2 learning and development have emphasized that even school-age
children or highly educated adult L2 learners require years of language training to
attain the levels of proficiency necessary to create effective written prose.

REFERENCES

Carroll, J. (1981). Twenty-five years of research on foreign language aptitude. In K. Diller (Ed.), Individual
differences and universals in language learning aptitude (pp. 83–118). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Chastain, K. (1975). Affective and ability factors in second language acquisition. Language Learning, 25(1),
153–161.
Nunnally, J. C. (1975). Introduction to statistics for psychology and education. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Perkins, D. N. (1985). General cognitive skills: Why not thinking and learning skills? Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Simon, H. 1981/1996. The science of the artificial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
418
23

Age in Second Language

Development
Georgette Ioup
University of New Orleans

Consider the members of a hypothetical family that emigrate to a new country, set-
tling in a community where no one speaks their language. Further imagine that this
extended family covers an age range from 2 to 50, and that every member becomes
fully integrated into the daily life of the new community. Most people when asked
the probability that any member of this hypothetical family would become indis-
tinguishable from a native speaker in ten years would give responses that form
a descending curve, from 100% for the 2-year-old to 0% for the 50-year-old. Most
likely the curve would descend gradually and level off near the age of 20. Do these
common assumptions correspond with actual findings on age and second language
learning?
In language acquisition theory the concept of a time frame for optimal acquisition
of a language is known as the critical period hypothesis (CPH). It was first postulated
by Lenneberg in 1967 with an onset of 2 years of age and a close at puberty. Lenneberg
hypothesized that a decline in ability to acquire a natural language at puberty resulted
from the end of neural plasticity and thus the completion of hemispheric lateraliza-
tion in the human brain. Language learning after the close of the critical period would
result in incomplete acquisition. Another way of stating the effect of a critical period is
to say that after its close, ultimate attainment will be deficient in some way. Lenneberg
drew major evidence for his hypothesis from data on recovery from aphasia (language
loss) after major brain trauma, as well as acquisition patterns among the congenitally
deaf and Down syndrome children. Recovery from aphasia is directly tied to the age
at which the trauma occurs. Thus, children whose brain injuries resulted in language
loss are likely to regain normal speech while adults are not so fortunate. Further-
more, only deaf individuals who had hearing restored before puberty appeared to
achieve normal language acquisition. Lenneberg derived additional support for his
position from the observed difficulty in second language learning after the onset of
puberty.
Since his initial postulation of the CPH, several questions have plagued researchers.
First, has an attested difference in ultimate attainment actually been observed when

419
420 IOUP

the acquisition onset (AO) occurs after the close of the critical period? Second, if there
is a difference, what causes it? Is it the result of neurobiological maturational factors, or
something else? Third, are there any particular aspects of language learning behavior
that are affected by late AO? And fourth, how, if at all, does language learning aptitude
influence outcomes either before or after the close of the critical period?
In what follows, I will review the studies that attempt to support or refute the critical
period, then discuss the individual variables that have been suggested as the source
of age differences: the natural decline in learning ability with normal aging, environ-
mental factors such as amount of input available to the learner or access to instruction,
the motivational/attitudinal disposition of the learner, crosslinguistic factors, and fi-
nally, the learner’s aptitude for language learning. I will argue that although these
variables can influence the degree to which late learners reach their full potential, they
cannot explain why, given the same conditions, there is so much variability, and why,
in the best of circumstances, the full potential of most adult acquisition falls short of
nativelike attainment. With the exception of aptitude, these individual variables are
viewed as necessary but not sufficient to ensure nativelike outcomes. The explanation
this chapter puts forth is that there is a fundamental difference between child and adult
language learning (Bley-Vroman, 1989). Children possess an ability that is lost in most
adults—the ability to intuit the rule structure of the language without paying atten-
tion to it (Schmidt, 1983, p. 172). Nevertheless, a small number of adults do appear to
realize near-native attainment, and only the variable of aptitude can ultimately shed
light on how they are different.

THE CRITICAL PERIOD AND FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Most researchers agree that there is a critical period for mother tongue or first lan-
guage (L1) learning. Evidence from feral children who have been reintegrated into
society and deaf children after their first exposure to sign language makes it clear
that normal first language acquisition does not occur after a fixed age. Such children
who have first exposure to language input in early childhood seem to achieve normal
language acquisition while those who begin later come nowhere near native ultimate
attainment. The most extensively studied case of feral language acquisition is that of
Genie (Curtiss, 1977). Genie was discovered after the onset of puberty, having endured
an abusive, silent childhood. Even after extensive tutoring by linguistic specialists,
she was not able to gain the rule-structured dimensions of language (phonology, mor-
phology, and syntax), although her vocabulary acquisition flourished.
However, since feral children have psychological issues with which to contend that
might give rise to learning disabilities, it is more insightful to examine L1 acquisition
in the congenitally deaf. Two case studies of language acquisition in deaf adults who
had hearing restored upon being fitted with hearing aids after reaching puberty, give
results similar to that of Genie. Chelsea (Curtiss, 1994) was fitted with hearing aids in
her 30s, and EM (Grimshaw, Adelstein, Bryden, & MacKinnon, 1998) at age 15. Both
exhibited severe structural deficits in the little language they were able to acquire.
Extensive research comparing onset ages of American Sign Language (ASL) and at-
tained proficiency comes to the same conclusion. Newport (1990) examined three
groups of adults who had been using ASL for over 30 years: one group was exposed
to ASL in infancy, one group had first exposure between ages 4 and 6, and one group
first acquired ASL after age 12. Using morphological criteria, she found a negative
correlation with age at first exposure to ASL among the three groups, confirming
age constraints on L1 acquisition. (For excellent reviews of this and other evidence
supporting a critical period for L1 acquisition, see Long, 1990; Harley & Wang, 1997;
Hyltenstam & Abrahamsson, 2000.)
 23. AGE IN SECOND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT 421

Critical Period Closure

Opinions vary on the age of closure for a critical period. Several large-scale studies of
L2 learners note a difference in performance occurring in the teen years. Patkowski
(1980) and Johnson and Newport (1989) set the cutoff point in the mid to late teens.
However, a study by Mayberry (1993) of L1 learners suggests that the optimal period
closes much earlier. Mayberry compared the L1 and L2 acquisition of ASL at differ-
ent ages. Her subjects fall into four groups—three L1 groups who were congenitally
deaf from birth and one L2 group. The three L1 groups were classified as follows:
native signers who were exposed to ASL from their deaf parents, 2) childhood learn-
ers whose first exposure occurred between the ages of 5 and 8 when they entered
a residential school for the deaf, and late acquirers who began ASL between ages
9 and 13. The L2 group lost hearing after they had already acquired a well-established
spoken language, between the ages of 9 and 15. Subjects were tested on their ability
to comprehend and reproduce long, complicated sentences. The childhood ASL on-
set did not perform like the infant learners, but rather were more similar to the late
onset L2 signers, sometimes not even as good. These findings suggest that an onset
of acquisition beyond the age of 5 is too late to achieve native proficiency in L1, and
that the close of the critical period may be much earlier than previously thought. The
study by Newport (1990) adds further support to an earlier terminus; her childhood
ASL learners did not perform as well as the infant learners.
Additional evidence for an earlier closure comes from studies of child L2 learners.
Mack (1998), investigating the perception of English vowels by Korean/English bilin-
guals, found that nativelike performance correlated with an age earlier than puberty.
Subjects were divided into two groups based on their age of arrival in the United
States (0-3 and 4-7) and were compared to native speakers. When they were asked to
discriminate /i/ from /I/ and /u/ from /U/ (distinctions not made in Korean) in
computer-synthesized continua of these pairs, only those who had first exposure to
English before age 4 performed as the native speakers did. Additional variables such
as length of exposure or degree of Korean proficiency did not strongly correlate with
task accuracy. Other large-scale studies discovered slight accents in learners whose
first exposure occurred before age 10 (Flege, Frieda, & Nozawa, 1997; Oyama, 1976,
1978; Thompson, 1991; Yeni-Komshian, & Liu, 1997).
Testing in the areas of syntax and semantics also uncovered prepuberty learners
who did not match native-speaker performance (Hyltenstam, 1992; Johnson & New-
port, 1989). A study by Ioup (1989) documented both syntactic and semantic deficits
in university-level subjects who had immigrated between the ages of 6 and 10 and
who had 10 years or more of exposure.
Several researchers have proposed the existence of multiple critical periods, each
governing a different component of language. One of the first was Seliger (1978) who
argued that plasticity in the language portions of the brain terminated according to dif-
ferent schedules, phonology being the first to close. Other researchers who expanded
on this idea were Long (1990) and Eubank and Gregg (1999). Long suggested that the
critical period for phonology closed at age 6, while those for morphology and syntax
terminated near puberty. The acquisition of lexical semantics may remain available
throughout an individual’s life span.

MULTIPLE DEFINITIONS OF A CRITICAL PERIOD HYPOTHESIS

There is much less agreement on the applicability of the CPH to second language
acquisition (L2). Some researchers argue that once a mother tongue is acquired, the
cognitive mechanisms that allow for language acquisition are still intact and that from
422 IOUP

a neurological perspective second language acquisition is just as possible. Johnson and

Newport (1989) describe this position as the exercise hypothesis. Once the language
learning mechanism has been exercised, it remains available. Birdsong (1999) refers
to this as the “use it or lose it” approach to the critical period. Others argue that the
neurocognitive mechanisms of language acquisition become defective by the close of
the critical period so that nativelike attainment in both L1 and L2 cannot occur after
that point. Johnson and Newport label this view of the critical period as the matu-
rational constraint hypothesis. The language acquisition mechanism deteriorates at
a certain point in development causing further language acquisition to be less than
optimal. Birdsong refers to this approach as the “use it then lose it” view of the critical
period. Only the second definition predicts difficulty in adult L2 acquisition.
There is also disagreement on whether the biological time frame should be labeled
a critical period since many claim that the term implies an abrupt closure (see Bialystok
& Miller, 1999). The term sensitive period, which assumes a gradual decline in ability,
has been suggested as more appropriate. Oyama (1979) and Long (1990) both point
out that the critical period offset in animal species may also be gradual and variable;
therefore, the terms critical and sensitive are often used interchangeably to describe
a biologically determined developmental window of opportunity. I will continue to
refer to this time frame as the critical period since it is the more commonly used term.

Is There Evidence for a Critical Period in L2?

Early support for a critical period in L2 acquisition is found in studies by Asher
and Garcia (1969), Oyama (1976, 1978), and Patkowski (1980) comparing L2 acquir-
ers with varying AOs to native speakers. Asher and Garcia assessed the accents of
71 Cuban learners of English and found that those who entered the United States at
age 6 or earlier had the highest probability of being judged nativelike. Oyama tested
60 Italian-born immigrants to the United States whose AO was 6 to 20 years and who
had a length of residence (LOR) from 5 to 18 years, comparing their performance to
native-speaking controls. Subjects were rated by native-speaker judges on perceived
accent (1976) then tested on their ability to comprehend sentences through white noise
(1978). Only those who began L2 acquisition before age 10 performed in the range of
the native-speaking controls.
Patkowski (1980) investigated the acquisition of syntax by assessing 67 immigrants
from a variety of language backgrounds who were grouped into those arriving before
and after age 15. Results again correlated negatively with age with all but one subject
in the younger AO group scoring at a native-speaker level. Subjects in the older AO
group produced a normal distribution curve with a few very poor performers, a few
scoring very well, but most performing in the midrange. Patkowski concluded that
the difference in the distributional function for the two groups provided evidence for
a maturationally defined critical period. In the area of pronunciation, since these early
studies, other research has documented similar age effects, but not all have been in
full agreement as to the source of the age differences.
Until the early 1990s, studies of late arrivals tended to support the critical period
hypothesis. Some studies compared adult acquirers to native speakers while others
compared child and adult acquirers. One of the most widely cited studies is that of
Johnson and Newport (1989). The study examined Korean and Chinese L2 learners
of English who had migrated to the United States between the ages of 3 and 39.
Half were early arrivals who came before the age of 15; the others were late arrivals
who migrated after age 17. Subjects were asked to evaluate the grammaticality of
276 orally presented sentences that exemplified 12 morphological and syntactic con-
structions, counterbalanced between grammatical and ungrammatical items. Overall
results correlated negatively with AO; however, age was relevant only before age 15,
 23. AGE IN SECOND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT 423

as the late learners’ scores were randomly dispersed. Performance was within the
range of native controls until age 7, declined linearly, but was still high until age 15,
and exhibited no well-defined linear age effects in the adult acquirers. The authors
concluded, therefore, that there was a maturational constraint on L2 acquisition.
Johnson (1992) replicated the Johnson and Newport (1989) study using an untimed
written format. Again, subjects were Korean and Chinese. She found a weaker rela-
tionship between age and outcomes, with late arrivals performing in the range of the
8-15 year olds. Johnson attributed the difference to the advantage that time and the
written format gave the subjects. Nevertheless, her results still exhibited an overall
negative correlation between age of arrival and performance. Liu, Bates, and Li (1992)
examined L2 sentence processing by Chinese learners of English. Subjects who be-
gan learning English before age 16 utilized the same strategies as the monolingual
controls, whereas those who began learning after age 20 employed Chinese-based
processing strategies.
Scovel (1988) presented convincing data from several studies to support a terminus
at puberty for the ability to lose a foreign accent. Patkowski (1990) tested the same
subjects who had participated in his 1980 study, this time on the relationship between
age and degree of perceived accent. The results were similar to those found in the 1980
study in that there was a similar negative correlation with age and a discontinuity in
the curve.
Several of the studies from this period restricted the investigation to learners
who had achieved a near-native level of language competency. One of the first was
Coppieters (1987). The study examined 21 very highly proficient second language
speakers of French who had begun learning the L2 as adults and who were per-
ceived by native speakers to be nativelike. The study had two parts, a grammati-
cality judgment test on subtle points of French grammar, and individual interviews
with the author where generalizations governing the grammatical points tested were
elicited. On the grammaticality judgment portion of the study, near-native speakers
differed significantly from native speakers in their assessment of which sentences
were correct. More important, the near-native speakers diverged from native speak-
ers on the types of grammatical explanations they offered for the subtle rule-governed
contrasts.
Sorace (1993) elicited grammaticality judgments from 20 L1 French and 24 L1 En-
glish near-native learners of Italian. Her study was restricted to the acquisition of
auxiliary constructions in Italian. Like Coppieters, Sorace found the near-natives’ in-
tuitions of grammaticality to be substantially different from native-speaker controls.
The French-speaking subjects exhibited divergence while the English-speaking sub-
jects exhibited incompleteness.
Hyltenstam (1992) also limited his investigation to L2 learners who were judged to
be nativelike; however, his study differed in that it examined only learners who had
begun acquisition before puberty. Subjects were 24 adolescent bilinguals ages 17–18
who were enrolled in Swedish secondary schools. Half had Spanish as their L1 and
half were native speakers of Finnish. Only subjects who were identified as nativelike
in both phonology and syntax by their teachers were selected for the study. A second
criterion was that they should be active bilinguals who used their native language
on a regular basis. A demographically matched group of native speakers served as
controls. Bilinguals were divided in to two groups, those who arrived on or before
age 6 and those who arrived between age 7 and puberty.
Subjects were asked to retell orally four prepared texts and provide a written com-
position commenting on a silent film. The analysis consisted of counting the num-
ber of errors made by each subject. Although the frequency of error was low for all
groups, there was a significant difference in the performance of the bilinguals and
monolinguals. Hyltenstam found that the late childhood arrivals’ performance was
424 IOUP

in complementary distribution with that of the native speakers. On the other hand,
the error totals of early childhood arrivals sometimes matched those of the late ar-
rivals and sometimes those of the native speakers. He also found that certain types of
errors were only made by the bilingual subjects. He concluded that late childhood L2
learners do not attain an L1 level of ultimate attainment, even in those cases where the
bilingual is perceived to be a native speaker in casual encounters with a monolingual.
Whether or not early childhood L2 learners achieved native ultimate attainment may
depend on external factors such as the frequency or intensity of L2 use.

MATURATION AND THE ACCESSIBILITY

OF UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR

A further line of inquiry in studies from the pre-1990 period investigated whether the
principles and parameters of Universal Grammar (UG) that constrain L1 acquisition
(Chomsky, 1981) are available to the second language learner. The question is whether
L2 learners still have access to these principles and parameters. Several studies investi-
gated the acquisition of the UG principle of subjacency1 by adult learners whose native
language did not manifest this principle. The findings were that adult acquirers did
not perform like native speakers. Bley-Vroman, Felix, and Ioup (1988) determined
that their adult-onset Korean learners averaged 75% accuracy on a grammaticality
judgment measure, while native speakers averaged 95% accuracy. The results imply
only partial access to subjacency. On the other hand, Schachter’s (1989) study with
similar subjects indicated a lack of access to subjacency, as her subjects performed at
chance level.
Nevertheless, these results give no information on whether child L2 learners would
acquire the principles and parameters of UG. This gap was filled by a study from
Johnson and Newport (1991) that compared both early and late acquirers on the
principle of subjacency. The study included subjects from four AO groups: 4 to 7,
8 to 13, 14 to 16, and adult, all with Chinese as their L1. Although none of the subjects
performed in the range of native speakers, results indicated an effect for age of arrival.
The curve declined until early adulthood onsets at which point performance was at
chance level, providing further evidence for maturational constraints.
A study by Hilles (1991) testing the UG principle of Morphological Unity2 with a
small number of Spanish-speaking learners of English also obtained child/adult dif-
ferences. Subjects were two children, two adolescents, and two adults in the early
stages of L2 acquisition. The study utilized longitudinal data covering a period of
9 months. Only the two children and one of the adolescents followed an acquisition
sequence guided by the Morphological Unity Principle. This study provides no infor-
mation on their ultimate attainment, but does give insight into the ability of learners
with differing onset ages to utilize the principles of Universal Grammar.
Young-Scholten (1994) examined the ability of adult L2 learners to access UG in
the domain of phonology, namely, the ability to reset syllabification parameters when
the new language required it. Using data from the L2 acquisition of several L1/L2
language pairs, she concluded that learners may not be able to reset parameters at the
phonological level, but must rely on those set for the L1, especially if the settings of
the target language were a subset of those in the native language and as a result, they
required negative evidence that the L1 settings were not applicable to the L2.

Possible Exceptions to a Critical Period

Until the early 1990s, data-driven research on the critical period gave results that
supported maturational constraints. Long’s (1990) review article set out a case for a
 23. AGE IN SECOND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT 425

biologically defined period constraining language acquisition. He noted that unless

exceptions were found where L2 ultimate attainment after puberty matched native-
speaker competence, the critical period hypothesis should be accepted. However, as
the 1990s progressed, studies began to question the validity of the CPH. A source of
scepticism was the identification of learners who appeared to be exceptions.
Early studies of exceptional learners selected individuals who seemed to have
prodigious language learning ability and then tested them in various neurocogni-
tive domains to see how they differed from the norm (Novoa, Fein, & Obler, 1988;
Schneiderman & Desmarais, 1988). The aim of these studies was to identify the cogni-
tive correlates of language learning talent. Both studies reported exceptional incidental
and verbal memory in their subjects; however, on measures of general intelligence,
performance was in the average range. Ioup et al. (1994) did an in-depth analysis of
two adult learners of Egyptian Arabic on measures of pronunciation quality, ability
to differentiate dialects, grammaticality judgments, and semantic intuitions. The au-
thors found that both subjects were near to or at native performance on all measures,
a surprising result given that one of the subjects was untutored and illiterate in the L2.
One of the first to find near-native attainment in an experimental study was Bird-
song (1992). He critiqued Coppieters’ (1987) study that found gaps in attainment
among near-native speakers of French, then conducted his own study using a gram-
matical judgment test combined with a think-aloud protocol. Fifteen of his subjects fell
within the range of native-speaker performance. White and Genesee (1996) assessed
the ability to acquire subtle properties of Universal Grammar using francophone near-
native speakers of English who began L2 acquisition after puberty. Sixteen of their
subjects exhibited nativelike performance on judgment and production measures.
A study by Bongaerts, Van Summeren, Planken, and Schils (1997) assessed the
accents of highly proficient Dutch late-onset learners of English who had received
extensive instruction in English phonetics. Judges found that many of these learners
were indistinguishable from the native controls. The authors suggested that the results
might be due to the fact that Dutch and English are typologically similar languages.
To see if the results held with typologically dissimilar languages, Bongaerts (1999)
evaluated the accents of highly proficient Dutch late-onset learners of French. Three
subjects performed in the native-speaker range.
Many other studies assess the accents of learners with different ages of acquisition
by using ratings made by native-speaking judges. Accent ratings produce the most
variability across and within studies, and provide the least reliable method of estab-
lishing nativelike performance. Often learners who are judged comparable to native
speakers on the basis of pronunciation are shown to have gaps elsewhere in their
internal grammar (cf. Coppieters, 1987; Hyltenstam, 1992). Thompson (1991) rated
accents in the spontaneous speech and oral reading of 36 Russian learners of English.
She concluded that results on evaluative assessments of pronunciation are influenced
by both the nature of the test and the type of judges doing the rating. Linguisti-
cally experienced raters were more reliable, but also more lenient than inexperienced
raters. Orally read sentences were judged more accented than spontaneous speech.
Flege (1999) also discussed variables that may affect rating judgments in studies that
evaluate degree of accented speech.

Questioning the Critical Period Hypothesis

Even though studies began to question a biologically ordained critical period, for the
most part, they continued to find the same inverse correlation between onset age and
test performance, at both the phonological and morphosyntactic levels (Bialystok &
Miller, 1999; Birdsong & Molis, 2001; Flege, Frieda & Nozawa, 1997; Flege, Monroe,
& Skelton, 1992; Flege, Yeni-Komshian, & Liu, 1999; Stevens, 1999; Thompson, 1991;
426 IOUP

Yeni-Komshian, Flege, & Liu, 1997). However, in contrast to the earlier studies, this
later research argued that the distribution of the data was better explained by non-
maturational factors.
Whether the observed age-related outcomes are the result of neurobiological factors
or other variables is an important question that has implications for the theory of
language acquisition, specifically the degree to which it is guided by a dedicated
modular bioprogram specific to language. As Bialystok and Miller explain, “If the
evidence fails to support the existence of such a biological constraint on language
acquisition, then the options for language acquisition are more diverse but are based
on a much larger role for general cognitive mechanisms and environmental influences
throughout all stages of language acquisition” (p. 128).
One of the most frequently made arguments against maturational constraints is that
there does not appear to be an identifiable change in the shape of the proficiency func-
tion at a point that defines the critical period terminus, something which the definition
of a critical period demands. The change does not have to be abrupt, but there should
be a period of heightened performance followed by a gradual decline to a plateau
near the offset point that continues to show relatively high performance. The function
should be discontinuous at this point with no further age-related decline (Newport,
1991). Instead, several studies indicate a steady decay in performance over the life
span. A discontinuous nonlinear relationship across age groups would support a
(Critical Period), while a linear function that extended from childhood through adult-
hood and exhibited an overall negative relationship between age and performance is
claimed to provide evidence against it (Bialystok & Hakuta, 1999; Bialystok & Miller,
1999; Birdsong, to appear; Flege, 1999). The Johnson and Newport (1989) study exhibits
the necessary discontinuous function. The under-15 group displayed a linearly declin-
ing learning curve while scores in the over-15 age group were randomly distributed.
Many recent studies, however, do not generate the Johnson and Newport findings.
Rather, they document a steadily declining curve from childhood through adult-
hood. Two such studies examined data from the 1990 U.S. census. Both relied on
self-report by immigrants to assess the degree of English fluency.3 Stevens’ (1999)
findings led her to conclude that L2 proficiency is strongly related to age of immi-
gration. However, she found no abruptly outlined critical period, but rather a steady
decay with those immigrating before age 5 having the highest probability of report-
ing in adulthood that they spoke “very well.” In addition, she determined that factors
such as length of residence, higher levels of education, or marriage to a native-born
spouse enhanced the probability of greater proficiency. Interestingly, the presence of
English-speaking children in the household had little effect on their mother’s level of
proficiency.
Likewise, using the 1990 census Bialystok and Hakuta (1999) found a continu-
ous age-related declining curve The data came from Chinese- and Spanish-speaking
immigrants residing in New York state. Only those with LOR of 10 years or more
were included for analysis. The curves for both groups were quite similar, although
the Chinese group had lower overall self-reported proficiency. Bialystok and Hakuta
concluded that factors other than an innate bioprogram were responsible for the de-
cline. It is important to observe that the fact that performance continues to decline
in adulthood as onset age increases does not, in and of itself, argue against a critical
period terminus, for adults may become slower learners as they age.
Studies by Flege and his associates ascertained that degree of deviation from an L1
norm increased with age of acquisition onset, but the authors were frequently able to
attribute their results to other variables. Non-age factors that affected outcomes were
determined to be amount of L1 use (Flege, Frieda, & Nozawa, 1997), amount of L2
use (Flege & Liu, 2001; Flege, Bohn, & Jang, 1997), and amount of input (Flege, Frieda,
 23. AGE IN SECOND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT 427

& Nozawa, 1997; Flege & Lui, 2001; Flege, Monroe, & Skelton, 1992; Riney & Flege,
1998). However, length of residence was not a significant factor.
Several recent studies administered a variation of the Johnson and Newport (1989)
research. Bialystok and Miller (1999) administered a grammaticality judgment task
with items similar to those of the Johnson and Newport study. Again, there was an
effect for manner of presentation (written versus oral) and a steadily declining linear
function across ages. Neither of these results is predicted by a biologically defined
critical period. Flege, Yeni-Komshian, and Liu (1999) investigated ultimate attainment
in both pronunciation and morphosyntax with 240 native Korean speakers, using
for the latter a grammaticality judgment test drawn from Johnson and Newport.
Performance in both areas produced an age-related declining function; however, only
accent was influenced by AO. Both level of education and self-reported daily amount
of English use influenced the morphosyntax results.
Birdsong and Molis (2001) did a replication of Johnson and Newport using the same
methods and material, but with subjects from a very different language background,
in this case, Spanish. Results were the inverse of Johnson and Newport—the younger
group produced no age-related function while the older group did. There appeared
to be a ceiling effect on early arrivals; most performed at the native speaker range,
making very few errors. Among the late arrivals there was a gradually declining slope
exhibiting a strong age effect. The divergent results may be a reflection of the use of
different L1s in the two studies, in that the test may be easier for speakers of a language
that shares typological similarities with English.
This was the conclusion reached in van Wuijtswinkel’s (1994, cited in Kellerman,
1997) study using Dutch subjects in a foreign language environment to replicate John-
son and Newport. Though most had postpubertal initial exposure, performance was
extremely high, a result attributed to the typological similarity of the L1 and L2. It
appears then that the Johnson and Newport instrument is not as difficult for certain
native-language groups.
A replication of Johnson and Newport by DeKeyser (2000) with L1 Hungarian
speakers also produced results that diverged from the original study. Like Birdsong
and Molis (2001), early arriving subjects exhibited a ceiling effect. However, the late
arrivals presented no declining function; rather, their performance was random. Thus,
findings for this group were similar to the Johnson and Newport study.
It is important to note that in these post-1990 studies with large subject pools,
although variables other than age were able to influence the degree to which late
learners attained L2 proficiency, few achieved the level of native speaker. This was
true even after a long LOR and with specific variables working in their favor.

Other Explanations for Age Effects

One of the first to develop alternate explanations for any observed child/adult differ-
ences was Schumann (1975). He dismissed the biological explanation citing Krashen’s
(1973) research that argued that hemispheric lateralization was complete by age 5
(although Krashen, himself, did not rule out a different neurobiological explana-
tion for age differences). Instead, Schumann advocated an explanation based on so-
cial/psychological factors arising from the social conditions in the environment or the
motivational/attitudinal disposition of the learner. Language acquisition will be im-
peded when learners experience social distance (as part of a dominant, subordinate,
or assimilating L2 culture, or from enclosure within a large L2 population confine)
and/or psychological distance (when the attitude or motivation of the learner is not
optimal). A recent discussion of non-age influences on ultimate attainment in an L2 is
found in Marinova-Todd, Marshall, and Snow (2000). These authors also maintain that
428 IOUP

it is the situation of learning, rather than the potential for learning, that differentiates
the attainment of adult and child learners.
Among the situations of learning, amount of L2 input and use figure promi-
nently. Stevens (1999) determined that being married to a native speaker increased
the probability of greater proficiency; however, for reasons as yet unknown, living
with children who only spoke English did not. Riney and Flege (1998) ascertained
that Japanese students who continued their studies in the L2 environment outper-
formed those who remained in Japan to study. Flege and Liu (2001) found that stu-
dents enrolled in courses where they interacted with native speakers achieved higher
proficiency than nonstudents whose contact was mainly with speakers of their L1.
They concluded that it was the input-rich environment the students encountered that
was responsible for their higher achievement. Flege, Frieda, and Nozawa (1997) de-
termined that learners who have more contact with native speakers and hence, more
input, achieved better accent ratings than learners in L2 contexts that provided less in-
teraction. Since increased input and use correlates with higher attainment, one would
expect that length of residence would also be a significant variable; however, few
studies have found this to be the case. One is at a loss to explain why longer lengths
of residence, which imply greater input and use, do not correlate with increased at-
tainment, as the research would predict.
Several studies established that education impacted level of attainment. Flege, Yeni-
Komshian, and Liu (1999) correlated increased proficiency with three variables, one of
which was the amount of U.S. education. Whereas degree of foreign accent was related
to AO, and performance on lexically based aspects of morphosyntax improved as L2
use increased, achievement on rule-based morphosyntactic portions of the test was
a function of the amount of U.S. education the subjects had received. Moyer (1999)
found that prior training in pronunciation was related to degree of perceived accent
among highly motivated graduate students in German, with those who had received
more training achieving the better scores. Likewise, in Bongaerts, van Summeren,
Planken, and Schils (1997), more nativelike accents were produced by subjects who
had received extensive instruction in phonetics. Stevens’ (1999) census survey deter-
mined that higher levels of education increased the probability of greater proficiency.
The fact that education has some influence on adult attainment actually argues for a
child/adult difference, since L2 children are cognitively too immature for education
to impact their acquisition.
A number of researchers have concluded that L1 influence is responsible for some
of the age-related effects. Interestingly, some have found that it produced a positive
impact, while others have documented a negative influence. Early on, Wode (1978)
noted that similarities between the native and target language could have a debili-
tating effect. He described the crucial similarity measure where learners would assume
that similar L1 and L2 structures were identical, thus slowing down their acquisition
of those structures. He noted that German-speaking children added an extra step to
their acquisition of English negation, one not found in the acquisition patterns of
children learning English from typologically dissimilar L1 backgrounds. Since En-
glish and German negation pattern so closely, the children assumed a complete over-
lap and incorporated into their L2 grammars a German rule that does not exist in
English.
In a similar vein, Flege (1995, 1999) developed the speech learning model to account
for age effects in degree of foreign accent. He theorized that the mechanisms needed
to produce new sounds remain intact throughout the life span, but that late-onset
learners experience difficulty perceiving L2 phones that do not contrast in their L1,
since the ability to discern new contrasts decreases with age (1995, p. 239). Thus,
sounds that are similar but not quite the same in both languages will be the hardest to
master. Conversely, the greater the dissimilarity between the L1 and L2 sounds, the
 23. AGE IN SECOND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT 429

more likely it is that the learner will notice the difference and thus not rely on the L1
to produce the L2 phone.
On the other hand, some have found that similarity between L1 and L2 struc-
tures facilitates acquisition. Bialystok (1997), in two small studies, determined that
the correspondence between structures in the L1 and L2 was the best predictor of suc-
cess. The first examined the acquisition of gender marking by English and German
speakers learning French. German speakers, who already possessed the concept of
gender marking, performed more accurately on French gender across ages of ar-
rival. The second study tested Chinese speakers learning English. Test structures that
were similar in the two languages were consistently easier regardless of arrival age.
Bialystok and Miller (1999) compared native speakers of Chinese and Spanish who
were learning English. Though the two groups were matched on relevant variables,
the Spanish speakers outperformed the Chinese speakers. The authors suggested that
the typological similarity between Spanish and English allowed the Spanish speakers
to progress more rapidly. With the Chinese subjects, any structural similarity that oc-
curred facilitated the acquisition. They concluded that those aspects of the L2 that are
structurally different from the L1 are more difficult to master at all acquisition ages.
It is important to note, however, that L1 influence only seems to impact adults, since
the morpheme studies done in the 1970s using child second language learners do not
show any mother tongue influence, either positive or negative.
Some researchers have attributed child/adult differences to the decline in cognitive
learning ability that accompanies aging. Bialystok and Hakuta (1999) discuss several
studies that documented the deterioration; for example, older learners perform more
poorly on paired-associate tasks (Craik, 1986), are more cautious in cognitive tasks
(Birkhill & Schaie, 1975), require more trials to learn a list (Rabinowitz & Craik, 1986),
and have difficulty remembering details (Hultsch & Dixon, 1990). From these studies
they concluded that one explanation for the age-related decline found in most L2
research on age differences is the natural cognitive deterioration that accompanies the
aging process. Although Bialystok and Hakuta make no mention of the age at which
natural cognitive deterioration begins, one assumes that it would not commence until
well past age 35. Schaie and Willis (1996) discussed research that followed subjects,
ages 25 to 88, as they performed a range of cognitive tasks. As expected, the data show
modest gains in cognitive ability from young adulthood to early middle age, then a
gradual decline. Herein lies the problem with attributing the results from studies
of age differences in L2 to natural aging. The peak performance in all studies of L2
ultimate attainment is found with learners who began the task before age 6 or 7.
Learning started later than that begins to produce the age-related decline. No other
area of cognitive learning produces such an advantage for learners younger than age 7.
Studies of natural aging do not see a cognitive decline in learning ability until early
middle age. Thus, it is hard to see how the natural aging process could be responsible
for the critical period age effects found in second language acquisition.

Comparing Child/Adult Acquisition

Several studies document similarities in the manner in which learners with different
AOs respond on grammaticality judgment measures. They observe that even though
subjects with early AOs exhibit higher performance, they respond with the same error
patterns as those with later onsets. Thus, Juffs and Harrington (1995) found the same
degree of subjacency transfer in older and younger onset Chinese learners of English.
Bialystok and Miller (1999) also found no transfer difference as a function of age with
their Chinese learners of English. If a biologically defined critical period is responsible
for age effects, one might expect to see differences in the error types made by those
within and outside the time frame. The fact that younger and older learners appear
430 IOUP

to follow the same course of acquisition provides indirect evidence against a critical
period. Recently, Schwartz (1998) argued that both child and adult L2 learners have
full access to UG. Therefore, in terms of the abstract properties of language, the same
acquisition sequences should be followed.
In contrast to Schwartz, Meisel (1997) found that adults do not have full access to
UG. He presented L2 data from adults with a number of L1 backgrounds acquiring
either German or French negation. Although the various L1/L2 combinations make
different predictions for the stages of learning negation, none of the predictions were
observed. In contrast to earlier research, Meisel concluded that L2 adults acquiring
negation differ from L1 children in that UG does not guide the process.
The same conclusion was reached by Clahsen and Muysken (1986). They compared
the acquisition of German word order by L1 children and L2 adults from several L1
backgrounds. The children, through access to UG, quickly realized that German was
a verb final language. Adults, in contrast, relied on general learning strategies and
therefore, had difficulty, even in late stages, producing the correct word order. Another
study that found that child and adult L2 follow different paths with respect to UG is
Hilles (1991), discussed earlier.
Non-UG contrasts in child/adult L2 development were observed in Ioup and Tan-
somboon (1987). The study compared the Thai proficiency of Thai/English bilingual
children to that of both beginning and very fluent adults whose L1 was English. Both
syntactic and phonological performance were assessed. The authors found that the
children were consistently more proficient in phonological aspects of Thai, while both
groups of adults were more proficient on the syntactic measures. The child learners
outperformed all of the adults on subtle aspects of Thai tone. It appears that what is
easiest to acquire is not the same for children and adults.

CASE STUDY SUPPORT FOR A CRITICAL PERIOD

Now let us turn from experimental studies to case studies. Wong-Fillmore (1979)
and Schmidt (1983) make for two interesting case study comparisons. Wong-Fillmore
observed five Spanish-speaking children, ages 5 to 7, in the early stages of learning
English, noting the similarities and differences in their approaches to the task. The
study, covering a period of 1 year, allowed for several generalizations that held for
all the children. Wong-Fillmore determined that social integration was their main
focus; in contrast, they were not particularly concerned with the task of learning a
new language. It was more important for them to be socially accepted by the English-
speaking children than to learn the language they spoke. Wong-Fillmore predicted
that by the end of three years all the children would be fluent English speakers; thus,
the individual differences that she described were confined to rate of acquisition only.
Interestingly, Nora, the child who progressed far more rapidly than any of the others,
was the one who was most socially adept and least concerned with language structure.
The one who progressed the least was the child who was most preoccupied with being
accurate.
Schmidt (1983) provided a contrasting picture using naturalistic adult acquisition.
He detailed the English acquisition of a 33-year-old native speaker of Japanese over the
course of three years. The subject, Wes, had made little grammatical progress by the
end of the study; thus, his functional grammar remained stabilized. Yet in all respects,
Wes seemed to employ the same strategies as Nora, the most successful learner in the
Wong-Fillmore study. He was little concerned with grammatical structure, was most
interested in making friends with Americans, spent most of his time conversing with
English speakers, and was gregarious and outgoing. Clearly, like, Nora, social inte-
gration was much more important to him than advancing his knowledge of English.
 23. AGE IN SECOND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT 431

Schmidt (personal communication) reports that after 20 years of speaking mainly

English, Wes’s grammatical output had still not improved. One can conclude from a
comparison of these two studies that what works naturally for a child to facilitate L2
acquisition does not work at all for an adult. Moreover, one can safely assume that if
Wes had been 6 years old instead of 29 in his initial stages of English acquisition, and
doing exactly what he was doing as an adult learner, he would have been quite close
to nativelike by the end of the 3-year study.
Lardiere (1998) presents a second case study of an adult learner who does “every-
thing right” but still does not advance very far in English. The subject, Patty, is an
Indonesian whose home language was Chinese and school language was Indonesian.
At age 14, she immigrated from Indonesia to China where she completed her sec-
ondary schooling, including a bit of English instruction. At age 22, she moved to the
United States and attended a junior college that provided ESL classes.
As stated earlier, most recent age-related research claims that it is the situation of
learning, rather than the potential for learning, that is the best predictor of successful
ultimate attainment. Factors said to positively enhance the learning situation are daily
use of the L2 (Flege, Frieda, & Nozawa, 1997; Flege & Liu, 2001; Riney & Flege, 1998),
marriage to a native-speaking spouse (Stevens, 1999), and high levels of education in
the L2 (Bialystok & Hakuta, 1994, 1999; Flege, Yeni-Komshian, & Liu, 1999; Stevens,
1999). All these variables characterize Patty.
After attending community college, Patty earned a B.A. and M.A. in account-
ing at American universities. She subsequently married an American and joined an
American company in a senior management position, totally immersing herself in an
English-speaking environment. Thus at home, at work, with her family, neighbors, and
friends, she spoke English exclusively. Lardiere reports that after living in the United
States for almost 18 years, Patty had a fossilized end-state grammar replete with
basic errors. This fossilization was determined through observations that were imple-
mented at the end of her tenth and eighteenth year in the United States. During that
eight-year interim of total immersion, her grammar did not become more nativelike.
We see that although Patty had all the variables necessary to predict successful lan-
guage acquisition, she did not, in fact, succeed. Her lack of success occurred in spite of
the fact that she had an extra advantage that L2 children do not have, one that they are
not cognitively mature enough to avail themselves of, that is, formal ESL instruction.

The Role of Aptitude

One case study (Ioup et al., 1994) does not fit the profile described in the previous
section. The two subjects in this study tested at close to native speaker performance.
Both subjects were English speakers living in Egypt and married to Egyptian na-
tionals. They differed in that one had extensive formal instruction in Arabic, while
the other had learned the language through exposure alone. To make her situation
more like child language acquisition, the latter subject never learned to read Arabic.
Marinova-Todd, Marshall, and Snow (2000), commenting on the success of these two
learners, attributed their level of attainment to their high level of motivation, but no
such claim can be made because the Ioup et al. study also included similar learn-
ers who did not approximate native performance. They were also foreign nationals
who had married Egyptians, had long periods of residence in Egypt, had studied
Arabic, and had exerted great effort to master the language. At the time of testing,
these learners were very fluent, but noticeably non-native. Thus, one has no basis
to claim that they were less motivated than the successful learners. Marinova-Todd
et al. also attributed the attainment of the two successful learners to the fact that they
were language teachers who, therefore, understood linguistic structure. However, the
nonsuccessful learners in the study were also professional language teachers. What,
432 IOUP

then, accounts for the remarkable achievement of the two successful learners? Ioup
et al. attributed it to language-learning aptitude, asserting that this was the essential
variable that distinguished successful from nonsuccessful adult acquisition.
Two data-based studies provide support for the role of aptitude: DeKeyser (2000)
and Harley and Hart (1997). Harley and Hart examined 11th grade French immersion
students, comparing those who had begun immersion in the first grade with those
who had begun it in the seventh grade on proficiency and aptitude measures. There
was a difference in how the two groups performed; only the proficiency scores of the
late immersion students correlated with analytic language aptitude. The results led
the authors to conclude that this type of aptitude is not relevant to child L2 acquisition.
DeKeyser tested 57 Hungarian immigrants to the United States with varying AOs
on both grammaticality judgments and language learning aptitude. Results indicated
that all but one of the subjects whose acquisition began before the age of 15 per-
formed in the native speaker range. The scores of those arriving after age 15 were
randomly distributed with only six performing like the child learners. The corre-
lation between the grammaticality judgment scores and scores on the aptitude test
were significant for the adult onset learners only. DeKeyser maintained that the late-
onset learners who performed in the near-native range possessed a special talent for
language learning. He explained his results by embracing the fundamental difference hy-
pothesis (Bley-Vroman, 1989), which contends that children acquire language through
an innate language-specific bioprogram while adults must rely on general cognition
and knowledge obtained from their first language.

CONCLUSION

This chapter has reviewed the research on age in L2 development and has concluded
that child and adult language acquisition are fundamentally different, thus support-
ing the maturational constraint version of the critical period hypothesis that argues
for a modular language acquisition mechanism available to child learners only. Find-
ings indicate that while certain variables significantly advance adult acquisition, they
alone do not guarantee nativelike attainment. Subtle, and often not-so-subtle aspects
of language appear to allude adults, even when they avail themselves of formal in-
struction. Only children are able to acquire the subtle properties of a language without
paying attention to them. The few adult exceptions to the critical period hypothesis
have high language learning aptitude.
One gap has been observed in research on the critical period. There are few studies
that provide an in-depth examination of the processes of child L2 acquisition, compar-
ing them to both child L1 and adult L2. More information on the availability of UG
to child L2 learners is needed, as well as information on the factors that enhance or
impede their progress.

NOTES

1. Subjacency is the principle of UG that governs when movement can occur across boundaries. It has
particular consequences for wh- preposing.
2. The Morphological Unity principle governs the permissibility of null subjects in a language. It states that
null subjects can only exist in languages where either all verb forms are morphologically complex (e.g.,
Spanish), or none are (e.g., Chinese).
3. Self-report is not always reliable. In recently obtained census data from 1930, which indicated the re-
sponses of my father’s family, my grandmother claimed to both speak English and be literate. Neither
was true. Until her death in 1951, she spoke no English at all, and could neither read nor write in any
language.
 23. AGE IN SECOND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT 433

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436
24

Cognitive Considerations
in L2 Learning
Robert DeKeyser and Alan Juffs
University of Pittsburgh

INTRODUCTION

Nobody would doubt that language, whether first or second, is an aspect of human
cognition. The extent, however, to which language either occupies a separate com-
ponent of the mind or draws largely on the same mechanisms as other aspects of
cognition is hotly debated (see, e.g., Elman et al., 1996; Fodor, 1983, 2000; Jackendoff,
2002; Pinker, 1997 for L1; O’Grady, 1999; Schwartz, 1999; Wolfe-Quintero, 1996 for L2).
It is not our intention, of course, to try to resolve this debate here. We have referred
to it where necessary, but thought it much more fruitful, given the subject matter of
this book, and the shortness of this chapter, to concentrate on what the content of L2
cognition is.
Cognition is really a fancy word for knowledge, its acquisition, and its use. Hence,
the main questions we ask in this chapter are simply: How do people come to know el-
ements of/about L2? (Sources of L2 Knowledge), and how do they use what they know
of/about L2? (Resources for use in L2). Our main goal will be to show the multiplicity
of the answer to both questions. Learners acquire some specific knowledge about the
structure of L2 explicitly (with concurrent awareness of what is being learned) and
some implicitly (without such awareness). They also have a certain amount of less
structured, ‘formulaic’ knowledge specific to L2, as well as knowledge transferred
from L1, and perhaps access to Universal Grammar (UG). On top of this ‘real’ knowl-
edge, they may have all sorts of misconceptions about what transfers from L1 or L2
or other aspects of L2 structure. This is part of their ‘knowledge’ too.
When L2 speakers get to use this knowledge, their actual behavior is even more
multifaceted. They draw on their knowledge about L2 structure, whether that knowl-
edge be specific to L2, transferred from L1, or part of their biological endowment.
They draw variably on universal processing strategies, L1 processing skills, and in-
cipient L2 processing strategies and skills. They put certain structures together from
scratch, but often use ready-made chunks. For some structures at some point in time,
they consciously access explicit knowledge (knowledge they are aware of); for other
structures or at other times they intuitively access implicit knowledge (knowledge
437
438 DEKEYSER AND JUFFS

they are not aware of). These forms of knowledge may have been acquired implicitly
or explicitly, and may or may not have been transformed from explicit to implicit (‘pro-
ceduralized’ and ‘automatized’) through large amounts of practice, or from implicit
to explicit (‘analyzed’) through reflection.
Just as we have largely sidestepped the issue of whether language is a separate
component of human cognition, we have also tried to avoid the terms competence
and performance as much as possible, given that there is a long history of contentious
debate about what aspects of language variability fit into competence (e.g., R. Ellis, 1990;
Gregg, 1990; Tarone, 1990, 2002). Instead, we prefer to speak simply about knowledge
and use. In what follows, then, we will simply discuss (the evidence for) various kinds
of knowledge sources and uses in L2, and try to point out what seems well established,
and what remains unknown or controversial.

Sources of L2 Knowledge
Universal Grammar
Universal Grammar (UG) is a theory of the linguistic knowledge that human beings
bring to the task of acquiring a first language. This knowledge is expressed as a
formal grammar that precisely describes all categories, and clearly states grammatical
relations as operations on those categories (Hall, 1995; Fodor, 2000, p. 11). The precise
and detailed nature of such grammars is perhaps their greatest strength.
Most research on UG in the past 20 years has been conducted in the Chomskyan
paradigm, known as ‘Principles and Parameters’ (Chomsky, 1986), which has trans-
formed into ‘Minimalism’ (Chomsky, 1995). The new theory consists of the lexicon (a
learned component), a system of constraints that limit interpretation of combinations
of items drawn from the lexicon, as well as a system of constraints on phonology.
The constraints provide a system of principles that all languages adhere to; such prin-
ciples account for similarities among languages. Languages vary in only superficial
ways from the point of view of UG, that is, only at phonological form, for example,
in their linear order, and of course arbitrary sound-meaning correspondences. This
variation is explained by parameters expressed in terms of abstract features, which
state where in the derivation abstract features are checked for well-formedness. For
example, whether a language puts the wh- phrase at the front of the clause or not
is a superficial difference—the constraints on interpretation of wh- phrases will be
much the same. UG is not a theory of all language phenomena, but the vital part that
constitutes the innate endowment—a blueprint for any human language.
Chomskyan theories of UG share some basic properties. The first property is mod-
ularity, which can be understood in at least two ways (but perhaps as many as four
ways; see Schwartz, 1999). UG is modular in the sense that it is a system of knowledge
that is ‘encapsulated’, or set apart, from other cognitive capacities. This claim remains
controversial and continues to be clarified by its proponents (Fodor, 2000; Jackendoff,
2002, p. 71, pp. 90 ff.). Jackendoff points out that while modularity may be plausible,
interfaces between modules must exist. For example, for the claims of eye-tracking
studies of sentence processing to make sense, a link between the visual module of the
brain and the syntactic module of the brain must be established and maintained.
UG is modular in a second important sense; namely, it is itself made up of sub-
components. Alone, these subcomponents are relatively simple, but together they can
interact to produce systems of great complexity (Gibson & Wexler, 1994; Gold, 1967;
but cf. Fodor, 1998).
The claim that UG plays a key but not exclusive role in first language acquisi-
tion has won acceptance among most linguists (e.g., Crain & Lillo-Martin, 1999; but
cf. MacWhinney, 2001). In contrast, UG as a source of knowledge in adult second
 24. COGNITIVE CONSIDERATIONS IN L2 LEARNING 439

language acquisition has been far more controversial (Eubank & Juffs, 2000; Juffs,
2001). Even researchers who accept a role for UG in L1 acquisition do not accept that
it plays a role in L2 acquisition (e.g., Bley-Vroman, 1989; Jackendoff, 2002, p. 96, but cf.
p. 251; Schachter, 1989). Controversy has arisen because the results obtained from ex-
periments that elicit knowledge of universals among adult second language learners
have produced equivocal results, or cannot show that the knowledge could not have
come from the first language.
Debate in UG-based L2 research has recently centered on the importance of showing
that L2 grammars are underdetermined by input. For example, Schwartz and Sprouse
(2000) argue strongly for such a research agenda. In contrast, Hawkins (2001, p. 354)
points out that studies that show poverty-of-the-stimulus (POS) effects may be of
interest, but tell us little about the process of second language acquisition or why there
are differences between L1 and L2 acquisition, especially the lack of success in adult
SLA. Part of the reason for this conclusion may be that in the 1990s and into the present,
attention in linguistic theory has switched to ever more general principles. Much more
emphasis has been put into the lexicon, most of which is learned directly from input. It
therefore becomes a problem to show that, if an L2 shows evidence of going beyond the
input, this L2 knowledge is based not on L1 knowledge already available. For instance,
even if Japanese, Korean, and Chinese-speaking learners of English L2 reveal even
some knowledge of subtle constraints on English wh- movement, the UG constraint
may be so abstract that it is at work in the L1s of the learners as well, even if those
languages do not place wh- phrases at the beginning of the clause.
It is therefore important to investigate that parametric variation, especially clus-
tering effects, for example, those contingencies between verb raising, negation, and
question formation. A central finding based on formulations of parameters is that sec-
ond languages appear to permit optionality where L1s do not, particularly in the area
of morphosyntax (Sorace, 2000). Another important, and perhaps related, question is
why L2 learners’ capacity at the morphophonological interface is ‘impaired’ (Beck,
1998). It is these L1–L2 differences that make SLA expressed in terms of linguistic
theory interesting (Hawkins, 2001). If finding evidence for UG principles is difficult,
finding influence of first language is easier. Formal grammars are particularly valu-
able at making precise predictions about such influence, and it is to this issue that we
now turn our attention.

The Role of the First Language

Currently, agreement exists that although some developmental phenomena may be
shared among learners of different languages, the first language exerts a powerful in-
fluence on second language development (Gass & Selinker, 1983, 1992). Language, like
the brain, is not an undifferentiated mass, but a complex set of interacting components,
many learned, some innate. (If any doubt remains on this point, see Carroll, 2001, on
the complex issues facing L2 researchers.) Differential effects of the L1 in different parts
of the L2, and at different stages of L2 development, should therefore be expected.
At the level of the lexicon, Kroll and her colleagues (e.g., de Groot & Poot, 1997;
Kroll et al., 2002) have shown that, at the first stage of learning, lexical entries in
the L2 must access concepts via the L1 lexical entry. Recent brain-imaging studies
indicate that fluent bilinguals do not have this problem (Rodriguez-Fornells et al.,
2001). In contrast, Juffs (1996, pp. 228–229) and Montrul (1999, p. 216) suggest that in
the initial stages of learning argument structure of verbs, the part of lexical knowledge
constrained by universal principles, learners resort to a ‘universal’ template rather
than the L1, although the L1 also influences knowledge of this domain.
L1 influence is also claimed to be very strong in morphosyntax. Schwartz and
Sprouse (1994) argue that the initial state of second language acquisition is the whole
440 DEKEYSER AND JUFFS

abstract grammar of L1. This transfer includes all the values of parameters that distin-
guish surface word order, and all of the abstract constraints on interpretation, but of
course not the morphophonological entries in the lexicon. Debate now centers around
whether second language learners can acquire new abstract features of morphosyntax
or whether the acquisition of these components of the grammar is fatally impaired
(e.g., Beck, 1998; Hawkins & Chan, 1997; Duffield & White, 1999; Montrul, 2001).
In phonology, Young-Scholten and Archibald (2000) have shown that subtle in-
teractions occur between development of the segmental inventory and constraints
on syllable structure in the L2. For example, they have argued that Korean-speaking
learners of English L2 use epenthesis in syllable initial clusters because Korean does
not distinguish between certain kinds of liquids at the level of feature geometry.
The term crosslinguistic influence is preferred to L1 influence by many researchers
(Kellerman & Sharwood-Smith, 1986; Kellerman & Perdue, 1992). One recent example
of crosslinguistic influence is reported in Yeni-Komshian, Robbins, and Flege (2001).
These researchers note that Korean-speaking learners of English L2 exhibit superior
accuracy on the pronunciation of segments in verbs as compared to nouns. They
attribute this difference to an increased focus on verbs by Korean speakers due to the
verb-final syntax of their L1.
Thus, L1 influence is apparent in all areas of L2 development, although this influ-
ence may not be direct.

Formulas
Although universal features of language and the L1 may contribute to L2 knowl-
edge, learners clearly directly memorize pieces of the L2 for use in specific contexts.
Formulaic utterances, or chunks, are thus another source of knowledge in the second
language (Gass & Selinker, 2001, pp. 207–208). Wray and Perkins (2000) provide an
overview of types and functions of formulas and define formulaic utterances as “vari-
ous types of word string which appear to be stored and retrieved whole from memory.”
Although formulas were somewhat neglected by L2 researchers until the later
1990s (Celce-Murcia, 1997), linguists have long been interested in them (e.g., Becker,
1975). With renewed attention to input and frequency effects in L2 learning, interest
in formulaic utterances as a source of L2 knowledge has been revived. N. Ellis (2002a)
devotes a whole section to formulaic utterances, suggesting that one reason SLA may
take so long is that learners have to accumulate a large store of chunks. Ellis does not
seem to want to admit a role for any rule-based knowledge, but Wray and Perkins
(2000, p. 13) accept the coexistence of both ‘rule-based’ language and formulas.
L2 researchers such as Myles and her colleagues also accept a role both for formulas
and rule-governed utterances in the L2. They are particularly interested in the role of
formulaic utterances in the creative construction of underlying rules (Myles, Mitchell,
& Hooper, 1999; Myles, Hooper, & Mitchell, 1998). In the 1999 study, they seek to
show that learners who are efficient at using formulas go on to develop rule-based
systems alongside these formulas, whereas learners who are unable to pick up and
use chunks seem to get stuck at a very basic level (Myles et al., 1998, p. 76). The authors
relate this difference in success to individual differences in phonological short-term
memory (see section on Aptitude): a higher short-term memory permits learners to
process and store longer chunks, which in turn leads to better development of rules.

Explicit Learning and Automatization

The acquisition of explicit knowledge can take many forms. The most prototypical
is through instruction in metalinguistic rules, but many other ways exist of making
learners aware of linguistic structure. Doughty and Williams (1998), for example., pro-
vide an extensive discussion of various ways of focusing learners’ attention on form,
 24. COGNITIVE CONSIDERATIONS IN L2 LEARNING 441

the vast majority of which are likely to lead to increased awareness of linguistic form,
and therefore meet our definition of explicit learning: input enhancement, output
enhancement, interaction enhancement, negotiation, recasts, consciousness-raising
tasks, dictoglosses, input processing instruction, and garden path techniques. While
such instruction implies various degrees of awareness, it does not necessarily lead to
understanding (cf. Schmidt, 1990, 2001). Activation of the directly resulting knowl-
edge typically involves awareness too; therefore we speak about explicit knowledge.
Mere explicit knowledge is of limited direct usefulness for communication (see section
on Using Explicit and Implicit Knowledge); therefore the concept of practice has been
around for centuries. Practice is meant to make this explicit knowledge more easily
accessible, perhaps even to automatize it to such an extent that it becomes function-
ally equivalent to implicitly acquired knowledge. It can be mechanical, meaningful,
or communicative (Paulston & Bruder, 1976).
Few empirical studies on practice and automatization exist in the area of SLA, but a
large literature on the acquisition of cognitive skills exists in experimental psychology.
That literature has documented how the acquisition of a wide variety of cognitive
skills follows a power law, that is, the learning curve takes a very particular shape
known in mathematics as a power function (see esp. Newell & Rosenbloom, 1981).
While the exact mechanisms underlying this phenomenon remain controversial (see
DeKeyser, 2001, and the debate between Rickard, 1997, 1999; Delaney et al., 1998;
Palmeri, 1999; and Haider & Frensch, 2002), the phenomenon itself is very robust,
and has been documented in the learning of L2 grammar in a study by DeKeyser
(1997). Although there are hardly any longitudinal studies of automatization in L2,
many studies have investigated the short-term effect of task conditions, especially
various amounts and kinds of planning, on the use of (explicit) knowledge for L2 oral
production, especially in terms of accuracy, fluency, and complexity (see e.g., Foster
& Skehan, 1996, 1999; Mehnert, 1998; Ortega, 1999; Skehan & Foster, 1997, 1999). An
urgent need exists for research that combines the longitudinal aspect of DeKeyser
(1997) with the ecological validity of these studies with classroom learners. Unless the
profession develops a better insight into how explicit knowledge evolves over time as
a function of specific types of practice, many will remain skeptical about the usefulness
of explicit knowledge (see section on Using Explint and Implicit Knowledge).

Implicit Learning
Although nobody has any doubts about the possibility of explicit learning, only
about its usefulness, the situation for implicit learning is the other way around: No-
body doubts that implicitly acquired procedural knowledge would be useful; the main
question is to what extent it exists. For about 25 years now, the relationship between
implicit and explicit knowledge has been a topic of frequent discussion in the applied
linguistics literature (see, e.g., Bialystok, 1979, and Krashen, 1982, for influential early
work), and for about the same amount of time, applied linguists have been referring
to the ever-growing body of publications on this topic in the experimental psychology
literature to justify their theories or to provide the theoretical motivation for their em-
pirical research. Since the early work by Arthur Reber and associates (e.g., 1976; Reber
et al., 1980), numerous experiments, mainly with artificial grammar learning and se-
quence learning tasks, have shown that people can learn to distinguish grammatical
from ungrammatical strings of letters without being aware of the underlying rules, at
least in a sense that is statistically significant (this usually means that participants in
such experiments can make correct grammaticality judgments about 55 to 70% of the
time, where 50% would be random). An enormous controversy continues, however,
about whether what takes place in such experiments is the implicit learning of abstract
rules, with many researchers contending that the knowledge gained is not abstract,
not about rules, or neither (e.g., Dulany, Carlson, & Dewey, 1984; Kinder & Assmann,
442 DEKEYSER AND JUFFS

2000; Perruchet & Pacteau, 1990; Redington & Chater, 1996; Shanks, Johnstone, &
Staggs, 1997, among many others). The methodology for this keeps getting more so-
phisticated; yet the debate is as vigorous as ever, and many new suggestions are
being made to get out of the theoretical and methodological quagmire (see esp. Reed
& Johnson, 1998, for advice on experimental methodology; and the contributions to
French & Cleeremans, 2002, for theoretical innovations).
It should come as no surprise, then, that the debate is also alive and well in ap-
plied linguistics, where the learning tasks are much more complex, the experimental
methodology much less advanced, and the number of studies comparing (otherwise
identical) implicit and explicit treatments much more limited. Only three classroom
studies can be said to have made exactly this comparison (according to the stated def-
inition). Von Elek and Oskarsson’s final conclusion from the Swedish GUME-project
was “The explicit method was almost uniformly superior at all age, proficiency, and
aptitude levels” (1973, p. 39), and Scott (1989, 1990) also showed a significant ad-
vantage for explicit instruction. Many more classroom studies exist, of course, on the
broader concept of focus on form. They tend to lend support to the importance of ex-
plicit learning, but it is often hard to pull apart the contributions of explicit instruction,
systematic practice, error correction, awareness of form, and so on. For reviews see
especially. Doughty and Williams (1998), R. Ellis (2002), Long and Robinson (1998),
Norris and Ortega (2000, 2001), and Spada (1997).
A somewhat larger number of studies have investigated the role of implicit and
explicit SLA learning in the laboratory. Some of these studies involved miniature
linguistic systems learned exclusively for the purpose of the study (Alanen, 1995;
de Graaff, 1997; DeKeyser, 1995; N. Ellis, 1993); others dealt with learners who were
already studying the target language in question (ESL in Doughty, 1991, and Robinson,
1996, 1997; Spanish in Leow, 1998, and Rosa & O’Neill, 1999). The evidence from all
these laboratory experiments is clearly in favor of explicit learning (except for implicit
induction of difficult rules in Robinson’s 1996 rule-search condition).
Not surprisingly, then, the meta-analysis in Norris and Ortega (2000, 2001) found
that the advantage of explicit over implicit instruction is the most clearly documented
method effect in the empirical literature on types of instruction. Two important caveats
are in order, however. First, the duration of almost all these experiments was very
short; this is to the disadvantage of implicit learning, which is known to work through
the slow accumulation of instances of massive input. Second, outcome measures al-
lowed for various degrees of monitoring of explicit knowledge (see, e.g., R. Ellis,
2002), which means that it is not always clear to what extent explicit learners would
outperform implicit learners under conditions that make it nearly impossible to draw
on explicit knowledge. We deal with this issue in more detail in the section on Us-
ing explicit and implicit knowledge. The point here, however, is that, where explicit
learning yields knowledge that may be of doubtful use without the lengthy autom-
atization processes referred to in the section on Explicit Learning and Automatiza-
tion, attempts at implicit learning in the classroom or the laboratory do not even
seem to yield that. Furthermore, the critical period literature provides ample docu-
mentation that, even after many years of constant exposure to L2, implicit learning
processes yield knowledge that is far from complete (see DeKeyser & Larson-Hall,
in press).
There is now converging evidence from studies in the laboratory, the classroom, and
the natural L2 environment (DeKeyser 1997, 1998, 2000, in press; N. Ellis, 2002a, 2002b;
R. Ellis, 1993, 1997, 2002) that the best way to develop implicit/procedural/auto-
matized knowledge may not be to try to provide it directly, but instead to foster
optimal conditions for its acquisition in the long run, and that means providing an
explicit jump start. “Perhaps we do not have to bother with trying to teach implicit
knowledge directly” (R. Ellis, 2002, p. 234).
 24. COGNITIVE CONSIDERATIONS IN L2 LEARNING 443

Resources for Use in L2

L1 and Universal Processing Strategies

At the end of the section on the role of the first language, the issue of L1 influence
on L2 processing was raised. This area of research in SLA is perhaps one of the least
developed in the field (for a review see Harrington, 2001). Much of the early research
in this domain was not carried out with formal grammar in mind, because researchers
in the formal tradition were focusing on competence knowledge, that is, the property
theory part of a theory of SLA rather than the transition part of the theory, or per-
formance issues (Gregg, 1996, p. 51; 2001). However, research into L2 competence
often appealed to performance, or processing, as a way of explaining apparent L1–L2
differences, without actually saying what these factors might be (a rare exception is
Schachter & Yip, 1990).
In contrast to UG-based research, early studies that seriously addressed processing
were carried out in the Competition Model (CM), for example, Harrington, 1987. (See
MacWhinney, 1997, 2001, for recent overviews.) In the CM, the first language plays
the key role in the process of acquisition and in processing the L2. Therefore, the L1
processing strategy is a source of L2 performance. At the heart of this model is the idea
that there are different cues that match semantic roles such as Agent, Patient, and Goal
with syntactic positions in the clause. For example, in English, to map a semantic Agent
to the grammatical function of Subject, the processor needs to know that a subject is
more likely to come before the verb, the verb is more likely to agree with the Subject,
that an Agent is more likely to be animate, and so on. Different languages weight
these cues in different ways: hence, Animacy for Subject in Japanese has a heavier
weighting than in English, and Case marking in German has a heavier weighting
than in English. MacWhinney’s (2001) summary of studies involving several pairs of
language indicate that the L1 influences the processing of the L2. CM is essentially
a parallel distributed processing model of language representation and acquisition.
The forces driving acquisition are strengths of associations based on distributional
properties of the input (MacWhinney, 2001, p. 70). These models deny any role for an
innate cognitive architecture specific to language.
Two issues arise when one considers the explanatory power of this model. One
is that they are based on participants in laboratory studies who process three word
strings, for example, NVN, NNV, VNN, and so on. It is not clear that any natural
language syntax, or input, is ever so simple. More seriously, the model assumes some
hidden connections called additional units (MacWhinney, 2001, p. 72). These addi-
tional units are inherently part of the cognitive architecture, but are not described
precisely. Recall that the great strength of a formal grammar is the precise statements
they make about the target of learning. The units, or features, are characterized by
Caplan and Waters (2002, p. 71) as being both too powerful and inadequate to model
actual behavior. For example, Caplan and Waters claim that such models fail to capture
the fact that object relatives (“the senator who the reporter attacked was criticized”)
are more difficult than subject relatives (“the senator who attacked the reporter was
criticized”), no matter how many examples a speaker may encounter. Thus, the power
of the CM is weakened to the extent that it cannot be shown to account for certain
kinds of data (see also Harrington, 2001, p. 114, fn. 9).
L2 sentence processing studies linked to more precisely articulated theories of
grammar are less numerous than those in the CM. Most of these studies have as-
sumed a principle-based parser or a parser based on another formal grammar (e.g.,
Pritchett, 1992; Inoue & Fodor, 1995). They have been more ambitious than CM models
in the range of sentence types that they have attempted to investigate in SLA. Juffs and
Harrington (1995, 1996) showed that second language learners seem to parse sentences
444 DEKEYSER AND JUFFS

incrementally in much the same way as native speakers. They also sought to show that
a processing deficit lay at the heart of difference between Chinese-speaking learners
and native speakers of English in processing long-distance wh- movement. Williams,
Möbius, and Kim (2001) confirmed that non-natives have a filler-gap strategy similar
to natives, and that they are less able to recover from misanalysis. Juffs (1998) demon-
strated that adult L2 learners seemed as sensitive as native speakers to the interaction
of argument structure and plausibility cues in processing, although there were also
clear L1 effects.

Formulas
In addition to serving as input for creative construction of competence (Using Ex-
plicit and Implicit Knowledge), formulas will also be a source of performance in the L2.
Wray and Perkins (2000, p.16, Table 3) point out that although speakers may be able to
generate phrases by rule, because of memory constraints it might be easier just to pro-
duce stock set-phrases from store. From this point of view, then, a formula is a device
for compensating for a performance limitation and not a replacement for rules. In ad-
dition to serving a memory function, formulas may also help speakers to make a point
through emphasis, help them hold a conversational turn, or retain information. Wood
(2001) suggests that formulas could be one way of developing fluency in a second
language. Creating a repertoire of formulaic utterances and focusing on automatizing
those formulaic utterances in output practice can contribute to learners’ fluency.

Using Explicit and Implicit Knowledge

In those cases where implicit learning has led to implicit knowledge of L2 struc-
tures, such knowledge should be available for any kind of use, and explicit knowledge
is irrelevant. Such may be the happy fate of the L2 speakers who learned the language
implicitly as a child, much in the same way they learned their L1. For classroom learn-
ers, however, or for adults, implicit learning is very limited; in the former case because
of grossly insufficient time/input, for the latter because of restrictions on their implicit
learning capacities (and of course, because of both factors for adult classroom learners).
The question arises then, of how and how much learners draw on their explicit
knowledge for actual communication. Krashen’s (e.g., 1982, 1999) opinion on this point
is well known: They don’t because they can’t, unless they know the rules well, and care
to apply them, and have enough time to do so, which means rarely, and that is why
the explicit knowledge resulting directly from explicit learning is rather irrelevant. A
number of empirical studies could be quoted as evidence for Krashen’s point of view,
because they are thought to show that learners largely draw on implicit knowledge
only, especially for spontaneous speech of course (Macrory & Stone, 2000), but also
for meaning-focused writing (Krashen & Pon, 1975), and even for grammaticality
judgments and error correction (Bialystok, 1979; Green & Hecht, 1992; Renou, 2000).
The picture, however, is not as bleak as it may seem for explicit knowledge. First of
all, a number of these negative findings should probably be attributed to methodolog-
ical problems (cf. DeKeyser, 2003). Secondly, a number of studies did find positive
relationships between (solid) explicit knowledge and use (DeKeyser, 1990a, 1990b;
Hulstijn & Hulstijn, 1984). Most important, however, the availability for use of ex-
plicitly acquired knowledge is a matter of degree, not of yes or no. As should be
clear from the section on explicit learning and automatization, explicitly acquired
knowledge can be automatized, but the automatization process takes a long time and
does not generalize much beyond the rules and skills practiced, which means that for
most structures, most skill uses, and most learners, access to the relevant explicitly
learned rules is not fully automatic. This, of course, explains findings like Macrory
 24. COGNITIVE CONSIDERATIONS IN L2 LEARNING 445

and Stone’s, that students could use past tense morphology in French well on fill-in-
the-blank tasks, but not in spontaneous discourse. The less automatized a rule is, the
more its application will depend on task characteristics.
Besides the interaction of automaticity and task conditions, however, there are
further factors at work. Students with high aptitude, especially with a high working-
memory capacity (cf. Age) and perhaps also high degrees of grammatical sensitivity,
may be able to juggle explicit knowledge around rather easily during spontaneous
communication while others with identical amounts of equally (non)-automatized
knowledge may find it much harder to use this knowledge because of bottlenecks in
working memory. Finally, the degree of prototypicality of a given use of a given rule
(Hu, 2002) will also influence the ease with which the relevant explicit (or implicit)
knowledge is triggered. Hu (2002) even argues, on the basis of his empirical findings,
that the issue of L2 knowledge use is not so much a matter of implicit versus explicit
knowledge, but largely a matter of the extent of explicit knowledge use made possible
by the interaction between automaticity, prototypicality, and task conditions (+/- focus
on form).
Combining the findings that little implicit learning takes place, that automatization
of explicitly learned knowledge is possible but far from automatic, and, that learners
can draw on explicit knowledge to the extent that the interaction between the degree
of automatization and the degree of task pressure allows, it seems that the focus of
the debate in applied linguistics should not be on the usefulness of implicit versus
explicit learning or knowledge, but on ways to maximize explicit learning and the
automatization of its product.

Individual Differences
Aptitude
It often appears that the word aptitude is almost as unfashionable as grammar. To
some extent, this is because of broad political or philosophical concerns, but SLA re-
searchers are especially wary of the concept because it has become strongly identified
with a very limited set of tests, such as the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT)
and the Pimsleur Language Aptitude Battery (PLAB), which were developed at a time
when language teaching was largely audiolingual, and research on naturalistic second
language acquisition research was virtually nonexistent. Hence the concern that these
instruments may not be the best predictors for learning with more contemporary, com-
municative methodologies, let alone for untutored acquisition. In our opinion, these
concerns are exaggerated. Evidence is accumulating that these traditional tests do
predict learning in communicative classrooms (e.g., Ranta, 2002), in immersion class-
rooms (e.g., Harley & Hart, 1997), among previously instructed students who start
functioning in the target community (Harley & Hart, 2002), and among untutored
adult immigrants (DeKeyser, 2000).
From the point of view of the cognitive psychologist, there is a different, more
serious problem with traditional language aptitude tests, however: They largely treat
aptitude and learning as ‘black boxes.’ The history of research on language learning
aptitude since World War II closely parallels the history of research on intelligence
since World War I: The first concern was to develop tests with high predictive validity
for specific learning contexts; construct validity and understanding the relationship
between the building blocks of aptitude and the requirements of different learning
contexts came into focus much later (see, e.g., Hunt, 1999; Deary, 2001 for intelligence
testing; Carroll, 1981, for language learning aptitude testing).
Research into these building blocks and their interactions with instructional and
other environmental factors is still very limited, but is already showing promising
446 DEKEYSER AND JUFFS

results. Strong interactions between aptitude (profiles) and instructional treatments

have been documented, for example, by Wesche (1981) in a classroom context, and
by Robinson (2002c) in a laboratory context. With more analytic classroom teaching
or under conditions of explicit rule learning, aptitude plays a large role; with more
holistic teaching methodologies or under conditions of incidental learning in the lab
(entirely meaning-oriented) aptitude as traditionally construed plays little or no role.
Interactions between aptitude (profiles) and age have been documented, for example,
in Harley and Hart (1997) and DeKeyser (2000). For adults and adolescents, aptitude
in the traditional sense is a strong predictor of success; for children it is not.
Even more interesting are the research prospects in Segalowitz (1997) and Ske-
han (2002). Both authors hypothesize a number of interactions between very specific
cognitive components of aptitude and different stages of learning; Segalowitz from
the point of view of skill acquisition theory within cognitive psychology (following
Ackerman, 1987), and Skehan from the point of view of SLA theory. The future of
aptitude research in the L2 domain probably lies in the study of these interactions
between (components of) aptitude and learning contexts, instructional treatments,
age of learning, and stages of acquisition, not only because such research gives a more
accurate empirical picture of reality and a better ability to predict success or failure
than studies on any of these variables can separately, but also because establishing
such interaction effects tells us more about what elementary cognitive mechanisms
underlie aptitude, and what cognitive processes take place under various conditions
of learning than mere correlational aptitude research or mere experimental research
on treatments. Continued success in this area of research, however, will require the
development of new fine-grained measures of components of aptitude, such as work-
ing memory for language, an area to which we now turn. (For more information on
individual differences in SLA, see Dörnyei & Skehan, 2003; Sawyer & Ranta, 2001;
for more information on aptitudes and their interaction with educational treatments,
see Corno et al., 2002; for more information on constellations of aptitudes of potential
relevance to SLA, see Robinson, 2002b; for a collection of recent empirical studies on
individual differences in SLA, see Robinson, 2002a.)

Age
In contrast to aptitude research, the role of age in second language acquisition is a
popular issue. It is not uncontroversial, however. On the one hand, its practical im-
plications continue to be misunderstood (for a discussion see, e.g., DeKeyser, 2003;
DeKeyser & Larson-Hall, in press); on the other hand the very existence of a critical
period for second language learning is now being questioned. The very fact that post-
puberty learners do not go as far in their second language as children is not disputed;
what is at issue is the exact shape of the age-proficiency function, and above all, its
cognitive interpretation. While some researchers such as Johnson and Newport (1989)
and DeKeyser (2000) have found a strong decline in ultimate attainment for learners
whose age of acquisition is around puberty but no significant decline thereafter, others
such as Bialystok and Hakuta (1999) or Birdsong (2001) claim to have found a con-
tinued decline through adulthood. Furthermore, while Johnson and Newport (1989)
and many others see their findings as clear evidence for a maturational phenomenon,
rooted deeply in the psychology of cognitive development, and ultimately in devel-
opmental cognitive neuropsychology, others such as Birdsong (2001) or Hakuta (2001)
argue that the shape of the age function does not correspond to the concept of critical
period as it is used in the biological literature, and that the age-proficiency function is
merely due to the confusion between age on the one hand and various environmental
factors and/or the decline of various aspects of perception and memory throughout
adulthood on the other.
 24. COGNITIVE CONSIDERATIONS IN L2 LEARNING 447

Those who do believe that the critical period is real, that is, that the age effects doc-
umented are due to maturation in the cognitive domain that takes places roughly
between ages 6 and 16, have given various but not incompatible interpretations
to this phenomenon. Some hypothesize a shift from implicit or domain-specific to
explicit or general-purpose learning processes (Bley-Vroman, 1989; DeKeyser, 2000,
in press; Segalowitz, 1997; Skehan, 1998, 2002); others attribute the age effects to
changes in the size of working memory (Cochran, McDonald, & Parault, 1999; Elman,
1993; Goldowsky & Newport, 1993; Kersten & Earles, 2001). Increasingly, however,
behavioral neurolinguistic as well as neuroimaging studies support the hypothesis
that there are fundamental differences in the neurological representation of language
between proficient speakers who learned a language as a child and those who learned
it as an adult (e.g., Hahne, 2001; Kim et al., 1997; Newman et al., 2002; Weber-Fox &
Neville, 1996, 1999), and at least one researcher has linked a variety of neurolinguistic
findings with the explicit/declarative versus implicit/procedural distinction (Ullman,
2001). For more information about critical period studies, their interpretation, and the
methodological challenges involved in this area, see DeKeyser and Larson-Hall (in
press) and Hyltenstam and Ambrahamsson (2003).

Working Memory
Views of working memory in language can be divided into two main types. One
is phonological short-term memory (STM), usually measured by the ability to repeat,
in the exact order presented, a sequence of digits, words, or nonsense syllables. The
second type is a storage and processing capacity, usually measured by the classic
reading span task (RST) of Daneman and Carpenter (1980), in which participants must
read sentences and then recall individual words that occurred in those sentences. It is
possible that the first type of working memory is a component of the second, although
many studies have shown no correlation between the two. Furthermore, researchers
such as Just and Carpenter (cf. Just, Carpenter, & Keller, 1996) have tried to show
that it is only the second kind of capacity that has predictive power where individual
differences in language processing and comprehension are concerned.
Working memory (WM) is currently among the most intensively researched and
controversial areas of research in first language processing. This intense activity is
reflected in the number of edited volumes in recent years (Andrade, 2001; Miyake &
Shah, 1999; Tulving & Craik, 2000), as well as numerous journal articles. Disagreements
and changes in viewpoints among researchers about the precise nature of working
memory itself and the usefulness of tests that claim to measure it outside college-age
and intellectual-level participants have naturally arisen (e.g., Baddeley, 2000, pp. 86–
87). Moreover, these disagreements reflect differences of opinion about the modular
and encapsulated nature of language discussed in the sections on UG and LI and
universal processing strategies (e.g., Just & Varma, 2002; MacDonald & Christiansen,
2002; Caplan & Waters, 2002).
Researchers in psychology are already well advanced in the use of brain imaging
techniques for investigating working memory, for example, event-related potentials
(ERP) (e.g., Fiebach, Schlesewsky, & Friederici, 2002, Vos et al., 2001) and functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) (e.g., Carpenter, Just, & Reichle, 2000). Main-
stream SLA researchers are still using basic techniques to measure working memory,
for example, the Daneman and Carpenter (1980) reading span test. Early work involv-
ing Japanese-speaking EFL learners by Harrington and Sawyer (1992) found correla-
tions between the reading span working memory task (RST) and scores on grammar
and reading sections of the TOEFL, but no relationship between scores on the phono-
logical STM task and these proficiency measures. However, for francophone learners
of EFL, Berquist (1997) reported both a correlation between the two memory scores
448 DEKEYSER AND JUFFS

and a stronger relationship between STM scores and the TOEIC proficiency measure.
Robinson (2002c) reports some reliable correlations between working memory and
listening tests in a laboratory study of Japanese-speaking learners acquiring ergativ-
ity and constraints on incorporation in Samoan. N. Ellis (1996) reviews a series of
studies that suggest that phonological STM is a very strong predictor of L1 and L2
proficiency.
Juffs (2000, 2002) has reported correlations between the two memory measures.
However, contrary to many L1 studies, no reliable relationship was found between
scores on the working memory measures and online reading times during process-
ing. Using the Waters and Caplan (1996) reading span task, Kroll et al. (2002) also
found no reliable relationship between this working memory measure and word
naming.
Measures of working memory are typically thought of as measuring individual ca-
pacity differences in input processing or comprehension. However, some researchers
have begun to investigate whether a role exists for working memory in explaining
individual differences in production (Fortkamp, 1999). Robinson (2002c) also reports
positive correlation with production tests in his study. Mackey et al., (2002) were
interested in a possible relationship between working memory and noticing of inter-
actional feedback, developmental level, and interactionally driven L2 development.
Although their conclusions are somewhat tentative, noticing occurred more with high
WM learners, phonological STM played a different role depending on the level of the
learner, and high WM capacity learners benefited more from interaction. Such con-
clusions mesh with the advantage noted by Myles, Mitchell, and Hooper (1999) for
learners who were better at retaining formulaic utterances.
Further research in this area will need to take into account the following issues: If L2
learning is based on general cognition, WM will be a reliable predictor of attainment
and performance only if those tests of WM are also related to general cognitive ca-
pacities. If WM is domain specific, and related to domain-specific language processes,
we might find a correlation between some measures of WM and online language pro-
cessing, but fail to find it with WM measures that are more general. Hence, different
tests of working memory along with different linguistic tests may help sort out which
parts of language learning are served by which parts of the cognitive architecture.
Second language researchers are only beginning to take a careful look at these issues
and to investigate their relevance for L2 learning. Researchers will need to follow
rapid developments in the psychology literature very closely.

CONCLUSION

Thanks to research in a variety of areas, from the experimental psychology of learn-

ing and skill acquisition, to the psycholinguistics of sentence processing and lexical
retrieval, to more applied research on the effect of learning conditions and individual
differences on SLA, we now have much better insights than a couple of decades ago
into the complexity of L2 knowledge and use. We understand that L2 knowledge can
be acquired implicitly (at least in children) or explicitly, can greatly change in nature
over time as a result of practice or reflection, and is drawn on variably depending on
the individual and the circumstances.
Many unanswered questions remain, however, about the relationship of L2 knowl-
edge to L1 knowledge and to broader aspects of cognition, and about the interaction
between implicit and explicit knowledge at the learning, storage, and retrieval stages.
Much work remains to be done to integrate the field of second language acquisition
better into cognitive science.
 24. COGNITIVE CONSIDERATIONS IN L2 LEARNING 449

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25

Fossilization in L2 Learners
ZhaoHong Han
Teachers College, Columbia University
Larry Selinker
New York University

“What is essential is often invisible to the eye.”

—Anonymous

This chapter addresses the fundamental issue of why the majority of adult L2 learners
are unable to reach the level of competence that they have aspired to, usually native-
speaker target-language competence. This problem has been stated most clearly by
Kellerman (1995a):

One of the most enduring and fascinating problems confronting researchers of second
language acquisition (SLA) is whether adults can ever acquire native-like competence
in a second language (L2), or whether this is an accomplishment reserved for children
who start learning at a relatively early age. As a secondary issue, there is the question
of whether those rare cases of native-like success reported amongst adult learners are
indeed what they seem, and if they are, how it is that such people can be successful when
the vast majority are palpably not. (p. 219)

In the history of ideas, the place of this phenomenon is even more important. It has
been central to second language acquisition since its founding in the late 1960s and
may be the main reason why there is a field of second language acquisition at all.
Selinker has long thought that the field of second language acquisition was ‘spurred
into existence’ (discussed in Long [2003] in the text related to his fn. 1) by the idea that
no matter what learners do, they will always be stuck in the second language at some
distance from expected target-language norms. This idea has led to the hypothesis that
being stuck in the L2 occurs with most, if not all, learners even at the most advanced
stages. It was this idea that forced early SLA researchers, who believed they were
working in a contrastive analysis framework (e.g., Briere, 1968; Nemser, 1971; Selinker,
1966), into positing intermediate linguistic systems that in some serious sense do not
seem to change. Nemser, for instance, explicitly had the stabilizing idea, which he
attributed to Weinreich (1953) where it is explicitly stated in the preface by Martinet.
455
456 HAN AND SELINKER

These intermediate stable systems were thought to be intermediate between, but more
important, different from, the native language as well as from the target language,
hence “approximative systems” in Nemser’s terms.1
One way to address the problem of observed (premature) stabilized forms was in-
spired by the Interlanguage Hypothesis (Selinker, 1972), which sought to understand
the problem in terms of the concept of fossilization, the hypothesized (invisible) in-
terlanguage process whereby interlanguage development in all linguistic domains
can cease, and apparently, ceases differentially. The goal of this chapter is to look at
and evaluate where the field is with this line of inquiry. This is a complex subject,
with much comment over the past 30 years. Therefore, in this chapter only some main
ideas will be highlighted. It will first be shown that fossilization can no longer be
considered a monolithic concept as it was three decades ago, but rather a concept that
is tied up with various manifestations of ‘failure,’ or “nonprogression of learning,”
by L2 learners in various contexts. It will then be argued that any attempt to explain
fossilization by way of a singular explanation will prove to be inadequate and that
contextual concerns of various types will be central. The chapter will end by arguing
that in constructing theories of second language acquisition, fossilization remains a
central issue to be confronted and explained, hence the need to develop principled
approaches to investigating the construct.
The plan of the chapter is to first look at fossilization as a theoretical construct,
then to regard the attempts to look at fossilization as an object of empirical study, and
finally, to consider implications for theories of second language acquisition.

FOSSILIZATION AS A THEORETICAL CONSTRUCT

In this section an overview is given of a) the various definitions of fossilization that

have appeared in the literature over the decades, b) the variables that frequently have
been associated with the term, and c) suggested explanations.

Definitions
The term fossilization was introduced into the field of second language acquisition by
Selinker in 1972 as an attempt to account for the observation that the vast majority of
second language learners fail to achieve native-speaker target-language competence.
Apparently, this observation, although not necessarily the fossilization idea, is now
accepted as fact. Fossilization, as originally conceptualized to account for this fact, im-
plied both a cognitive mechanism known as the fossilization mechanism (Selinker, 1972,
p. 221) and a performance-related structural phenomenon, that is, forms that remain in
learner interlanguage over time. As a cognitive mechanism, it was thought to be a
constituent of a latent psychological structure, one that dictates a learner’s acquisition
of a second language. This was conceived of as different from the then popular latent
language structure of Lenneberg (1967) that was widely assumed to be responsible for
first language acquisition through a language acquisition device (LAD) that triggered
Universal Grammar. This latent psychological structure responsible cognitively for
interlanguage and hence, fossilization, has been much commented on over the years
(see, e.g., the extended discussion in Ellis [1985]) but has not been directly studied,
so that will be left as work for the future. As a performance-based structural notion,
fossilization was defined in terms of hypothesized fossilizable structures:

[F]ossilizable linguistic phenomena are linguistic items, rules, and subsystems which
speakers of a particular L1 tend to keep in their interlanguage relative to a particular
TL, no matter what the age of the learner or amount of explanation and instruction he
receives in the TL. . . . (Selinker, 1972, p. 215)
 25. FOSSILIZATION IN L2 LEARNERS 457

This earliest conception suggests several properties of fossilization: fossilizable struc-

tures are persistent; they are resistant to external influences; and fossilization affects
both child L2 learners and adult L2 learners alike. Behind these factors, it is im-
portant to note, is the strong implication that L2 learners lack the ability to attain
nativelike competence, no matter what they do. It is precisely this strong hypothe-
sis for all learners2 that accords the construct of fossilization its intrinsic interest; it
is what has drawn the attention of many second language researchers and practi-
tioners.
Also, fossilization initially was thought to be shown empirically, primarily through
the concept of backsliding, that is, retrogression to an earlier form of interlanguage,
and this point is made explicitly in Selinker (1972) and much commented on in the
literature. Since 1972, Selinker (working with others) has broadened the referential
scope of fossilization: from backsliding to cessation of learning and to ultimate attain-
ment, gradually moving away from the 5% estimate that was made initially concern-
ing the hypothesized successful population of L2 learners, to the claim that no adult
L2 learner can hope to achieve nativelike competence in all discourse domains (see,
e.g., Selinker, 1996a, 1996b; Selinker & Douglas, 1985; Selinker & Lakshmanan, 1992;
Selinker & Lamendella, 1979).
Beyond Selinker’s definitions, the second language acquisition literature over the
past few decades has also seen numerous interpretations of fossilization. In the eyes
of many researchers, fossilization is a product as well as a process.3 It is also seen
to affect the entire interlanguage system as well as its subsystems; it is literally per-
manent as well as relatively permanent; and it is persistent and resistant. However,
there is no unanimity: for some researchers, fossilization happens to every learner
and yet to only some learners for other researchers. For some, it is only a stage of
interlanguage learning, thereby incorporating the fossilization of correct as well as of
incorrect forms (e.g., R. Ellis, 1985; Vigil & Oller, 1976). It can be externally manifested
as well as internally determined. Furthermore, it is suggested that fossilization may
represent the ultimate outcome of L2 learning (e.g., Tarone, 1994). Clearly, there are
many possibilities here, more than we have space to discuss in detail.
One ongoing criticism is that the various definitions of fossilization developed thus
far lack sophistication, thereby making the phenomenon unmeasurable (K. Gregg,
1997, SLART-L listserve discussion). In response, Han (1998) suggested a two-tier def-
inition, taking into account both the innateness as well as the external manifestations
of the phenomenon. Following this criterion, a cognitive and an empirical level with
respective definitions are thus obtained:

COGNITIVE LEVEL: Fossilization involves those cognitive processes,4 or underlying

mechanisms that produce permanently stabilized interlanguage forms.
EMPIRICAL LEVEL: Fossilization involves those stabilized interlanguage forms that
remain in learner speech or writing over time, no matter what the input or what the
learner does. (Han, 1998, p. 50)

This two-tier definition solves at least part of the definitional problem by redefin-
ing fossilization at two interrelated levels. At the cognitive level, it specifies that
fossilization is a cognitive mechanism made up of more than one process; at the em-
pirical level, it ties fossilization with stabilization over time that has manifestations
in interlanguage output. The two levels are also tied respectively to fossilization as
a process and as a product; that is, the cognitive level pertains to fossilization as a
process, whereas the empirical level speaks to its product dimension. The two imply
a cause-effect relationship in that it is the cognitive level of fossilization (i.e., fos-
silization as a process) that gives rise to the empirical level (i.e., fossilization as a
product). Moreover, fossilization on the whole is predicated on the condition of “no
458 HAN AND SELINKER

matter what the input or what the learner does,” thus suggesting that fossilization,
as a cognitive mechanism, would function regardless of learning conditions, and that
fossilization, when showing up in interlanguage output, would be out of the learner’s
control.
Whether or not this complex definition will work out better in the long run than its
predecessors is as yet to be judged by the field. Nevertheless, what does seem clear
at this point is that the revised definition, despite getting rid of some problems, still
leaves considerable room for interpretation. For example, at the cognitive level, it is
still not clear what processes make up the mechanism(s) referred to, and presuming
we do know what they are, the questions that ensue are how and when they are
activated (this mechanism issue as a problem was discussed as early as Selinker,
1972). At the empirical level, as discussed later, although fossilization is associated
with stabilization over time, both the length of the stabilization and its manner remain
to be determined.5 In interpreting cognitive, it also must be recognized that the present
intellectual world is quite different from the more behavioral world of the 1960s when
the concept was first discussed; now, internal mental processes strictly called cognitive
in the past are not really cognitive in this literal earlier sense but also include neural
and socio-affective processes.

Denotations and Explanations

Concerning work in fossilization over the years, there is one series of problems that
cannot be ignored: The lack of uniformity in the understanding of the notion of fos-
silization has led researchers to use the term to denote a very wide range of phe-
nomena. A summary of frequently associated variables includes (see also Han, 2003a,
2003b):
r Backsliding (e.g., R. Ellis, 1985; Schachter, 1988; Selinker, 1972).
r Stabilized errors (e.g., Schumann, 1978a).
r Learning plateau (e.g., Flynn & O’Neil, 1988).
r Typical error (Kellerman, 1989).
r Low proficiency (e.g., Thep-Ackrapong, 1990).
r De-acceleration of the learning process (e.g., Washburn, 1991).
r Persistent non-targetlike performance (e.g., Mukattash, 1986).
r Variable outcomes (Perdue, 1993).
r Cessation of learning (e.g., Odlin, 1993).
r Structural persistence (e.g., Schouten, 1996).
r Errors that are impervious to negative evidence (Lin & Hedgcock, 1996).
r Random use of grammatical and ungrammatical structures (Schachter, 1996).
r Ultimate attainment (e.g., Selinker, 1996a, 1996b; passim the SLA literature).
r Habitual errors (SLART-L listserve, 1997).
r Long-lasting free variation (R. Ellis, 1999).
r Persistent difficulty (Hawkins, 2000).

These denotations of potentially relevant variables have, in turn, spawned a myriad

of attempted explanations, some of which are based on empirical studies ostensibly
devoted to the subject matter of fossilization, and others of which provide speculations
without any empirical basis. The major problem, it seems, is assuming fossilization
without presenting any longitudinal interlanguage data for the claims made.
As a result, fossilization, in association with the listed variables, is found to be
explained in the following plethora of terms, among others (for a comprehensive list,
see Han, 2003a, 2003b):
 25. FOSSILIZATION IN L2 LEARNERS 459
r Multiple factors acting in tandem (e.g., Han & Selinker, 1999; Jain, 1974; Keller-
man, 1989; Selinker, 1992; Selinker & Lakshmanan, 1992; Sharwood Smith, 1994).
r Satisfaction of communicative needs (Corder, 1978, 1983; R. Ellis, 1985; Klein,
1986; Klein & Perdue, 1993; Selinker & Lamendella, 1978).
r Absence of corrective feedback (Tomasello & Herron, 1988; Vigil & Oller, 1976).
r Lack of acculturation (e.g., Preston, 1989; Schumann, 1978a, 1978b; Stauble, 1978).
r Lack of input (Schumann, 1978a, 1978b).
r Maturational constraints (e.g., Seliger, 1978).
r L1 influence (e.g., Andersen 1983; Han, 2000; Kellerman, 1989; Schouten, 1996;
Selinker & Lakshmanan 1992; Zobl, 1980).
r False automatization (Hulstijn, 1989, 2002a).
r Processing constraints (Schachter, 1996).
r Lack of access to learning principles (White, 1996).
r Lack of verbal analytical skills (DeKeyser, 2000).
r Lack of sensitivity to input (Long, 2003).
r Neural entrenchment (N. Ellis, 2002).

This list reveals multiple, unrelated explanations, presented in a roughly chrono-

logically ordered sequence. Loosely conceived, they fall into the following categories:
environmental, cognitive, neurobiological, and socio-affective, which are summed up
in Han (2003a, 2003b). Suffice it to say that factors both external and internal to L2 learn-
ers contribute to fossilization (though, as argued by Selinker & Lamendella [1978],
the so-called ‘external’ have to be filtered through internal neurofunctional structures
and processes). Within the internal factors one can differentiate between cognitive,
neurobiological and socio-affective ones. The cognitive factors—in line with more
current thinking, as mentioned earlier—now include those that pertain to knowledge-
representation, knowledge processing, and psychological processes such as attention,
avoidance, and emotion.
Given the multiple dimensions of fossilization (mainly, general and local), any effort
to explain the phenomenon through one unitary account will ultimately prove inad-
equate. Consider, for example, biological maturational constraints as a causal factor.
Whereas it may explain away the general failure of the overwhelming majority of adult
L2 learners to reach native-speaker competence in an L2, it is incapable of accounting
for interlearner as well as intralearner differential success and failure in L2 learning
(cf. Pulvermuller & Schumann, 1994). Hence, the biological account cannot serve as
a universal ontological account of fossilization (cf. Birdsong, 1999; Scovel, 2000).
Summing up this brief excursion into conceptual issues regarding fossilization, over
the years the term has become associated with a wide range of variables, exhibiting
divergent interpretations of the construct. The lack of uniformity in the conceptu-
alization and application of the notion, while creating confusion, points to the fact,
among other things, that fossilization is no longer a monolithic concept as it was in
its initial postulation, but rather a complex construct intricately tied up with varied
manifestations of failure (Han, 2002, 2003, 2004). The proliferation of uses of the term
fossilization is matched in excess by explanatory accounts exhibiting a rich spectrum
with almost every perspective on second language acquisition represented: the cogni-
tive, the neural, the environmental, and the socio-affective. Just as each idiosyncratic
application of the term adds a new empirical property to the discovery of fossiliza-
tion, each explanatory account reveals a new underlying factor, and together they
weave a large and delicate picture of fossilization. The general understanding of the
phenomenon is thus not to be based on a single perspective account but on a yet to
be discovered integrative account of the various factors.
460 HAN AND SELINKER

FOSSILIZATION AS AN OBJECT OF EMPIRICAL STUDY

Following the first suggestion of the concept of fossilization in the late 1960s, there
were repeated attempts to devise a research methodology to successfully discover
it empirically. This task has proved to be a difficult one. Historically, the first set
of studies on fossilization occurred very early and is exemplified by Watkin (1970).
Apparently, he was the first to empirically distinguish with different types of data
between what Selinker (1966) called “meaningful performance situations,” an early
view of the discourse domains view of interlanguage. Watkin, using what is referred
to here as the-typical-error approach showed that similar errors in article and verb for-
mation occurred in Hindi-English and Japanese-English samples, thereby implicating
the target language more than the native language in fossilization, a recurring discus-
sion. With admittedly limited data, he found overgeneralization phenomena where
the strategy might be described as reducing the L2 to a simple, functional system sim-
ilar to that of the L2. In retrospect, though not longitudinal, this study did raise issues
of transfer, or lack of it, and the possibility of differential fossilization by structure,
issues that are still alive today.
Following Watkin and others from that period, many researchers have attempted
to gather various types of data on fossilization, but fossilization is often assumed with
the subjects being labeled from the outset as fossilized. The subsequent research effort
is then to try to confirm fossilization in learners. One interesting set of studies were
the defossilization studies. One should revisit the interesting series of case studies done
in the 1970s by Schumann’s students at UCLA (e.g., Agnello [1977] and Bruzzeze
[1977]), since in all these cases, the defossilization attempts were unsuccessful, and
this needs to be explained. Even when temporary defossilization seemed to occur,
backsliding regularly occurred when attention was removed from the target language
forms concerned. This lack of defossilization was thought to provide evidence that
the subjects were initially fossilized, but a serious discussion about the place of these
studies remains to be undertaken.
Another series of studies has relied on cross-sectional methodology for establish-
ing what is fossilizable, considered by us as pseudolongitudinal. On the whole, re-
searchers have looked to persistence and resistance as major indicators of fossilization,
even though there is a lack of agreement on what persistent and resistant actually
mean. Consequently, these studies have set out to look for different symptoms of
fossilization. Some have sought stabilized deviant interlanguage forms; others have
looked for typical errors across learners with the same L1, and still others have col-
lected the remaining errors in the interlanguage of the advanced learners in the belief
that what remained should be the most persistent and are therefore the most likely
candidates for fossilization.
Empirical studies to date thus typically adopted one or a combination of the follow-
ing methodological approaches: 1) longitudinal, 2) typical-error, 3) advanced-learner,
4) corrective-feedback, and 5) length-of-residence (LOR). Since the literature is vast,
a detailed review of these studies is impossible here, so instead one empirical study
will be cited to illustrate each of the methodological approaches.

Longitudinal Approach
The longitudinal approach, which is highly recommended for studying stabilization
leading to fossilization, has few exemplars in the literature, and this is due, primarily,
to the amount of energy and time involved. Nonetheless, they are necessary, and one
of the best exemplars is Lardiere (1998a).
Lardiere reported on an 8-year longitudinal case study of an adult L2 learner of
English. Her subject, Patty, whose L1s were Hokkien and Mandarin Chinese, had
 25. FOSSILIZATION IN L2 LEARNERS 461

lived in the United States for 18 years prior to the study. Out of these 18 years, she was
totally immersed in the English-speaking environment for 10 years. Data, admittedly
limited, came exclusively from three audio-recorded conversations with Patty. The
first and second recordings were 8 years apart; and the second and third recordings
were 2 months apart.
One of Lardiere’s primary motives for the study was interestingly methodological,
namely to question an overreliance, following what is called the ‘Weak Continuity Ap-
proach’, on the criterial production rates of inflectional morphology as evidence for
positing underlying syntactic representations in the interlanguage grammar. Lardiere
examined Patty’s pronominal case marking and past tense inflectional morphology
across the three recordings. A quantitative analysis of the subject’s past tense mark-
ing in finite obligatory contexts showed that Patty had “remained unchanged over
the 8 years, despite massive exposure to target-language input by native speakers
in a virtually exclusively target-language environment” (p. 17). In contrast, her mas-
tery of pronominal marking is perfect, as evident from a quantitative analysis of the
nominative forms that she used as subjects of finite clauses.
This differential result, of both aspects of Patty’s interlanguage grammar achieving
a steady state, with one successfully meeting the target and the other falling short
of it, is interesting and a Universal Grammar explanation is provided with Lardiere
(1998b; 2000) subsequently arguing for dissociation between development of inflec-
tional affixation and syntactic knowledge of formal features.

Typical-Error Approach
In studies using typical-error analysis, errors that are characteristic of learners with
the same L1 background are studied, usually across different proficiency levels. The
much quoted studies by Kellerman (e.g., 1989) is a case in point. The major concern
here was linguistic features that give rise to the syntactic accent of Dutch-English
interlanguage. Two assumptions appear to underlie this study. First, errors that typ-
ify a whole community of L2 learners with homogeneous L1 background are the
strongest candidates for fossilization; second, errors that are not only common to that
community but also stay with its most advanced members are indicative of fossi-
lization.
One well-known example comes from the study conducted by Wekker, Kellerman,
and Hermans (1982) of a typical error in Dutch English that involves using ‘would’
in the protasis of hypothetical conditionals:

If I would be able to live all over again, I would be a gardener. (cited on p. 110)

This study investigated the performance of Dutch learners of English on nonpast

and past hypothetical conditional sentences in Dutch and English under experimental
conditions. The subjects were first-, second-, and third-year university students and
were considered advanced. The study was pseudolongitudinal in that learners at dif-
ferent proficiency levels were used as subjects to provide a pseudodiachronic view of
the interlanguage structure under scrutiny. Results obtained showed that all groups of
subjects “showed at least some tendency to select +/+6 as the English target, irrespec-
tive of their choice in Dutch” and that “even third-year students do not behave like
native speakers” (p. 100). The fact that even the most advanced learners persisted in
the typical error was, for Kellerman, the evidence of the tendency to fossilize. Looking
at relevant evidence in world languages as well as in first language acquisition, he
concluded that the fossilized structure was a function of the intersection of multiple
tendencies (an early example of the ‘Multiple Effects Principle’ proposed by Selinker
& Lakshmanan [1992]): a) avoidance of directly transferring the modal meaning of
462 HAN AND SELINKER

Dutch past tenses to English past tenses intersecting with b) avoidance of structural
ambiguity and c) creation of a structural symmetry.

Advanced-Learner Approach
This approach, similar to the previous approach because it uses advanced learners
as the major source of information on fossilization, studies very advanced learners,
usually calling them near-native speakers. The underlying assumption is that “the dif-
ferences from native speakers are presumably limited, and therefore easier to study”
and that “the few deviances from the native norm that do exist should be more cer-
tain candidates for inclusion in the category of fossilization” (Hyltenstam, 1988, p.70).
Hyltenstam’s study was, in fact, the first to deal with lexical fossilization and ad-
dressed two questions: Are there any differences between near-native and native
speakers in the variation, density, and specificity of their lexicon in literacy-related
language use? Are the near-native speakers different from native speakers in the qual-
ity and quantity of lexical units that deviate from the native norm? Students at Swedish
senior high school level served as subjects. Among them, one half were bilingual in
Finnish and Swedish and one half in Spanish and Swedish; these were compared with
monolingual Swedish speakers as controls. The bilinguals were considered to be near-
natives on the grounds that they could pass as native speakers of Swedish in everyday
conversation; that they used their first language on a daily basis; and that they repre-
sented the whole range of grade levels. Quantitative measures were used to estimate
lexical characteristics of the three groups, and a qualitative lexical error analysis was
used to analyze two main error types with results showing insignificant differences
between the three groups in the density, variation, and specificity of their lexicon: “the
vocabulary, as it is used in the literate tasks in this investigation, seems to be as large,
as varied, and as sophisticated in the bilingual groups as in the monolingual group”
(p. 79). However, significant differences were found between bilingual subjects and
the monolingual subjects in terms of the frequency of errors and the distribution of
error types. Hyltenstam concluded that the results had some bearing on fossilization.
In his view, the subjects who were near-natives were in an “end state” (Klein, 1986),
and that the lexical deviances that remained in their interlanguage must have fos-
silized. He nevertheless urged that longitudinal studies of near-natives be conducted
“to see whether fossilization features really are fossilized, or if they disappear with
time, although at a very slow rate” (p. 82).

Corrective-Feedback Approach
A question that appears to confront any fossilization study is how can one estab-
lish that for a given learner, fossilization is a permanent condition and not merely a
temporary cessation of learning? Selinker and Lamendella (1979) suggest that “the
conclusion that a particular learner had indeed fossilized could be drawn only if the
cessation of further IL learning persisted in spite of the learner’s ability, opportunity,
and motivation to learn the target language and acculturate into the target society”
(p. 373). Thus, studies of fossilization need to grapple with these two issues: demon-
stration a) that a certain interlanguage structure has ceased developing, and b) that
cessation of progress has occurred (or not) despite the learner being in both an inter-
nally and externally favorable position to learn.
To tackle the first issue, researchers have resorted to L2 learner reaction to corrective
feedback as a means of determining whether or not learning has ceased developing. In
Kellerman (1989), for example, it was not only a typical error in Dutch-English inter-
language community but also an error that seemed to be immune to the pedagogical
intervention that was made the linguistic focus for investigating fossilization (see
 25. FOSSILIZATION IN L2 LEARNERS 463

also Schouten, 1996). To investigate the second issue, researchers have often chosen to
study learners who have lived in the target language environment for some time. The
premise here is that the length of residence is correlated with the amount of exposure
to the target language, hence a good indicator of the learning environment (see Han
[2003c] for a more detailed discussion).
Thep-Ackrapong (1990) used a combination of corrective feedback and length of
residence, to study an ethnic Chinese Vietnamese refugee student at an American
university for a year and a half. Important from the present point of view, the sub-
ject, Lin, was assumed to be fossilized from the outset based on the observation that
“she made many errors in all aspects of language performance though she had been
studying and exposed to English in the United States for over six years” (p. 109).
Focusing on infinitival complements and related structures, Thep-Ackrapong tutored
the subject for one semester by means of providing explicit rule explanation and cor-
rective feedback, and subsequently observed whether any progress was made. Data
collected at three times over a year and a half (i.e., before and after the tutoring ses-
sion and a year afterwards) indicate that the tutoring had little effect on Lin’s use of
the linguistic structures. In other words, her errors persisted despite the pedagogical
intervention. For the researcher, this result confirmed her conviction that Lin was a
fossilized learner, and the lack of progress was, in turn, attributed to Lin’s lack of
ability to analyze and synthesize linguistic elements.

Length-of-residence (LOR) Approach

Unlike the previous study, in some empirical studies LOR is employed as the singular
criterion for determining fossilization, and as such, fossilization is again assumed as
opposed to being established through longitudinal study. An example can be found in
Washburn (1991), the focus of which was “to identify some characteristics of linguistic
behavior that distinguishes fossilized non-native speakers from those who are still
learning” (p. v).
Using primarily the well-discussed five years as the cut-off point, Washburn di-
vided her undergraduate subjects into two groups, which she labeled fossilized and
nonfossilized respectively. Within a Vygotskian theoretical framework, she devised a
number of tasks, including grammaticality judgments, imitations, short-term learn-
ing, and picture narration. Data, compiled from several types of recordings, were
collected to test several hypotheses, an example of which is that “On the short-term
learning task, the nonfossilized subjects will learn (become able to learn) to produce the
task utterance more accurately and efficiently than the fossilized subjects, as measured
by the number of turns needed and the maintenance of accuracy of form” (p. 78). Sub-
sequent data analyses showed that some of the hypotheses were indeed supported
but some were not. For example, the hypothesis just mentioned was strongly sup-
ported, but where there was lack of support from the data, attribution was given not
to a disbelief in these fossilized learners but to difficulty in accessing the required
cognitive processes.

Evaluation of These Various Approaches

This has been a very brief review of a few, hopefully prototypical studies that have
attempted to struggle with the difficult task of empirically studying fossilization. Han
(1998, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c) and Long (2003) provide more detail on additional studies.
What the previous cursory survey shows is that researchers have attempted various
means to determine fossilization.
Positively speaking, a typical error study shows the pervasiveness of an interlan-
guage structure within a particular interlanguage group. This way, however, of trying
464 HAN AND SELINKER

to demonstrate fossilization has the drawback of only producing a general picture

of the group at different levels at one point in time and, by definition, cannot show
change/nonchange over time in individual interlanguage, where learning takes place.
It either reduces the credibility of the typical error as the indicator of fossilization in
an L2 learner’s interlanguage, or falsely implies that the typical error would fossilize
in every learner within the same interlanguage community. This latter assumption
cannot be justified since fossilization is understood to be an idiosyncratic process
(Nakuma, 1998; Selinker, 1992; Selinker & Lamendella, 1978). The use of such pseu-
dolongitudinal evidence seems effective in revealing the genesis of the interlanguage
construction, but weak in revealing individuality and may say nothing about the
object of study, fossilization itself.
Turning to advanced learner studies, often called near-native-speaker studies, one sees a
rationale that whatever has remained in the interlanguages of the group studied had
been subject to long-term stabilization and changed least. Several types of questions
remain here: If these advanced learners have succeeded in moving so close to the
target language, why is it not possible for them to move even closer? In the absence
of longitudinal evidence, how sure can one be that the deviant features are products
of long-term stabilization rather than of more recent restructuring? (See, however,
arguments against this rationale in Selinker & Lakshmanan [1992].)
Concerning studies that use corrective feedback as the diagnostic of fossilization,
there is often the assumption that corrective feedback is a unidimentional rather than
a multidimensional interactive process. One consequent problem is that learners’
performance following the corrective feedback may be overemphasized, but not the
nature of the corrective feedback itself. This can be problematic because in the feedback
process, a number of factors—such as the explicitness, the timing, and the learner’s
interpretation—may interact to determine its effect (for recent studies of learners’
response to corrective feedback, see Han, 2001; Mackey, Gass, & McDonough, 2000;
Roberts, 1995). It follows, then, that if L2 learners do not respond to corrective feedback
in the way the teacher/researcher desires, it is possible that the feedback provided
is itself not appropriate and thus the fossilization issue is again not directly attacked
(see discussion in Selinker & Lamendella [1978] in response to Vigil & Oller [1976]).
Turning now to the LOR studies, some recent SLA research has seen increased use
of LOR in conjunction with age of arrival (AOA) to index L2 ultimate attainment
and age effects in SLA (for a most recent collection of studies, see Birdsong, 1999).
However, both LOR and AOA may have a limited scope of application here as they
confine research to subjects who reside in the target-language environment. Moreover,
research based on LOR raises the fundamental question that keeps arising regarding
fossilization: In the absence of longitudinal evidence, how can one be sure that an
interlanguage form has stabilized or not? LOR presupposes the knowledge of the
time it generally takes for acquiring an L2, but this knowledge does not yet exist with
regard to L2 acquisition. Time alone, when devoid of any substance, is an uninteresting
variable. As Klein (1993) states, “. . . what matters is the intensity, not the length of
interaction” (p. 115). And perhaps, as Selinker and Lamendella (1978) expressed it
long ago, what is crucial with fossilization is how the neurofunctional systems engage
with stimuli in such environments.
In conclusion, none of the diagnostics mentioned can stand alone as an indepen-
dent and reliable source of evidence of fossilization. It is clear that empirical research
must be preceded by careful consideration of the variety of factors mentioned in pre-
vious sections and perhaps others that have yet to be explored. Finally, it has been
strongly argued over the years (for recent discussions, see Han, 1998, 2002, 2003a,
2003b; Lardiere, 1998a, 1998b, 2000; Long, 2003) that longitudinal studies are neces-
sary to establishing long-term stabilization in individuals.
 25. FOSSILIZATION IN L2 LEARNERS 465

UNDERSTANDING FOSSILIZATION AS A PREREQUISITE

FOR SLA THEORIES

As previously shown, there have been many attempts to deal with fossilization and
each of them involves factors necessary to understanding second language acquisition
in general. Thus, it is important for SLA in general that we try to get the logic right to
demonstrate fossilization. Given how difficult it is to study fossilization over time and
then to extrapolate from controlled experiments to real-life interlanguage interaction,
it appears that there must be at least four sets of criteria to demonstrate the existence
of fossilization or some form of cessation of learning7 :

r Empirical studies must be longitudinal.

r There must be abundant positive evidence to the learner.
r The learner must show high motivation.
r The learner must have considerable opportunity for practice.8

As Selinker and Mascias (1997) stated, “. . . only with longitudinal interlanguage

data in the context of positive evidence to the learner where there exist motivational
criteria are we able to show instances of fossilization” (p. 257).
It is clear that the present state of fossilization research is still characterized by a
plurality of unresolved issues, despite the popularity of the term9 —often in dismaying
collocations such as fossilized error or fossilized learner. With great strides made
in SLA research over the past three decades, fossilization is no longer a monolithic
concept, but rather one tied up with different manifestations of failure or non-learning
or getting stuck in L2. Research attempts to examine failure are occurring on both a
macroscopic and a microscopic level. On the macroscopic level, researchers (e.g., those
who study the critical period effects in SLA) typically look at general failure (i.e.,
failure across the group of adult L2 learners). On the microscopic level, researchers
look at individual learners and focus on the local and differential cessation of learning
that takes place in various interlanguage domains such as phonology, morphology,
syntax, semantics, lexicon, and pragmatics. Given the widespread use of the concept, it
becomes essential that researchers make it clear what they understand by fossilization,
at least operationally, in each study.
Research in fossilization, and understanding its etiology, is central to understanding
second language acquisition and prerequisite to any SLA theory that purports to be
general. This must be so, since, as noted earlier, the recognition that there is something
“fundamentally different” (in Bley-Vroman’s [1989] terms) about second language
acquisition that is intimately related to invisible phenomena underlying fossilization
has pushed early researchers into creating the construct of interlanguage in the first
place, and thus has provided the impetus for the separate field of second language
acquisition.
Over the past decades, significant advances have been made in understanding
adult SLA. Several strands of research have come to the fore with great relevance
to understanding fossilization. The first is the research on the critical period (CP) and
age in general, long debated issues in SLA. Researchers (see, e.g., Bialystok & Hakuta,
1994; Birdsong & Molis, 2001; Johnson & Newport, 1989; Long, 1990; Marinova,-Todd,
Bradford, & Snow, 2000; Patkowski, 1980; Scovel, 1988; Seliger, 1978; Snow, 1987) have
vigorously argued for/against the validity of the Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH;
Lenneberg, 1967) in the context of SLA. Long’s review (1990), examining both the
findings and the methodological designs of the past studies on CPH, points to mat-
urational constraints and their potential consequences. Admitting such maturational
466 HAN AND SELINKER

constraints, Long asserts, allows for a more plausible explanation for reduced ability
and failure. Of particular relevance to understanding fossilization is his insight that
there exists a cause-and-effect relationship between the timing of the first exposure
and ultimate attainment. Adult second language learners appear to begin with some
degree of “biological handicap” (Slobin, 1993), and because of this, their learning is
doomed to incompleteness. Concerns of fossilization must thus be integrated into
the study of the critical period and age concerns in understanding second language
acquisition.
A second strand concerns native language (and ‘other’ language, interlanguage) transfer,
a perennial issue in any discussion of second language acquisition and where transfer
appears to be central to any type of learning. Research on language transfer has taken
us afar from an all-or-none view, which prevailed in the early days of SLA research, to
a much more qualitative understanding of how prior linguistic knowledge may influ-
ence L2 learning. Transfer is now generally recognized to be a cognitive, idiosyncratic,
and selective process that to a significant extent determines the quantity and quality
of success in an L2. Even though it may consciously be acted upon (Andersen, 1983),
L1 influence is largely an invisible implicit force that drives language acquisition
(Kellerman, 1995b; Pavlenko & Jarvis, 2001). SLA research has produced a great wealth
of evidence showing that this influence, as a psycholinguistic factor, intersects with
a host of other factors, external and internal, leading to long-term stabilization (see,
e.g., Han, 2000; 2001; Han & Selinker, 1999; Kellerman, 1989; Schachter, 1996; Schu-
mann, 1978a; Selinker & Lakshmanan, 1992) and thus, potentially, to fossilization. So,
the transfer concerns must be integrated into the understanding of fossilization in
understanding second language acquisition.
A third strand of popular SLA research relates to the extensive work on form-focused
instruction, which has blossomed in the last 15 years or so (for recent publications on the
topic, see Doughty & Williams, 1998; Lightbown, 2000; Norris & Ortega, 2000; Schmidt,
1995). Issues examined along this line include, but are not limited to, the nature of the
pedagogical procedures that appear to have an impact on interlanguage development,
the role of many variables, such as attention, awareness, noticing, the role of carefully
staged instructional interventions, and the role of interaction in leading to the learners’
continued restructuring of their interlanguage system. Han and Selinker (2001, 2002,
2003) have tried to show that there is a possible causal relationship between certain
pedagogical procedures and fossilization. If this can be demonstrated with systematic
evidence, then concerns of fossilization must be integrated into our understanding of
form-focused instruction in understanding second language acquisition.
A fourth strand derives from research on tasks and processing characteristics of adult
L2 learners. Skehan (1998), for example, highlights L2 learners’ natural inclination to
focus on meaning, not on form. He claims that in the processes of comprehension
and production, “meaning takes priority for older learners, and that the form of lan-
guage has secondary importance” (p. 3). As a result of the meaning priority, learners
may tend to employ what he calls a dual-coding approach to L2 learning: rule-based
and instance-based, both of which together enable economical, parsimonious, and
effective performance. Of particular relevance here is his insight that fossilization—
by which he means erroneous exemplar—is the premature product of the rule-based
approach, which is then adopted under the instance-based approach in language
use, and that “if the underlying system does not so evolve, and if communicative
effectiveness is achieved, the erroneous exemplar may survive and stabilize, and be-
comes a syntactic fossil” (p. 61). So, concerns of fossilization must be integrated into
our understanding of social-cognitive demands in understanding second language
acquisition.
In conclusion, notwithstanding its yet-to-be-determined nature, the construct of
fossilization has enjoyed much popularity in the second language acquisition research
 25. FOSSILIZATION IN L2 LEARNERS 467

literature as well as in the literature and discussions about second language teaching.
The view advocated here is that fossilization research of a longitudinal kind must be
carried out with care and that while fossilization may not be prevented in any absolute
sense, it is possible to discover interventionist procedures to delay its onset, an effort
essential and worthwhile in terms of the best learning and teaching traditions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Mike Long and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable input and
suggestions on an earlier version of this chapter, and Paula Korsko and Jung Eun Year
for their research assistance. Any errors are ours.

NOTES

1. It is interesting to note that until the late 1960s, none of these researchers knew about the others’ work
and each discovered the phenomenon independently.
2. In a remark that has caused much discussion over the years, Selinker (1972) made a comment about
perhaps 5% of learners possibly being on a different track and maybe being able to achieve nativelike
competence. The idea there was not to come up with a precise number, 5% versus 4% or 6% and have to
defend that, but to leave the way open to the possibility that some small percentage of people could in
principle achieve nativelike status and if this were the case, then these individuals would, by definition,
be going along another ‘non-interlanguage’ path in the learning of a second language. This is still an
open question, perhaps unstudyable and ultimately, perhaps, depending upon various definitions of
native. This issue is discussed further in the next section.
3. In Kellerman (1989), interestingly, fossilization appears as both a non-countable noun considered as a
process and as a countable noun considered as a linguistic product.
4. In this context, cognitive assumes a broader meaning than is traditionally accorded it, encompassing
not only aspects of knowledge development and use but also the dimension of emotion (see, e.g.,
Mandler, 1999; Schumann, 1998; Selinker & Lamendella, 1979). In addition, it is necessary to recognize
that cognition results from the interaction between internal mechanisms and external social and cultural
environments.
5. Following Selinker’s (e.g., 1985, 1993) suggestion, two to five years of stabilization have generally been
taken as evidence of fossilization (see, e.g., Han, 1998; Long, 2003). This criterion is, however, arbitrary
in nature (for a discussion, see Han, 2003a).
6. + indicates the presence of the periphrastic conditional (would + infinitive) and − indicates the use of
a past tense.
7. ‘Cessation of learning’ can be competence and/or performance related.
8. ‘Practice’ here does not refer to mechanic drills type of practice, but rather using language under real
operating conditions (Johnson, 1996). It includes comprehension and production.
9. As has been pointed out several times, most recently by Long (2003), fossilization may be one of only
two or three second language acquisition terms to have made it into a number of popular dictionaries;
and it may be unique in being borrowed into other fields such as political discourse.

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26

The Output Hypothesis: Theory

and Research
Merrill Swain
The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
The University of Toronto1

INTRODUCTION

In the 1980s, the word “output” was used to indicate the outcome, or product, of the
language acquisition device. Output was synonymous with “what the learner/system
has learned.” In the decades that have followed, therefore, it is perhaps not surprising
that the second language learning literature has been slow to take on the concept of
output as part of the process of learning, not simply the product of it. In this chapter,
my intent is to provide a description of the “the output hypothesis”: the context in
which it was proposed, supporting research and theoretical underpinnings, and future
directions. This review will show that though an uphill battle, there has been a shift
in meaning from output as a noun, a thing, or a product to output as a verb, an action,
or a process.

THE OUTPUT HYPOTHESIS

Put most simply, the output hypothesis claims that the act of producing language
(speaking or writing) constitutes, under certain circumstances, part of the process
of second language learning. Furthermore, the processes involved in producing lan-
guage can be quite different than those involved in comprehending language (Clark &
Clark, 1977). Swain (1995) outlined three functions of output in second language learn-
ing: 1) the noticing/triggering function, 2) the hypothesis-testing function, and 3) the
metalinguistic (reflective) function. These are discussed further. First, however, it is
important to understand the context in which the output hypothesis was formulated.

Context in Which the Output Hypothesis Was Formulated

There are two aspects of the context that are important to mention. One aspect of
the context was the dominant theoretical paradigm for second language acquisition
471
472 SWAIN

(SLA) research at that time (1980s): information-processing theory. The second was
the widespread growth of French immersion programs in Canada, the evaluations of
which were showing some rather unexpected findings.
Krashen’s writings on the input hypothesis (e.g., 1982, 1985) claimed that there was
only one necessary and sufficient condition for second language acquisition, and that
was the presence of comprehensible input. Specifically, if learners are at stage “i” in
their language development, they can acquire i + 1 if they understand input containing
i + 1. Various ways in which input could be made comprehensible to the learner
were proposed and investigated. Long (1983, 1985), for example, claimed that certain
discourse moves such as clarification requests and comprehension checks served to
make input more comprehensible. Considerable research effort was expended on the
study of input, and the Xth University of Michigan Conference on Applied Linguistics
was devoted entirely to the topic of language input (Gass & Madden, 1985). Pica
(this volume) and Long (1996) have since outlined the theoretical developments and
findings of this view of SLA. Suffice it to say, that in the early 1980s, the burgeoning
field of SLA was dominated by the concept of input.
Indeed, when asked to write about immersion education for a special issue of
Language and Society, a magazine published by the Office of the Commissioner of
Official Languages in Canada, Krashen (1984), after claiming that “no program, to
my knowledge, has done as well,” stated that “second language acquisition theory
provides a very clear explanation as to why immersion works. According to current
theory, we acquire language in only one way: when we understand messages in that
language, when we receive comprehensible input” (p. 61).
It was certainly the case that the initiation of French immersion programs in Canada
in the late 1960s infused parents and teachers with renewed energy and excitement
about the teaching and learning of French as a second language (FSL). In these pro-
grams, English-speaking children were taught some or all of their curriculum in
French beginning with the start of school (early immersion), around grade 4 or 5
(mid immersion), or around grade 6 or 7 (late immersion). Evaluation after evaluation
was conducted of these programs (for early summaries, see Lambert & Tucker, 1972;
Swain, l978; Swain & Lapkin, 1982, 1986). The results of these evaluations demon-
strated that the French proficiency of the immersion students was more advanced
than that of students taking 20 to 30 minutes a day of FSL. Furthermore, on some tests
of French listening and reading comprehension, French immersion students obtained
scores similar to those obtained by francophone students of the same age. However, to
the surprise of some, the speaking and writing abilities of French immersion students
were, in many ways, different from those of their francophone peers. It was these
latter findings that raised doubts about the validity of the input hypothesis (Swain,
1985), most particularly about the argument that comprehensible input was “the only
true cause of second language acquisition” (Krashen, 1984: 61). No one could possi-
bly argue that immersion students did not receive an abundance of comprehensible
input.
Alternative explanations were sought. One explanation, based on both informal
and formal observations in immersion classrooms, was the output hypothesis (Swain,
1985). Observations revealed that the immersion students did not talk as much in the
French portion of the day (in French) as they did in the English portion of the day (in
English) (Swain, 1988). More important, the teachers did not “push” the students to
do so in a manner that was grammatically accurate or sociolinguistically appropriate.
Thus it was that the initial version of the output hypothesis (Swain, 1985) referred
to “comprehensible output.” As Swain said, “. . . the meaning of ‘negotiating meaning’
needs to be extended beyond the usual sense of simply ‘getting one’s message across.’
Simply getting one’s message across can and does occur with grammatically deviant
forms and sociolinguistically inappropriate language. Negotiating meaning needs to
 26. THE OUTPUT HYPOTHESIS: THEORY AND RESEARCH 473

incorporate the notion of being pushed toward the delivery of a message that is not
only conveyed, but that is conveyed precisely, coherently, and appropriately. Being
‘pushed’ in output . . . is a concept parallel to that of the i +1 of comprehensible input.
Indeed, one might call this the ‘comprehensible output’ hypothesis” (pp. 248–9).
Mackey (2002) provides evidence of the reality of the notion of “pushed output.”
Mackey had adult ESL students watch videotapes of themselves interacting with
others and asked the students to recall what they were thinking at the time when
the original interaction occurred. Example 1 shows an interaction episode between a
learner and a native speaker.

NNS: And in hand in hand have a bigger glass to see.

NS: It’s err. You mean, something in his hand?
NNS: Like spectacle. For older person.
NS: ’Mmm, sorry I don’t follow, it’s what?
NNS: In hand have he have has a glass for looking through for make the print
bigger to see, to see the print, for magnify.
NS: He has some glasses?
NNS: Magnify glasses he has magnifying glass.
NS: Oh aha I see a magnifying glass, right that’s a good one, ok.

The stimulated recall of the learner is provided next as an instantiation of the

perception of “being pushed.”

In this example I see I have to manage my err err expression because he does not under-
stand me and I cannot think of exact word right then. I am thinking thinking it is nearly
in my mind, thinking bigger and magnificate and eventually magnify. I know I see this
word before but so I am sort of talking around around this word but he is forcing me to
think harder, think harder for the correct word to give him so he can understand and so
I was trying, I carry on talking until finally I get it, and when I say it, then he understand
it, me. (non-native speaker, excerpt b of example 3 in Mackey, 2002).

Mackey (2002) found a high degree of agreement between learners’ perceptions

and the researchers’ interpretation that an interaction episode involved learners being
pushed to make modifications in their output: 81.5% in student–teacher interaction
in a classroom setting; 72% in NNS/NS interaction in a laboratory setting; and 64.5%
in NNS/NNS interaction, also in a laboratory setting. This suggests that students’
perception of being “pushed” is highest when the feedback comes from the teacher
and least when it comes from a non-native speaking peer.
Looking back over the research of the late 1980s and 1990s, I think the label “com-
prehensible output” tended to get in the way of the idea of output as process even
though the 1985 formulation was clear that the output hypothesis was about what
learners did when “pushed,” what processes they engaged in. There were two ways in
which the “comprehensible output” label focused research on the product of learning.
First, the label was taken literally, and out of context, so that “comprehensible” was
taken by some (e.g., Van den Branden 1997) to mean just that—able to be understood—
rather than output that was an improved version of an earlier version in terms of its
informational content and/or its grammatical, sociolinguistic, or discourse features.
Second, the label (a noun) put the focus on product, rather than on process. Much
of the research (e.g., Pica, Holliday, Lewis, & Morgenthaler, 1989; Pornpibul, 2002;
Shehadeh, 1999; Van den Branden, 1997) conducted in the late 1980s and 1990s about
the output hypothesis was descriptive in nature, and tended to focus more on “oc-
currence than acquisition” (Shehadeh, 2002, p. 641). The research demonstrated that
learners often responded to negotiation moves such as requests for clarification with
474 SWAIN

modified output. Instances of this modified output were counted and compared ac-
cording to context and learner variables, for example, the type of task (e.g., Iwashita,
1999) and type of negotiation move (e.g., Pica et al., 1989) that generated it, gender of
participants (e.g., Gass & Varonis, 1986; Pica, Holliday, Lewis, Berducci, & Newman,
1991), and proficiency level of participants (e.g., Iwashita, 2001; Shehadeh, 1999).

Three Functions of Output

I turn now to a brief discussion of the roles that output might play in second language
learning as proposed by Swain (1995). One function of producing the target language,
in the sense of “practicing,” is that it enhances fluency. As this seems noncontroversial,
particularly if it is not confused with the adage that “practice makes perfect,” I will not
discuss this role further. We know that fluency and accuracy are different dimensions
of language performance, and although practice may enhance fluency, it does not
necessarily improve accuracy (Ellis, 1988). In each of the following three sections, I
provide examples from the research literature that support the claim being made.

The Noticing/Triggering Function. The claim here is that while attempting to produce
the target language (vocally or silently [subvocally]), learners may notice that they do
not know how to say (or write) precisely the meaning they wish to convey. In other
words, under some circumstances, the activity of producing the target language may
prompt second language learners to recognize consciously some of their linguistic
problems: It may bring their attention to something they need to discover about their
second language (possibly directing their attention to relevant input). This awareness
triggers cognitive processes that have been implicated in second language learning—
ones in which learners generate linguistic knowledge that is new for them, or that
consolidate their current existing knowledge (Swain & Lapkin, 1995).
Example 2, taken from a think-aloud session with an eighth grade French immer-
sion student while he is composing, is illustrative.

[2] La dé. . . truc. . . tion. Et la détruction. No, that’s not a word. Démolition, démolisson,
démolition, démolition, détruction, détruision, détruision, la détruision des arbres au
forêt de pluie (the destruction of the trees in the rain forest).
(from Swain & Lapkin, 1995)

In Example 2, the student has just written “Il y a trop d’utilisation des chemicaux toxiques
qui détruissent l’ozone.” (There’s too much use of toxic chemicals which destroy the
ozone layer). In his think-aloud, we hear him trying to produce a noun form of the
verb he has just used. He tries out various possibilities (hypotheses), seeing how each
sounds. His final solution, “la détruision,” is not correct, but he has created this new
form by making use of his knowledge of French: he used the stem of the verb he has
just produced and added a French noun suffix. This example is revealing because it is
an incorrect solution. It allows us to conclude that new knowledge has been created
through a search of the learner’s own existing knowledge, there being no other source.
The learner’s search was triggered by his own output, which he noticed was incorrect.
Here, as with Schmidt and Frota (1986), noticing means “in the normal sense of the
word, that is, consciously” (p. 311). What is noticed is available for verbal report as
illustrated in Example 2. Learners may simply notice a form in the target language due
to the frequency or salience of the feature (Gass, 1997). Or, as proposed by Schmidt and
Frota in their “notice the gap principle,” learners may notice that the target language
form is different from their own usage. Or, learners may also notice that they cannot
say what they want to say in the target language (Swain, 1995). Noticing this “hole”
(Doughty & Williams, 1998) may be an important step to noticing the gap.
 26. THE OUTPUT HYPOTHESIS: THEORY AND RESEARCH 475

Izumi (2002), building on previous studies (Izumi & Bigelow, 2000; Izumi, Bigelow,
Fujiwara, & Fearnow, 1999), conducted a meticulously designed controlled experiment
to examine whether output promotes noticing and learning of English relativization
(object-of-preposition [OPREP] type of relative clauses [RCs]) among adult ESL learn-
ers. His study addressed two main questions: 1) Does the act of producing the target
language promote the noticing of formal elements in it more so than visually enhanced
input? 2) Does the act of producing the target language promote the learning of these
formal elements more so than does visually enhanced input? There were four treat-
ment groups and a comparison group. The treatment groups differed with respect to
output requirements and exposure to enhanced input. Students were given a text to
read for purposes of either reconstruction (+O) or comprehension (−O). After either
reconstructing the text (in writing) or indicating their comprehension by responding
to a set of questions, students read the original text again with the relative clauses ei-
ther underlined (+EI) or not (−EI). For those who received the enhanced (underlined)
input, the head noun, relative pronoun, and preposition in the RC were highlighted by
a combination of bolding, shadowing, and font sizes. Then the students again recon-
structed the story (+O) or responded to questions (−O). The comparison group was
only administered the pre- and posttests. Pre- and posttests were given to assess the
students’ productive and receptive knowledge of English relativization. Additionally,
two measures of noticing were obtained from the notes the students took when they
read the text, and the uptake of the form in the output phases of the treatment.
The findings concerning noticing were somewhat mixed. Izumi found that the notes
taken by the output groups as they read the text did not include as many head nouns,
relative pronouns, and prepositions as those taken by the groups whose input was
visually enhanced. However, in terms of immediate uptake of the form as indicated
by the number of target-like uses of the OPREP RCs during reconstruction, visually
enhancing the input did not add to the effect of output alone.
The findings concerning acquisition were much clearer. The results revealed a sig-
nificant main effect for output, none for input enhancement, and no interaction effect.
In other words, those students who reconstructed the text learned more about rela-
tivization than those who engaged in input comprehension activities independently
from whether the input was enhanced.
To help explain the puzzle of the apparent greater noticing of the targeted forms
by the enhanced input group but the greater learning by the output group, Izumi
suggests that the notetaking measure served only to measure a superficial notion of
noticing (much like choral repetition). The notetaking measure was a quantitative
measure of noticing (attention), and did not take into account qualitative aspects such
as the depth (Craik & Lockhart, 1972) or type (e.g., Robinson, 1995; Schmidt, 2001;
Tomlin & Villa, 1994) of attention and processing that learners engaged in with the
forms in focus.
Depth of processing refers to the degree of analysis and elaboration carried out on
input (paraphrasing rather than mere repetition), with greater depth being associated
with longer term and stronger memory traces. This implies that quantity of attention
is less important than the quality of it, with deeper and elaborate processing being
key. Izumi (2002) suggests that within this framework, “input enhancement may have
caused mere recirculation or rehearsal at the same, relatively shallow processing level,
which led the learners to experience only a short-term retention of the attended form.
On the other hand, the greater learning evidenced by the output subjects suggests
that output triggered deeper and more elaborate processing of the form, which led
them to establish a more durable memory trace” (p. 570).
Although different types of processing (e.g., incidental versus intentional; focal
versus peripheral) have been discussed in the SLA literature, Izumi (2002) draws par-
ticular attention to the concept of integrative processing as discussed by Graf and
476 SWAIN

colleagues (Graf, 1994; Graf & Schacter, 1989). Graf’s point is that not only must one
pay attention to the elements but also the relationships among them so as to connect
and organize elements into a coherent whole. To cite Izumi (2002) once again, he
suggests that “output processing . . . pushed . . . learners further in their cognitive pro-
cessing and prompted them to perceive or conceive the unitized structure. This occurs
by virtue of the grammatical encoding operations performed during production. As
a consequence, the output task served effectively both as the stimulator of integrative
processing and as the glue to connect individual form elements, which . . . were only
vaguely related to one another during the comprehension process” (p. 571). Gram-
matical encoding is quite different in its effect from grammatical decoding, which
does not push learners to reorganize their form-meaning mappings.

The Hypothesis Testing Function. The claim here is that output may sometimes
be, from the learner’s perspective, a “trial run” reflecting their hypothesis of how to
say (or write) their intent.
Mackey’s (2002) study, mentioned earlier, has an excellent example of hypothesis
testing from a learner’s perspective. The learner is reacting to an interaction episode
in which she, another learner, and a teacher are involved. During this episode, among
other things, the learner is trying to figure out both the meaning of “suite” and how
to say it. Here is what the learner says after seeing the video of the interaction:

I am thinking at that time why she say “really?” she understands me or does not agree me
or does not like my grammar or my pronounce? So I try again with the answer she like
to hear but I still try out suit, suit, I cannot get the correct word but I see in my picture,
written in the door of the room and I think it is a name, name of this area. I say suit, suit,
I was try it to see how I sound and what she will say, and she does not understand me.
Sad for teacher . . . but I keep trying and here, here, she finally she gets my meaning, and
she corrects me, and I see I am not I do not was not saying it in the correct way, it is suite
suite and this sound better, sound correct, even to me (non-native speaker, Excerpt b of
Example 4 in Mackey, 2002).

If learners were not testing hypotheses, then changes in their output would not be
expected following feedback. However, research has shown that learners do modify
their output in response to such conversational moves as clarification requests or con-
firmation checks. For example, in a laboratory setting, Pica et al. (1989) found that over
one third of learners’ utterances were modified either semantically or morphosyntac-
tically in response to the feedback moves of clarification and confirmation requests. In
communicatively oriented second language classroom settings, Loewen (2002) found
that almost three quarters of learners’ utterances were modified in response to teach-
ers’ “on-the-spot” (incidental) feedback (focus on form). The difference between the
two settings clearly plays a key role here, a communicative classroom being a context
in which learners would more likely feel comfortable to test out their hypotheses than
in a test-like situation with a stranger.
Important in this argument is the assumption that the processes in which learn-
ers engage to modify their output in response to feedback are part of the second
language learning process. However, until recently it has not been shown that mod-
ified (reprocessed) output predicted learning, only that output was sometimes mod-
ified in response to various feedback moves (see earlier discussion, and Lyster &
Ranta, 1997; Lyster, 1998) . Recently, however, research has been directed at estab-
lishing whether the production of modified output facilitates L2 learning (e.g., He
& Ellis, 1999; Mackey, 1999; Storch, 2000, 2001). In her Ph.D. research, McDonough
(2001) found that learners who produced modified output involving the target forms
of questions and past tense were more likely to learn them than learners who did
not produce modified output. More important, as in Tanaka’s Ph.D. research (2000),
 26. THE OUTPUT HYPOTHESIS: THEORY AND RESEARCH 477

McDonough found that output had an effect that was independent from the feedback
that triggered it. Additionally, however, McDonough found that the only significant
predictor of posttest scores was the production of modified output. This is entirely
consistent with Loewen’s Ph.D. research (2002) where he found that the best predic-
tor of posttest scores was successful uptake by the students during teacher–student
interaction.
As noted earlier, Loewen (2002) examined the occurrence, nature, and effectiveness
of incidental focus on form episodes (FFEs) in communicatively oriented classes.
Incidental focus on form consisted of instances where teachers reacted to a student’s
non-targetlike use of linguistic items (grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation) as
they arose in meaning-focused classroom interaction. Broadly speaking, teachers’
reactions could be classified into those that provided the student with an answer (e.g.,
recasts) versus those that pushed the student to produce an answer (e.g., elicitations,
clarification requests) (see also Lyster, 1998). Uptake by the students could occur in
either case. Loewen observed 32 hours of classroom interaction in 12 different ESL
classes of young adults, and found that teacher recasts were the most frequent reactive
response, but that both uptake and successful uptake were more likely to occur in
response to elicitation moves. In other words, students were more likely to modify
their output, and do so successfully, when they were pushed to do so.
What is unique about Loewen’s study is that, using Swain’s (1995) suggestion, he
made use of the FFEs that occurred in class to construct test items and then admin-
istered them to the particular student who had been directly involved in the FFE. A
total of 491 FFEs were used as the basis for these individualized test items. His re-
sults showed that the best predictor variable of correct posttest scores was successful
uptake, that is, output that was modified successfully during the FFE. This finding
suggests that it is important for students to actually produce the targeted linguistic
items correctly, supporting the notion that in these cases the learners were actively
seeking feedback through hypothesis testing.
Explanations for why there may be a direct relationship between modified output
and L2 learning vary—from ways in which producing the output stimulates pro-
cesses implicated in second language learning (de Bot, 1996; Izumi, 2000; Linnell,
1995; Swain, 1995) to syntactic priming effects of the modified output on subsequent
output (Bock, 1986 as cited in McDonough, 2001).
Swain and Lapkin (1995) identified in their learners’ think-aloud protocols pro-
cesses and strategies the learners used to solve language problems they encountered
while trying to produce a written text. These strategies included noticing; generat-
ing and testing alternatives (generating and testing hypotheses); applying existing
knowledge to known or new contexts (increase in control and consolidation); and ap-
plying new knowledge (internalization of new heuristics/rules/forms/knowledge).
The communicative need engendered by the task pushed learners into thinking about
the form of their linguistic output, moving them from semantic to grammatical pro-
cessing. As Long (1996) says, production is “useful . . . because it elicits negative input
and encourages analysis and grammaticization” (p. 448). Likewise, Cumming (1990)
observed that the production of written texts particularly elicits these kinds of problem
solving in a second language because learners are prompted to treat, while they com-
pose and edit, their emerging texts as an object amenable to metalinguistic analyses
and revisions.
De Bot (1996), making use of Levelt’s (1989; 1993) language production model,
argues that the impact of output in acquisition comes from increasing control over
language forms and consolidating what is known (i.e., increasing automaticity of pro-
cessing), thus releasing attentional resources for higher-level processes. In Levelt’s
model, the grammatical encoder syntacticizes the preverbal message using the syn-
tactic specifications provided in the lemma in order to derive a surface structure of the
message.2 Consistent with the original formulation of the output hypothesis, Izumi
478 SWAIN

(2000) suggests that “It is possible that . . . the very process of grammatical encoding
in production sensitizes [the learners] to the possibilities and limitations of what they
can or cannot express in the target language. Such sensitization can be heightened by
the feedback system available for internal speech and overt speech” (p. 101).
McDonough (2001) argues that modified output can serve as a “prime” for the sub-
sequent production of the structure. She provides an example of syntactic priming
involving question forms. In an initial question, the learner omitted an auxiliary verb
from the question “What two guys doing?”. The NS respondent requested clarifica-
tion, and the learner modified her question form by adding the auxiliary “are.” In
the dialogue that followed, the learner produced several other target language (TL)
questions with the same structure, suggesting that her modified output primed her
subsequent use of the TL structure. McDonough also proposes that because priming
results in the repeat production of a syntactic form, over time it will facilitate automatic
retrieval of that form.

The Metalinguistic (Reflective) Function. The claim here is that using language
to reflect on language produced by others or the self, mediates second language learn-
ing. This idea originates with Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of mind. Sociocultural
theory is about people operating with mediating tools (Wertsch, 1980, 1985, 1991).
Speaking is one such tool. Swain (2000; 2002) tentatively relabeled “output” as speak-
ing, writing, collaborative dialogue, and/or verbalizing in order to escape the inhibit-
ing effect of the “conduit metaphor” implied in the use of terms such as input and
output (Firth & Wagner, 1997; Kramsch, 1995; van Lier, 2000).
Speaking is initially an exterior source of physical and mental regulation for an
individual—an individual’s physical and cognitive behavior is initially regulated by
others. Over time, however, the individual internalizes these regulatory actions—
actions such as reasoning and attending. Internalization is an “in growing” (Frawley,
1997) of collective to individual behavior, and this growing inwards is mediated by
speaking (and other semiotic tools). As Stetsenko and Arievitch (1997, p. 161) state it:
“Psychological processes emerge first in collective behavior, in cooperation with other
people, and only subsequently become internalized as the individual’s own posses-
sions.” This means that the dialogue learners engage in takes on new significance. In
it, we can observe learners operating on linguistic data, operations that move inward
to become part of the participants’ own mental activity. In dialogue with others, we
see learning taking place (Donato & Lantolf, 1990; Lantolf, 2000a; Spielman Davidson,
2000; Swain, 2002).
These claims provide a basis for having students work together—eventually stu-
dents are expected to engage in solo mental functioning, and that solo mental function-
ing has its source in joint activities. In those joint activities language is used, initially
to externally and collaboratively mediate problem solution. Swain and Lapkin (1995;
1998; 2002) have called this joint problem-solving dialogue “collaborative dialogue,”
which is “taken in,” so to speak,—recreated on the intramental plane—by the learner,
and serves later to mediate problem solution by him or herself. Collaborative dialogue
is thus dialogue in which speakers are engaged in problem solving and knowledge
building—in the case of second language learners, solving linguistic problems and
building knowledge about language.3
Swain and her colleagues (e.g., Kowal & Swain, 1997; Swain, 1998; Swain & Lap-
kin, 1998; 2002) have experimented with tasks that encourage students to engage in
collaborative dialogue and found that tasks where students are asked to write some-
thing together tend to elicit collaborative dialogue as the students discuss how best
to represent their intended meaning. Furthermore, they have shown through the use
of post test items based on the students’ collaborative dialogues that the collaborative
dialogues were a source of language learning.
 26. THE OUTPUT HYPOTHESIS: THEORY AND RESEARCH 479

Similarly, Tocalli-Beller’s (2002) data provide many examples of collaborative dia-

logues of pairs of students as they unravel the meaning of puns and riddles. Over time
and together, the students work out the meaning of the puns and riddles—learning in
action for certain. Later, on their own, the students are able to define the meaning of
key words and help their classmates understand the basis of the humor. Data of these
sorts, which trace in the learners’ dialogue about language how they moved from non-
comprehension to spontaneous use, provide a pretest/posttest, longitudinal study of
learning.
Speaking also completes thought. Vygotsky (1978, 1987), Barnes (1992), Wells (1999),
and others have argued that speech can serve as a means of development by reshaping
experience. It serves as a vehicle “through which thinking is articulated, transformed
into an artifactual form, and [as such] is then available as a source of further reflec-
tion” (Smagorinsky, 1998, p. 172), as an object about which questions can be raised
and answers can be explored with others or with the self. As Smagorinsky (1998) says,
“The process of rendering thinking into speech is not simply a matter of memory re-
trieval, but a process through which thinking reaches a new level of articulation”
(pp. 172–173). Ideas are crystallized and sharpened, and inconsistencies become more
obvious.
Swain and Lapkin (in press) provide just such an example of how a student’s talk
about language crystallizes ideas and, in this case, makes inconsistencies so clear that
“unlearning” occurs opening the way for new learning to take place. Sue, a Grade 7
French immersion student, who, as she talks with the researcher during a stimulated
recall session, verbalizes her understanding of the meaning of the reflexive pronoun
‘se’. She thinks that the reflexive pronoun is in fact a tense marker (a rather remarkable
and interesting interpretation of a reflexive pronoun). Key in this example is that
through her own verbalization, Sue talks herself into understanding that she does not
understand—a step that must be crucial in her learning process.
In turn 48, Sue is responding to a question from the researcher about the verb se
lever. At that point Sue and the researcher are watching a video of Sue where she is
noticing the differences between a short story she wrote and a reformulation of it. We
can see in Sue’s response to the researcher’s question about se lever that Sue thinks
that se marks the notion of the progressive aspect as well as the “near future”—futur
proche.

SR-S. 48: [ . . . ] because I thought it meant like he was going to. So he was se lever,
which means like in a moment, not exactly right away.

In turn 58, Sue suggests that se marks the progressive aspect (“He’s doing it. . . ”).

SR-S. 58: He’s doing it and then he is doing it again. Instead of just kind of uh
he did this and that and that, so it’s a better form of saying it by adding the se.
It’s more French.

When asked about the difference between se brosse les dents and brosse les dents in
turn 73, Sue suggests that by removing the se, this means that the event happened in
the past.

SR-R. 73: Do you see a difference between the two? (se brosse les dents and brosse
les dents)
SR-S. 74: Uh . . . yeah, because when you say se brosse les dents, it’s kind of like
um he is brushing his teeth and then he’s gonna comb his hair. But when you
take off the se, it’s like so he brushed his teeth, combed his hair and then kind of
left.
480 SWAIN

In the full data set, there are other examples of Sue’s differing interpretations of se.
Across the excerpts, Sue generates different explanations of the role of the pronoun se,
and becomes increasingly confused. Finally, she acknowledges that she simply does
not understand:

SR-R. 77: [ . . . ] Why would you need se?

SR-S. 78: Um I think . . . I don’t know. I don’t really get why you do need se.

Sue has talked herself into understanding that she doesn’t understand the use of
“se” in French. What Sue’s verbalization has accomplished for her is two-fold: She
has externalized her thinking, and her externalized thinking provides her with an
“object” on which to reflect. Sue’s speaking was a tool through which her thinking was
articulated and transformed into an artifactual form, and as such became available
as a source of further reflection. She recognizes through the inconsistencies in her
explanations that she did not understand what this “se” is all about—a step that must
surely be an important step for her language development to proceed.
From a sociocultural perspective, then, producing language has vital and significant
functions in second language learning that need to be explored in the future. Over the
last few decades, there’s been a shift in meaning from output as product to output as
process—a shift that creates the need for some new metaphors, new research questions,
and a new respect for our research tools. If, just for example, verbalization has the
impact I am suggesting on second language learning, then research tools such as
think-alouds and stimulated recalls, need to be understood as part of the learning
process, not just as a medium of data collection (Smagorinsky, 1998; Swain, 2002).
Think-alouds and stimulated recalls are not, as some would have it, “brain dumps”;
rather, they are a process of comprehending and reshaping experience. They are part
of what constitutes learning.
Sociocultural theory, then, puts language production in a “star role,” so to speak.
Speaking (and writing) are conceived of as cognitive tools—tools that mediate in-
ternalization; and that externalize internal psychological activity, resocializing, and
recognizing it for the individual; tools that construct and deconstruct knowledge; and
tools that regulate and are regulated by human agency.
Information-processing theory and sociocultural theory both provide valuable in-
sights about mind and memory. My view is that we should take full advantage of each
theory for the insights each has provided, and for the many each has yet to inspire
concerning the role of language production in second language learning. As Lantolf
(1996) suggests, different theories afford different insights.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

There are several directions that research about the output hypothesis could take.
Experimental studies within an information-processing framework would seem par-
ticularly fruitful. Investigation of the levels and types of processing that output under
different conditions engenders seems to me to be a particularly interesting route to
pursue. Within a sociocultural theory of mind framework, ethnographic and case
study approaches would seem to be more valuable at this point in time, although
there is certainly a place for experimental work. Particularly useful to understanding
processes and strategies of second language learning will be studies of the dialogue
and private speech of learners as they work to solve language-related problems they
face in their language production, be they at the level of morphology, syntax, dis-
course, pragmatics, or conceptualization of ideas. Of considerable sociocultural inter-
est are other broader questions about verbalization; for example, if verbalization is
 26. THE OUTPUT HYPOTHESIS: THEORY AND RESEARCH 481

such an important cognitive tool, can it help prevent memory loss? How is cognition
distributed through verbalization? In what ways does the environment constrain or
enhance learners’ opportunities to produce language?
The most significant new understanding for me in studying language production is
just how very important it is as a cognitive tool—as a tool that mediates our thinking.
Pursuing this idea widens greatly the second language learning and teaching research
agenda.

NOTES

1. I would like to thank those who read and commented on an earlier draft of this chapter: Alister Cumming,
Huamei Han, David Ishii, Jim Lantolf, Sharon Lapkin, and Harry Swain.
2. Levelt’s model assumes that messages are constructed independently of language production. It supports
the conduit metaphor of communication.
3. Collaborative dialogue, of course, also serves to mediate solutions to, for example, scientific problems
and to construct scientific knowledge, but that is not the focus here.

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27

Speaking in a Second Language

Elaine Tarone
University of Minnesota

INTRODUCTION

This chapter will consider what is involved when an individual speaks, using a lan-
guage other than the native language. Speaking is a process of oral language production.
It is one of the traditional “Four Skills” involved in using a second language, and as
such is usually viewed as the most complex and difficult skill to master.

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

We can analyze speaking from a wide range of perspectives. The chapter will begin
with an overview of these perspectives, cross-referenced where possible with other
chapters in this book. It will then turn to a consideration of two functions of learner
speech: transactional functions (including learners’ use of communication strategies)
and ludic functions. Following will be a discussion of the form of learner speech,
with particular attention paid to characteristics of the pronunciation of adult second
language (L2) learners, variation in the forms produced in learner speech, and the
sort of knowledge for speaking that learners acquire. Implications and applications
for teaching the skill of speaking in a second language will be drawn throughout the
chapter.

OVERVIEW OF RESEARCH ON SPEAKING

IN A SECOND LANGUAGE

The scope of research on speaking in a second language is broad, far broader than can
be dealt with in a single chapter. Fortunately, at least some of this material is covered
in other chapters of this book.
We can analyze learners’ speech from the point of view of form or function. Formal
aspects of the second language that the learner must produce orally are described
in terms of linguistic system. They include the sounds of the language, morphology
and syntax of the language, discourse markers of the language, and lexis: words.
Second language learners who attempt to produce second language forms orally do
485
486 TARONE

not in fact produce linguistic forms identical to those produced by native speakers;
rather they produce interlanguage forms. The interlanguage is the linguistic system
evidenced when an adult second language learner attempts to express meanings in the
language being learned (Selinker, 1972; Tarone, 1994). When the learner speaks, there
is a system evidenced in the form of what is spoken: a system with its own formal rules
of phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and discourse patterns. This system does
not conform exactly to the rules of the target language as spoken by native speakers
of the target language, nor does it conform exactly to the rules of the speaker’s native
language. The goal of development of the interlanguage is undefined. We can describe
this system in its own terms, as an interlanguage system.1
The form of learner speech is described in the following chapters:

r Sounds produced orally: phonemic segments, syllables, and prosodic features

(this chapter).
r Words and their meanings (Nation, chap. 32).
r Morphemes of the language: affixes and free morphemes like prepositions (Byrd,
chap. 30).
r Syntax of the language, including word order (Byrd, chap. 30).
r Discourse markers of the language, including cohesive markers and transition
words (Celce-Murcia & Olshtain, chap. 40).
r Variation in the forms produced in learner speech and the implications of this
variation for our understanding of learner competence (this chapter).

Learners’ progress in producing these forms orally is also described in other chapters
of this volume (Lantolf, chap. 19; Pica, chap. 15; Swain, chap. 27; Han & Selinker, chap.
25; Williams, chap. 37).
Of course, second language learners must learn more than just the linguistic form of
the second language. They must also learn how to use those forms to fulfill a variety
of functions. Scholarship has focused on learners’ production of oral discourse for
functions that are interactional and transactional (cf. Brown & Yule, 1983a, 1983b; Yule,
1999) as well as ludic (Tarone, 2000). Discourse in its interactional function establishes
or maintains social relationships; in its transactional function, it conveys information;
in its ludic function, it is used for entertainment. These three functions of learners’
speech are covered in this volume:

r Interactional functions of learner language, including politeness and pragmatics

(Kasper & Roever, chap. 18), and turn-taking in conversation (Markee, chap. 20).
r Transactional functions of learner language (this chapter).
r Ludic functions of learner language (this chapter).

Taking a top-down approach, in this chapter we will begin with the functions of
learner speech. As mentioned earlier, the interactional function is adequately covered
in other chapters of this volume, so we will turn to the remaining two of three functions
of speaking in a second language: transactional and ludic functions.

FUNCTIONS OF LEARNER SPEECH

Transactional Discourse
Discourse in its transactional function is language used to convey information (Brown
& Yule, 1983a, 1983b).
 27. SPEAKING IN A SECOND LANGUAGE 487

Referential Communication. Yule (1997) refers to discourse in its transactional

function as referential communication, defined as

communicative acts, generally spoken, in which some kind of information is exchanged

between two speakers. This information exchange is typically dependent on successful
acts of reference, whereby entities (human and nonhuman) are identified (by naming
or describing), are located or moved relative to other entities (by giving instructions or
directions), or are followed through sequences of locations and events (by recounting an
incident or a narrative). (p. 1)

Speakers are not always successful in referential communication even in their na-
tive language. This ability is acquired late in the native language, and some native
speakers never fully acquire it in their first language (L1). In addition, referential
communication in L1 is

clearly tied to institutional demands, beginning in school, for decontextualized language

use, where the participants are not depending on substantially shared experiences or
common knowledge. It requires decentering, or the recognition that others typically do
not already know or see what the self obviously does. (Yule, 1997, p. 14)

This capacity to imagine the world from the receiver’s point of view is central to
successful referential communication: In this type of communication, the goal is for
the listener to understand in relatively precise terms the information that the speaker is
trying to send. For this reason, it is the speaker who can accurately assess both what the
listener knows and does not know already, and who will be relatively successful with
referential communication (Yule, 1999). Because of the premium placed on precision
in encoding information for a possibly unfamiliar listener, referential communication

. . . is, in spoken language, the necessary transition type of communicative language use
that leads to literacy and the ability to cope with written language communication. Just
as most written language is transactional in function and designed to be received by
nonfamiliars, so too is the kind of talk known as referential communication. (Yule, 1997,
p. 14)

Thus, oral transactional discourse appears to be directly related to the development

of cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP), which in turn is essential for the
development of literacy skills (Cummins, 1984; cf. Wiley, chap. 29).
Yule (1997) describes useful referential communication tasks that teachers can as-
sign students in the second language classroom to encourage the development of
transactional competence in the second language. Plentiful illustrations of already-
developed tasks are provided, as well as principles to follow in devising new tasks
and task formats to use for that purpose as well. Yule’s claim that successful refer-
ential communication is key to developing the ability to use language in academic
contexts suggests a range of potential pedagogical applications. For example, very
simple versions of the referential tasks described in Yule (1997) and Tarone and Yule
(1989) may be useful to provide undereducated adult English as a Second Language
(ESL) students with contexts where they can develop more precision in their ability to
use oral language transactionally with unfamiliar interlocutors. In pair-work in such
tasks, the speaker has one picture to describe so that a hearer can pick it out from a set
of three pictures that are very similar to it. Neither can look at the other’s pictures, so
the descriptive language must be very clear if the partners are to succeed in successful
referential communication.
488 TARONE

Communication Strategies. Speakers use communication strategies (CSs) to re-

solve difficulties they encounter in expressing an intended meaning. In SLA research,
CSs have been studied in the context of referential communication2 . Tarone (1980,
p. 420) defines them as “mutual attempts of two interlocutors to agree on a meaning
in situations where requisite meaning structures do not seem to be shared.” Commu-
nication strategies are used both in the native language and the second language (Yule
& Tarone, 1990), but they appear to be more common in communication between in-
dividuals who do not share proficiency in the same language, probably because there
are more referential difficulties in such conversations. For example, second language
learners have been shown to encounter difficulties performing referential communi-
cation tasks of the sort described in Yule (1997).
Imagine, for example, that a learner in an ESL class is doing a task that requires
that he refer to a balloon, but he realizes that he doesn’t know how to say “balloon.”
When this happens the learner may either choose not to refer to the object at all (an
avoidance or reduction strategy) or try to find some other linguistic expression that
will allow him or her to refer to it (a compensatory strategy). Numerous taxonomies
exist for different kinds of compensatory strategies. For example, the learner might
use a holistic approximation, referring to a related object (e.g., “something like a ball”);
or be more analytic, describing the properties of the referent, as with circumlocution
focused on either its physical properties (“a spherical shape, filled with air or gas and
tied with a string”) or its function (“we use them to decorate at birthday parties”).
Code-related strategies may also work, as with code-switching (“globo”), foreigniz-
ing (“globe”), or word coinage (“airball”). The speaker may use nonverbal gestures or
sound imitation, or appeal for assistance (“How do you say globo in English?”). Recall
Tarone’s (1980) definition of communication strategy use as “mutual”: A speaker’s
selection of one or another of these strategies depends on her assessment of its likeli-
hood of success with her particular interlocutor. For instance, the code-switching or
appeal strategies illustrated would work only with listeners who also know Spanish.
Similarly, the functional strategy used relies on the speaker’s accurate assessment of
the listener’s cultural knowledge about birthday party decor.
Research on communication strategies has resulted in a number of publications
over the years proposing different taxonomies for classifying communication strate-
gies, or documenting L2 learners’ communication strategy use on a range of different
task types. Two general perspectives have been taken on communication strategy re-
search (Kasper & Kellerman, 1997; Yule & Tarone, 1997). One popular perspective on
communication strategies focuses on the cognitive processes involved in selecting one
or another strategy, operates with a smaller number of categories, and views learn-
ers’ ability to use these strategies as something that is innate and cannot be taught
to improve performance in using the second language. Although observable linguis-
tic differences exist between communication strategies in using the L1 and in using
the L2, proponents of the “psycholinguistic” perspective argue that the underlying
cognitive processes are the same, and so do not need to be taught. Examples of this
perspective are Bialystok (1990); Bongaerts and Poulisse (1989), Kellerman (1991), and
Poulisse (1990). The other common perspective emphasizes the linguistic expressions
used as communication strategies, which are extensive and varied, and focuses on
the core vocabulary in the L2 that might be useful for communication strategy use.
Researchers following this second approach propose that L2 learners can be taught
the linguistic expressions needed for effective communication strategy use and given
practice to improve their performance in using strategies in speaking in the second
language (Yule & Tarone, 1997). Examples of this perspective are Faerch and Kasper
(1983), Konishi and Tarone (2004), Paribakht (1985), Tarone (1978b; 1986), and Yule
and Tarone (1991).
 27. SPEAKING IN A SECOND LANGUAGE 489

Unfortunately, research on communication strategies done by researchers in both

camps has not maintained the original emphasis on the essential contextuality of com-
munication strategy use. Much effort has been expended to identify different types of
communication strategies, classifying them into different taxonomies. This approach
means removing the strategies from the interactive context in which they originally
occurred, a process that has come under some criticism (V. Cook, 1993; Wagner &
Firth, 1997). V. Cook (1993, pp. 131–137) critiques the methodology used in com-
munication strategy research, calling for a wider range of data collection techniques
(including introspection), less emphasis on taxonomic description and classification,
and more emphasis on looking at the learner’s communication strategy choices in the
context of situation. These recommendations all make sense, especially if we view the
learner’s communication strategy use in conversation as an expression of free will and
creativity:

The concept of strategy . . . starts from the learner’s choice. The learner is a human being
with the free will to opt for one thing or the other; given that the learner is at a particular
moment of time in a particular situation, what can the learner choose to do? . . . [there
are] possibilities of choice open to the L2 learner in a dynamic situation. (V. Cook, 1993,
p. 137)

Recent attempts have been made to examine communication strategy use using
more contextualized approaches. Anderson (1998) studied interactions between non-
native speakers of English, and analyzed their use of communication strategies from
the perspective of collaborative theory (Wilkes-Gibbs, 1997). Central to collaborative
theory is the idea of the “grounding process,” the interactive process of presenting and
accepting ideas in building common knowledge through communication. Anderson
found that the learners’ communication strategy use in their interactions could be
readily interpreted as serving this kind of grounding process, thus supporting Tarone’s
(1980) view of communication strategies as tools used in mutual attempts to agree
upon a meaning. Wagner and Firth (1997) suggest that conversation analysis might be
an appropriate framework for the study of communication strategies. Willey (2001),
in fact, successfully uses conversation analysis in just such a study, examining the
way the “appeal for assistance” strategy (Tarone, 1978b) is used in the context of
discourse between adult ESL students in an intensive English program. He shows, for
example, that their use of “direct” versus “indirect” versions of the strategy does not
correspond to levels of ambiguity (as claimed by Faerch & Kasper, 1983, in using a
more decontextualized approach), but rather to whether the speaker was involved in
another course of action (such as telling a story) when they used the strategy. Appeals
issued incidentally to the main course of conversational action were indirect, while
appeals that were the main focus of the interaction were invariably direct.
These recent papers and studies exemplify a promising recent development in
communication strategy research: a research approach that examines the use of these
strategies as expressions of a speaker’s creativity and choice in the interactional context
of problem solving as part of successful referential communication. This approach is
very promising, since, as V. Cook (1993) points out, it can also help us to see the
relevance of communication strategy use for second language acquisition.
In terms of pedagogical applications, we can again recommend classroom use of
tasks described in Yule (1997) and Tarone and Yule (1989) to encourage students’
use of communication strategies to build common ground and solve problems that
arise in the process of communication. Such activities can help students develop the
core vocabulary they need for effective communication, as well as syntactic frames
that are useful for that purpose (cf. Konishi & Tarone, 2004). At a deeper level,
490 TARONE

these activities encourage students to exploit the “possibilities of choice” (V. J. Cook,
1993) they have in dynamic communication situations. Even in pronunciation classes,
where we often tend to focus only on getting students to produce standard phono-
logical forms, it is useful to also teach them to use communication strategies when
the interlanguage (IL) phonology interferes with comprehensibility. This teaching
approach keeps the focus where it should be: on intelligibility (for more on intelli-
gibility and comprehensibility, see The Target of Learning: Nativelike Accent versus
Intelligibility).

Ludic Discourse
Ludic discourse involves the use of language for the purpose of amusing and en-
tertaining oneself or others. For most speakers, it is less common than interactional
or transactional discourse, and is also much less commonly studied. However, it
has been argued that language play is important for second language acquisition
(G. Cook, 2000; Tarone, 2000), and some L2 teaching materials provide opportunities
for language play (Murphey, 1998). Some studies on language play (at all linguis-
tic levels) are Broner and Tarone (2001), Garvey (1974, 1977), Huizinga (1955), Peck
(1978), Rampton (1995), and Weir (1962). In language play, a speaker unpredictably
manipulates language forms to provide entertainment and amusement for herself or
others. There is no information exchange, and the primary focus is not on establish-
ing or maintaining social relationships. Language play has been defined using Peck’s
(1978) three conditions, being typically a socially constructed phenomenon which is
nonliteral, inherently entertaining, and rule-oriented. One kind of language play in-
volves play with the sounds of language, rhyme, rhythm, song, alliteration, and puns;
another type involves semantic play, “play with units of meaning, combining them
in ways which create worlds which do not exist: fictions” (G. Cook, 2000, p. 228).
Broner and Tarone (2000) discuss ways that teachers can encourage learners to ex-
ercise their creativity in language play in the classroom. Tarone (2000) points out that
the IL system could not develop unless the more conservative forces demanding ac-
curacy were counterbalanced with more creative forces favoring innovation. We have
seen that communication strategy use may be seen as an expression of choice or free
will (V. Cook, 1993), and so, we conclude, as one such force for innovation. Language
play is another such force promoting flexibility and innovation in the interlanguage
phonological system (Tarone, 2000).
We have seen that there are elements of creativity involved both in the use of
communication strategies to negotiate common ground in referential communication,
and also in language play with phonological form. We now turn to a discussion of the
form itself: interlanguage phonology and research on its development.

FORMAL CHARACTERISTICS OF LEARNER SPEECH

Characteristics of the Pronunciation of L2 Learners

At the time of this writing, it is fair to say that research on pronunciation learning
in a second language is less popular than research on interlanguage morphology,
syntax, discourse, or pragmatics. It seems that publications in the area of interlanguage
phonology often seem to slip under the radar screen of researchers focusing on other
aspects of learner language.
It is heartening, therefore, to report that there have been a number of anthologies,
monographs, books, or special issues of journals in the last decade that focus on issues
related to the acquisition of pronunciation skills in a second language. The reader
who is interested in learning more about the findings of research on interlanguage
 27. SPEAKING IN A SECOND LANGUAGE 491

phonology than is possible to report in these few pages should read Archibald (1995,
1998), Ioup and Weinberger (1987), James and Leather (1997), Jenkins (2000), Leather
and James (1992, 1997), and Major (1998, 2001). For a particularly thought-provoking
proposal for the teaching of pronunciation at a time when English is becoming an
international language, and learners use English as a second language with each other
more than they do with native speakers of English, Jenkins (2000) offers a stimulating
and readable argument for a pedagogy that focuses on “accent addition” and mutual
intelligibility as an achievable goal.
Research on interlanguage phonology has characterized the segmental, syllabic,
and suprasegmental characteristics of the system, the origins of these characteristics
in processes of native language transfer, overgeneralization of target language forms,
or language universals of various kinds, and the relative importance of accentedness
versus intelligibility as goals of pronunciation teaching.

Segments, Syllables, and Suprasegmentals. Segments are the individual sounds,

or phonemes, of a language. A second language learner needs to master the indi-
vidual characteristics of the sounds of a new language, as, for example, the fact that
in French the /R/ is uvular but in American English the /r/ is a glide. Sometimes
there are completely new phonemes to be mastered, as with Xhosa clicks for English
L1 speakers. In addition, the learner must master the allophonic rules governing use
of segments in the new language: the way sounds change in different contexts. So,
for example, in American English the /t/ is aspirated syllable-initially in a word like
“tea,” but becomes a flap medially in a word like “butter.” In Spanish, however, /t/
is neither aspirated syllable-initially (e.g., “ti”), nor flapped medially (e.g., “rato”).
Native speakers of English or Spanish learning Spanish or English as a second lan-
guage will have difficulty mastering such patterns at the segmental level. Research
on interlanguage phonology has been extensive at the segmental level (for examples
of recent research, see Cichocki et al. (1999), Flege (1991), Flege, Bohn, & Jang (1997),
Flege, et al., (1998), and summaries in Leather (1999a) and Major (2001)). Stockman
and Pluut (1999) present evidence that segmental characteristics are more influen-
tial in many cases than syllable structure in predicting pronunciation errors. Flege’s
(1995) Speech Learning Model predicts the effect of similarity between segments in L1
and L2 on difficulty in acquisition of the L2 segments. Examples of segmental studies
are those on Japanese learners’ difficulties with English /r/ and /l/ by Sheldon and
Strange (1982) and by de Jonge (1995), who also examined certain problematic English
segmental contrasts for speakers of Arabic and Spanish.
The syllable, which is composed of consonants and vowels, is a unit of timing in
English and other Western languages. The syllable is increasingly seen as more central
to processing in second-language acquisition than the phoneme or the distinctive
feature (Leather, 1999a, p. 22). Archibald (1998) distinguishes two major approaches
to research on the way NL syllable structure affects L2 pronunciation: a structural
approach (e.g., Broselow, 1988) and a typological approach (e.g., Eckman, 1991), each
adhering to a different sonority principle. Segments can be grouped into sonority
types in terms of where they occur in syllable structures; these segment types are,
ranging from most to least sonorous: vowels, glides, liquids, nasals, fricatives, and
plosives. Tropf (1987) found that degree of sonority of segments correlated well with
their acquisition in German L2 by Spanish speakers (see Archibald, 1997, 1998, for
a more recent model of sonority). Other research on interlanguage syllable structure
includes Broselow, Chen, and Wang (1998), and Hancin-Bhatt and Bhatt (1997).
Though much SLA research has focused on the syllable, other suprasegmental units
have also been explored. There has been increasing interest in the mora as a unit of
timing in some Asian languages; see, e.g. the discussion in Major, 2001:18–19; Broselow
& Park, 1995. In addition, Flege & Munro (1994) suggest that phonologists should also
492 TARONE

consider the impact of the word on IL phonology, finding that L2 perception responds
to phonetic errors distributed over entire word.
Finally, research on suprasegmentals has touched on stress, rhythm, vowel length,
tone, intonation, and rhythm in interlanguage phonology. Such suprasegmental (or
prosodic) features are often the primary factors affecting judgments of the quality of
L2 pronunciation (Anderson-Hsieh, Johnson, & Koehler,1992). Patterns of the place-
ment of stress, or the perceived prominence of a syllable, can vary a good deal from
one language to another, and stress patterns tend to be transferred in second language
acquisition. See Archibald (1997, 1998) for recent studies of interlanguage stress pat-
terns; Flores (1993) on rhythm in English L2; Kaltenbacher (1997) on German speech
rhythm in SLA; Mairs (1989) on Spanish L1 stress patterns in English L2. Tone is pitch
at the syllable level, and intonation is pitch patterning at anything from the syllable
to the sentence level. There is relatively little SLA research on tone and intonation;
some studies of possible interest are de Bot (1994), Holden (1993), and Leather (1997).

Evidence of Phonological Learning Processes: Transfer, Markedness, and Develop-

mental Factors. The major process influencing the interlanguage sound system is
transfer, or the influence of the native language phonology. Learners tend to rely on
their native language sound system when they pronounce the L2. This is true of their
production of segments, as predicted by the Speech Learning Model (Flege, 1995); their
production of syllables (see Eckman & Iverson, 1993); and also in the suprasegmen-
tals they produce (Kaltenbacher, 1997; Mairs, 1989). At one time, Contrastive Analysis
claimed to be able to predict all pronunciation difficulties by identifying the differ-
ences between native language and target language pronunciation patterns; where
there were differences, there would be difficulty (Lado, 1957). However, abundant
empirical data over the last half century have clearly shown that native language
transfer, while it exerts a strong influence on interlanguage phonology, is not the only
source of pronunciation errors in SLA. Difficulty in pronouncing L2 sounds is not
completely predicted by L1-L2 differences; other factors are involved.
One of those other factors is a kind of language universal called markedness. Sounds
and types of sounds vary in the frequency with which they occur in world languages;
the more frequent sounds (the unmarked ones) appear to be easier to acquire than the
less frequent sounds (the marked ones). These markedness relations can be laid out
as simple frequencies. Major (2001, p. 42) gives the example of the American English
/r/, which is more marked than the American English /l/ because in the languages
of the world, the American way of pronouncing /r/ makes up only about 5% of all
liquids but the /l/ makes up 42% of them. Markedness relations are often framed
as implicational hierarchies that show the relative frequencies of given phonological
features. For example, often the presence of Sound Y in any language implies that
that language also has Sound X (but not vice versa); thus, Sound X is unmarked (and
more frequent) relative to Sound Y. Such implicational hierarchies may be made up
of segment types or syllable types; for example, it is a fact that if any language has
a CVC syllable structure, it will also have a CV syllable structure. Thus, presence of
CVC syllables in any language implies the presence of CV syllables in that language.
Eckman’s (1977) Markedness Differential Hypothesis (MDH) predicts that, in second
language acquisition, native language transfer combines with markedness to shape
IL phonology; in general, unmarked phenomena in any implicational hierarchy are
acquired before marked phenomena. This influence of markedness on difficulty, order
of acquisition, and success in the process of acquisition of interlanguage phonology
has been supported by subsequent research (e.g., Eckman & Iverson, 1993). Carlisle
has done extensive work validating predictions of the MDH in the consonant clusters
of Spanish-speaking learners of English (e.g., Carlisle 1991), and Major (1996) used a
VARBRUL analysis of the phonology of Brazilians learning English to show that initial
 27. SPEAKING IN A SECOND LANGUAGE 493

and final consonant clusters conformed to predictions of the MDH. However, because
the MDH did not account for all the data, Eckman (1991) subsequently proposed
the Structural Conformity Hypothesis (SCH), which claims that as natural languages,
interlanguages obey all primary language universals (not just markedness universals).
Current research supporting the SCH includes Carlisle (1998, 1999).
In addition to NL transfer effects, sometimes there are developmental influences,
such as sound substitutions made by second language learners that are the same as,
or similar to, those produced by children acquiring the TL as native speakers. Major
(1986, 2001) proposed the Ontogeny Model (OM) to describe the relationship between
the two factors of native language transfer and these universal developmental variants
in the acquisition of an IL sound system. The model predicts that at early stages of
acquisition of an interlanguage phonology, universal factors (termed “UG”) will not
play a major role because the influence of transfer is strong and the influence of
developmental factors is minimal. According to the model, however, at later stages of
acquisition the role of UG will increase because transfer decreases and developmental
factors decrease. The Ontogeny Model has received some support from Hancin-Bhatt
and Bhatt (1997), who use an Optimality Theory framework to discuss the interaction
between NL transfer and the developmental factors described in the OM.
To sum up, then, the interacting factors that influence the pronunciation of a second
language include transfer of sound patterns from the native language, and universal
influences such as the relative markedness of the particular phonological feature being
acquired and developmental features relevant to the particular target language.
Leather (1999a) sums up the pedagogical implications of research on interlanguage
phonology this way:

While the teacher cannot be expected to exert very detailed control on all the phonolo-
gical environments to which the learner is exposed, the developer of teaching materials
can profitably take into account the difficulties that can be predicted—on the basis of
markedness, syllable phonotactics, and so on. (p. 37)

More work is needed in the future to find ways to incorporate these research find-
ings into pronunciation textbooks, but all this research assumes that the target of
acquisition is known and that learning to pronounce a second language is simply a
linguistic matter. It is time to step back and ask a prior question that is also relevant to
teaching the pronunciation of a second language: What is the target of pronunciation
learning?

The Target of Learning: Nativelike Accent Versus Intelligibility. Brown and Yule
(1983b, p. 3) ask, “From the point of view of pronunciation, what is a reasonable
model?”. The model has often been assumed to be the nebulous “ideal native speaker,”
and “nativelike pronunciation” has been taken as the goal of L2 pronunciation teach-
ing. It was believed that this was “a proper—if largely unattainable—goal, and that
any pronunciation that fell much short of the nativelike could be considered defective
and would impair intelligibility” (Leather, 1999a, p. 35). Certainly this has been the as-
sumption of the ubiquitous “Accent Reduction” courses and programs for immigrants
that proliferate in U.S. contexts, and is an approach that many, apparently including
Pennington (1998), still advocate. In this view, the model is the native speaker of some
standard variety of the second language.
Intelligibility can be understood as the degree to which a speaker’s utterance is
understood by a listener. It is of course an empirical question whether non-nativelike
pronunciation impairs intelligibility. Munro and Derwing (2001) undertook an inves-
tigation of the relationship between foreign accent and intelligibility. Eighteen native
speakers of English judged the pronunciation of ten NSs of Mandarin speaking English
494 TARONE

as a second language with regard to the amount of global foreign accent, intelligibility,
and comprehensibility. Intelligibility was operationalized as the number of deviations
between what a speaker said and what listeners could write down (e.g., missing words,
wrong words); listeners assigned global comprehensibility scores on a 9-point Likert
scale. The study showed that even heavily accented speech was sometimes perfectly
intelligible to native speakers. Prosodic errors were much more influential in loss of
intelligibility than segmental errors. Other studies replicated their findings and ex-
panded on them; Munro and Derwing (2001), for example, find that L2 speech rates
that are somewhat faster than the most common L2 user rates were perceived by native
speakers as more comprehensible and less accented, though speeds that were very
fast or very slow had low ratings. Interestingly, Derwing, Munro, and Wiebe (1998)
show that some pedagogical methods may be effective in improving intelligibility
whereas others only affect accentedness.
The goal of “nativelike accent” has always been problematic, and is increasingly
being questioned by researchers and educators alike. The goal has been problematic
because it has apparently been unattainable for virtually all adult second language
learners (see Han & Selinker, chap. 25 on fossilization in SLA). From the very beginning
of research on interlanguage, researchers like Scovel (1969) pointed out that second
language learners could apparently achieve nativelike proficiency in all areas of the
language except pronunciation. Scovel coined the term Joseph Conrad Phenomenon
to refer to advanced second language learners who apparently sounded like native
speakers in their use of syntax, morphology, and discourse, yet retained foreign accents
(Henry Kissinger has been offered as a more recent equivalent example of this type
of learner). Tarone (1978a) argued that the most likely cause of this retention of native
accent is social and affective, since pronunciation is a primary indicator of group
membership and identity. Brown and Yule (1983b) pointed out as well the profound
sociocultural forces favoring accent retention:

. . . students are not going to be highly motivated to improve their pronunciation beyond
a certain point. Most students identify ‘how they speak’ with their own personal and
cultural identities. Many foreign speakers of English who have lived in Britain for twenty
or thirty years understand English just about perfectly, and produce English just about
perfectly in every respect, except that they still retain a foreign accent. (p. 22)

V. J. Cook (1993) and Jenkins (2000) among many others in this field, point to the
increasing prevalence of English as an International Language (EIL) by non-native
speakers of English worldwide (cf. Kachru, chap. 9), and argue that in view of the pur-
poses for which English is now used, mutual intelligibility is a far more sensible target
of pronunciation instruction than “nativelike accent.”
Jenkins (2000) focuses on the uses of EIL and on intelligibility in conversations
between NNSs who do not share the same native language (NL). In her research on
such conversations, phonological patterns converged in ways apparently aimed at
improving communication. This did not always mean more correct TL-like patterns
or more NL-like patterns, and though the learners accommodated toward each other’s
communicative needs, this didn’t always mean adopting one another’s phonological
features. Jenkins claims that successful communicators gravitated toward an intel-
ligible phonological core. On the basis of this research, Jenkins proposes use of a
Lingua Franca Core (LFC) as the learning target in EIL pronunciation teaching. In the
LFC, the target is adjusted with a focus on phonemes, cluster simplification patterns,
and prosody that are deliberately nonstandard, but masterable and facilitative of
intelligibility3 . The author argues for “accent addition” instead of “accent reduction”
(p. 209) and suggests ways accommodation can be practiced in English Language
Teaching (ELT) classrooms. Jenkins states that pronunciation teachers and materi-
als writers must be conversant with the sociolinguistic factors involved in the use of
 27. SPEAKING IN A SECOND LANGUAGE 495

English as an international lingua franca worldwide. Any phonology course designed

for teachers of EIL as opposed to English as a Foreign Language (ESL) or English as
a Foreign Language (EFL) “is morally obliged to consider L2 accent within a frame-
work of sociolinguistic variation rather than within one of ‘NNS’ error” (Jenkins, 2000,
p. 202).
How then is L2 accent affected by sociolinguistic variation?

Variation in Forms Produced in L2 Learner Speech

Speakers’ tendency to vary their production of phonological form in response to a
range of social factors has been well attested in the realm of phonological research,
not just in second language research but in first language research as well. As a result,
the notion of interlanguage variation is far less controversial among phoneticians and
phonologists than it is among researchers on interlanguage morphology and syntax.
Few if any researchers on IL phonology would argue that variation does not occur or
should not be described. Major (2001), for example, states flatly:

Variation exists and furthermore all language data show variation both in NSs and
NNSs . . . Therefore, any model, theory, or purported explanation that fails to account
for variation is not accounting for the data, period. (Major, 2001, p. 69)

Research has documented this systematic variation from the beginning of research on
L2 learner language: See Nemser (1971), Dickerson (1975), Dickerson and Dickerson
(1977), and Gatbonton (1978), all studies documenting shifts in the accuracy of phono-
logical forms produced on different elicitation tasks. Tarone (1979, 1983) posited that
when second language learners pay the most attention to their speech (i.e., are focused
on form), their speech in this “careful style” would tend to be more accurate: that is,
closer to target language norms. However, in fact, research has shown this view to be
too simple.
Both Beebe (1980) and James (1983) tested this claim and although they found sys-
tematic shifts in the accuracy of IL phonology, they also found that the “careful” style
was not always necessarily closer to TL norms. In both cases, variants from the L1
careful style turned up in the IL careful style, but in Beebe’s case, the phonological
variants transferred from the Thai L1 careful style actually led to less accuracy in En-
glish and the Thai informal style variants led to more accuracy in English. In other
words, the L2 learner’s careful style is not objectively more accurate but rather con-
tains forms the learner believes to be more accurate. It is the learner’s perception of what
is correct that matters; when learners pay attention to language form, they shift toward
that perceived TL norm4 . Tarone (1988) included these observations in a comprehen-
sive summary of the research studies documenting the existence of interlanguage
variation, with substantial evidence in the realm of phonology.
Beebe and Zuengler (1983) and Beebe and Giles (1984) turned for an explanation
of IL variation to speech accommodation theory (SAT), (Giles & Byrne, 1982; Giles
et al., 1987), which describes convergence and divergence in the speech patterns of
interlocutors. Certain phonological features produced by speakers will converge or
become more similar to those of interlocutors from whom they desire approval or with
whom they wish to express social identity. Similarly, phonological forms will diverge
or become dissimilar from those of interlocutors with whom they differ socially. Such
accommodation can be short-term, lasting only for the duration of the conversation,
or can be long-term—that is, may include the relatively permanent acquisition of
phonological forms involved in either convergence or divergence. The claim is that
when an L2 learner interacts with a more proficient speaker of the L2 with whom
they identify, their phonology will move closer to that of the interlocutor (though
see the result of Jenkins (2000), cited earlier). If the learner retains these convergent
496 TARONE

phonological features in their interlanguage over an extended period of time, we say

acquisition has occurred.
Giles, Coupland, and Coupland (1991a, 1991b) later renamed Speech Accommo-
dation Theory (SAT) as Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) to include
a range of nonverbal and discourse dimensions of social interaction such as speech
rate, pauses, utterance length, pronunciation, and nonvocal features such as smiling
and gaze. Divergence in such a model would mean speakers might emphasize speech
and nonverbal differences between themselves and their interlocutors, just as Ramp-
ton’s (1995) Pakistani students in London did when they deliberately used a “Me no
+ verb” construction with their teacher. Both convergence and divergence constitute
strategies of identification with the communicative norms of some reference group,
either present or absent at the time of speaking.
Lybeck’s (2002) longitudinal research in Norway supports this model of accommo-
dation and long-term retention for some L2 learners. This longitudinal, naturalistic
study shows that pronunciation and cultural identity are closely tied. The degree
to which American sojourners used nativelike Norwegian phonological features de-
pended on their acculturation patterns over time, as predicted by Schumann’s (1978)
model. The more the sojourners acculturated into a tight social network (cf. Milroy,
1980) of Norwegian speakers, the more Norwegian phonological features they used,
but when they became alienated from such a network, their use of these features
dropped off. Lybeck concludes that those who were members of close-knit target cul-
ture groups used linguistic features similar to those of their group members, while
learners whose social networks were open and uniplex developed fewer nativelike
features.

Competence for Speaking in a Second Language

Given that learner interlanguage use is systematically variable, how do we characterize
what second language learners know at any given point in time?
Gregg (1990) argues that interlanguage variation is merely a performance phe-
nomenon, quite separate from learners’ competence, and competence ought to be the
only focus of SLA research. Similarly, Long has stated his belief that social contextual
factors do not affect the process of second language acquisition to any great degree:

Few would dispute that SLA takes place in an interactional and sociolinguistic context. A
persistent question in the field, however, is the relevance of that context, and of different
dimensions of it, to acquisition. . . . The goal of research on SLA, qualitative or quantitative,
inside or outside the classroom, in the laboratory or on the street, is to understand how
changes in that internal mental representation are achieved, why they sometimes appear
to cease (so-called “fossilization”), and which learner, linguistic, and social factors (and
where relevant, which instructional practices) affect and effect the process. (Long, 1997,
pp. 318–319)

In this view, knowledge of linguistic form is claimed to be a matter of competence,

while social factors influence only learners’ speech performance; it is taken as a given
that competence and performance are completely separate. Variation in performance
has nothing to do with learners’ knowledge or with possible development of the
learner’s knowledge of the second language rule system.
In contrast with this position is a collection of papers in Brown, Malmkjaer, and
Williams (1996), which addresses the relationship between competence and perfor-
mance from a range of different perspectives. The scholars in this volume propose
different models of learner knowledge that all assume an integral relationship be-
tween competence and performance. Brown (1996), for example, posits a kind of
cyclical relationship between knowledge and output, each influencing the other.
 27. SPEAKING IN A SECOND LANGUAGE 497

Interestingly, V. Cook (1996) suggests that in SLA, the target for acquisition is “multi-
competence,” not a native speaker competence that is impossible by definition.

But the one thing that L2 learners cannot do by definition is become native speakers—fully
balanced bilinguals perhaps, natives never. The goal of L2 acquisition should be seen
as something other than monolingual native competence. The term ‘multi-competence’
has been introduced to cover knowledge of more than one language in the same mind
(Cook, 1991). There is no assumption that this knowledge corresponds to a monolingual
native speaker’s in either L1 or L2; this is a matter for empirical research . . . The starting
point should be what L2 learners are like in their own right rather than how they fail
to reach standards set by people that they are not by definition. Multi-competence is
then a necessary basis for second language acquisition research. L2 learners are not failed
monolinguals, but people in their own right. (p. 64)

In V. Cook’s view, there are different grammars in the mind, but they coexist within
the same holistic system, so that the learner can maintain different settings for the same
set of parameters.

The argument is that the description of linguistic competence has been misleadingly
based on monolinguals, like a description of juggling based on a person who can throw
one ball in the air and catch it, rather than on a description of a person who can handle
two or more balls at the same time. Calling the knowledge of a person who knows one
language linguistic competence may be as misleading as calling throwing one ball in the
air juggling. (V. Cook, 1996, p. 67)

This possibility, proposed early on by Tarone (1983, 1986, 1988, 1990) and R. Ellis
(1985), that learner knowledge might itself be variable and probabilistic has been im-
possible for Gregg—and apparently for others as well—to reconcile with the genera-
tive construct of competence. Gregg railed against the idea that variable rule analysis
of the sort described by Bayley and Preston (1996) might have psychological reality
of any kind, and asked, “Do we really want to claim that a speaker knows, whether
consciously or unconsciously, the probabilities for the production of a specific form?”
(p. 372). However, new information seems to support this kind of claim. N. Ellis (2002),
describing the state of the art in connectionist research on second language acquisition,
now claims exactly that “grammatical representations must have variable strengths
reflective of their frequency and connections must similarly be variable in weight”
(N. Ellis, 2002, p. 372).
This view of learner knowledge itself as inherently variable is an essential claim
of Preston’s (2000) psycholinguistic model of language variation. Preston’s model,
although it does not originate in connectionism or in research on language process-
ing, dovetails very nicely with N. Ellis’ views on the variable nature of linguistic
knowledge. Preston’s work is important because it provides the most detailed model
available to date showing, in sociolinguistic terms, how interlanguage variability re-
lates to the development of interlanguage knowledge.
In Preston’s (2000, 2002) model, the speaker has a choice between two forms within
the same competence. In Level I of his model, selection of one or the other con-
struction is achieved via a probabilistic sociocultural selection device, which operates
in the way a weighted two-sided coin might operate in a coin toss (Preston, 2000,
pp. 10–11). For example, the coin might be weighted one way for utterances directed
to one interlocutor and another way for utterances directed to another interlocutor.
N. Ellis’ (2002) description of language processing gives us a good idea of how those
weights might come to be established in the first place, in light of “our incessant
unconscious figuring” (p. 146). Level II of the psycholinguistic model describes “not
only a grammar whose variable elements are preferred by sociocultural facts but also
498 TARONE

probabilistically constrained by accompanying grammatical, information status, and

other cognitive facts” (Preston, 2000, p. 17). Level III of the model shows longitudinal
variation: acquisition over time.
An important claim of Preston’s model is that when there is a choice between two
linguistic forms, the “vernacular” (in sociolinguistics, the first-learned form of one’s
language) is stronger in the sense that it is more deeply embedded. We are more fluent
in our vernacular. Other language forms (native or nonnative) are postvernacular,
less deeply embedded, and weaker. We are always less fluent in the postvernacular.
The notion that language constructions internalized in the postvernacular period are
always weaker parts of the grammar relates to the traditional notions of style and
attention in sociolinguistics. Some items can only be produced by careful monitoring
because they are not as firmly embedded, and even then, they may not be retrievable
or “correctly” retrievable (Preston, 2000, p. 25).
Preston’s concept of weaker interlanguage grammars and weaker parts of gram-
mars requires substantiation from the sort of research on psycholinguistic processes
reviewed in N. Ellis (2002). As we know, in light of our earlier discussion of learner
creativity and agency (V. J. Cook, 1993, p. 137), the model cannot fully determine
the output of either native or interlanguage grammars because the speaker’s inten-
tion plays a role in activating the sociocultural selection device (Preston, 2000, p. 27).
Preston points out, “The ‘intention’ of a speaker may . . . interact with his or her so-
ciocultural identity. That is, one may choose to ‘perform’ (or perform to a greater or
lesser extent) an available sociocultural identity, and such choices must play a role
in the activation of the selection determined by sociocultural selection” (p. 27). Such
intentional choices to perform particular sociocultural identities are expressions of
speaker creativity, a topic addressed earlier. Preston’s model is the most comprehen-
sive to date in integrating linguistic, sociolinguistic, and psycholinguistic data, and
allows us to explore the ways in which interlanguage variation may impact second
language acquisition in a coherent and theoretically interesting way.

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

This brief review of the topic of speaking in a second language has unfortunately had
to cover quite a bit of ground. I have tried to refer the interested reader to other recent
sources, which can provide more depth and, through references in those sources, a
direction for future reading on topics of interest.
A number of future directions for research and development in this area have been
mentioned, among them:

r Exploring the usefulness of referential communication tasks for the development

of improved language for literacy.
r Examining the use of communication strategies as expressions of a speaker’s
creativity and choice in interactional context, using such frameworks as Conver-
sation Analysis.
r Studying the role of language play, creativity and agency in the speech of second
language learners, and exploring its implications for SLA.
r Exploring the usefulness of Jenkins’ Lingua Franca Core as a target for pronun-
ciation teaching English as an International Language.
r Pursuing more research on characteristics of interlanguage phonology, and test-
ing the various theoretical models being proposed.
r Finding more ways to integrate research findings on IL phonology into ESL/EFL/
EIL pronunciation textbooks.
r Developing and testing Preston’s (2000, 2002) model of the L2 learner’s variable
“multi-competence” (V. J. Cook, 1996): identifying the role of sociocultural factors
 27. SPEAKING IN A SECOND LANGUAGE 499

in the model, the relationship of connectionist psycholinguistic research to the

model (N. Ellis, 2002), and tying in insights of Communication Accommodation
Theory (Giles, Coupland, & Coupland 1991a, 1991b).

NOTES

1. It does not make sense, in my opinion, to claim as Major (2001, p. 25) does, that “everyone speaks an
interlanguage.” For one thing, Major does not seem to use Selinker’s definition of “interlanguage.” The
larger point he is trying to make is important: Everyone’s native language system (L1) is constantly
undergoing change, and is influenced by other language varieties. However, Major’s proposal to use the
term interlanguage to refer to all spoken language seems counterproductive. Maintaining the original
definition of interlanguage makes it possible for us to study L2 learner language as a distinct entity and
determine empirically its resemblance to real-world variable and developing L1s.
2. Lazaraton (personal communication) suggests that CSs may also occur in interactional discourse. If we
begin to study CSs as they occur in natural conversation, we may be able to empirically validate this
claim. At the present time, however, all the CS research of which I am aware has been done in the context
of referential communication.
3. Quite possibly a new form of the English language is evolving, as the language is being used as a lingua
franca internationally. In 200 years, who knows how English will be pronounced? Perhaps the proposed
lingua franca core might in fact become the heart of a new standard English phonology of the future.
4. This insight continues to be validated, most recently by Lin (2001), who examined the production of
English syllable onset C clusters by 20 Chinese adult EFL learners in four types of tasks. Systematic
style shifting occurred, not in terms of errors, but in terms of syllable simplification strategies. The
use of epenthesis increased as the task style became more formal, and the percentage of deletions and
replacements become systematically higher in less formal tasks.

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28

L2 Listening
Michael Rost
University of California–Berkeley

Listening refers to a complex cognitive process that allows a person to understand

spoken language. Listening encompasses receptive, constructive, and interpretive as-
pects of cognition, which are utilized in both first language (L1) and second language
(L2) listening. In L1 acquisition for children, listening ability and cognition develop
interdependently; as such, in normal hearing persons, listening as a specific skill is
rarely given direct attention in L1 education. In L2 development, more direct interven-
tion is considered necessary, because in most cases the learner is acquiring a second
language after cognitive processing skills and habits in the L1 have been established.
In L2 development, listening constitutes not only a skill area in performance, but also
a primary means of acquiring a second language. Listening represents the channel
through which a learner processes language in real time—utilizing pacing, pausing,
and units of encoding that are unique to the spoken language.
As a goal-oriented activity, listening involves “bottom-up” processing, in which
the listener attends to data in the incoming speech signals as well as “top-down”
processing, in which the listener utilizes prior knowledge and expectations to guide
the process of understanding. This simultaneous bottom-up and top-down processing
takes place at different levels of cognitive organization: phonological, grammatical,
lexical, propositional, and discoursal. Because of the multiple levels of organization,
every listener utilizes a parallel processing model to find the “best fit” of meaning:
Representations at each of these five levels create activation at other levels, while the
entire network of interactions serves to produce a “best match” that fits all of the
levels. (McClelland et al., 1995).
While L1 and L2 listening utilize the same basic underlying neurological processes
that take place in the same parts of the brain, there are important developmental and
functional differences between L1 and L2 listening. The pragmatic constraints govern-
ing the acquisition of an L1 for a young child and the acquisition of an L2 for an older
child or an adult are substantively different. The most significant differences are the
needs and motivations of the learner for acquiring the language and the amount and
quality of access to speakers of the language over long periods of time. In addition to
these pragmatic constraints on L2 acquisition, there is evidence that when the learner
passes a “critical period” in early adolescence, some aspects of phonological and gram-
matical processing and some psychomotor skills (for pronunciation) are no longer
sufficiently flexible for complete acquisition and native-like performance in the L2.
503
504 ROST

This chapter examines research that has characterized the processes of listening,
highlighting those areas of particular interest to the development of L2 listening.

PROCESSES IN L2 LISTENING

Listening consists of three basic processing phases that are simultaneous and parallel:
decoding, comprehension, and interpretation. A fourth phase, listener response, is often
included as well in descriptions of listening competence and performance.
Decoding involves attention, speech perception, word recognition, and grammatical
parsing; comprehension includes activation of prior knowledge, representing proposi-
tions in short term memory, and logical inference; interpretation encompasses compari-
son of meanings with prior expectations, activating participation frames, and evaluation
of discourse meanings. Each of these phases contributes to the larger goal of finding
what is relevant to the listener in the input, and what kind of response may be required.
The goal of decoding is to feed recognized lexical items and parsed propositions for
comprehension. The goal of comprehension is to connect the input with relevant
knowledge sources for further interpretation. The goal of interpretation is to present
a set of viable listener response options to the listener.

Decoding Processes: Attention

In neurological terms, attention is a cyclical process requiring three actions: arousal,
orientation, and a focus of cognitive resources. These actions occur in various struc-
tures within the brain, mainly in the auditory cortex, the auditory brainstem, and
the eighth cranial nerve (Hahne & Frederici, 1998). In L2 processing, orientation and
focusing involve a suppression of L1 phonological and lexical processing resources
(Gernsbacher & Shlesinger, 1997).
Attention is essentially a process of guiding selection of input so that intake of
meaning will become more efficient. Because our working memory is quite limited
both temporally (the length of time we can process something) and semantically
(the number of discrete items we can deal with), a user processing language in real
time must decide continuously what to process further. For a proficient listener, in
an L1 or an L2, selective attention works well if three conditions are present: the
input is presented at a proper speed for processing (neither too slow nor too fast),
the number of new items in the input is relatively small compared to the number of
already known items, and there are no semantic or syntactic anomalies in the input.
If any of these conditions are violated, the listener experiences an “attentional blink”
(AB), a detectable disruption in rhythms of the brain which indicates impairment
in processing. When too many ABs occur, the listener experiences discomfort with
processing and difficulty with input-related tasks (Metsala, 1997; Osterhout & Nicol,
1999).
In L2 acquisition research, the role of attention in long-term learning is a subject
of debate. Two main positions have been outlined in this area. Connectionist models
(e.g., MacWhinney, 1994) view L2 acquisition in terms of neural connections and
interactions, contending that learning takes place in the absence of conscious attention
and that learning does not require the intention of the learner to learn. The Noticing
Hypothesis (Schmidt, 1995) holds a contrasting viewpoint, namely, that attention is
necessary for long-term learning to occur. As Segalowitz and Lightbown (1999) note,
part of what fuels the controversy in this area is the lack of agreement on the meaning of
such key terms as attentional capacity, conscious awareness, noticing, and intention
to learn. For L2 listening, attention is considered to encompass all those aspects of
cognition that the listener can control (Shiffrin, 1998).
 28. L2 LISTENING 505

Decoding Processes: Perception

Auditory perception has the goal of helping the listener make sense of the speech
signal. This goal is achieved in three complementary ways: (1) through calculating
articulatory causes for the sounds that strike the ear (identification of the physical ways
the speaker made the sounds, which is enhanced by visual cues when the speaker’s
face is visible), (2) through experiencing psychoacoustic effects (identification of audi-
tory qualities, which may be altered or degraded by competing sounds), (3) through
estimating the speaker’s linguistic intentions (identification of what the speaker is try-
ing to articulate, which is supported by the listener’s knowledge of the language).
The redundancy of these processes assures that, for competent listeners, most of the
continuous speech signal can be broken into segments and categorized for further
processing (Massaro, 1994; Best, 1995).
Some speech processing researchers contend that phonetic feature detectors in the
auditory cortex, which enable the listener to encode speech into linguistic units, atro-
phy during development if they are not used. This means that adults eventually retain
only the phonetic feature detectors that were stimulated by their native language, and
will experience perceptual difficulties in perception of any L2 sounds that are not sim-
ilar to those in their L1. According to this view, exposure to speech during childhood
alters neural organization such that individuals, born capable of learning any lan-
guage, develop perceptual and cognitive processes that are specialized for their own
native language. This means that for adult L2 learners, L2 speech can be difficult to
segment into words and phonemes, different phonemes in the second language can
sound as if they are the same, and the motor articulations of the second language can
be difficult to reproduce (Kuhl, 2000; Iverson et al., 2001).
There is substantial evidence that during the first year of life, the child develops
categorical perception for the sounds of its first language, using the “perceptual magnet
effect” to determine prototypes and variations of all the linguistic sounds it hears.
By the end of the first year, the child begins to suppress perception of other non-
L1 linguistic sounds, apparently to aid in development of first language acquisition
(Kuhl, 1991; Kuhl et al., 1992).
Perception is made possible by coordination of functional neural circuits that inte-
grate across areas of the brain. For aural perception, one such circuit is the phonological
rehearsal loop (Gupta & MacWhinney, 1997) which links together the auditory pro-
cessing in the temporal lobe with attentional and motor processing from prefrontal
cortex. We use this loop to store and repeat a series of words that we hear and to speed
the perception and learning of new words.

Metrical Cadence and Speech Rate. Research into speech processing has shown
that listeners of any language develop common “preferred strategies” for aural de-
coding in their L1. These strategies are readily acquired by the L1 child in presence
of ample oral input, but apparently are often only partially or imperfectly acquired
by the L2 learner because of interference with one’s previously acquired L1 aural
strategies. At the same time, a similarity of segmentation strategies between the oral
properties of one’s L1 and L2 may result in positive transfer, making speech processing
in the L2 easier (Cutler, 1997; Auer et al., 1999).
According to the Optimality Theory (Tesar & Smolensky, 2000; Kager, 1999;
Escudero & Boersma, 2001) all L1 listeners acquire a primary metrical segmentation
strategy to process strings of speech. The strategy acquired is based on the phonolexi-
cal system (how content words receive stress) and the phonotactic principles of their
“first heard language” (the rhythm of consonantal and vocalic intervals). Together,
these allow L1 listeners to segment the words in the speech stream effectively. For
most varieties of English, the preferred segmentation strategy utilizes two principles:
506 ROST

(1) a strong syllable marks the onset of a new content word (90% of content words
in English have stress on the first syllable; many of course are monosyllabic) and (2)
each pause unit of speech (most speech is uttered in 2- to –3-second bursts, bounded
by pauses) contains one prominent content item (which may be a single word or a
phrase). L1 learners also acquire secondary segmentation strategies, but only after the
preferred strategies are established (Jusczyk, 1997).
A major factor in comprehensibility of speech for L2 listeners is speech rate. De-
spite the common belief that slower rates facilitate listening comprehension, empirical
studies have yielded contradictory findings. Although in general, listening compre-
hension improves for L2 listeners when the speech rate is slowed down, this is only
one factor in ease of comprehension, and it does not apply universally for all learners
nor for all parts of a text (Griffiths, 1992; Cauldwell, 1996). The most consistent find-
ing from speech rate research is that additional pausing at natural pause boundaries,
rather than slowed speech itself, seems to aid comprehension (Flowerdew, 1994). This
finding suggests that assistance with metrical segmentation is more important than
simple speech rate reduction in phonological perception.
Normal speech in English averages from 100 words per minute to 240 words per
minute (although some cattle auctioneers have been clocked at 400 words per minute)
(Crystal & House, 1990). Nearly all speech styles include some bursts at the high end
of this range. As reported by Vandergrift (1999), in live questioning of L2 listeners as
they listened to an audio tape, it is most often these fast bursts of speech, especially
when they occur at unexpected times, that cause difficulty. One finding from speech
rate research is that individual listeners tend to have a “preferred rate” of speaking
at which they find listening most comfortable (Brown & Hulme, 1992). This rate does
not always correlate with language proficiency, for instance, better listeners do not
necessarily prefer a faster rate.
Using a novel approach and developments in audio technology, a study by Zhao
(1997) examined the issue of speech rate and listening comprehension from the per-
spective of listener control. By giving the control of speech rate to the learners and
by attending to individuals instead of groups, this study concluded that when given
control of the speed of the input, students’ listening comprehension improved. This
implies that interactive factors, including the listener’s perceived role, influence how
speed of input affects comprehension. It is known that even in L1 listening, alterations
that slow down the input, including disfluencies such as false starts, will aid in com-
prehension, though there is an obvious ceiling effect to this phenomenon (Brennan &
Williams, 1995).
In L2 listening, in addition to aiding comprehension, slower input, along with other
simplifications in syntax and rhetorical structure, may aid in acquisition. Some studies
indicate that slower speed of input, along with simplification of syntactic structure,
aids specifically in short-term L2 vocabulary acquisition (Leow 1993; Ellis, 1994)
In L2 pedagogy, it is clear that a familiarity and comfort level with the L2 phonology
is the basis for listening development and language processing. Chun (2002) in review-
ing approaches to teaching phonology to L2 learners over the past several decades,
argues that four principles need to be observed: (1) pronunciation and intonation must
be taught in context; (2) intonational meanings must be generalizable, (3) teaching of
pronunciation and intonation must be subordinate to larger communicative purposes,
and (4) intonation must be taught with realistic language samples.
The relationship between speech perception and production has been a long-
standing issue in L2 acquisition. Many believe that a learner’s inability to produce
target-like phonology entails a lack of perception ability and that practice with pro-
duction of target-like pronunciation and intonation will lead to improved perception
of L2 phonology. Both of these views have been challenged by research. For example,
Yamada & Tokura (1992) have shown that learners can be trained to hear phonetic
 28. L2 LISTENING 507

distinctions (e.g., /r/ vs. /l/), but cannot reliably produce such distinctions in their
own speech. Studies like this suggest that L2 learners may come to perceive L2 phono-
logical distinctions accurately, but do not have the pscyhomotor skills to produce them
(Flege, 1995).

Decoding Processes: Word Recognition

Word recognition in listening refers to two processes: identification of words and im-
mediate activation of lexical knowledge linked to words that have been recognized.
Word recognition achieves two felicitous goals: it locates the onset of the immedi-
ately following word and it provides “proactive processing,” indicating syntactic and
semantic constraints that are used to recognize the immediately following word.
In continuous speech, there is no auditory equivalence to the white spaces in read-
ing continuous text, so the listener does not have reliable cues for marking word
boundaries. As such, it is often word recognition that becomes the most salient area of
difficulty for L2 listeners. When beginning and intermediate L2 learners are given the
opportunity to report what they don’t understand in an oral text, it is word recognition
problems—identifying but not knowing a word or not recognizing word boundaries—
that are most often reported (Rost & Ross, 1991).
Speaking rate influences word recognition. Normal speaking rates are about eight
words per every 2- to 3-second burst of speech (Brazil, 1995). The 2- to 3-second burst
in natural speech is common across the world’s languages, and seems to be a feature
adapted to the capacity of our working memories (Chafe, 1994). Because the typical
rate of speech is so rapid, word recognition obviously must happen very rapidly as
well. The process occurs primarily in a sequential, automized fashion, although lis-
teners must regularly employ “backward recognition” (utilizing the auditory loop in
short-term memory) to clarify ambiguities (Massaro & Burke, 1991). Several models of
word recognition have been developed: the Cohort Model (Morton, 1969), the TRACE
model (Marslen-Wilson, 1987), the Fuzzy Logic Model (Massaro, 1994)) to account for
the kinds of psycholinguistic competence that underlies rapid word recognition in
speech. All models address the following points. Words are:

(1) Recognized through the interaction of perceived sound and knowledge of the
likelihood of a word being uttered in a given context (Luce & Pisoni, 1998).
(2) Recognized essentially in a sequential fashion, but not all words need to be rec-
ognized in sequence for speech processing to occur successfully. Unrecognized
words can be held in a phonological loop in short term memory while other cues
are used to help identify them or, minimally, determine their likely function in
the input (Marslen-Wilson, 1990).
(3) Initially accessed by two main clues: the sounds that begin the word and lexical
stress.
(4) Recognized when the analysis of the acoustic structure and other available cues
eliminates all candidates but one—the most likely candidate. This process need
not be complete until an entire “pause unit” or phonological phrase is processed.
The phonological loop in short term memory can readily hold about one pause
unit, typically 2 to 3 seconds in length.

In essence, this process is aimed at creating lexical effects during perception (see
Figure 28.1). Creation of lexical effects is a receptive (bottom-up) process of identifying
potential lexical candidates out of known items in the mental lexicon, and deciding
upon the most likely candidate strings by invoking contextual constraints, which is
an active (top-down) process. For this dual processing to work smoothly, the listener
needs to generate multiple candidates as the speech string is processed sequentially.
508 ROST

FIG. 28.1. Bottom-up processes in word recognition, from Rost, 2002.

Without a large receptive vocabulary, the listener cannot create lexical effects, and
has to rely upon straight matching procedures with known words, a non-dynamic
process which is much slower (Marslen-Wilson, 1987).

Vocabulary Size and Listening Comprehension

In principle, listening is facilitated by the size of an individual’s mental lexicon
and the listeners’ facility in spoken word recognition. The activation of background
knowledge (content schemata and cultural schemata) that is needed for comprehension
of speech are linked to and launched by word recognition. Speed and breadth in
word recognition have been shown to be a consistent predictor of L2 listening ability.
(Segalowitz et al., 1998; Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001).
Corpus studies show that a recognition vocabulary of 3,000 word families is nec-
essary for comprehension of “every day” conversations, if we assume that a listener
needs to be familiar with—and able to recognize—90% to 95% of content words to
understand a conversation satisfactorily (Nation & Waring, 1997; Read, 2001). There
is evidence that occurrences of “out of vocabulary” words in a spoken text (i.e., words
outside of one’s vocabulary knowledge, either nonsense words or unacquired words)
create attentional problems that interfere with comprehension of both the immediate
and subsequent utterances (Rost & Ross, 1991; Vandergrift, 1997b).
 28. L2 LISTENING 509

There can be no clear agreement on what a “recognition vocabulary” means be-

cause word knowledge involves a number of aspects and continuously expands.
Word knowledge includes, on a surface level, recognition of the word’s spoken form
(including its allophonic variations), its written form, and grammatical functions, and
on a deeper level, its collocations, relative frequency in the language, constraints on
use, denotations, connotations, association, concepts and referents (N. Schmidt, 2000).
There is evidence that depth of knowledge of words influences speed of spoken word
recognition, by way of priming effects. Where “neighborhood density” is greater,
that is, when semantic connections in the mental lexicon are more complex, word
recognition becomes easier. This means that the depth of individual word knowledge
determines a given word’s degree of integration into the mental lexicon, and therefore
the facility with which it is accessed in real time (Luce & Pisoni, 1998).
How one activates vocabulary knowledge while listening has not been widely
studied in L2 contexts. Based on L1 research, it is assumed that activation is more
readily automized for high frequency (i.e., frequently used) words than for low fre-
quency words. It is also assumed that vocabulary knowledge interacts with other
competencies in the process of listening, such as syntactic processing and discourse
processing. In L2 contexts, the four major views of the role of vocabulary in language
comprehension are as follows:

(1) The instrumentalist view, which sees vocabulary knowledge as being a major
prerequisite and causative factor in comprehension.
(2) The aptitude view, which sees vocabulary knowledge as one of many outcomes
of having strong general “intelligence” or “feel” for a language.
(3) The knowledge view, which sees vocabulary as an indicator of strong world
knowledge. This world knowledge enables listening comprehension.
(4) The access view, which sees vocabulary as having a causal relationship with
comprehension provided that the vocabulary can be easily accessed. Access can
be improved through practice. This access can involve several factors including
fluency of lexical access, speed of coping with affixed forms, and speed of word
recognition.
(adapted from Nation, 2001)

Because word recognition and vocabulary knowledge play such an important role
in L2 listening and second language acquisition, most approaches to teaching L2
listening involve vocabulary development. Five types of instructional methods are
commonly used:

(1) Priming of lexical knowledge through pre-teaching of vocabulary items known

to be unfamiliar to L2 learners (Ellis & Heimbach, 1997; VanPatten, 1990);
(2) Concurrent lexical support while listening, either through captioning of videos
(Baltova, 1999) or overt signaling and paraphrasing of unfamiliar lexical items
in face-to-face delivery (Chaudron, 1988);
(3) Prior simplification of vocabulary in oral texts, including restatements and para-
phrases to promote vocabulary learning (Chaudron, 1988)
(4) Emphasis on negotiation of meaning of unknown lexical items during conver-
sational interactions, to promote awareness of lexical gaps in input processing,
and on increasing use of contextual strategies for inferring meanings of unknown
words (Chaudron, 1988; Pica, Doughty, & Young, 1987)
(5) Group reconstruction activities following listening (sometimes called “dicto-
gloss”) to promote awareness of unfamiliar lexical items and attempts to deepen
and extend partial vocabulary knowledge (Wajnryb, 1990)
510 ROST

All five methods have demonstrated gains in vocabulary knowledge, as measured

through pre- and post-test comparison in comparison to control groups, though part
of this gain must be attributed to the additional time of lexical processing that is
provided in each method.

Decoding Processes: Syntactic Parsing

As words in speech are recognized, processing the language for meaning requires a
partial syntactic mapping of incoming speech onto a grammatical model. A number of
syntactic and morphological cues influence how the listener processes meaning: word
order, subject-verb (topic-comment) matching, pro-form agreement (e.g., agreement of
pronouns with their antecedents), case inflections (e.g., “I” vs. “me”), and contrastive
stress. The listener’s grammatical knowledge, and ability to utilize that knowledge in
real time are used during syntactic processing.
Syntactic processing occurs at two levels, that of the immediate utterance, or sen-
tence, level and that of the extended text, or discourse level. There is some evidence
that syntactic processing takes place in two passes. The first pass identifies syntactic
categories of units in the speech stream, and the second pass integrates syntax of the
immediate utterance with syntax of the larger speech unit that is being processed.
(Osterhout & Nicol, 1999).
In the “first pass”, syntactic processing, or parsing, accomplishes three basic goals:
(1) it speeds up aural processing by use of constraints to assign parts of incoming
utterances quickly to inviolable syntactic categories, (2) it allows for prediction of
functions of incoming parts of an utterance and for disambiguating partially heard
parts of an utterance, (3) and it helps the processor create a propositional model of
the incoming speech from which logical inferences can be calculated for further com-
prehension.
In fluent listening, the parsing process is known to be highly automatized. Re-
search on “slips of the ear,” in which naturally occurring aural errors are studied
systematically, have been used as evidence of normal aural syntactic (Garnes & Bone,
1980; Bilmes, 1992). This research illustrates that listeners tend to hear (or mishear)
entire functional phrases, rather than single syllables or words. The listener maps out
the heard input onto a plausible phonological structure that represents an entire func-
tional phrase, and if a mishearing occurs, it generally produces a syntactically possible
(even if pragmatically implausible) “heard utterance.” For example, one data entry
from Garnes and Bon (1980) cites a listener hearing “go to the car and get the tuna”
instead of the speaker’s actual utterance “go and get my car tuned up.” This mishear-
ing shows how the listener attempts to parse an entire functional unit, here, the verb
phrase.
One illustrative study, in which subjects are asked to identify where a “blip” (non-
linguistic sound) occurred while they were listening, further demonstrates how nor-
mal listeners tend to parse incoming speech as full, functional units, “undisturbed”
by disruptions (Bond, 1999a, 1999b). For example, if a “blip” is inserted after the word
“somewhere” in an utterance, “I left it somewhere on the porch,” most listeners will
report hearing the “blip” before “somewhere” because they tend to process “some-
where on the porch” as a single unit, which is resistant to interruption. It is a single
unit both in terms of semantic function (i.e., location) and also in terms of syntactic
role (i.e., adverbial).
For most fluent listeners, syntactic processing is typically noticed only when an
anomaly occurs. Perception of a syntactic anomaly produces a characteristic disrup-
tion in L1 listeners. This is called the P-600 effect, in which electrical activity in the
auditory cortex, jumps by about 600 microwatts. Interestingly, for most L2 listen-
ers, this syntactic disruption effect typically does not occur, suggesting that syntactic
processing is not entirely automized.
 28. L2 LISTENING 511

The “second pass” in syntactic processing involves integrating representations of

utterances in the discourse. The most critical syntactic integration processes are (1)
determining conjunctions between utterances, including equivalences between text
items in adjoined utterances, by calculating cohesion markers for anaphoric (previ-
ously mentioned), cataphoric (to be mentioned), and exophoric (external to the text)
references, and (2) filling in ellipsis (items that are left out of the utterance because
they are assumed to be known by the listener, or already “given” in the text), and
(3) calculation of logical inferences that link propositions within the discourse, which
most often are not explicitly stated.
These integration processes are facilitated by three underlying competencies: (1)
A pragmatic knowledge of common discourse functions (e.g., apologies, invitations,
complaints) and discourse types (e.g., greeting routines, personal anecdotes). In par-
ticular, ability to note episode boundaries or other conventional division points that
“bind” sets of utterances together assists in discourse parsing. (Gernsbacher &
Foertsch, 1999)

(2) The ability to attend to pitch levels, as episodes in discourse are often “bracketed”
intonationally. In English this is achieved through starting a new topic (a set of
linked utterances) on a high key and closing the topic, often several turns later,
on a low tone.
(3) A knowledge of “discourse markers” that cue speaker intention. Explicit markers
may signal an opening of a new episode or topic (e.g., in informal conversation,
“Well, anyway, . . . ”), a continuation of a current topic or episode (“Right, and
another thing. . . ”), a reversion to a previous episode or topic (“As I was saying
before. . . ”), or a redirection of the discourse (“That reminds me of . . . ”).

There are two similar pedagogic approaches to help L2 learners develop their
syntactic processing of oral language, or in effect, to help them learn grammar through
listening. The first, “enriched input,” provides learners with prerecorded (or scripted)
texts that have been “flooded” with exemplars of the target syntactic structure in the
context of a meaning-focused task. This approach caters to incidental learning of the
target grammar structure through, what Long (1990) first called “focus on form.” The
second is known by the term first used by VanPatten (1990), “processing instruction.”
In this approach, learners attend to interpretation tasks that encourage learners to
engage in intentional learning by consciously noticing how a target grammar feature
(e.g., passive voice) is used in the spoken input, even though the feature is not explicitly
called out.
Ellis (2003) reviews a number of studies using these approaches. Concerning the
enriched input approach, Ellis concludes that enriched input can help L2 learners
acquire new grammatical features and use partially learned features more accurately,
and that this form of grammar instruction is at least as effective and often more
effective than explicit instruction in grammar. Clear, positive effects, however, seem
to be evident only when the treatment provided is prolonged. Concerning input-
processing instruction, Ellis concludes that processing instruction in conjunction with
explicit grammar instruction leads to the most consistent gains in the ability of learners
to comprehend target structures being taught. Furthermore, he concludes that effects
of processing instruction on both comprehension and production are more durable
than explicit instruction alone.

Paralinguistic Cues in Speech Processing

There is an additional, non-verbal, layer of information in the speech signal that
parallels lexical and grammatical cues. This is the paralinguistic layer, which pro-
vides meaningful fluctuations in duration (length), pitch (intonation), and intensity
512 ROST

(loudness). Crystal (1995) has summarized the six types of information that are typi-
cally encoded by the speaker, and available to the listener, through intonation:

(1) Emotional: intonation is used to express the speaker’s feelings for the topic;
(2) Grammatical: intonation can be used to mark grammatical structure of an utter-
ance, like punctuation in written language;
(3) Informational: intonation indicates the salient parts of an utterance;
(4) (Textual: intonation is used to help large chunks of discourse contrast or cohere,
rather like paragraphs in written language;
(5) Psychological: intonation is used to chunk information into units that are easier
to process. For example, lists of words, or telephone or credit card numbers are
grouped into units to make them easier to memorize;
(6) Indexical: intonation can indicate membership in specific social or cultural
groups. For example, preachers and newscasters often use a recognizable in-
tonation pattern.

Couper-Kuhlen (2001) provides numerous illustrations of how speakers encode

these types of information intonationally. In addition, she documents how listeners,
in conversational contexts, also respond intonationally to this information, through
degrees of signaling understanding, degrees of acceptance of the speaker’s percei-
ved meaning, and through attempts to amplify, reduce, or redirect the focus of the
discourse.

Integration of Visual and Aural Cues

Speech processing is known to be aided by consistent visual signals from the speaker,
in the form of both gestures and articulatory movements (of the mouth, cheeks, chin,
throat, or chest) that correspond to production of speech. (Rost (2002) provides a
review of gestural signals available in face-to-face communication.) Because of the
importance of visual cues, psycholinguists consider speech perception to be bi-modal,
involving both auditory and visual senses. (Massaro, 1994). Indeed, it has been shown
that children acquire speech perception in their L1 through dependence on visual
signals from their caretakers (McGurk & MacDonald, 1976).
When visual and auditory signals do not coincide, there are a great number of
incidences of blended mishearings, called the “McGurk Effect,” in which part of the
signal is taken from visual cues and part from auditory cues. This effect illustrates
attempts by the listener to integrate information from multiple channels. (Stork &
Hennecke, 1996 provide additional examples and discussion of blended mishearings.)
Consistent with the principle of integration, when auditory cues are completely absent
(as in listening on the telephone or to the radio), acoustic mishearings and other com-
prehension problems are significantly higher than in face-to-face delivery of messages
(Massaro, 1998).

Comprehension Processes: Identifying Salient Information

Comprehension is essentially a constructive process that takes place in the listener’s
short-term and long-term memory. It is a process of relating language to references
in the real world as well as to concepts and representations in personal memory, and
consists of four overlapping sub-processes: identifying salient information, activating
appropriate schemata, inferencing, and updating representations.
To comprehend speech, the listener must construct a concept in memory for the lex-
ical items uttered and propositions stated or implied by the speaker. This construction
takes place in a state of cognitive uncertainty as there are certain to be mismatches
 28. L2 LISTENING 513

between the speaker’s concepts and those of the listener. In other words, what is col-
loquially referred to as “complete comprehension” takes place without any guarantee
of shared concepts, beliefs or knowledge between speaker and listener (Brown, 1995a;
Sperber & Wilson, 1986; Krauss & Fussell, 1991).
Because comprehension involves the mapping and updating of references that the
speaker uses, the process of comprehending occurs in an ongoing cycle, as the listener
is attending to each utterance of the speaker. Each intonation unit (often called a pause
unit) uttered by a speaker includes both new information (or focal information) and
given information (or background information). “New” refers to the assumed status,
in the speaker’s mind, that the information is not yet “active” in the listener’s working
memory. “New” information then does not necessarily mean that the speaker believes
the information itself is novel for the listener. “Given” refers to the status, again in
the speaker’s mind, that information is already active in the listener’s mind. Mutual
comprehension is never assured: the speaker may, of course, be mistaken about either
assumption. (Allwood, 1995; Chafe, 1994; Keysar et al., 1998; Hinds, 1985).
The interplay of given and new information in spoken discourse is reflected in the
prosody of speech: In most varieties of English, utterances with given information
tend to end in rising or level intonation and are uttered more quickly, while utter-
ances with new information tend to end in falling intonation (Brazil, 1995). These
prosodic elements serve as cues to the listener about how to attend to the information
given.

Comprehension Processes: Activating Appropriate Schemata

Understanding what a speaker says depends to a large degree upon shared concepts
and shared ways of reacting to the world, or at least the imagination of shared concepts.
The advantage of shared concepts is that the speaker need not make explicit whatever
he or she can assume the listener already knows (Gass & Neu, 1996; Scollon & Scollon,
1995). Although it is impossible that any two persons (even close family members)
would share identical concepts for a topic, it is indeed possible that many people who
are members of similar communities will share common activation spaces in memory,
which allows them to experience “mutual meanings” (Churchland, 1999).
The central component in comprehension is the activation of these concepts, or
“modules” of knowledge. Known as schemas (often referred to in the plural as schemata),
these memory structures measure the semantic content of the input for its degree of
conformity or variance to knowledge the listener already possesses. The notion of
schema as an organizing principle of long-term memory was introduced to explain
how listeners created apparent distortions in content when they recalled stories that
they heard (Rumelhart, 1980). In a seminal study, Mandler & Johnson (1977) had sub-
jects read a passage involving an unknown cultural ritual (”The War of the Ghosts”).
Subjects were tested on their recall at various intervals. The recall protocols revealed
a range of distortions of story content, even though the subjects considered their re-
call to be accurate. This study and many others in the “story grammar” paradigm
(e.g., Bransford & Johnson, 1972 ; Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978; Abu-Akel, 1999) and the
“reader response” paradigm (e.g., Spiro, 1982; Miall, 1989) demonstrate how back-
ground knowledge, expectations, and affect influence the ways we understand and
remember what we hear or read. Schemas are in effect “psychological anchors,” which
create biases in the comprehension process. Unless strong enough evidence is pre-
sented to motivate the listener to “move the anchor,” the listener will assume that the
speaker’s meaning is consistent with the schema the listener has (Wilson et al., 1996)
and use this schema to initiate and carry forward the comprehension process.
Neurologically, a schema is a set of simultaneously activated “connections” (related
nodes) in the frontal cortex of the brain. Each schema may be triggered by activation of
514 ROST

any node in the network (Rumelhart, 1997; Rubin, 1996). What defines a schema is its
heuristic nature. A set of memory nodes needed to guide one through an activity, such
as “withdrawing money from an ATM” or “dealing with phone solicitor,” becomes
a heuristic when it first works as a “solution” to a comprehension problem (Port &
van Gelder, 1995). It is estimated that any adult by age 21 has roughly one million
schemas in memory that can be drawn upon in language comprehension. Because
these schemas can be interrelated in a variety of ways, the connections among them is
nearly infinite (Churchland, 1999). To remain operational as heuristics, new schemas
are created every day and existing ones are updated constantly: every time we read,
listen to, or observe something new we create a new schema by relating one fact to
another through a logical or semiotic link (Altarriba & Forsythe, 1993).
The notions of schemata and particularly culturally-influenced schemata are par-
ticularly important in L2 comprehension, because L2 listeners continuously come in
contact with assumptions and expectations that are in variance to their own. Com-
prehension problems arise, not only when schemata are markedly different, but if
the listener is unaware of what these schematic differences might be (Lantolf, 1999;
Schrauf & Rubin, 1998). L2 pedagogy has taken a significant interest in the notion
of schemata and the activation of appropriate background knowledge for listening.
Training methods typically incorporate pre-listening activities to raise awareness of
cultural schemata that will be needed for comprehension (Long, 1990), and follow up
discussion of cultural allusions, cultural preferences, and so on that were included in
the listening text (Buck, 2001). Some methods stress the interrelatedness of gaining
intercultural competence (awareness of cross-cultural factors in language learning
and L2 use) and skill development (Sercu, 2000; Bremer et al. 1996). Methods for
teaching academic listening directly incorporate an awareness of cultural and content
schemata in extended listening and recall (Flowerdew, 1994). These methods are con-
sistent with general L1 educational methods for promoting use of schematic maps in
developing critical thinking and understanding extended texts (e.g., Manzo & Manzo,
1995).

Comprehension Processes: Inferencing

In language comprehension, the process of inferencing is similar to a mathemati-
cal inference in that it is a calculation, a problem-solving process, employed when
there is sufficient evidence from which some conclusion can be drawn about related
propositions (Kintsch, 1998). (For example, if one hears two related propositions,
“I brought the ice. It’s in the trunk.” we can infer that the ice, in the trunk of the
speaker’s car, might be melting.) Inferencing is involved in comprehension because
the conclusions that must be drawn are almost always based on inexplicit evidence.
Research on inferencing during comprehension has been carried out in three basic
ways: through recall analysis, through test performance, and through introspection
protocols.
Recall protocols paired with text analysis has been a primary method of studying in-
ferencing processes for both L1 and L2 listeners (Olson, Duffy, & Mack; 1984; Trabasso
& Magaliano, 1996; Golden, 1998; Golden & Rumelhart, 1993; Rost 1994). In this form
of comprehension research, the researcher identifies the differences between what is
explicitly stated in a text and what the listener “infers” when reconstructing the text
or answering questions about the text. This line of research, done primarily in L1 con-
texts, has shown how listeners utilize scripts (sequential patterns of knowledge), goal
hierarchies (knowledge of organization patterns in a text or discourse type), conceptual
graphs (idealization of the speaker’s assumed meaning), and causal nets (cause-effect
arcs and conditional logic syllogisms) to remember large stretches of text and to draw
inferences as they listen.
 28. L2 LISTENING 515

Analysis of test performance, which has been extensive in the area of L2 listen-
ing, is another way of studying inferencing processes. This type of research outlines
the information that is available in the text (or test stem) and projects the presumed
cognitive processes that are required to respond to the text (or test stem). These pro-
jections are then validated by factor analysis. Using this research paradigm, a study
by Freedle & Kostin (1996) analyzed TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language)
tests and found the following kinds of inferences being tested: inferring similari-
ties between morphologically similar pairs of words and phrases. (Stem: Her friend
was. . . . Response option: She was friendly. . . ); inferring lexical synonymy. (Stem: He
intended to leave . . . Response option: He wanted to leave . . . ); inferring lexical hi-
erarchies (Stem: She cut her finger. Response option: She injured part of her hand.);
inferring case (semantic role) of a noun or noun phrase in a sentence (Stem: He cut
the grass. Response option: The grass was cut by him.)
Buck (2001) in an analysis of several listening test formats, found the following
types of inferencing questions present in published tests: asking for the main idea
of the text or section of the text, asking about anything that is not clearly stated,
but that is deliberately indicated by the speaker (e.g., by choice of words or tone of
voice or connotations of words); asking about any pragmatic implication or logical
entailment.
Introspection research has been particularly fruitful in understanding the problem-
solving and inferencing procedures of L2 listeners. Rost & Ross (1991) using text recon-
struction and directed questioning, constructed a typology of clarification question
types asked by L2 listeners. This typology identified the kinds of inferential questions
posed by listeners: global questions (suggesting insufficient information understood
on which to base an inference), lexical questions (suggesting insufficient knowledge
of word meanings or insufficient context to relate to the word understood), hypothet-
ical questions (suggesting incomplete propositions on which to base inferences), and
forward inference questions (suggesting a coherent propositional structure on which
to base “normal” inferencing, not based on a perceived deficiency of information).
Vandergrift (1997a, 1999) conducted one-on-one interviews with learners as they
listened to L2 audio tapes, stopping periodically to ask the learners what kinds of
comprehension problems they were experiencing. The purpose of the research was to
discover the types of strategies learners used to infer meaning, and to explore corre-
lations between strategy use and learner proficiency. Based on the work of Vandegrift
(1997b, 1999) and O’Malley et al. (1985), there is now a consensus that use of metacogni-
tive strategies—planning for listening, self-monitoring of comprehension processes,
and evaluation of one’s own performance and problems—are associated with bet-
ter listeners. As such, pedagogical approaches now incorporate the development of
metacognitive strategies for inferring meaning as part of an instructional approach
(see Figure 28.2).

Comprehension Processes: Updating Memory

Use of memory during language comprehension is generally discussed as involving
two dimensions: long-term memory, associated with the sum of all of a person’s
knowledge and experience, most of which is inactive at any time, and short-term
memory, associated with knowledge that is activated at a particular moment. For
purposes of understanding verbal communication, it is preferable to speak in terms
of memory activation rather than in terms of memory size. The popular term short-
term memory (STM), however, is ambiguous because it is used to refer to either (1) the
set of representations from long-term memory stores that are currently and temporarily
in a state of heightened activation, or (2) the focus of attention or content of awareness
that can be held for a limited period of time.
516 ROST

STRATEGY What the listener does What the teacher can do to

promote this strategy
PLANNING
Advanced organization Decide what the objectives of a Write the topic on the board and
specific listening task are. Why is ask learners why it might be
it important to attend to this? important to listen to it.
Directed attention Learners must pay attention to the In setting up a listening task ask
main points in a listening task to learners what type of information
get a general understanding of they are likely to hear.
what is said.
Selective attention Learner pay attention to details in Before listeners listen a second
the listening task. time to a recording, set specific
types of information for them to
listen for.
Self-management Learners have to manage their own Before setting up a listening task
motivation for a listening task. the teacher talks with the Ss in the
L2 so that they become attuned to
listening.
MONITORING
Comprehension monitoring Learners check their understanding Teacher sets up a task so that Ss
of ideas, through asking have opportunities to ask for
confirmation questions. clarification and confirmation.
Auditory monitoring Learners check their identification Teacher sets up "bottom up"
of what they hear. listening task to check for accurate
perception of key words and
grammatical structures.
Task monitoring Learners check their completion of Teacher sets up task with
the task. intermediate steps so that Ss can
tell that they are in the process of
completing the task.
EVALUATION
Performance evaluation Learners judge how well they did T. sets up task with tangible
on the task outcome that can be evaluated by
learners.
Problem identification Learners decide on what problems T. provides follow up to elicit
they still have with the text or task problem areas.

(from Rost, 2002)

FIG. 28.2. Pedagogical approach for developing metacognitive strategies for L2

listeners.

Cowan (1993) argues for a hierarchical conception of STM, with the focus of atten-
tion being a subset of the activated neural connections in long-term memory. Con-
sistent with this conception is the notion of multiple working memories, modules
that are associated with different modalities (e.g., speech vs. writing) and with differ-
ent kinds of representations (e.g., spatial, serial, verbal), any of which is active at any
 28. L2 LISTENING 517

time. Working memory is a “computation space” in which various operations, such

as rehearsal, phonological looping of input, information reductions, generalizations,
and inferences occur. A computational version of working memory has strict tempo-
ral span limitations, namely, a brief sensory component lasting up to three seconds
(sometimes called echoic memory or a rehearsal loop ) and a computational “resolution
space” lasting up to 30 seconds.
According to Gupta & MacWhinney (1997), there is a strong reason to believe that
the rehearsal loop plays a central role in both first and second language listening. By
testing the immediate serial recall (ISR) of L2 learners, it is possible to estimate the
STM capacity of this rehearsal loop. Differences in the abilities of learners to store
items in this loop have been shown to correlate well with differential success in both
L1 and L2 learning (MacWhinney, 1996).
Updating of representations, through the use of comprehension and inferencing
processes, takes place in the resolution space in short term memory. The ability of the
learner to deal with input in real time in this memory space is an essential feature of
proficiency in the L2. Three approaches to L2 listening pedagogy have addressed de-
veloping this fundamental aspect of proficiency: shadowing, non-reciprocal listening
tasks, and note-taking.
Shadowing is a technique using direct or paraphrased repetition, similar to Elicited
Imitation (EI) in applied linguistics studies, in which the listener is asked to repeat
what the speaker says, in the same language, either verbatim, or in close paraphrase. In
training of simultaneous or consecutive translators, verbatim repetition is eventually
accompanied by a dual, non-linguistic, task and then by paraphrase.)
The goal of shadowing is to increase the efficiency of working memory, for peri-
ods up to 30 seconds, with increasingly complex inputs. By attempting to produce a
complete and accurate version of what the speaker has said (including paralinguistic
meanings), the listener is exercising the capacity of STM. The underlying cognitive
ability for shadowing and paraphrasing is “chunking,” the process of using key words
to represent whole ideas and then collapsing an extended utterance into a manageable
series of key words. Because it has been known for some time that working memory
can hold only about seven “items” (Miller, 1956), chunking ability is essential for ac-
curate comprehension of extended texts (Kussmaul, 1995; Robinson, 1991; Mikkelson,
1996).
Non-reciprocal tasks are a type of task involving a one-way delivery of information.
In a listening task, the learner hears (or views) input and is given a specific goal,
using selected information from the input. Typical tasks used in L2 pedagogy involve
filling in grids, completing charts, or selecting or ordering visuals. Listening tasks
either use pre-selected “authentic” input (i.e., input that naturally occurs outside of
pedagogic settings, such as news programs) or a constructed (pre-modified) input that
deliberately employs simplification to assist processing or flooding of certain kinds of
text features (as in vocabulary or grammar processing tasks) to facilitate noticing and
learning of specific language points. In modern instruction, listening tasks are often
in a multimedia environment (Hoven, 1999).
Brown (1995b) studied the effects of pre-modified input on comprehension as mea-
sured by task outcomes, and concluded that features of cognitive (processing) load in
the input influence task performance (see Figure 28.3).
Tasks which make use of these principles allow listeners to focus their attention on
meaning in a continuous fashion, thus increasing the efficiency of working memory
when listening to L2 input.
Note-taking, independently and as part of a task sequence (involving preparation,
note-taking and reconstruction), has been used as part of listening methodologies to
develop comprehension and memory processes in the L2. Note-taking can facilitate
comprehension of a lecture in two ways (Di Vesta & Gray 1972): through assistance
518 ROST

Cognitive Load: Principle 1

It is easier to understand any text (narrative, description, instruction, or argument), which involves fewer
rather than more individuals and objects.

Cognitive Load: Principle 2

It is easier to understand any text (particularly narrative texts) involving individuals or objects, which are
clearly distinct from one another.

Cognitive Load: Principle 3

It is easier to understand texts (particularly description or instruction texts) involving simple spatial
relationships.

Cognitive Load: Principle 4

It is easier to understand texts where the order of telling matches the order of events.

Cognitive Load: Principle 5

It is easier to understand a text if relatively few familiar inferences are necessary to relate each sentence to
the preceding text.

Cognitive Load: Principle 6

It is easier to understand a text if the information in the text is clear (not ambiguous), self-consistent and fits
in readily with information you already have.

(based on Brown et al., 1994)

FIG. 28.3. Cognitive load principles in assessment of difficulty of listening texts.

with encoding and through assistance with retrieval. As an assistance to encoding,

taking notes serves as a way of condensing, evaluating, and organizing lecture content
while listening and thus of increasing comprehension. At the very minimum, note-
taking seems to help activate the learners’ attention and self-monitoring mechanisms
(Dunkel 1988; Benson, 1989). As an assistance with retrieval, note-taking results in an
accessible, compressed record of the content of a lecture which can be later referred to
and which thus promotes long-term retention and recall of the material. Having notes
to refer to enables learners to replay the content in STM and also aids reconstruction
of long-term representations of the content. Because short term memory is known
to be able to handle only about seven items at a time (Miller, 1956), it is essential
that any listener learn to chunk complex information into key words or abbreviated
propositions that can later be reconstructed.
A number of issues concerning the relationship between note-taking and com-
prehension and memory have been investigated. One issue is whether taking notes
works better for understanding and remembering than just listening. Dunkel, Mishra
& Berliner (1989) found no difference in the scores obtained from tests measuring com-
prehension of main points and specific details between L2 students who took notes
and those who just listened. Chaudron, Loschky & Cook (1994) found no difference
in the comprehension test scores between those students who were allowed to retain
their notes after the lecture and those who were asked to hand them in. Ellis (2003)
speculates that one possible reason for these studies failing to find a positive relation-
ship between taking—retaining notes and comprehension may be that the notes were
 28. L2 LISTENING 519

lacking in quality. It is reasonable to assume that notes will only assist comprehension
if they are complete, accurate and clear enough to support subsequent reconstruction
of key ideas and information.
The key issue, then, is the relationship between note quality and comprehension.
Dunkel (1988) used multiple regression analysis to try to identify what specific charac-
teristics of the notes taken by both L1 and L2 students predicted scores on comprehen-
sion tests measuring understanding of main concepts and details. She concluded that
the key variables were (1) terseness (i.e., the ratio between the number of information
units encoded and the number of words used in the notes) and (2) answerability (i.e.,
the extent to which the notes included information relating to the test items).

Interpretation Processes: Adopting a Pragmatic Perspective

Interpretation is a stage of listening during which the listener orients to the speaker’s
meaning through adoption of a perspective and an assessment of relevance. Interpret-
ing spoken language is fundamentally based on assuming a pragmatic perspective, that
is situating oneself in terms of the topic, the setting, the event, the speaker and purpose
for listening and relationship to the topic, setting, event and speaker. Interpretation
can be seen as including listener response, both the overt responses and covert responses
that a listener makes in response to what a speaker has said. Overt responses include
feedback given to the speaker, such as backchanneling and reframing. Covert responses
include transformative effects, such as realignments of the relationship with the speaker
and affective adjustments of the listener’s attitudes and beliefs.
There are numerous ways to portray the listener’s pragmatic perspective. Hymes
(1972) characterizes seven coordinates, which he called “situation-bound features,”
that determine the pragmatic perspective of speaker and listener in a communication
event:

(1) setting or scene,

(2) participants (”utterers” and “recievers”),
(3) purposes (outcomes, goals),
(4) act sequence (message form and content)
(5) key (formality, politeness, power relations),
(6) instrumentalities (channel, forms of speech),
(7) norms (assumptions or expectations about interaction and interpretation),
(8) genre (text type).

From a pragmatic viewpoint, differences in understanding of discourse will occur

because of differences in the participants’ perspectives on these coordinates. Misun-
derstandings abound in all types of discourse, but misunderstandings in cross-cultural
communication, in which at least one participant is using an L2, is a particularly fertile
ground for studying this phenomenon (e.g., See Gumperz, 1990; 1995; Roberts et al.,
1992; Bremer et al., 1996; Sarangi & Roberts,1999; Allwood & Abelar, 1989).
Initially, for interpretation to occur, there must be an engagement by the listener,
which entails some level of recognition of each of these coordinates (Verschueren,
1999). The ways and the degree to which the L2 listener comes to recognize these
coordinates, comes to gain knowledge about these coordinates, and learns to deal
with power relationships with speakers over the negotiation of these coordinates are
all critical aspects of development of L2 listening.

Norms in Interpretation. The norms of interpretation that a listener uses are in-
fluenced by one’s identity in what Fish (1994) calls an interpretive community. All
language comprehension is filtered through the norms of the interpretive community
520 ROST

that one belongs to. An “interpretive community” is defined as any group that shares
common contexts and experiences, and the listener is known to draw upon the ex-
pectations and norms of the group in language comprehension. Lakoff (2000) points
out that this membership is both inclusive and exclusive: people who share the same
expectations as the listener will be deemed to “get it,” while those who don’t share
those expectations “just don’t get it.” Indeed, in order to understand complex genres
of discourse (e.g., talk about elements of “pop culture”), it is more essential to be
accepted as part of the group you are taking with than to “comprehend” the language
used (Duff, 2001).
Interpretation of language by the L2 listener takes place within social frames, real or
imagined that influence norms about the ways that the listener acts. The social frame
for an interaction involves two interwoven aspects: the activity frame, which is the
activity that the speaker and listener are engaged in, and the participant frame, which
is the role that each person is playing within that activity, or the relative status that
each participant has (Tyler, 1995).
The determination of the participant frame is a key factor in interpretation by
the L2 listener. Carrier (1999) notes that the objective status, or societal status, can be
predicted from knowledge of existing social mores (e.g., doctors are seen as superior
in knowledge to their patients, teachers superior in knowledge to their students),
the situational nature of status is less predictable. This is because situational status is
not socially defined, is co-constructed by both interlocutors in each encounter, and
can shift over the course of the encounter. Research on cross-cultural encounters has
shown that the way in which interlocutors define their status relative to the other will
determine a great deal about how they will communicate with each other, their degree
of affective involvement, and what they will understand (Gumperz, 1995; Linell, 1995;
Hinnenkamp, 1995).
One aspect of affective involvement in an interaction is the raising or lowering of
anxiety and self-confidence, and thus the motivation to participate in meaningful,
open, and self-revelatory ways. For listeners, greater affective involvement promotes
better understanding through better connection with the speaker, while lower affec-
tive involvement typically results in less connection, less understanding, and minimal
efforts to evaluate and repair any misunderstandings that arise (Pica, 1992). For ex-
ample, Yang (1993) found in a study of Chinese learners of English a clear negative
correlation between learners’ levels of anxiety and their listening performance. Aniero
(1990) noted that listening anxiety, or receiver apprehension, correlated with poor listen-
ing performances in pair interactions. One implication is that anxiety about listening
is often triggered by social factors, such as perception of roles and status, and the sense
that one’s interlocutor is not responsive to one’s own intentions in the interaction.
Listener anxiety is explained in part by uncertainty management theory (Gudykunst
et al., 1996). This theory predicts that initial uncertainty and anxiety about another’s at-
titudes and feelings in a conversation are the basic factors influencing communication,
and that this uncertainty and anxiety inhibits effective communication. This theory
predicts that the amount of information-seeking and “openness” that will take place
in an interaction will be determined by the degree of uncertainty. Not all predictions
of this theory are realized in practice because of other mitigating social factors. For
example, Carrier (1999), researching interactions between L2 students and their pro-
fessors in a university context, hypothesized that social status would have a negative
effect on listening comprehension because opportunities for negotiation of meaning
by the L2 speaker would tend be limited. She also hypothesized that comprehension
of the NNS (non-native speaker) by an NS (native speaker) interlocutor would also
be influenced negatively because the NNS would have fewer opportunities to restate
unclear information. Neither hypothesis was supported by her research: She found
that the superior party often used politeness strategies, or face-saving strategies (e.g.,
 28. L2 LISTENING 521

“It’s okay, you can ask me a question if you like”). These strategies immediately affect
the status relationship between the NS and NNS and to allow for more negotiation of
meaning and more attempts at output by the NNS.

Interpretation Processes: Listener Response

Listener response is often considered part of the listening process, as it is interwo-
ven with interpretation and adoption of a pragmatic perspective. Listener response
generally involves display of uptake, backchanneling, and follow-up acts.
Though a speaker initiates acts in conversation, the listener has the choice of up-
taking any initiating move or ignoring it. Typically, the speaker intends the listener
to uptake the act in a specific way, in both verbal and non-verbal ways that consti-
tute a normal, or preferred response. For example, an invitation leads to a preferred
response of an acceptance. A listener response that expresses inability or reluctance
to provide completion, or otherwise comply with the speaker’s initiating move forms
a challenge. A dispreferred response challenges the presupposition that the addressee
has the information or resource the speaker needs and is willing to provide it, or it
challenges the speakers right to make the initiating move (e.g., S1: Could you show
me some identification, please? S2: What for?)
Challenges are by nature face-threatening—they upset the participation frame by de-
moting one interlocutor’s power. Of course, some challenges are less face-threatening
than others. Specifically, challenging the presupposition that one is able to provide
the information is less face-threatening than challenging the presupposition that one
is willing to provide it. This is why in most cultures it is more “polite” to declare
ignorance than to refuse to comply with a request (Tsui, 1994).
Another type of listener response is backchanneling. Backchanneling responses are
short messages—verbal, semi-verbal, and non-verbal—that the listener sends back
during the partner’s speaking turn or immediately following the speaking turn. These
messages may include brief verbal utterances (“yeah, right”), rhythmic semi-verbal
utterances (e.g., “uh-huh”, “hmm”), laughs or chuckles, and postural movements,
such as nods. Backchanneling, with norms of meaning and use differing from culture
to culture and within sub-cultures, is important in conversation for showing a number
of listener states: reception of messages, readiness for subsequent messages, agree-
ment on turn-taking, and empathy. Backchanneling occurs more or less constantly
during conversations in all languages and settings, though in some languages and in
some settings, it seems more prevalent. Maynard (1997) in her analyses of Japanese
casual conversation notes clear backchanneling every 2.5 seconds. She terms the in-
terplay between speaker and listener as the “interactional dance.” When backchan-
neling is withheld or disrupted, the interaction becomes perceptibly disordered, and
the speaker will usually seek to repair the interaction.
A third class of listener response in discourse is the follow-up act. Follow-up acts
are responses to a discourse exchange, and can be provided by either the listener
or the speaker from the previous exchange. (e.g., S1 [elicit]: I’ll see you tomorrow.
S2 [response]: Okay, see you. [follow-up act] Could we meet in my office around
nine?) Follow-up acts can be endorsements (positive evaluations), concessions (neg-
ative evaluations), or acknowledgements (neutral evaluations). A follow-up act may
include a move to reframe the interaction by adjusting the participation frame or by
redirecting the topic (e.g., S1: I’ll see you tomorrow. S2: Wait, you can’t leave. We
haven’t finished.).
L2 pedagogy dealing with interpretation in face-to-face encounters has incorpo-
rated three approaches: (1) ways of entering listener roles and using interactive pro-
cedures for enhancing listening effectiveness, (2) two-way (collaborative) tasks, and (3)
metapragmatic treatment of speech acts and listener behavior in interactions.
522 ROST

In professional encounters, particularly between native and non-native speakers,

(e.g., doctor-patient, manager-employer, mediator-clients), the notions of listener roles
and listener response options have received increasing attention because the acknowl-
edged importance of listening in work settings. For example, in medical encounters,
listening is involved in problem assessment (e.g, evaluation of a problem at the initial
medical visit), “gatekeeping” (e.g., observance of protocols required to see a physican),
negotiating forms of treatment, and follow-up visits. Increasingly, education in “re-
sponsive listening” has become part of many professional and workplace trainings
(e.g., Sarangi & Roberts, 1999; Scollon, 2001).
Similarly, in social settings, the notion of listener control in NS-NNS interactions has
become an important handle for language training. Using longitudinal studies of NNS
in several European settings, Bremer et al. (1996) have documented many of the social
procedures that L2 listeners must come to use more comfortably and confidently as they
become successful listeners and participants in everyday conversations. These proce-
dures include identifying topic shifts, providing backchanneling (”listenership”) cues,
participating in conversational routines (providing obligatory responses), shifting to
topic initiator role, and initiating queries and repair of communication problems.
A proposal by Bremer et al (1996) suggests that a program of instruction might
include:

(a) A focus on the use of explicit responses to understanding problems e.g., met-
alinguistic comments (such as “I’m not sure I understand this”) and the use of
partial repetition to distinguish the non-understood elements;
(b) A strong encouragement to formulate hypotheses, to develop high inferencing
capacities in the struggle for understanding;
(c) Awareness raising of the strategic use of different responses to a problem in
understanding that fits the local context;
(d) Awareness of issues of face in conveying problems in understanding and in
mitigating face-threats to gate-keepers ;
(e) Encouragement to take initiative in topic nominations as a way of reducing some
frame and schema difficulties in understanding.

Two-way collaborative tasks are widely used in L2 oral language instruction to pro-
mote listening skills. Use of structured communicative tasks involving two-way com-
munication promotes listener control of conversations, including regulating turn-
taking, and seeking feedback through clarification, and confirmation checks. (Lynch,
1997). According to Ellis (2003), the key characteristics of an effective two-way collab-
orative task are (1) a primary focus on meaning (rather than on language form), (2)
selection by the learner of linguistic resources needed for completion of task (rather
than on all resources all given to the learner), and (3) a tangible outcome (which can be
evaluated for its correctness or appropriateness). These features are seen as necessary
in promoting learner uptake during the task, rather than mere completion of the task,
in that they promote collaborative learning, active listening, negotiation of meaning,
and attention to feedback (Pica et al, 1987; Pica, 1994; Lyster & Ranta, 1997; Gass, 1997;
Carroll & Swain, 1993).
Metapragmatic treatments are now being employed in listening pedagogy in order
to assist learners to become aware of pragmatic forces in interactions. In particular,
this style of instruction is aimed at helping learners understand the pragmatic force
that decisions by speakers and listeners exert in functional interactions. In explicit
metapragmatic instruction, the targeted pragmatic feature (e.g., ways of refusing an
invitation) is made the object of treatment through description, explanation, or dis-
cussion. In implicit instruction, the pragmatic feature is included in contexts of use
and practiced in various activities. A number of researched speech acts (requesting,
 28. L2 LISTENING 523

thanking, apologizing, etc.), discourse features (openings, softenings, etc.) and so-
ciolinguistic factors are now included explicitly in L2 pedagogy. A strong general
trend emerging from these studies is a distinct advantage for explicit metapragmatic
instruction, for all levels of learners (Kasper & Rose, 1999).

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29

Second Language Literacy

and Biliteracy
Terrence G. Wiley
Arizona State University

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

Embarking on any discussion of literacy with those who are literate is problematic,
not only because the topic can become technical but also because literacy is so ever-
present and familiar. Probing the subject in any depth reveals that it is often laden with
tacit assumptions that impact theory, policy, and practice. Second language literacy
and biliteracy studies are potentially even thornier because all the assumptions and
debates within literacy studies broadly remain despite any attempt to narrow the
focus. Thus, it is necessary to foreground some of the major issues and ideological
tensions in the broader field of literacy studies that necessarily intrude on the study
of second language literacy and biliteracy.

BACKGROUND

Nomenclature
Critically reflecting on nomenclature used in discussions related to literacy is impor-
tant, particularly in the United States where there is often considerable confusion in
popular discourse regarding the extent of literacy and illiteracy among language mi-
norities. In recent years, there has been increasing sensitivity concerning the need to
use non-stigmatizing nomenclature when referring to language minorities. For some,
the expression “language minority” itself may seem negatively ascriptive. Neverthe-
less, the expression will be used in this chapter, referring to those who speak lan-
guages other than English or so-called “nonstandard” varieties of English as their
initial household or community language(s). They may be considered “minorities”
either in a strict numerical sense and/or in the sociopolitical sense of being mem-
bers of “non-dominant” language groups. “Language minority” is preferred herein
because it provides a basis for appealing to legal rights and protections that other

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more euphemistically motivated labels lack (see Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000; Wiley, 1996,
particularly chap. 6; and Wiley, 2001, 2002b).
Nomenclature is also important because it reveals implicit assumptions and biases
that are not without social consequences. Nonliteracy merely notes the absence of lit-
eracy without specifying any expectations, but illiteracy implies a failure to become
literate and educated amidst societal expectations to do so. Preliteracy assumes the in-
evitability of literacy. Thus, when a person is called illiterate it implies a social failing,
often a personal failing. If a group is called preliterate, the assumption is that they
are somewhere on a developmental path toward the inevitable. Historical and an-
thropological discussions relating to the rise of literacy in human societies have often
treated literacy as a technological advance resulting in a qualitative cognitive divide
separating the literate from the nonliterates. Gee (1986) concluded this alleged divide
represents “a new, more subtle version of the savage-versus-civilized dichotomy . . . .
[nonliterates] were sometimes said to be ‘mystical and prelogical’ incapable of ab-
stract thought, irrational, childlike, . . . and inferior” (pp. 720–721; text in brackets
added).

The Importance and Functions of Second Language

Literacy and Biliteracy
Biliteracy is common around the world. It is promoted in the European Economic
Union. India has two national official languages—Hindi and English—along with
15 regional languages that coexist with them. Switzerland has four official national
languages: German, French, and Italian have federal status, along with Romansh,
which has local status. Canada is officially bilingual and uses French and English as
languages of literacy. In the United Kingdom, Wales has a dual language policy that
now promotes biliteracy in Welsh along with English (Baker & Jones, 2000). Language
minorities are well positioned to become biliterate if they can develop literacy and
have access to quality education in the majority or dominant language (Wiley, 2002a).
Unfortunately, all too often this is not the case.
Second language literacy and biliteracy may be approached from individual, com-
munity, societal, and cross-national perspectives. Individuals become biliterate for
many reasons. Literacy in more than one language has both pragmatic and status sig-
nificance. Second language literacy/biliteracy is vital for language minorities to have
access to employment and to access the social, political, and economic life of the pre-
vailing society as well as in their local communities (Spener, 1994). Those migrating
from one country to another seeking better economic or educational opportunities, or
fleeing hardships or discrimination in their countries of origin, may need to acquire lit-
eracy in a second language (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000). Given the importance of literacy
and educational achievement in the contemporary world for economic access, social
participation, and political participation, understanding both the distribution of liter-
acy and access to equitable educational programs are particularly important because
many language minorities do not have immediate access to literacy and schooling in
their own languages.
Biliteracy serves many social and personal uses around the world and in the United
States. It has pragmatic functions in facilitating international travel and trade. At the
community level in the United States, for example, native language newspapers assist
immigrants and other language minorities by providing a means by which they can
use their stronger language of literacy while they acquire English literacy. They can
also keep abreast of local news and news from their country of origin not dealt with in
English language newspapers. In this regard, recent alternative language newspapers
function similarly to those of the past. In 1910, for example, there were 540 German
language newspapers in the United States (Wiley, 1998). Presently, Spanish, Chi-
nese, and Vietnamese newspapers, to name a few, serve similar functions in biliterate
 29. SECOND LANGUAGE LITERACY AND BILITERACY 531

communities. Many around the world also acquire biliteracy to sustain their religious
identities. Sacred texts may exist in classical languages or languages not commonly
used for other purposes: Muslims study classical Arabic to read the Koran, orthodox
Jews learn Hebrew to read the Torah (Baker & Jones, 2000).
There has always been an elitist tendency to treat literacy as social capital and
the same has been true for biliteracy. Historically, biliteracy was an expectation for
the literati, who were not even considered fully literate unless they could read Latin
or Greek, even if they could read and write their vernacular language (Wiley, 1996).
French became the prestige language of literacy and “reason” during the European
Enlightenment, and many, including American revolutionary leaders, were biliterate
in English and French. English second language literacy has assumed a similar world-
wide prestige today. Native English speakers who are biliterate are commonly held in
admiration in the United States if they acquire competence and literacy in languages
other than English. In contrast, language minorities who achieve functional literacy
in English are generally not similarly admired by English-speaking monolinguals for
their biliterate abilities (Wiley, 2002a). The distribution of literacy within a society is
often taken to be a barometer of societal well-being and, between nations, is seen as a
sign of national strength and competitiveness.

Common Misperceptions about Literacy and Language Diversity

A number of misperceptions underlie the popular understandings about literacy and
language diversity in the United States. These misperceptions are based on what vari-
ous scholars have identified as the dominant monolingual English language ideology
(cf. Kloss, 1971; Krashen 1997, 1999; Macı́as, 1985; Ovando & McLaren, 2000; Schmidt,
2000; Wiley, 1999, 2000). Some of the most common misperceptions are: (a) illiteracy
in the United States is primarily attributable to the presence of languages other than
English; (b) social and regional varieties, or “dialects,” of English are “illiterate” and
weaken the purity of “standard” English; (c) lack of English oral facility indicates a
lack of English literacy; and (d) bilingual education has failed because it keeps lan-
guage minorities from learning English and becoming highly literate. Although these
misperceptions have no authority among applied linguists, they are widely believed
and often influence policymaking. Some examples of works that help to refute them
are Baugh (1999), Crawford (2000), Hakuta (1986), Krashen (1997, 1999), Lippi-Green,
(1997); Tse (2001), Wiley (1996); Wiley & Lukes (1996).

DEFINING LITERACY AND BILITERACY

There is no universally accepted definition of literacy. In fact, in recent years it has

become common for many scholars to challenge the singular construct of literacy with
“literacies/multiliteracies,” even though our spellcheckers have not been programmed
to accept the pluralization. Defining literacy is also complicated because notions of
literacy are not static. Expectations regarding literacy skills inflate over time, giving
the false impression that literacy standards and performance of recent generations are
falling (Berliner & Biddle, 1995; Bracey, 1997; Resnick & Resnick, 1977).
The following basic distinctions are important in constructing a typology of literacy:
native language literacy, second dialect literacy, second language literacy, and biliteracy/
multiliteracy (cf. Macı́as, 1990). It is also worth noting that typologies of second lan-
guage literacy are generally framed with implicit reference to a standard oral lan-
guage of literacy. Given that one may be deaf from birth and acquire literacy in a
print language, to extend the notion of language beyond oral languages is important.
Similarly, since the blind may acquire literacy in Braille, the notion of print needs to
be extended beyond visual systems.
532 WILEY

Traditional Definitions
Ever since the rise of mass education, there has been widespread concern regarding
the extent of literacy, the effectiveness of literacy instruction, and low performance.
Contemporaneous with the rise of social efficiency and technologist orientations in
education, there has been alarm over underachievement and “laggards” in the schools
(see Kliebard, 1996) as well as very legitimate concerns about disproportionate school
failure and underachievement among some language minority groups. Any attempt to
assess the distribution of literacy in society, performance in schools, or the knowledge
and skills necessary to function in a literate society involves either implicit or explicit
notions of what it means to be literate. In this context, examination of some of the
more common definitions is helpful, with the qualification that additional definitions
are plentiful (see Wiley, 1996 for elaboration).
Minimal literacy refers to the ability to read or write something, at some level, in
some context(s). In the past, even the ability to write one’s own name or read a simple
passage out loud were taken as an adequate display of literacy (Resnick & Resnick,
1977). During World War I, language minority immigrants trying to enter the United
States were required to show that they had minimal literacy abilities by reading short
passages from the Bible in their native language (see Wiley, 1996, chap. 4). Even this
simple test, which was sensitive to language background, was not without bias given
the diversity of religious orientations of the immigrants.
Conventional literacy refers to the ability to use print by reading, writing, and com-
prehending “texts on familiar subjects and to understand” print within one’s envi-
ronment (Hunter & Harman, 1979, p. 7). This definition begs the question somewhat
because there are no consensus definitions of reading and writing. Consider that
“familiar” texts could include a wide range of reading levels (from a skills-based
point of view) and a wide variety of materials (from a social practices perspective).
Language minorities asked to demonstrate their conventional literacy rarely are as-
sessed on texts in their native language.
Basic literacy presumes a foundational level of skills from which continued literacy
development is sustained through individual effort (Macı́as, 1990; Venezky, Wagner,
& Ciliberti, 1990). Mikulecky (1990) has warned, “there is little evidence that basic
literacy in itself wields a magical transforming power for learning” (p. 26).
Functional literacy refers to the ability to use print in order to achieve individ-
ual goals as well as the print-related obligations of employment, citizenship, daily
problem solving, and participation in the community. It includes the notion of con-
ventional literacy while locating it in economic and social contexts. Functional lit-
eracy has dominated popular and policy discussions about literacy, but the notion
has been criticized for imposing a middle-class bias in notions of functional com-
petence (see Hunter & Harman, 1979). Given these criticisms, Kirsch and Junge-
blut (1986) devised three broad domains of literacy assessment—prose, document,
and quantitative— subsequently used in the National Adult Literacy Survey (see the
following discussion).

Elite and Unconventional Definitions

Elite literacy evokes the notion of literacy as a “possession” of knowledge and skills
acquired in school and legitimized by the academic credentials one “holds,” which
constitute a sociocultural capital for strategic power (Erickson, 1984). Elite literacy
is sanctioned and accredited by official endorsement and certified with diplomas
from universities, which function as surrogates for mastery and high levels of attain-
ment in culturally approved knowledge, expressed in standard language and institu-
tionally approved genres. Elite education may include literary instruction in foreign
 29. SECOND LANGUAGE LITERACY AND BILITERACY 533

languages, usually with a focus on “high” culture and “great” literature rather than
on functional or vernacular literacy. “Cultural literacy,” the creation of E. D. Hirsch
(1987; see also Hirsch, Kett, & Trefil, 1988) may be seen as an attempt to define a
monocultural elite version of literacy as the basis for mass acquisition.
Analogical literacies pertain to knowledge and skills related to particular types of con-
tent, knowledge, technologies, and methodologies. They extend traditional notions of
literacy with other technologies and specialized areas of knowledge. There has been
much ado about computer literacy, numeracy, historical literacy, and graphicacy (used
by geographers; Graff, 1994). Macı́as (1990) has cautioned that the analogical literacies
can become “secondary aspects of literacy study, not parts of the definition of literacy”
(p. 19), thus confusing or confounding the definition of literacy with the analogical or
secondary aspects of literacy. Kress (2003) focuses on the relationship between literacy
and various new technological modalities of literacy in the new media age.

Ethnographically Informed Definitions of Literacy

Restricted literacy refers to “participation in script activities” that remain “restricted to
a minority of self-selected” people (Scribner & Cole, 1981, p. 238). It differs from func-
tional literacy because “those who do not know it can get along quite well” without
it (p. 238) and because it fails to “fulfill the expectations of those social scientists who
consider literacy a prime mover in social change” (p. 239). Restricted literacies are
usually learned informally for specific purposes within a self-contained community
rather than in school or wider societal contexts.
Similarly, vernacular literacies pertain to “unofficial” or “local” practices rather than
to conventional or academic standards wherein the defining group may be in oppo-
sition to academic or institutionally sanctioned genres or channels of communica-
tion. They may be designed to challenge formal rules of what can be written. Shu-
man (1993) contends that vernacular literacies are intended to confront privileged
channels and genres of communication. Vernacular literacies intentionally use “oral”
styles in writing and also include so-called nonstandard and nonacademic varieties of
language.
Situated literacies (Barton, Hamilton, & Ivanic, 2000) reorient the focus of attention
to the role of literacy in social practices, wherein literacies are “the link between the
activities of reading and writing and the social structures in which they are embedded
and which they shape” (p. 7). As Gee (2000) notes, “there are as many literacies as there
are ways in which written language is recruited within specific social practices to allow
people to enact and recognize specific social identities . . . and specifically situated
social activities. . . . That’s why the New Literacy Studies often uses the literacy in the
plural, literacies” (p. iii). Multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000) provide a similar
way of referring to situated literacies. The notion is likewise derived from the social
practices perspective and ideological orientation (discussed next) identified by Street
(1984, 1993, 1995, 1999). Barton et al. (2000) note that a fundamental unit of social theory
is literacy practices, which is simply “what people do with literacy” (p. 7). Following
Street (1993), they contend “practices are not observable units of behavior since they
also involve values, attitudes, feelings, and social relationships” (p. 7).

SCHOLARLY ORIENTATIONS TOWARD LITERACY

AND BILITERACY

The study of literacy, second language literacy, and biliteracy are interdisciplinary,
drawing from linguistics (particularly applied linguistics), education, sociology,
psychology, history, and anthropology (cf. Baynham, 1995, p. 21). Nevertheless, there
534 WILEY

are some common areas of emphasis and difference across, and sometimes within,
these disciplines. In an effort to analyze how different scholars approach literacy, Street
(1984, 1993, 1995, 1999) identifies two broad approaches or “models”: autonomous and
ideological.

The Autonomous Orientation

The autonomous orientation focuses on formal mental properties of decoding and
encoding text, and comprehending vocabulary without any in-depth analyses of how
these processes are used within sociocultural contexts. The achievement of the learner
in obtaining literacy is characterized in terms of how it correlates with individual psy-
chological development. Cognitive consequences are considered to result from the
ability to master print and characteristics associated with particular types of texts,
often in the essayist tradition (Street, 1984). Even if the social practices in which
they are used are alluded to, there is little attention to their sociocultural and in-
stitutional embeddedness. Major proponents of this orientation are Goody and Watt
(1988), Havelock (1963, 1988), Olson (1977, 1984, 1988), and Ong (1982, 1988, 1992).
In subsequent work, Goody (1988, 1999), Ong (1992), and Olson (1994, 1999), have
moderated their earlier positions somewhat (see Street’s, 1999, commentary).

Social Practices and Ideological Orientations

The social practices view of literacy has its origins in a variety of sources. Scribner
and Cole (1978, 1981) went in search of cognitive effects of literacy and schooling and
ended up endorsing a strong social practices view of literacy. Heath’s (1983) Ways
with Words provided a significant example of an in-depth, ethnographic analysis of
three communities’ oral and literate practices. Street (1984) helped to demonstrate
commonalities in his work and that of others focusing on social practices. Gee (1986)
and Cook-Gumperz (1986) complemented this general direction. Other noteworthy
works followed (e.g., Baynham, 1995; Street, 1993). In the early and mid-1990s, a
consensus was forming around the social practices view and what was more broadly
being referred to as the New Literacy Studies (Willinsky, 1990). According to Gee (2001),
there are two major claims of this orientation:

[First,] if you want to know how reading and writing work, don’t look at them directly
and in and of themselves. Rather, look directly at specific social practices in which specific
ways of writing and reading are embedded. Furthermore, look at how specific ways of
reading and writing, within these social practices are always integrally connected to
specific ways of using oral language. . . . (p. iii)
[Second,] literacy is not first and foremost a mental possession of individuals. Rather, it
is first and foremost a social relationship among people, their ways with words, deeds,
and things, and institutions. Literacy is primarily and fundamentally out in the social,
historical, cultural, and political world. It is only secondarily a set of cognitive skills,
which subserve literacies as social acts in quite diverse ways in different contexts (p. iv).

Gee’s second point identifies where the social practices orientation differs with the
autonomous view, which is largely one of emphasis and directionality. The issue is
not that social practices scholars are disinterested in cognitive development, but that
they maintain language and literacy skills or proficiencies are better understood and
analyzed in social context, rather than as independent, autonomous skills, whether
they are in or out of school (e.g., Hull & Schultz, 2002; Kalmar, 2001; Scribner, 1981;
and Taylor, 1997).
Heath’s (1983, 1988) and Street’s (1984) work in particular has strong implica-
tions for studies of second language literacy and biliteracy, even though they are not
 29. SECOND LANGUAGE LITERACY AND BILITERACY 535

directly focused on them. Heath’s study includes a focus on speech and literate activ-
ities in “literacy events” among three speech communities that had different “ways
with words,” and most significantly different practices of language and literacy so-
cialization, which are not always understood or appreciated by schools. Street’s (1984)
study includes a focus on rural literacy practices in Iran. Both studies emphasize how
literacy practices are socially embedded and constructed across various language
communities. Taylor (1997) and Weinstein-Shr (1993), to name only a few, have pro-
vided useful studies of immigrant language minority communities consistent with
the social practices perspective.
The ideological orientation emphasizes that literacy practices “are aspects not only
of ‘culture’ but also of power structures” (Street, 1993, p. 7). Similarly, Levine (1982)
saw these literacy practices as being embedded in historical contexts and as includ-
ing activities in which an individual both wishes to engage and may be compelled
to engage (p. 264). Other works that are relevant to this perspective are Auerbach
(1989, 1992a, 1992b), Delgado-Gaitán and Trueba (1991), Edelsky (1996), Freire and
Macedo (1987), Lankshear (1997), Luke (1988), Stuckey (1991), and Walsh (1991). The
viewpoints of these writers are hardly uniform, but generally illustrate the embed-
dedness of literacy in social practices; institutions; sociocultural, economic, and po-
litical practices; and ideologies “that guide the processes of communicative produc-
tion; the outcomes of utterances and texts produced in these practices” (Grillo, 1989,
p. 15).
Again, from the ideological orientation, literacy practices are viewed as neither a
neutral nor autonomous process, nor as mere individual achievements. Rather, they
are seen as being shaped by the dominant social, economic, and political institutions in
which they are socially, culturally, and politically embedded. Given that some groups
succeed in school whereas others fail, the ideological approach seeks to interrogate
the way in which literacy development is undertaken by scrutinizing implicit biases
and the hidden curriculum in schools that can privilege some groups to the exclu-
sion of others. From this perspective, differential literacy outcomes across groups
generally, and for language minorities specifically, represent structural, systematic, or
institutional bias (Wiley 1996; cf. Haas, 1992). Thus, from an ideological orientation,
it is important to explore how differences in literacy and educational achievement
function across groups, including language minority groups.

Deschooling Literacy
One is the relationship between literacy and schooling. In a landmark study, Scribner
and Cole (1978, 1981, 1988) attempted to unravel the purported cognitive effects of
literacy per se, from those specific to school practices by studying a West African
people—the Vai of Liberia—who acquired literacy without going to school. Scribner
and Cole sought “a practice account of literacy” (1981, p. 235). Heath’s (1980, 1983,
1986, 1988) work overlapped in timeframe with Scribner and Cole’s study. One of
her contributions was to avoid dichotomizing literacy and orality by studying their
interaction in social contexts. Heath helped to deschool the notion of literacy by focusing
on literacy functions in broader community and social contexts such as daily business,
social, and news-related functions, as well as memory supportive and record-keeping
functions. This provided an alternative to oral communication through notes, and
authoritative functions used to confirm, validate, or support beliefs by appealing to the
authority of texts, both religious and secular. Deschooling the notion of literacy allows
us to move beyond confounding literacy with school-based notions and practices, and
may even enrich classroom literacy practices (Cook-Gumperz & Keller-Cohen, 1993;
Hull, 1997; Hull & Schultz, 2000; Street, 1993, 1995, especially chap. 5; Weinstein-Shr,
1993).
536 WILEY

ASSESSING AND MEASURING SOCIETAL

LITERACY AND BILITERACY

Many among the speakers of the world’s estimated 5,000 or so spoken languages may
achieve literacy in a second language rather than in the language(s) of the households
into which they are born. Similarly, to become literate, many must acquire literacy
in a standardized variety of language that diverges from their own social or regional
variety. In the United States, this challenge is faced by speakers of Appalachian En-
glish, Ebonics or African American vernacular English, and Hawaiian English Creole,
among others. These second “dialect” issues in literacy acquisition are also of major
importance when studying literacy among language minorities and other second lan-
guage learners, such as international students studying English as a foreign language
and native speakers of English studying foreign languages. Second language literacy
research must deal with all three populations, if it is to inform educational practice
and policy in any meaningful way (cf. Verhoeven, 1994).
Unfortunately, much of what constitutes second language acquisition research is
drawn from populations or samples of convenience, that is, from populations that the
researchers can easily access. Thus, findings are often very population- and context-
specific, but may be reported as if they are broadly applicable beyond the target group.
For university second language learners, studies generally assume literacy in a first
language, but often fail to probe it, as the focus of the research is the second lan-
guage. The notion of second language itself often presumes literacy wherein reading
and writing are two of four traditional skills (e.g., Kaplan, 2002, part 2). Yet, when
dealing with adult education populations, first language literacy or extensive train-
ing in school-based literacy skills or practices cannot be assumed. Among language
minority immigrant children and adults in the United States who have migrated from
Mexico or Central or South America; though labeled as native Spanish speakers, they
may in fact be native speakers of indigenous languages. In Mexico alone, 53 minority
languages of instruction are recognized in addition to Spanish. Thus, when children
or adults from these language backgrounds immigrate to the United States, English
literacy may not even represent a second language of literacy, but rather a third, and
they may or may not have only had access to prior literacy training in Spanish as a
second language.
The current educational standards movement and the widespread enthrallment
with accountability measures are not new, but they are nuanced by new twists of par-
ticular relevance for language minority students attempting to acquire English literacy
at school. The 20th century began with a pervasive fascination with efficiency and stan-
dardized testing. The goal then was to predict the “probable destinies” of children and
to relegate them to differing educational tracks (Kliebard, 1996). Widespread testing
of children and adults was insensitive to the fact that many of those tested lacked suf-
ficient proficiency in English to be tested. When adult language minority immigrants
were tested by the military, testing was only conducted in English. The results of such
assessments were often used to “prove” that minorities were inferior (see Gould, 1981;
Weinberg, 1995; Wiley, 1996).
Today, as in the past, particularly where there have been efforts to restrict opportu-
nities for language minority students to develop bilingualism and biliteracy, such as
in Arizona and California, the drive for accountability and one-size-fits-all standards
has resulted in many language minority children being assessed on standardized tests
in English before they have developed sufficient proficiency in English. Today, un-
like the past, the push to test incipient learners of English is rationalized as ensuring
that quality education will be maintained for all. The efficacy and appropriateness of
testing language minority children with commercial standardized tests has become a
major area of controversy (Quezada, Wiley, & Ramı́rez, 2002; Wright, 2002).
 29. SECOND LANGUAGE LITERACY AND BILITERACY 537

One of the dangers of making between-group comparisons among language minor-

ity groups or between them and the general population as a whole is that differential
performances tend to be reported in the popular media much like basketball scores
with some groups always being the winners and other the losers. Socioeconomic con-
ditions and opportunities, differential power relations, and discriminatory practices
must be considered when differential results are interpreted to avoid reinforcing stig-
matized notions prevalent in society. Literacy measurement can have a constructive
role if it is used to determine the kinds of literacy necessary for equitable participation
in society as well those desired by individuals within their own communities.

Approaches to National and Large Data Set Literacy Assessments

There have been three types of literacy assessment measures: (a) direct measures or
tests; (b) educational equivalencies or surrogate measures, which use a certain number of
years of schooling as an indicator of literacy; and (c) self-reported measures. There are
drawbacks to all three approaches, but, if used cautiously these data provide a gauge
for evaluating needs and designing programs that provide opportunities for access
and equity. Unfortunately, what typically has been and still is missing in nearly all
large data sets and national surveys is a concentration on literacy in languages other
than English. This lapse reinforces the common perception that English literacy is the
only language of literacy worth measuring or assessing (see Wiley, 1996, chap. 4).
A major criticism of direct measures is that they represent inauthentic assessments
of an individual’s actual ability to function in the real world (Erickson, 1984). Specif-
ically, they are tests of “explicitness” (Gee, 1986, p. 732), that is, the ability to make
things precise or obvious. Such tests are those of the type that we find in schools.
The critical issue from the standpoint of assessing literacy outside of school contexts
is that just because one performs well on school-based exams does not mean he or
she can function in real-world contexts. Competency-based tests of functional lit-
eracy are all exposed to concerns about ecological validity because they often lack
an ethnographic grounding and because the standards and skills selected are im-
posed. In addition to these concerns, the issue of test bias is particularly troublesome
for language minorities, including speakers of so-called nonstandard varieties. The
test itself as a literacy event possesses a particular problem considering that “while
procedures for taking standardized tests are presumably the same everywhere, test
takers may respond quite differently to those procedures” (Wolfram & Christian, 1980,
p. 180). More important, however, speakers of stigmatized social and regional varieties
of language can become acutely aware of the imposition of standards that by design
subordinate the language of their homes and communities, because they may have
had their language varieties corrected by teachers or have been mocked or ridiculed.
Thus, in a formal examination they may “perceive a test on language abilities as an in-
strument designed to measure them according to someone else’s standards, not their
own” (Wolfram & Christian, 1980, p. 181).
Educational equivalencies or surrogate measures of literacy provide an easy, econom-
ical way of assessing literacy, but concerns persist that grade-level equivalencies are
arbitrary, there is no assurance that literacy in school is retained (Hunter & Harman,
1979), and no guarantee that the quality of instruction from one school to the next is
equivalent (Wiley, 1996).
Self-reported data remain the easiest and least expensive way to assess national
literacy, or the literacy of large, selected groups, or members of a specific language
background group. The U.S. Census has collected national literacy data since 1850
(Venezky, Kaestle, & Sum, 1987). However, self-reported data is not as reliable as
direct measures because individuals can report an inflated or deflated assessment of
their abilities. On the positive side, however, there is evidence indicating a strong
538 WILEY

correlation between self-reported census data and direct measures of the English
Proficiency Survey (McArthur, 1993).

Conceptual Issues Related to National Assessment

The recent approach in U.S. national assessments of literacy has been to conceptualize
literacy in three domains (Greenberg et al., 2001):
r Prose literacy–the knowledge and skills needed to understand and use information
from texts, including editorials, news stories, poems, and fiction.
r Document literacy–the knowledge and skills required to locate and use informa-
tion contained in materials, including job applications, payroll forms, transporta-
tion schedules, maps, tables, and graphs.
r Quantitative literacy–the knowledge and skills required to apply arithmetic opera-
tions, either alone or sequentially, using numbers embedded in printed materials
(p. 8).

This schema has advantages over prior efforts to measure functional literacy, al-
though the basic approach retains a conceptualization of literacy as individual knowl-
edge and skills. Conceptualizing literacy within these three domains breaks with the
older practice of dichotomizing literacy/illiteracy. Nevertheless, a number of issues
remain:

Are all tasks involving documents distinct from those involving quantitative tasks? For
example, tax forms would seem to involve both document-related skills and quantitative
skills. Are skills that are identified as being specific to one domain (e.g., prose skills) all
confined to that domain? How well do simulated tasks represent real-world tasks? How
many of the skills assessed have been learned but forgotten due to lack of need or practice?
Do these thresholds become functionally equivalent to the former dichotomization of
literacy/illiteracy? In other words, have we merely exchanged the long-term concern
about illiteracy for one over low levels of literacy? What happens when these literacy
domains are superimposed on a multilingual population? Furthermore, does the notion
of continuum hold up across languages or only within them? If literacy is embedded
within social practices, is there a continuum that reflects these various social practices?
(Wiley, 1996, pp. 76–77, see chap. 4 for elaboration.)

Limitations of National Measures of Literacy for

Language Minority Students
Most national and large data set surveys of literacy primarily assess only English
literacy. Macı́as (1994) identified four types of limitations that are particularly note-
worthy when attempting to assess literacy among language minorities. These are: (a)
ignoring literacy in languages other than English; (b) overemphasizing English oral
language proficiency; (c) sampling biases; and (d) ambiguity in linguistic, ethnic, and
racial identification. For the past three decades, the United States has experienced
its second highest period of foreign immigration and has one of the largest Spanish-
speaking populations in the world. By failing to survey literacy in Spanish and other
languages, literacy is by default equated with English literacy, and the literacy picture
of the United States remains both incomplete and distorted. By failing to assess other
languages of literacy, results inflate the perception of a “literacy crisis” (Graff, 1994),
which stigmatizes those only literate in other languages and underinforms educa-
tional policymaking by failing to distinguish nonliterates from those who are literate
(Wiley, 1996).
 29. SECOND LANGUAGE LITERACY AND BILITERACY 539

Findings from National Adult Literacy Survey

The 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) was touted as providing the most
current comprehensive data on English literacy in the United States. Mandated by
Congress, the NALS survey built on the conceptual model developed for the Young
Adult Literacy Survey (YALS) that conceptualizes literacy along a continuum within
three domains (prose, document, and quantitative literacy). Each of these domains
used items that simulated real-world literacy tasks and seeks to determine five levels of
literacy (Wiley, 1996). NALS was more sensitive to issues of ethnic diversity than most
prior studies and included self-reported demographic questions related to language
diversity, which were later used for a biliteracy analysis. The NALS also provided
English and Spanish versions of the background questionnaire (Macı́as, 1994, p. 33).
The preface to the report (Kirsch et al., 1993) noted a demographic increase of
those who speak languages other than English. However, the NALS only assessed
English literacy through direct assessment. The initial findings of the NALS made
for sensational headlines in the nation’s leading newspapers and magazines. Among
some of the more far-fetched claims reported were that an astonishing 90 million
people were allegedly literacy deficient. A careful reading of the initial report should
have lent itself to a less reckless interpretation. Kirsch et al. (1993) note that, “The
approximately 90 million adults who performed in Levels 1 and 2 did not necessarily
perceive themselves as being “at risk.” . . . It is therefore possible that their skills, while
limited, allow them to meet some or most of their personal and occupational literacy
needs” (p. xv). Although it makes for smaller headlines and probably sells fewer
newspapers, more recent reports have now become newsworthy by correcting the
original claims. Now only 5% of those surveyed are considered not literate on the
basis of not having answered any questions (see Mathews, 2001). Other problems have
related to the five-level scale for each of the three domains. This scale is supposed to
increase in difficulty. Ideally, as an implicational scale, Level 1 tasks should be easier
than Level 2 tasks. However, some items do not appear to have scaled as predicted
(see also Berliner, 1996).
Of more relevance to the issue of biliteracy is the self-reported data. Additional
analyses of the NALS have recently been completed in which special attention has
been given to language minorities based on self-reported information such that it is
possible to construct a biliteracy variable. Participants in the NALS also completed
a background survey in English or Spanish. Those who spoke a language other than
English before beginning their formal schooling completed a self-reported survey re-
garding their fluency and literacy in their native language. Unfortunately, by limiting
the survey only to this group, native English speakers who later became biliterate
were not included (Greenberg et al., 2001). Findings indicated:

Bilingual and biliterate individuals tended to have received a substantial level of formal
education in their native country before immigrating to the United States. . . . The age
of arrival in the United States was the primary predictor of which language through
the formal education they received in the United States. Those who arrived later in life,
without the benefit of a substantial amount of education received in the native country,
were the least likely to develop English literacy skills. . . . Social policy efforts to address
these concerns face the challenge that many in need of ESL and basic skills training have
had little or no formal education in any language. (pp. 89–90)

Based on Greenberg et al.’s (2001) analysis of the NALS self-reported data for lan-
guage minorities only, approximately 70% of that group reported being biliterate at the
time of the survey. When correlated with race, the biliteracy rate among Whites was
only 3%, and only 2% for African Americans. Biliteracy rates were much higher for
540 WILEY

Hispanics, with 35% being biliterate, 33% literate only in English, and 27% literate only
in Spanish. Biliteracy was highest among Asians and Pacific Islanders, of whom nearly
half (47%) were biliterate. Higher biliteracy rates among Hispanics and Asians were
to be expected, as recent immigration rates have been higher for these groups. Based
on NALS data, biliterates tended to have higher levels of education than monoliter-
ates. Among biliterates, 48% acquired some postsecondary education, compared to
only 43% for those literate only in English. Most bilinguals and biliterates do not have
balanced abilities in two or more languages, given that their language and literacy ex-
periences and contexts for learning are rarely parallel across languages (Valdés, 2001).
Despite the many limitations of NALS data, the findings are important because
in the United States most national literacy estimations focus solely on English. Their
failure to acknowledge literacy among those who are literate in languages other than
English inflates the magnitude of a perceived “literacy crisis” (Wiley, 1996). However,
even as such data are useful in informing national educational policies, findings need
to be weighed against ethnographic studies that probe the functions and meanings of
literacy in social contexts. A number of ethnographic studies of learners of English as
a second language (e.g., Klassen & Burnaby, 1993; Weinstein-Shr, 1993) indicate that
many immigrants can function successfully within their daily lives without compe-
tencies in English literacy. Thus, they need not be stigmatized as being cognitively
deficient. Similar studies (e.g., Cushman, 1998; Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988) indi-
cate that marginalized families living in poverty often have more literacy skills than
they are usually given credit for and are not necessarily liberated from their poverty
by their literacy. They are blocked from economic mobility because they lack formal
schooling.

PROMOTING BILITERACY

In recent decades, bilingual education policy in the United States has allowed tran-
sitional bilingual education. Contrary to popular perceptions, the United States has
never endorsed the kind of maintenance programs that would ensure that language
minority students could attain biliteracy. Federal policies have not been the most ef-
fective in promoting biliteracy, although they have eased the pain of transition for
those language minority students who have been allowed to participate in transi-
tional bilingual programs. Bilingual policies have also been targeted by English-only
activists who have restricted transitional bilingual education in several states (e.g.,
California, Arizona, and Massachusetts).
There are other models that are more effective than transitional bilingual pro-
grams. For example, there are immersion programs for monolingual English-speaking
students. Although there are different configurations, immersion programs typically
begin with instruction in the target foreign language and gradually introduce literacy
in the dominant language. For language minority students, maintenance programs are
more effective than transitional programs in promoting the retention of the native
language while developing English literacy (Baker & Jones, 2000). Dual immersion, or
two-way bilingual programs, have proven successful when English-speaking language
majority and language minority children are brought together in the same program
(Christian, Howard, & Loeb, 2000). However, in these programs special consideration
needs to be given to language minority students, because some evidence suggests that
these programs advantage English speakers more than language minority students
(Valdés, 1997).
A pressing issue is the need to preserve threatened languages because the majority
of the world’s estimated 5,000–6,000 languages are endangered (Skutnabb-Kangas,
2000). Literacy can have a role in helping to preserve and promote these languages,
 29. SECOND LANGUAGE LITERACY AND BILITERACY 541

assuming that their speakers want to have their languages written down, which is
occasionally not the case, if literacy is seen as antithetical to the ecology of language
in the community (see Hinton & Hale, 2001).
Foreign language education provides another path by which biliteracy can be at-
tained. Unfortunately, in the United States, opportunities for foreign language instruc-
tion are far less favorable than they are in many other countries. Instruction is usually
delayed until middle school or high school, and program goals do not always include
the goal of biliteracy. Consequently, many who study foreign languages fail to acquire
more than a very rudimentary knowledge of them (Ovando & Wiley, 2003).
One positive trend in the United States since 1999, is that there has been national
attention accorded to developing students’ heritage languages (see Peyton, Ranard, &
McGinnis, 2001). Although not all are pleased with the heritage language (HL) label (see
Wiley, 2001), HL learners have been defined as those who grow up in a home where a
language(s) other than English is used. They may either have a passive understanding
of the language or be partially bilingual in the language and participate in a variety
of program types (see Wiley & Valdés, 2001). Many universities have recently been
moving to make HL literacy the primary goal of their programs. Spanish, Chinese
(Mandarin), Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Khmer (Cambodian) are just a few of
the languages now being offered for HL learners. Asian languages are also currently
taught in Asian American immigrant communities.
Promoting heritage language literacies offers a promising opportunity for increas-
ing the number of biliterate individuals in the United States, but the major challenge
remains working to change popular misconceptions and attitudes toward multilin-
gualism and biliteracy.

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30

Instructed Grammar
Patricia Byrd
Georgia State University

INTRODUCTION

The teaching of English grammar rests on an ever-shifting foundation of theory and

data about (a) grammar, (b) second language acquisition (SLA), and (c) classroom
teachers’ beliefs and practices about teaching grammar. At any point in time, we
may write and talk as if the foundation were firm, but the long view shows how
much shifting and change has already occurred and suggests that we can expect other
shifts more or less continuously. In this chapter, I review forces currently influencing
scholarship and practice in the teaching of grammar to suggest the choices that can be
made by scholars and teachers for effective, principled integration of grammar into
curricula and lessons.

GRAMMAR IN USE

The dominant approach to linguistics, at least in the United States, continues to be

variations on Chomskyan transformational-generative grammar (see Joseph, Love, &
Taylor, 2001, for a summary of Chomsky’s work). With its emphasis on underlying
psychological processes and systems, that approach to linguistics has had substantial
influence on SLA theories and research, especially in the form of Universal Grammar
(see Mitchell & Myles, 1998, for an overview of UG in SLA) and has not, because
of this interest in “language” rather than in a particular language, been a source of
equally substantive data or insight about the English language.
In contrast, the “language-in-use” focus of corpus linguistics and of other ap-
proaches to discourse analysis has led to major new tools and information for grammar
instruction (see Joseph, Love, & Taylor, 2001, on the British linguist John Firth; also
see, Conrad, chap. 22, this volume; Celce-Murcia & Olshtain, chap. 40, this volume;
Hinkel, chap. 34, this volume; Stubbs, 1993). Corpus linguistics involves the develop-
ment and use of collections of spoken or written texts in computer readable format.
These corpora are then analyzed to reveal patterns of usage, for example, words that
are used together frequently, grammatical patterns in particular types of writing or
speech, and other unifying patterns observed in the corpus. The analysis of large sam-
ples of various types of English, both spoken and written, and in numerous genres
545
546 BYRD

is revolutionizing our understanding of how the resources of English (its vocabulary

and grammar) are distributed among different discourse types.

Organization and Conceptualization of Relationships Among

Grammatical Units
In the United States, both theoretical linguistics and pedagogical grammar generally
build from a syntactic and sentence-level analysis that includes both functional units
such as “subject” and “predicate” and word class units such as “noun” and “prepo-
sition.” The results of this approach with its focus on grammatical forms can most
easily be seen in two widely influential types of publications: (a) the large-scale En-
glish grammar reference books (e.g., Quirk et al., 1985) and (b) ESL/EFL (English as
a Second Language/English as a Foreign Language) grammar textbooks with their
chapters on nouns, on verbs, on prepositions, on adverbs, on clauses, and so forth (e.g.,
Azar, 1999). Within the noun chapter, nouns are presented in terms of forms (singu-
lar, plural, irregular), syntax (subject, object), and meaning (abstract nouns, concrete
nouns) but the focus is on nouns as nouns.
There are other ways to organize grammar. When grammar is studied as arising
FROM context, then a variety of forms emerge as essential to the expression of par-
ticular meanings in particular discourse contexts (Byrd, 1998). In terms that Larsen-
Freeman (2001) has made familiar in TESL/TEFL, “forms” get their “meanings” when
used in particular “contexts.” But more than that, it’s not just that different types of
verbs are related to each other but that in particular kinds of discourse the idea of
relationship must be expanded to include the bond among verbs, nouns, adverbs,
textual order, and even particular vocabulary.
Studies using the multidimensional approach developed by Biber (e.g., Biber, 1988,
1999; Biber & Conrad, 2001; Conrad, 2000, 2001, 2002) and other studies of grammar in
various discourse settings (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig, 1994; Halliday, 1994; Schiffrin, 1981)
demonstrate the organization of the underlying grammatical patterns that character-
ize various types of discourse. For example, “involved” is the term used by Biber
(1988) for conversational interactions with speakers talking back and forth in real
time. His analysis shows that spoken conversations in English tend to use a particular
range of grammatical features. Table 30.1 provides the list of lexical and grammatical
features listed for “involved” communication, with those features given in the original
statistical order in the left column and then reorganized in the right column to show
the larger patterns that need to be considered for materials and for curricular design.
That is, to participate in a conversation in English, an ESL/EFL student needs to
know how to ask and answer questions, to talk about you and me, to reduce sentences
and clauses to shorter versions, and to use a specific set of vocabulary. Notice partic-
ularly that the verbs tend to be present tense versions of be and do along with a subset
of the modal auxiliaries for possibility meanings. To learn to have a conversation in
English is not to learn first about verb tenses and then about nouns and then about
questions as separate entities only vaguely related to each other. In conversation, these
forms are strongly related to each other.
This clustering of grammatical features is true not just of conversational English but
of other discourse types, including narrative. Using multidimensional analysis, Biber
(1988) and Conrad (2001) delineate the features of communication that involve some
type of narrative (fiction, history, and other uses of narrative or recasting of past events
in a narrative format). As with conversational discourse, narrative joins together gram-
matical features that include not only past tense verbs but also perfect aspect verbs,
third person pronouns, public verbs such as say or mention, synthetic negation (using
no rather than not), and participial clauses. While her focus is on stages in second
language (L2) development, Bardovi-Harlig (2000, 1998, 1994) provides details use-
ful for other purposes in her discussion of the lexical and grammatical features of
 30. INSTRUCTED GRAMMAR 547

TABLE 30.1
Grammatical Features of “Involved” Communication
In the original order based on numerical Reorganized to put forms into categories
strength from highest to lowest characteristic of conversational spoken English

private verbs: believe, doubt, know, etc. Verbs

THAT deletion [the book I bought]∗ present tense verbs
contractions DO as pro-verb
present tense verbs BE as main verb
2nd person pronouns possibility modals
DO as pro-verb [Who needs a pen? I do.]∗ Nouns and Pronouns
analytic negation [I don’t need a pen.]∗ 2nd person pronouns
demonstrative pronouns demonstrative pronouns
general emphatics 1st person pronouns
1st person pronouns indefinite pronouns
pronoun IT pronoun IT
BE as main verb
causative subordination Phrases and Clauses
discourse participles THAT deletion
indefinite pronouns contractions
general hedges analytic negation
amplifiers causative subordination
sentence relatives: [She gave me a pen, which sentence relatives
I appreciated very much.] WH questions
WH questions final prepositions
possibility modals conditional subordination
non-phrasal coordination [What do you need? Vocabulary
Pen, pencil, whatever.]∗ private verbs
final prepositions [Who’d you get the pen general emphatics
from?]” discourse participles
adverbs general hedges
conditional subordination adverbs

Note. Data adapted from Biber, 1988 (p. 102).

∗ Examples added.

narrative discourse. Working in the tradition of linguistic rather than literary analysis
of narrative (e.g., Dry, 1992; Labov & Waletsky, 1967), she analyzes L2 learner narra-
tives in terms of two intertwined elements: the foreground that tells the basic past
time story and the background that gives the reader additional information needed to
understand the story. The foreground is told in chronological order and, while other
choices are possible, uses primarily simple past tense verbs. The background can be
considerably more complicated as the writer/speaker gives the reader/listener in-
formation needed to understand the story, including events that happened before,
cultural background, personalities of characters and their relationships, and more.
Thus, the background can include a wide range of verbs including past perfect for
events that happened before the core story, present tense for generalizations that are
still true, past tense for generalizations that are still true but that are presented in past
tense because of verb harmony, and others.
For scholars and teachers interested in grammar instruction, these studies of the
linguistic features of different discourse types suggest that the grammar element in
language study can be organized in a coherent, meaningful way. In contrast to the list
of grammar traditionally used to organize materials and courses, a discourse-based
approach puts meaning and communication at the forefront and pulls grammar from
the types of communication needed by students.
548 BYRD

Grammatical Subsets
We are accustomed to thinking about languages in terms of traditional subsets such
as inflectional groups or closed sets such as determiners or open sets such as verbs
or structural units such as subject, verb phrases, and predicates. Because we are so
accustomed to these groupings, we naturally turn to them in our designs of studies,
courses, and materials in general linguistics and in English grammar (whether for
teacher training courses or ESL/EFL courses). In addition to showing us that other
organizations of grammatical units are possible for teaching purposes, corpus and
discourse studies help to clarify the often surprising ways that these abstract linguistic
structures are used in real communication.
Frequency studies show that members of the same inflectional group do not al-
ways have equal frequency of use or comparable range of use. For example, con-
sider the data in Table 30.2 in the British National Corpus for these everyday words
(Leech, Rayson, & Wilson, 2001)–nouns door/doors and the verbs walk/walks/walked/
walking.

TABLE 30.2
Frequency and Range of Use for Selected Nouns and Verbs

Range (use in the subsets of the Dispersion value from 0 to 100

Frequency per corpus out of a maximum (to show how evenly the word is
Word million words of 100) used across the whole corpus)

door 254 100 87

doors 48 100 93
walk 66 100 92
walks 7 97 92
walked 94 100 87
walking 48 100 92

Such data could not mean, I don’t imagine, that we would teach students to use
door rather than doors. Learning the morphological relationship between singular and
plural regular nouns would remain a learning goal. However, we need to explore
the differences between the usage of the words to learn more about how English is
actually used in context, seeking information to make materials and lessons more
authentically accurate as well as meaningful (e.g., Biber & Reppen, 2002).
In addition to the unbalanced use of members of inflectional groups, members
of other grammatical sets do not necessarily have the same frequency or range of
uses. Biber et al. (1999) report that in the corpus they developed for the Longman
Grammar of Spoken and Written English, the demonstrative pronoun that is heavily
used in conversational English. In the WordbanksOnline subcorpus of spoken English
collected in the United Kingdom, that is used 173,191 times; this, 39,930; these, 9,136;
and those 7,355. The demonstratives this/that/these/those are, of course, related to each
other in form and function, but they are not used in communication in exactly the
same ways or proportions. This insight into the demonstrative-in-use is contrary to
the traditional way of presenting these words as a set with meanings that are related to
physical (and sometimes emotional) closeness or distance from the speaker and that
are chosen based on the singular/plural form of the noun in conjunction with that
near/far meaning. In Larsen-Freeman’s terms (2001), the traditional approach works
with form and meaning but neglects context. The instructional challenge is to place
these words in appropriate contexts so that students learn how to use them effectively
rather than just knowing their definitions.
 30. INSTRUCTED GRAMMAR 549

Grammar and Vocabulary Connections

In the past few years, the learning and teaching of second language vocabulary has
become a major area of research and scholarship (see Nation, chap. 32, this volume).
Research on English grammar provided in corpus linguistics supports that change
by showing how closely vocabulary and grammar are connected. The study of what
is termed lexicogrammatical features of English shows how particular words are fre-
quently used in particular grammatical settings. A lexicogrammar of English includes
information about connections between words and grammar such as that found with
prepositional verbs, for example, like approve of or marry to, that generally require the
use of a particular prepositional phrase when a complement is given. Other inter-
sections between words and grammar include observations such as that reported by
Biber et al. (1999, p. 459) that “many verbs have a strong association with either present
or past tense.” In their corpus, bet, doubt, know, matter, mean, mind, recon, suppose, and
thank occur over 80% of the time in present tense; care, differ, fancy, imply, tend, and
want occur over 70% of the time in present tense; exclaim, eye, glance, grin, nod, pause,
remark, reply, shrug, sigh, smile, and whisper are used over 80% of the time in past tense;
bend, bow, lean, light, park, seat, set off, shake, stare, turn away, wave, and wrap are used
over 70% of the time in past tense.
Conrad (2000) predicted that in the 21st century the teaching of vocabulary and
grammar would be closely integrated. Her example of the strong ties between partic-
ular words and particular grammar is the relationship between the verbs such as know,
say, and think and particular verb complement types—that-complements or the infini-
tive complement. She makes two points about these connections. First, grammatical
analysis can abstract from the data a system that shows the possibilities for comple-
ments with particular verbs. The possibilities are that know, say, and think can take
either complement type. However, what is possible is not always what is actually done
when the forms are used for communication. In use, only the that-complement is fre-
quently used with these verbs. Second, words like these verbs need to be taught along
with their complement types, echoing a point made by Nation (2001) that knowledge
of a word includes knowledge of the grammar associated with the use of that word.

Challenges to Widely Held Beliefs

The new data we are getting about English grammar provide various types of chal-
lenges for those involved with instructed grammar. First, we must think about how to
integrate all of the new information about English grammar into our work. What do
we do with frequency data? How do we handle the lexicogrammatical relationships?
How do we modify our sense of what English grammar is to account for the new
insights into forms-in-use? We also have to face information that disproves some of
our traditional beliefs about English grammar.
Teachers have long taught lessons based on the belief that the most common verb
tense in present time communication is the present progressive. Unfortunately, the
belief is wrong. Biber and Conrad (2001) demonstrate that the most common verb form
in conversational, interactive English is the simple present tense. Here is a short sample
from a conversation around the supper table from WordbanksOnline to illustrate this
point. Bold has been added.

Speaker 1: What is it is it guacamole?

Speaker 2: No it’s erm spinach actually
Speaker 1: Spinach? Oh yum.
Speaker 2: and double cream and garlic.
Speaker 1: New to me so.
550 BYRD

Speaker 2: Parsley.
Speaker 1: Oh thank you very much.
Speaker 2: You’re welcome.
Speaker 2: Do you want me to remove the dog?
Speaker 1: No he’s all right. Interesting. Mm. Mm.
Speaker 2: Go away.
Speaker 1: Interesting. Mm. Tabasco. Did you make make it up or was it a recipe.
Speaker 2: I made it up from what was on the shelves.
Speaker 1: Yeah I really love spinach.

Another challenge to strongly held beliefs about grammar has to do with the no-
tion of grammatical “creativity” that comes from Chomskyan linguistics: A language
has an almost infinite vocabulary that can be plugged into syntactic slots to create
any possible message in sentences that have never been used before. Reports on
language-in-use suggest a more complicated system that includes a significant role
for set phrases such as (a) idioms (I’m not cut out for this type of work), (b) collocations
(where two words occur in the same range of words more often than could be by acci-
dent) such as the strong relationships between the prepositions before, at, for, on, over,
and after in front of the noun Christmas in WordbanksOnline data, and (c) lexical bun-
dles of three or more words that recur together in many different types of discourse
such as the phrase I don’t want to . . . in conversational English (Biber & Conrad, 1999).
At first glance, these might appear to be topics for the vocabulary rather than the
grammar portion of a course or set of materials. However, idioms, collocations, and
lexical bundles point to important issues in the organization, presentation, teaching,
and learning of English grammar. To put the grammar teacher’s problem in context,
consider the following data about fixed phrases in English.
In WordbanksOnline, the adverb always occurs 6,058 times (out of its 56,000,000
words). One of the top collocates for always is I , suggesting that we often use this
emphatic pronoun while expressing our own opinions or habits. Of the 6,058 uses of
always, 1,718 (28%) involve the combination of I always. . . . In that setting, the lexical
verbs most likely to be used are thought, wanted, felt, say, think, feel, used, knew, remember,
get, said, try, find, look, believed, make, like, got, tell, want, put, seem, liked, found, took, buy,
loved, take, wondered, watch, told, keep, wear, use, tried, enjoy, end, play, believe, expect, come,
love, carry, see. That is, users of English are very likely to use always in a set of words
that runs across several syntactic slots and that includes both function words and
lexical words: (a) I always thought (that) . . . , (b) I’ve always thought (that) . . . , (c) I have
always thought of. . . . , and so forth. In their study of similar patterns in conversational
English and English academic prose, Biber and Conrad (1999, p. 183) find numerous
recurring sets of words that are “not complete structural units and not fixed expres-
sions.” Their investigation shows the wide range of lexical bundles characteristic of
conversation and of academic prose. Examples from conversation include phrases
such as the following (p. 185): I don’t know what . . . , I don’t want to . . . , and You don’t
have to. . . . Academic prose includes numerous lexical bundles that build from various
types of prepositional structures (pp. 186–187): one of the most . . . , percent of the . . . , the
nature of the. . . , the ways in which. . . , as a function of. . . , and on the other hand. . . .
As for our “creativity” in language use: Yes, we can be; no, we often aren’t. When
we use English to communicate, research demonstrates that we often use set pieces of
language. Stubbs (2001) discusses the contrast in terms of “creativity” and “routine.”
Sinclair (1991) proposes two connected principles: (a) the idiom principle and (b)
the open-choice principle—a contrast also discussed in detail in Hunston (2002). For
language teaching, this insight provides two challenges: (a) collecting accurate, usable
information about those set pieces and the particular contexts where they are used
and (b) providing instruction and instructional materials that are both accurate about
 30. INSTRUCTED GRAMMAR 551

the grammar and effective in helping students learn how to be creative users of the
many set pieces that make up language as it is really used.

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND

INSTRUCTED GRAMMAR

Starting in the late 1970s and perhaps peaking in the late 1980s, the work of Krashen
(1977, 1982) combined with the influence of the concepts of communicative compe-
tence and communicative language teaching (CLT) led many SLA specialists, teach-
ing methodologists, and even classroom teachers into a rejection not just of instructed
grammar but of many other aspects of second language instruction (for historical
background see e.g., Celce-Murcia, 1991; Ellis, 2002). SLA specialists have managed
to correct course to less extreme positions about the second language learning process
and the role of the second language teaching (and grammar instruction) in that pro-
cess (Doughty & Williams, 1998c; Ellis, 2002; Lightbown, 1998, 2000; Long, 1988; Long
& Robinson, 1998; Norris & Ortega, 2000; Richards, 2002). Research into teaching and
learning of grammatical forms is widely practiced as a fundamental area of interest
for the discipline. In some instances, research uses grammar as a tool to gain insights
into second language learning processes (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig, 2000; Leeman, 2003);
in other instances, the research focuses on grammar in the classroom in “classroom-
based SLA” (e.g., Doughty & Williams, 1998b).

DICHOTOMIES

Numerous SLA publications structure their observations and reports about the learn-
ing and teaching of English grammar around a selection of dichotomies: accuracy
versus fluency, focus on form versus focus on forms, direct versus indirect (grammar)
instruction. These important topics are also basic to decision making for principled
teaching of grammar.

Accuracy Versus Fluency

In most uses, accuracy refers to “grammatical accuracy” but other areas of language
use can be involved, too: spelling and/or pronunciation. Fluency implies the abil-
ity to easily understand and participate in communication, generally spoken, in the
person’s second language. (See Richards, 2002, for an overview of fluency-accuracy
connections.) As with many dichotomies, this one all too quickly can lead to false
distinctions—after all, fluency requires some grammatical accuracy for comprehen-
sion and grammatical accuracy without fluency probably leads to silence. However,
different learners do have different needs for accurate fluency: (a) a tourist can have
a wonderful vacation while using her second language with limited accuracy and
limited fluency; (b) a “guest worker” can succeed in many types of jobs with fluent
but quite inaccurate spoken language; (c) a student learning English to pass a college-
entrance exam focused on grammatical accuracy needs (and seeks) little in the way
of fluent communicative skill in that language; (d) a student studying in a university
where a second language is used needs quite a different capacity in the language. The
goals for grammatical accuracy and communicative fluency necessarily change based
on the purposes of the learners as well as the purposes of the families, societies, and
governments that have an interest in the second language development of particular
groups of learners.
Current interest in grammatical accuracy for some SLA researchers has to do with
recognition that accuracy has not automatically developed in the second language of
552 BYRD

students who have participated in long-term study focused on fluency. The French
language skills of students in the immersion programs in Canada have led to concerns
such as that expressed by Long and Robinson (1998):

Evaluations of French immersion programs in Canada, moreover, have found that al-
though many child starters are successful in other subjects, eventually comprehend the L2
statistically indistinguishably from native speakers, and speak fluently, “their productive
skills remain far from nativelike, particularly with respect to grammatical competence”
(Swain, 1991), even after more than 12 years of immersion at school and university in
some cases. Some errors, such as failure to use the vous form appropriately, can be traced
to infrequent exposure in classroom input (Harley & Swain, 1984), but others, such as
failure to mark gender on articles correctly, cannot. Given that almost every utterance
and sentence to which the students have been exposed throughout their schooling will
have contained examples of gender-marked articles, it is unlikely that more exposure
is all the students need. Rather, additional salience for the problematic features seems
to be required, achieved either through enhancement of positive evidence or through
provision of negative evidence of some kind. (pp. 20–21)

Swain (1998) summarizes the research on the language development of students in

the French immersion program:

More than two decades of research in French immersion classes suggests that immersion
students are able to understand much of what they hear and read even at early grade
levels. And, although they are well able to get their meaning across in their second lan-
guage, even at intermediate and higher grade levels they often do so with non-targetlike
morphology and syntax. (For overviews of this research, see, e.g., Genesee, 1987; Swain,
1984; Swain & Lapkin, 1986. For detailed accounts, see, e.g., Harley, 1986, 1992; Harley &
Swain, 1984; Vignola & Wesche, 1991.) This research, related to the French proficiency of
immersion students, makes clear that an input-rich, communicatively oriented classroom
does not provide all that is needed for the development of targetlike proficiency (Swain,
1985). It also makes clear that teaching grammar lessons out of context, as paradigms to
be rehearsed and memorized, is also insufficient. (p. 65)

The problem, then, is how to add instruction in grammar to the curriculum in ways
that will be effective to achieve the goals of the Canadian educational system for
these learners of having bilingual citizens who are accurate and fluent in both of their
languages. Attempts by SLA researchers to deal with the challenge of including the
teaching of grammar in a communicative language teaching context often now turn
to two related topics: focus on form(s) and direct versus indirect grammar instruction.

Focus on Form Versus Focus on Forms

Starting with publications in the late 1980s, Long’s formulation of “focus on form” has
been widely influential, if variously interpreted, in second language acquisition re-
search, especially for studies of instructed SLA (e.g., Long & Robinson, 1998; Doughty
& Williams, 1998b). Doughty and Williams (1998a) provide the following definition
of the phrase focus on form:

Most researchers currently investigating the role of attention to form attribute the reawak-
ening of interest in this issue to Michael Long (1988, 1991). In that seminal work, Long
distinguished between a focus on formS, which characterizes earlier, synthetic approaches
to language teaching that have as their primary organizing principle for course design
the accumulation of individual language elements (e.g., forms such as verb endings or
agreement features, or even functions such as greetings or apologies) from what he (and
now we) call focus on form. The crucial distinction . . . is that focus on form entails a pre-
requisite engagement in meaning before attention to linguistics features can be expected
to be effective. (p. 3)
 30. INSTRUCTED GRAMMAR 553

For researchers and teachers who (a) worked from a belief that direct instruction
in grammar was wrong but (b) who observed students becoming fluent without
becoming equally accurate, this approach provided permission to reexamine ways in
which grammatical accuracy might be included in the curricular goals for L2 courses
and programs within the CLT framework.

Explicit Versus Implicit (Grammar) Learning and Teaching

Explicit (and overt) versus implicit (and deductive) learning is a complex area of SLA
research, theory building, and belief (see e.g., Doughty & Williams, 1998b; Leeman,
2003). While research led Long and others to reconsider the place of explicit, overt at-
tention to grammar, focus on form has been variously interpreted with some versions
including highly explicit instruction and others seeking ways to integrate grammar
in as indirect, unobtrusive a manner as possible (see Doughty & Williams, 1998a for
an overview of these variables).

The Appeal of Recasting Versus Other Possible Teaching Techniques

The reintroduction of (somewhat) explicit grammar instruction into the CLT frame-
work naturally led to discussion and study of the most effective ways to have focus
on form in the classroom. Because the impetus for the reintroduction of explicit gram-
mar teaching was concern over the lack of accuracy (that is, the continuing grammar
errors in the spoken and written production of learners), the initial emphasis has
been on error correction strategies. In addition, because of the desire to have that
error-focused instruction be as indirect as possible, numerous researchers and teach-
ers have turned to a teaching strategy called recasting (e.g., Doughty & Varela, 1998;
Leeman, 2003; Lightbown & Spada, 1999). A recast provides implicit negative feed-
back along with implicit positive feedback: A student says something that contains
an error; the teacher repeats what was said but with the error corrected; the student
(if he or she realizes what is going on and attends to the teacher’s words) hears the dif-
ference and recognizes that he or she needs to do/learn something differently. While
recasts are clearly favored by Long and his colleagues, other work in the focus on
form universe employs a wider range of activity types that include explicit (as well as
implicit) study and practice as long as these are done with communicative goals at the
fore (e.g., Lightbown & Spada, 1999). While descriptions of teaching materials (e.g.,
Skierso, 1991) often classify activities on a continuum from “non-communicative” to
“communicative,” my experience as a teacher, a materials writer, and a teacher edu-
cator is that just about any activity can be used for communication and that just about
any activity can be turned into a deadly, dull, teacher-focused, non-student-involved
non-communicative event. The old TESOL Newsletter had for many years a column
called “It Works!” with activities contributed by various teachers. A colleague used
to say that he bet that he could “make it not work.” That is, activities in and of them-
selves are neutral to communication and learning. How they are used by teachers
turns them into communicative or non-communicative events.

TASKS AND TASK-BASED INSTRUCTION

In addition to focus on form, SLA research has provided instructed grammar with
another tool in the form of task-based instruction (Ellis, 2003, chap. 39, this volume;
Bygate, Skehan, & Swain, 2001; Long & Crookes, 1992). Language teaching as a pro-
fession always struggles under the burden of not having a natural content. While
biologists teach biology and psychologists teach psychology, language teachers can-
not directly teach English or Spanish but have to clothe the language in some topic
554 BYRD

selected from the universe of possible content. The result has often been a random as-
sortment of topics selected on the basis of vaguely conceptualized notions of “things
interesting to learners.” Even content-based approaches that put meaning and com-
munication and coherent sets of content at the center of the curriculum (e.g., Snow &
Brinton, 1997) have problems justifying the selection of any particular content area.
Much of the classroom-based SLA literature on tasks involves attempts to specify the
nature of a task as a teaching strategy or event, especially in opposition to “exercises”
or “activities” (see Ellis, 2003, for an overview). For syllabus design, however, the
most useful formulations start with student needs analysis and specification of the
real world communication “tasks” required as the goal of instruction and learning (see
Long & Crookes, 1992; Doughty & Varela, 1998). By putting student needs analysis
into the form of “real world” tasks as the source for “language-learning tasks,” we can
make rational, principled decisions about the focus of instruction. Knowing the real
world tasks to be handled by learners means that we can reasonably expect to be able to
analyze those tasks for the language (vocabulary as well as grammar) and communi-
cation tasks that will be required of learners—and that can be the focus for instruction.

KNOWLEDGE, BELIEFS, AND BEHAVIORS

OF CLASSROOM TEACHERS

For the 25th anniversary issue of the TESOL Quarterly, Celce-Murcia (1991) traced the
history of the teaching of grammar in the period between 1967 and 1991, providing
overviews of the audiolingual approach, the cognitive code approach, the compre-
hension approach, and the communicative approach. Now, over a decade later, the
teaching of grammar by classroom teachers seems to fall on a continuum between
(a) continued use of teacher-fronted presentation and drill of grammar items and (b)
complete rejection of the teaching of grammar at all. In an article about the pressure
from the U.S. federal government on elementary and secondary schools to move ESL
students rapidly into mainstream courses, The New York Times reported the following
scene in a Colorado high school (Dillon, 2003):

Earlier this month, an 18-year-old born in Veracruz, Mexico, who has studied English at
Fort Lupton High for four years, stumbled repeatedly in a classroom drill on the idiomatic
uses of “the.”
“Where are you going?” the teenager’s teacher asked, pointing at the word “store” on
the blackboard.
He said, “I’m going to store.”
The teacher corrected, “No, you need to use ‘the’ before store,” and pointed to the word
“beach.”
He said, “I’m going to beach.” Again, she corrected him.

That is, decontextualized drill of grammar using random content, some of which is
inappropriate to the setting (“beach” in Colorado?), remains a feature of many ESL
classrooms. At an extreme away from that classroom and that teacher is the context
reported in Doughty and Varela (1998):

The subjects in the experiment were 34 middle school students from two different intact
classes studying science at an intermediate ESL level in a suburban east coast school dis-
trict. . . . Prior to the study, both teachers of these students admitted to spending little if
any time on grammar instruction or correction in their science classes, either orally or in
writing. However, students received some focus on formS in their language arts classes,
although even that portion of the curriculum embraces a “whole language” approach in
which instruction emphasizes integrating reading and writing skills for communication,
and grammar instruction is minimal. . . . At the time of the study, [the students] remained
non-targetlike in their use of many features of English despite their language arts teachers’
 30. INSTRUCTED GRAMMAR 555

attempts to focus on forms, which, as noted by Varela, was unfortunate given that their
achievement in mainstream classes could be hindered until they were able to reach a
level of precision in their oral and written grammar that would be acceptable to main-
stream teachers. Nonetheless, prior to their participation in this study, both of the ESL
science teachers routinely rejected the inclusion of explicit grammatical instruction in
their lessons for fear that it might manipulate, take away from, or hinder science learning
or communication about science. (p. 119)

Fortunately, the project described by Doughty and Varela did lead students to improve
their use of past tense verbs in the lab reports that they gave orally and wrote for their
ESL science course. Otherwise, practice based on belief in CLT is just as surely failing
ESL students as the older belief system in rote drill of a random collection of grammar
items.
The teaching of grammar in many ESL/EFL settings (at least in the United States)
presents a number of challenges for those who want to influence classroom instruction
in grammar because of various aspects of teacher knowledge, belief, and behavior
along with pressures on many teachers that result from class size and lack of job
stability and support for professional growth. While those teachers with advanced
degrees in the field sometimes have had some instruction in English grammar and the
teaching of English grammar (see the various ways that English grammar is handled
in M.A. programs in TESL/EFL in Liu & Master, 2003; Ferris, 2002), many other
teachers do not have degrees in the field and have limited knowledge of either English
grammar or issues in effective teaching of grammar. Even teachers with M.A. degrees
in the field have often only taken general courses in theoretical linguistics rather
than courses that delve into English grammar in detail. Additionally, many classroom
teachers have little or no connection with the larger profession and seldom attend
professional meetings where they might find out about alternative ways of handling
grammar instruction.
Because they have never taken a course in English grammar or because they were
minimally interested in that course when they were in their degree programs, many
teachers learn their grammar from the ESL/EFL grammar textbooks that they use
in their classes. The best-selling textbooks in ESL/EFL remain drill-based grammar
books. Thus, many teachers learn to think about grammar as a set of grammatical
forms that are organized in form sets (types of verb tenses, types of clauses, etc.) but
not connected to any communication patterns.
ESL teachers in U.S. college programs have a reputation (within their institutions
and with publishers) for being ruthless users of copy machines to violate copyright law
by making class sets of materials to supplement (or replace) the required textbooks
for their courses. The chair of a large ESL program at a U.S. college kept records
of the kinds of materials copied by teachers: She found that no matter what the
course that the teacher was supposed to be teaching—reading or writing or oral
communication—the great bulk of the handouts being copied were taken directly
from grammar textbooks, especially from the grammar textbooks and resource books
by Azar (1999).
While many teachers still work from beliefs in grammar drill, others have adopted
what Lightbown (1998) terms the “new orthodoxy”:

The impact of new approaches to language teaching is often brought home to me when
classroom teachers give me minilectures on the value of unfettered communication in
the classroom, the power of comprehensible input, and perhaps, above all, the danger
of raising the affective filter by correcting learners’ errors when they are in the midst
of a communicative act (Krashen, 1982)! If language is to be the focus of the learner’s
attention at any time, they argue, it should be in their home study materials or in a
separate lesson. Sometimes these separate lessons may be motivated by consistent errors
that the teacher is aware of, but errors should not be pointed out in the midst of a task or
556 BYRD

other communicative activity. Such a view is explicit, of course, in the “natural approach”
of Krashen and Terrell (1983), but I am fascinated by how this has—at least among many
teachers—become the new orthodoxy, embraced by many teachers who would not be
able to trace its origins. (p. 191)

As a result of these factors, teachers are a difficult audience to reach with messages
about changes in the ways that they teach English grammar in their ESL/EFL classes.
Even those who find time and energy to seek professional development are reasonably
suspicious of the latest new theory after all the changes in advice over the years.
Teachers are reasonably suspicious of advice from academics who have little (or little
recent) experience in L2 classrooms. Change is more likely to occur when researchers
work cooperatively and consistently within classroom settings (for examples of such
cooperation see, e.g., Doughty & Varela, 1998; Burns & McPherson, 2001; Williams &
Evans, 1998).

INTERSECTIONS

Connections need to be made that bring together (a) grammar as revealed by studies
of language in use, (b) SLA research on effective form-focused task-based instruction,
and (c) teacher support to evaluate new information and to integrate it into their
belief systems and into their teaching practices. I conclude by delineating five such
intersections.

Learner Corpora
Many, and perhaps most, studies of second language acquisition use collections of
learner language as the basis for study. These collections are not necessarily in com-
puter format or analyzed using software or corpus linguistics methods. The creation
and analysis of these corpora is a natural intersection of teachers, linguists, and SLA
specialists. Examples of effective collection and use of learner English that have led to
publications illustrate many different methodologies for data collection and analysis
along with the wide variety of research topics being studied: Bardovi-Harlig (1992,
2000) collected samples of adult ESL student writing and interview materials over
a period of months. Doughty and Varela (1998) planned an intervention strategy to
teach past tense in writing and talking about science by middle school students and
collected written and spoken data about the effects of that intervention. Ellis (1992,
1997) observed two children in ESL class to collect data on how they made requests
and how the language they used to make requests changed over time. Hinkel (2002)
used a collection of student essays to study language and rhetoric in learners’ prose.
A continuing problem for SLA research is the limited access to the corpus used in
a particular scholar’s work, making replication and extension of that work by other
scholars impossible. Thus, the development of widely available collections such as
the CHiLDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) is a valuable tool for second
language acquisition research. Also, while teachers are required to provide access to
learners and classrooms, they are not necessarily pulled into the projects or given
access to the results of the studies. For this intersection to be successful, more collab-
orative work is needed but we also need wider dissemination of the research results
in formats accessible to nonspecialist audiences.

The Acquisition of Grammar Clusters

Most published SLA studies of English grammar focus on a single grammar form or
on a random assortment of forms that have been studied by other SLA researchers or
that are known to be problems for learners. Studies of grammar in use have shown
 30. INSTRUCTED GRAMMAR 557

how grammatical forms tend to cluster in particular settings, with the implication
that fluent, accurate performance in that discourse setting will require control over
a whole set of features. Past tense alone does not a narrative make. More work at
the intersection of SLA and discourse-based studies of English grammar is needed
to help us understand how the whole set of grammar (and vocabulary) develop over
time. The power of such work is illustrated by studies such as Bardovi-Harlig (1994,
1998, 2000) where she studies the interrelationships among three features of L2 learner
narratives: (1) chronological order, (2) time adverbials, and (3) past tense verbs. Her
work shows that learners go through a developmental process that begins with use of
chronological order so that sequencing is used to tell the story by learners who have
limited vocabulary or grammar. As their language develops over time, learners then
add time adverbials to their stories and start to be able to add background information
to the narrative foreground. At this stage they continue to use chronological order but
are not totally dependent on it because they have new vocabulary to indicate time. The
next stage involves the addition of past tense verbs to go along with chronological
order and adverbs with some reduction in the use of adverbials because they are
no longer totally dependent on them. At a later stage when use of past tense has
stabilized, learners can add the use of past perfect forms to talk about things that
happened before the main events of the narrative. However, past perfect is seldom
required since simple past tense and adverbials can carry the same meaning (and
since past perfect is not commonly used by native speakers and so is not much in
evidence in the input received by learners)—so this next stage is not one that all
learners reach even when given instruction in the past perfect. At the final stage,
students are still combining chronological order, adverbials, and verb tense to create
narratives that effectively combine both foreground and background information. In
addition to that very useful information about the learning of those three aspects
of narrative discourse, information about the parallel development of the ability to
use noun phrases and pronoun reference would be helpful for understanding how
learner language develops over time. Bardovi-Harlig (2000) quotes Schumann (1987,
p. 38): “In standard language, verb morphology interacts with, supports, and often
duplicates the work done by pragmatic devices in expressing temporality.” Teachers of
English grammar need that information on those connections and about how students
learn to use the various forms in integrated sets.

The Acquisition of Set Phrases

According to SLA research and to the common experience of teachers and learners,
beginners and lower proficiency students often depend on chunks of language that
have been learned as chunks. The next stage of learning involves sorting out the words
and grammatical processes involved in the creation of those chunks. Both of those
insights into language learning and language use are widely reported and generally
accepted by teachers as well as scholars (Ellis, 1997; Lightbown & Spada, 1999). What
we do not know is how to help students at more advanced levels to recognize, learn,
and use the set phrases that corpus linguistics research has shown to underlie native
speaker versions of English in many different discourse settings. ESL/EFL teachers
and materials writers (and students) have long worked with idioms, but the studies
on collocations and on lexical bundles reviewed earlier in this chapter are a special
challenge for SLA and for pedagogical grammar.

Planning Ahead for Focus on Form

Long’s formulation of focus on form has been highly influential and is often quoted by
SLA researchers who are attempting to implement the system in classrooms. Doughty
and Williams (1998a, p. 3) quote two versions of Long’s requirements for focus on form:
558 BYRD

[version 1] focus on form . . . overtly draws students’ attention to linguistic elements as

they arise incidentally in lessons whose overriding focus is on meaning or communica-
tion. (Long, 1991, pp. 45–46)
[version 2] focus on form often consists of an occasional shift of attention to linguistic code
features—by the teacher and/or one or more students—triggered by perceived problems
with comprehension or production. (Long & Robinson, 1998)

Communication is the goal; linguistic elements such as grammar and vocabulary are
used only when there are problems in the communication. When the statements are
read from the point of view of classroom and teacher realities and also of language in
use, new interpretations are possible for potentially puzzling elements in the formula-
tion. The statement is often interpreted to mean that selection of the linguistic element
is made in real time based solely on student error in speech. Lightbown (1998) points
out the difficulty for classroom teachers of handling this task in the midst of compli-
cated, fast-moving communication involved in classes with large numbers of students.
Additionally, the interpretation that the recasting is strictly a spontaneous event does
not seem to include recognition that students can usually be sorted (roughly enough)
into proficiency levels based both on what they can do and know and on what they
still struggle to do consistently and what they haven’t learned to do yet. A teacher
does not need long experience of particular groups of students to be able to predict the
kinds of errors that the students are going to make and that are going to impede com-
munication. Additionally, teacher analysis of the real world tasks for which students
are preparing should lead to the selection of particular discourse types that involve
particular grammar and vocabulary. Planning ahead is possible based on knowledge
of students as well as knowledge of the difficulties that the language required by
certain tasks gives students.

Effective Use of Recasts

Leeman (2003) reports on a study of her use of recasts with English-speaking students
of Spanish in a research project aimed at understanding negative and positive feed-
back. That is, her purposes have to do with understanding SLA processes rather than
with investigating classroom-based SLA. To achieve her goals, “it was decided that
the ideal structure would have low perceptual salience and limited communicative
value and be likely to go unacquired by classroom learners despite its frequency in
the L2 input. . . . ” (p. 46). Her methods involved one-on-one interactions with the stu-
dents. This use of recasts is at the extreme end of a continuum from the requirements
for use of that technique in classroom settings.
Recasts are difficult to do well in typical classrooms for at least two reasons: (a)
the teacher’s attention is both focused and scattered as he or she works with the
individual but it also involves awareness of the whole group and (b) students are
likely to misunderstand the recast if they are focused on communication (Lightbown,
1998; Lyster & Ranta, 1997). That is, a teacher may not notice in accurate detail what
a student says and the student may not get the point of the repetition of her or his
statement. Additionally, some learners may not be good at learning through spoken
input. Also, many teachers are not well informed about English grammar and could
easily make inappropriate choices about which elements in a student’s production
to focus on. Thus, recasts are easy to do ineffectively and require substantial prior
decision making and even training for a teacher (Doughty & Varela, 1998). In the
process followed by Doughty and Varela, selection of the grammar form for recasting
was made based on two weeks of observation of the work of the students to select
a form that was problematic for them and that was central to their success in their
academic task of carrying out scientific demonstrations and preparing oral and written
 30. INSTRUCTED GRAMMAR 559

lab reports about their work. This approach to recasting suggests an intersection with
language in use research and methods along with implementation of a task-based
curriculum. When a teacher knows the kind of communication that her students
must control, then analysis of the grammatical and lexical patterns of samples of that
discourse can lead to principled decisions about the language that needs to be the
focus of her classes. Thus, other areas of grammar can reasonably be put aside to
focus on the centrally important forms and words whether the teacher decides to
limit grammar to recasts or explores a wider range of instructional activity types.

Grammar FROM Context

When task-based curricular approaches are combined with information from dis-
course studies, teachers, curriculum designers, and materials writers are given a
powerful tool to provide students with useful preparation for their lives outside the
language classroom. Doughty and Varela (1998) model that combination for us. The
students are learning English and science in a science class. They need to know how
to carry out certain procedures required by the science curriculum set up by the gov-
ernment and implemented in the school system. The spoken and written products
required for success in that curriculum are important real world tasks. Those tasks
are carried out with particular combinations of grammar and vocabulary. Certain of
the grammatical forms give the students more trouble than others. By analyzing the
tasks and the students, the teacher is able to reach principled decisions about what the
students need to know how to do. Working with a researcher who contributes to their
partnership knowledge about effective use of recasting and analysis of discourse for
grammatical features, the teacher helps to create a program of communicative tasks
along with grammar instruction that gives students information about past tense
verbs in scientific communication and that trains the students to be aware of that use
and to learn to incorporate it in their own scientific communication. Using this jointly
planned approach, the teacher begins the hard work of motivating, challenging, in-
teresting, and pushing as many of the students as possible to become accurate and
fluent in handling those important tasks—while her researcher-colleague helps to col-
lect and analyze data about the success of the program. The grammar isn’t random
but is selected based on the central features of the discourse to be learned and on
student problems with the language of that discourse. The grammar isn’t the purpose
for the lesson but is required for the students to successfully carry out their academic
task. The teaching and learning of the grammar isn’t separated off from the learning
of scientific writing and speaking; students learn that certain language—vocabulary
and the grammatically required forms to go along with the vocabulary—is expected
by this teacher and by the larger community of people who read and write about
scientific demonstrations and experiments.

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31

Reading in a Second Language

David E. Eskey1
University of Southern California

INTRODUCTION

Reading and Second Language Acquisition

For second language learners, reading may be both a means to the end of acquiring the
language, as a major source of comprehensible input, and an end in itself, as the skill
that many serious learners most need to employ. Many students of English as a Foreign
Language (EFL), for example, rarely speak the language in their day-to-day lives but
may need to read it in order to access the wealth of information recorded exclusively in
the language. In complementary fashion, this reading can serve as an excellent source
of the authentic language students need to interact with in quantity—language that is
always meaningful, often in fully grammatical form, and that includes every feature
of the target language but pronunciation. Krashen (1993) claims that students who
read frequently

acquire, involuntarily and without conscious effort, nearly all of the so-called “language
skills” many people are so concerned about. They will become adequate readers, acquire
a large vocabulary, develop the ability to understand and use complex grammatical con-
structions, develop a good writing style, and become good (but not necessarily perfect)
spellers. (p. 84)

In recognizing the truth of this claim (what Krashen sums up as “the power of read-
ing”), the field has come a long way since the audiolingual era when reading and
writing were marginalized as “secondary reinforcement” for learning the spoken lan-
guage (Fries, 1945).

RESEARCH ON READING

L1 Research Applied to L2
Specialists in second language (L2) reading are often criticized for depending too
heavily on research in first language (L1) reading, instead of focusing more narrowly
563
564 ESKEY

on studies of reading in a second language. There is some truth to this—especially

in respect to language issues, which create far more problems for L2 readers than
for L1 readers—but research on L1 reading provides a foundation for exploring both
the similarities and differences between L1 and L2 reading. Just as in language ac-
quisition research, where for years L2 specialists paid no attention to research in L1
language acquisition, despite its obvious relevance, similarities between these two
kinds of reading far outweigh the differences. The differences are important and must
be addressed, but reading is reading in any context, just as language acquisition is
language acquisition. If human beings are the only living creatures who speak, they
are also the only living creatures who read, and they do so in much the same way
throughout the world. Children acquire language instinctively (Pinker, 1994). They
must be taught literacy, but all writing systems are language based and share some
fundamental characteristics.

An Overview of Research on Reading

In the 1960s before the advent of what has come to be known as “cognitive psychol-
ogy,” most research on reading was hardly worth—well, reading—because the then
dominant behaviorist models in psychology could not accommodate discussion of
mental events, and reading is, almost purely, a mental event. One major exception
was Edmund Burke Huey’s (1908) The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading, but this
sank without a trace in the behaviorist sea before being rediscovered in more recent
times. Comparisons with linguistics (which Chomsky has always characterized as a
branch of cognitive psychology) come to mind; but language behavior, in the form of
spoken and written discourse, has always been accessible to direct empirical investi-
gation, whereas reading produces almost no physical data for investigation, with the
minor exception of eye movements.
By the late 1970s, however, reading specialists like Kenneth Goodman (e.g, Good-
man, 1975) and linguists like Ronald Wardhaugh (1977) were disputing the notion
that reading is merely the passive side—complementing the active skill of writing—
of being literate. Like the other receptive skill listening (with which it has much in
common as a psycholinguistic processing skill), reading is now generally understood
to be an active, purposeful, and creative mental process in which the reader engages
in the construction of meaning from a text, partly on the basis of new information pro-
vided by that text but also partly on the basis of whatever relevant prior knowledge,
feelings, and opinions that reader brings to the task of making sense of the words on
the page.
Research in the 1970s and 1980s was characterized by a search for more accurate
and more revealing models of the reading process. Major advances in our understand-
ing of what readers actually do when they read followed from a shift in orientation
from commonsense bottom-up (from text to brain) models of the process—in which the
reader is assumed to decode precisely (in the case of English) from left to right, from
letters into words, and from words into larger grammatical units in retrieving the
writer’s meaning, step by step, from the text—to a totally different kind of model, the
so-called top-down (from brain to text) model of the reading process. This shift, some-
times referred to as the top-down revolution—a movement in which Goodman and,
later, Frank Smith (e.g., Smith, 1973) were especially prominent—generated massive
research support and was widely accepted, in one form or another, by reading spe-
cialists everywhere. Top-down descriptions of the reading process characterize it as
what Goodman (1967) once called, in a famous remark, “a psycholinguistic guessing
game.” The notion is that readers do not decode in precise or sequential fashion but
instead attack the text with expectations of meaning developed before and during the
process, take in whole chunks of text (in short, jerky eye movements called saccades)
 31. READING IN A SECOND LANGUAGE 565

making use of just as much of the visual information on the page as they need to
confirm and extend their expectations—a process of predicting, sampling, and con-
firming in which readers interact with texts by combining information they discover
there with the knowledge they bring to it in constructing a comprehensive meaning
for the text as coherent discourse. Since prior knowledge plays such a major role in
this conception of reading, reading specialists also devoted considerable attention to
research on schema theory, research that attempted to account for the way in which
human beings store and organize information in networks of related notions called
schemata (or, more rarely, plans, scripts, or scenarios). In this area, the work of Rumelhart
and his associates was especially influential (e.g., Rumelhart, 1980).
During the latter part of the 1980s, top-down models were increasingly challenged
by proponents of interactive models of the process, who point out that strictly top-down
models cannot fully account for the results of much empirical research (Stanovich,
1980, provides an excellent summary)—research that, for example, shows that skillful
readers can process linguistic forms in print both more accurately and more rapidly
than less skillful readers can even in context-free situations where no prediction is
possible, and that weaker readers are as likely as strong ones to guess at meaning on
the basis of prior knowledge—both results that run counter to top-down assumptions.
From such research results, advocates for these interactive models (which should
not be confused with the interactive reader/text process described earlier) infer that
successful reading entails a balanced interaction between bottom-up and top-down
processing skills, thus restoring the simple decoding of text to a more central role
and raising doubts about the guessing game metaphor. Although it might be argued
that these interactive models are simply modifications of the topdown approach,
which do not involve the kind of radical new conception of the reading process that
the movement from bottomup to top-down models entailed, they have become the
standard for discussions of the psycholinguistics of reading.
After this period of relative coherence during which most researchers focused on
reading as a psycholinguistic process, reading research in the 1990s splintered into
a number of incommensurate perspectives. By the late 1980s, reading research had,
as noted, coalesced around interactive models, which give equal weight to bottom-
up processing of texts (i.e., decoding) and top-down construction of meanings for
those texts (i.e., comprehension). Stanovich (1992) provides an excellent example of
this balanced view. Today, however, the field is very much engaged in what Kamil,
Intrator, & Kim (2000) describe as both ”broadening the definition of reading” and
“broadening the reading research agenda” to include a wide variety of social, cultural,
neurobiological, and even political perspectives on reading.
Recently, for example, many prominent researchers have moved beyond the study
of reading as a psycholinguistic process to consider reading as a form of sociocultural
practice. These researchers are concerned with such questions as how much, what,
and why—as opposed to merely how—people read, if and when they do, with special
reference to the reading behaviors of particular socioeconomic groups. Building on
works on literacy by sociolinguists like Heath (1983) and Street (1984), such scholars
as Gee (2000) have begun to explore this sociocultural dimension of reading. Others,
like Friere (Friere & Macedo, 1987) and Shannon (1996), have taken this perspective
to the level of “critical literacy” in which reading behavior is regarded as a form of
political behavior.
At the same time researchers in cognitive science have moved beyond psycholin-
guistic models toward work in neurobiology, and some studies have been done on
the neurobiology of reading, especially in relation to dyslexia (Shaywitz et al., 2000).
Still another direction is represented by studies of new technologies in reading that
focus on the nature of reading in the rapidly expanding electronic media (Kamil &
Lane, 1998).
566 ESKEY

These many new perspectives on reading research have been accompanied by

related changes in research methodology. Experimental research has largely given
way to classroom-centered action research (McFarland & Stansell, 1993) and narrative
(Gilbert, 1993) and ethnographic approaches (e.g., Heath, 1983). There is less emphasis
on the typical reader and more on targeted groups or individuals. Thus, protocol
analyses (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995) and case studies of single readers (Neuman &
McCormick, 1995) have become increasingly popular.
In contrast to information-processing models, these newer perspectives have given
reading research a more human face but have also reduced the generalizability of its
results and raised doubts about the internal coherence of a subject as broad and
complex as reading.
Since reading is a kind of experience (albeit in purely symbolic form), potentially
involving the entire range of any reader’s thought processes, feelings, imagination,
and beliefs, as shaped by his or her genes and real-world experience, it is hardly
surprising that no single model of reading behavior can dominate reading research
for long. Even the boundaries of the topic are fluid, reading being just one instantiation
of the larger concept of literacy. In the latest Handbook of Reading Research (Kamil et al.,
2000), essentially the bible of reading researchers, all seven of the book’s subheadings
are labeled as discussions of literacy, not reading. As the editors of that volume suggest,
the remarkable diversity of perspectives on reading characteristic of reading research
today may either be described, optimistically, as “creating new frontiers of thought”
or, more skeptically, as “creating confusion” about a subject that probably cannot be
captured in a unified model.

Research on Second Language Reading: Specific Issues

Whether in a first or a second language context, most reading research can be sub-
sumed under three major headings, all of which have been mentioned in passing—
reading as a psycholinguistic process, reading as sociocultural practice, and reading
as individual behavior—because every human reader is, simultaneously, (1) a mem-
ber of the species (a human reader who reads as humans do, as opposed to some
other kind of reader—a computer, for example), (2) a member of a network of socio-
cultural groups (possibly, in relation to the writer, a member of a radically different
culture), and (3) an individual (and thus, within the limits established in (1) and (2),
cognitively and affectively unique to some extent). Within this general framework,
research in the following specific areas seems especially pertinent to major issues in
the field of second language reading.

Reading as a Psycholinguistic Process

Reading and Language Proficiency. Not surprisingly, the variable that correlates
best with success in second language reading is proficiency in the language. Motiva-
tion and background knowledge (of content) are also important, but reading begins
with decoding of language; and reading comprehension, although it involves both
bottom-up and top-down processing, begins with, and so depends on, rapid and ac-
curate decoding of the text (Birch, 2002). In any discussion of second language reading,
the place to begin is thus proficiency in the language. Serious discussion of this issue
can be traced to Clarke’s (1980) “short-circuit” hypothesis, which challenged the no-
tion that skillful readers in one language could simply transfer their skills to reading
in a second language (the so-called “language interdependence” hypothesis; see, e.g.,
Cummins, 1984). Clarke argued for a language proficiency “threshold”; readers whose
knowledge of the target language fell below that threshold, no matter how proficient
in their first language reading, could not transfer their skills to their second language
 31. READING IN A SECOND LANGUAGE 567

reading until they had mastered more of the language. Hudson (1982) demonstrated
that this threshold cannot be identified in absolute terms but varies with the reader’s
motivation and knowledge. Clarke’s basic premise however has stood the test of time
and was addressed most extensively in Alderson’s (2000) book-length treatment of
the subject. With reference to the competing hypotheses, Carrell (2001) observes, in
relation to a more recent study:

It may be more profitable to think of these two hypotheses in terms of Bernhardt and
Kamil’s restatements of them: “How first language (L1) literate does a second language reader
have to be to make the second language knowledge work?” and “How much second language (L2)
knowledge does a second language reader have to have in order to make the first language (L1)
reading knowledge work?” (Bernhardt & Kamil, 1995, p. 32)

Reading and Vocabulary. The relationship between reading and knowledge of

vocabulary is well-documented and reciprocal. It is now well understood that the
best (some would argue the only) way to acquire the extensive vocabulary required
for reading widely in a second language is reading itself, and it is equally well un-
derstood that a prerequisite for such reading is an extensive vocabulary—a classic
chicken and egg situation. Edward Fry (1981) has claimed that readers who en-
counter more than one unknown word in twenty in a text will be reading at what
he calls “frustration level” and will thus be unlikely to continue reading—a sobering
thought for teachers of adult second language readers who want to read adult ma-
terial but often lack the vocabulary required to do so successfully. Huckin, Haynes,
and Coady (1993) provide a good summary of research for second language read-
ers, addressing most of the major issues, starting with automatic word recognition,
a “necessary but not sufficient” condition (Stanovich, 1991) for successful reading
comprehension. For second language readers, the issues are obviously more com-
plex. Such readers are often slower and less automatic in recognizing words in the
target language than first language readers are (Favreau & Segalowitz, 1983). In
subsequent studies, Segalowitz, Segalowitz, and Wood (1998) have shown that ex-
tended experience in reading a second language has positive effects on word recog-
nition for adult subjects, and Geva, Wade-Woolley, and Shaney (1993) have explored
this issue with younger learners learning to read in two languages. Both studies
show that the development of fast and accurate word-recognition skills is a complex
process for second language readers that involves a wide range of knowledge and
skills.
Many texts for the teaching of second language reading promote guessing from
context as a major means of decoding unknown words, but research suggests that this
strategy is overrated and often leads to misidentifications (Bensoussan & Laufer, 1984).
Similarly, research demonstrates that second language readers, whether guessing or
not, frequently misidentify words (Bernhardt, 1991). Thus, although reading remains
the best means of acquiring a larger vocabulary, care must be taken not to immerse
readers in texts that are lexically beyond them, which does in fact reduce reading
to a kind of guessing game. The reciprocal relationship mentioned earlier between
reading and vocabulary must, in practice, be handled with care: Second language
readers should be lexically prepared for any texts assigned and the texts should meet,
or be taught in such a way as to meet, Krashen’s i + 1 standard for comprehensibility.
Vocabulary cannot be force-fed through reading, and second language readers cannot
read texts that are lexically beyond their proficiency.

Reading and Grammar. Although a firm grasp of syntax is obviously required

for successful decoding, researchers in this area have not been successful in disen-
tangling knowledge of sentence structure from other kinds of knowledge—especially
568 ESKEY

knowledge of vocabulary—to determine its particular contribution to reading com-

prehension. Some work has been done on syntactic simplification and elaboration,
but the results are inconclusive. Carrell (2001) summarizes:

. . . the research on syntactic simplification and elaboration shows that while syntactic
simplification can enhance foreign or second language reading comprehension, the pic-
ture is a complex one, with linguistic complexity interacting with such other factors as
age, proficiency level, cultural background knowledge, and, possibly, item type.

Reading and Text Structure. At the level of discourse, research suggests that
knowledge of text structure contributes to reading comprehension (Carrell, 1992; Ri-
ley, 1993). That is, a reader who understands the way in which the kind of discourse
he or she is reading is typically organized and will find it easier to comprehend such
texts. Like knowledge of the lexis and grammar of a language, this kind of knowledge
is part of what readers need to know to read successfully in a second language.

Reading Rate
Fluent decoding depends on the reader having achieved what reading specialists
call “automaticity,” that is, the ability to convert most written language into mean-
ingful information so automatically that the reader does not have to think about the
language and can concentrate on combining the information obtained with back-
ground knowledge to construct a meaning for the text. This requires the kinds of
knowledge reviewed earlier—knowledge of the real world and knowledge of lexis,
grammar, and text structure—but it also requires the skill of reading in meaningful
groups of words, sometimes called “chunking” and often described in terms of reading
rate, the ability to decode so many words per minute. Fluent decoding is thus both
rapid and accurate decoding, because the human brain cannot acquire information
from language that it does not understand or from language that is being processed
too slowly. In practice, the two are interrelated, given the way in which the human
memory system works. The system has three parts: sensory store, short-term memory,
and long-term memory (Stevick, 1976). Sensory store merely records the visual image
of the script or print the reader is reading. Short-term memory converts this image
into meaningful information. Since it holds only 5 to 7 units at a time, for efficient
reading these units must be reasonably large and meaningful. The units cannot be
individual words, that, similarly, have little meaning by themselves. Words do not,
as common sense suggests, give meaning to sentences so much as sentences give
meaning to words. Consider these sentences:

There is water in the well.

He was sick but he is well now.
He plays football well.
He saw tears well up in her eyes.
“Well, I don’t know,” he said.

By itself, the word well has many possible meanings—and therefore no clear
meaning—but when combined with other words, it takes on clear meanings. To
read for meaning, then, a reader must bring meaningful groups of words into short-
term memory. Letter-by-letter or word-by-word reading fill short-term memory with
meaningless units; no meaningful information gets through to combine with the
reader’s background knowledge for placement in long-term memory (where knowl-
edge is stored in the form of concepts or ideas, not words). Automaticity is thus a prod-
uct of both knowledge of language and skill in processing language in written form.
 31. READING IN A SECOND LANGUAGE 569

Reading and Background Knowledge (Content Discourses)

Successful reading begins with fluent decoding, but this must be accompanied by
the reader’s construction of a meaning for the text (commonly referred to as read-
ing comprehension), which goes well beyond decoding. Every written text provides
information for the reader, but the meaning of the text must be determined by a
reader who can relate that information to some relevant body of knowledge. To make
sense of the new information provided by a text, or written discourse, a reader must
have some knowledge of what the discourse is about—its content—to which to relate
that new information. The reader’s brain is not an empty container to be filled with
meaning from the text. The brain is full of knowledge in the form of schemata, which
collectively add up to “a picture of the world,” according to Frank Smith (1975), that
readers carry around in their heads. Therefore the brain relates new information taken
from the text to the much larger body of knowledge it already has to make sense of or
give a meaning to the text as a whole. As Smith says “what the brain tells the eyes” is
much more important that “what the eyes tell the brain.”
If a reader cannot determine what a text is about, that reader cannot comprehend
the discourse it contains even if he or she can decode the text perfectly. For example,
many people can decode each of the sentences in the following “opaque” text but
cannot even say what the text is about, let alone what it means:

The procedure is quite simple. First, you arrange the items in separate piles. Of course,
one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go
somewhere else due to lack of facilities, that is the next step; otherwise, you are pretty
well set. It is important not to overdo things. That is, it is better to do too few things at
once than too many. In the short run, this may not seem important but complications
can easily arise. A mistake can be expensive as well. At first, the whole procedure will
seem complicated. Soon, however, it will become just another facet of life. It is difficult to
foresee any end to the necessity for this task in the immediate future, but then, one never
can tell. After the procedure is completed, one arranges the materials into different groups
again. Then they can be put into their appropriate places. Eventually they will be used
once more and the whole cycle will then have to be repeated. However, that is part of life.

When told that the subject is washing clothes, however, most readers can apply that
knowledge to a second reading of the text and suddenly understand it perfectly.
By contrast, most American readers have no trouble comprehending the following
(relatively) normal text and answering the comprehension questions that follow:

It was the day of the big party. Mary wondered if Johnny would like a kite. She
ran to her bedroom, picked up her piggy bankand shook it. There was no sound!

1. Does this story take place in the past, present, or future?

2. What did Mary wonder?
3. What does the word would signal?
4. What is a kite?
5. What is a piggy bank?
6. What kind of party is this text about?
7. Are Mary and Johnny adults or children?
8. How is the kite related to the party?
9. Why did Mary shake her piggy bank?
10. Mary has a big problem; what is it?

The first five questions can be answered by decoding alone: The text provides the
relevant information (as long as the reader knows the meaning of the words and
570 ESKEY

structures in English and recognizes the text as a story); but to answer the second five
questions (simple enough for most native speakers but more problematical for non-
native speakers who may not have a Western kids’ birthday party schema), the reader
must bring cultural knowledge to the text, which provides no direct information on
these topics. In other words, to comprehend even this simple story, a reader must,
simultaneously, engage in bottom-up decoding and top-down interpretation of the
text to construct a plausible meaning for it, a process called parallel processing.
Thus, reading as a psycholinguistic process, when performed successfully, entails
both rapid and accurate decoding and the construction of meaning based on prior
knowledge. Second language readers often have problems with both processes.

Reading as Sociocultural Practice

It is now generally understood that literacy varies from culture to culture. That
is, the members of different cultures do different kinds of reading (and writing) for
different purposes. Most human beings learn to speak at least one language and
therefore use language to communicate with others, but people must be taught to
read and may never learn to do so. As human beings we have what could fairly
be called a biological instinct to learn to speak, but we must be taught to read in
some particular culture that employs written language for some particular purposes.
Thus becoming literate means not only acquiring the kinds of skills and knowledge
already discussed; it also means being enculturated (to the reader’s own culture) or
acculturated (to another culture) in a kind of apprenticeship, which Smith (1988) has
compared to joining a club—the literacy club—composed of those who read and write
in some particular culture.

L1/L2: Phonology and Orthography. Given the variety of writing systems, even
decoding may differ crosslinguistically. Among others, Koda (1989) and Haynes and
Carr (1990) have determined, for example, that students of English as a Second Lan-
guage (ESL) who have learned to read in a language that does not employ an alphabetic
writing system often have problems in decoding English texts.

Reading and Background Knowledge (Cultural Discourses). At higher levels,

most writers write for a culturally similar audience of readers and thus assume
that these readers share a common knowledge base and a common value system,
but common knowledge and values vary across groups (e.g., across cultures and
across classes and ethnic enclaves even within a single complex culture). Writers
also produce the kinds of discourse that have evolved naturally within their cul-
tures (e.g., sonnets or haiku, personal essays or research papers), which may not be
familiar to the second language reader. Although certain kinds of disciplinary knowl-
edge (like scientific knowledge) can reasonably be described as universal, second
language readers frequently encounter topics and attitudes in their reading (as in
the birthday party story) that are new or strange to them and interfere with com-
prehension.
Thus learning to read in a second language not only entails mastering a new lan-
guage in its written form, but also learning to engage in a new set of social practices
that may conflict with those the reader is used to.

Critical Literacy. During the past 10 or 15 years, a body of work has emerged
in the field dealing with what is sometimes called “the politics of literacy,” or, more
grandly, “critical literacy,” which addresses language teaching in relation to various
sociopolitical concerns. The patron saint of this work is Paolo Freire who, in his ear-
liest writings, made the valid point that in teaching so-called world languages to
 31. READING IN A SECOND LANGUAGE 571

oppressed peoples, second language teachers should teach these languages as use-
ful tools to be used in overcoming their oppression. Although some of this work is
thought-provoking and a useful reminder that language teaching, like other kinds
of teaching, does involve sociopolitical issues (Benesch, 1993; Gee, 1990), much of
it grossly exaggerates the political dimension of language teaching. Much of it also,
unfortunately, reflects the kind of political correctness that has made a laughingstock
of many English departments at U.S. universities. Based on post-everything analyses
that have largely been laughed out of the hard sciences as a result of physicist Alan
Sokal’s famous hoax (in which he submitted a transparent parody of postmodern dis-
course, “Transgressing the Boundaries—Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of
Quantum Gravity,” to a major postmodern journal that promptly published the piece
as a serious contribution to scholarship (Sokal, 1996; see Weinberg, 1996, for a lively
discussion of this event), this work attempts to place language teaching in the van of
a crusade for social justice. As Kaplan and Baldauf observe, however,

. . . one must be careful not to replace one kind of exploitation of minorities with another
kind, or to replace one existing minority with a new minority created by the process
intended to redress injustice . . . This is in fact what Friere seems to recommend in his
approach to the empowerment of minorities; he suggests turning the minority into a
majority and creating a new minority out of the present majority so that the new minority
may be exploited by the old minority. (Kaplan & Baldauf Jr., 1997, p. 81)

Such recommendations are, in any case, rarely feasible or in any danger of being im-
plemented by people with real political power, and this work is full of Canute-like
proposals for turning back the sea of history. The teaching of English as a second or
foreign language is a favorite target, English being guilty of having acquired “hege-
monic” status, and ESL teachers are frequently accused of aiding and abetting an
imperialist plot by the United States and United Kingdom to take over the world by
linguistic means, destroying other languages in the process (Phillipson, 1992). Since
many in the language teaching profession seem committed to the simplistic credo “the
more cultures and languages, the better” (as opposed to recognizing the obvious—
that multilingualism and multiculturalism can be either a blessing or a curse, or a
little of both), this work will always find an avid readership, but it seems to have little
to contribute to the improvement of second language teaching.

Reading as Individual Behavior

Of course, no human reader is ever just a generic text processor or a simple clone of
all the other members of some literacy club (or even a combination of the two), though
every kind of reading is strongly constrained by the nature of the reader’s brain as
a linguistic processing device and by the reader’s social and cultural experience.
Within these constraints, however, readers differ in what they read, how much they
read, how well they read, and how much they depend on or care about reading.
Every reader is, in short, an individual whose attitudes toward reading and reading
behavior are, to a considerable extent, idiosyncratic and unpredictable. Moreover, to
become a skillful reader, a reader must read a lot (just as a swimmer must swim a
lot to become a skillful swimmer). Thus engaging in extensive reading behavior is
a prerequisite for developing reading skills, especially at the level required for most
kinds of formal education, and readers are most likely to engage in such behavior if
they have access to texts that are interesting to them as individuals and relevant to
their particular needs. Reading from this point of view consists of every individual
reader developing a reading habit over time by reading texts of interest and value to
him or herself and reading those texts extensively.
572 ESKEY

Case Studies and Reading Protocols. Case studies are one means of investigat-
ing readers as individuals, and the arguments that Neuman and McCormick (1995)
advance for this kind of single subject research appear to apply with equal force to
first and second language reading. Cho and Krashen’s (1994) study of a Korean girl
who became enamored of the series of books about Sweet Valley High provides a well-
known example of such work. A second means of investigating readers as individuals
is protocol analyses, which requires direct interaction with readers. Bernhardt (1991)
makes a strong case for the use of protocols in researching, teaching, and testing L2
reading on the grounds that there is no way of predicting what specific problems a
given group of second language readers will have in comprehending particular texts.

Extensive Reading. A major topic in the field of teaching L2 reading is extensive

reading, many versions of which allow individual readers to select their own texts.
Day and Bamford (1998) is an excellent overview; Krashen (1993) makes the case for
this approach to instruction; and Elley and Mangubhai (1983) and Robb and Susser
(1989) provide reviews of successful extensive reading programs. Since this is an
approach to the teaching of reading, it will be discussed in more detail next.

Evaluation of Reading
Reading is the hardest language skill to assess because so much depends on what
is being read by whom. Beyond a certain minimal competence, there is no general
proficiency in reading, every reader being more proficient at reading some texts than
others. Thus any passage selected for testing will favor some readers and disadvantage
others, since no two readers have exactly the same proficiency in language or exactly
the same funds of knowledge. In testing reading comprehension, it is also difficult
to determine what kinds of questions any reader who understands a text should be
able to answer—that is, what constitutes reading comprehension for particular texts.
In practice, of course, educators do attempt to assess reading skills, and Alderson
(2000) provides a recent and comprehensive review of the most compelling work
in this area. Significant variables identified include question types (e.g., multiple-
choice versus open-ended); language effects (e.g., the language of assessment—L1 or
L2); and second language proficiency (e.g., more proficient, experienced versus less
experienced, beginning) (Wolf, 1993). In summarizing this literature, Carrell (2001)
observes:

What can safely be concluded from the results of research on the assessment of second lan-
guage reading is caution in the interpretation of findings utilizing reading tests. . . . Perfor-
mance on reading assessment measures is dependent upon many factors, including the
assessment task type, the language of the assessment, the reading texts, and so on. There-
fore, researchers often recommend multiple measures for testing reading comprehension.
(Shohamy, 1984)

IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING

Reading Research and the Teaching of Reading

A major issue in the field of L2 teaching is the relationship between such teaching
and research on language acquisition. Currently, many teachers, and many more re-
searchers, seem to take it for granted that good teaching practices can and should be
derived directly from research. The only problems with this notion that they recog-
nize are identifying which research is best and filling in whatever gaps may exist.
The road from research to practice is assumed to be a one-way thoroughfare with no
 31. READING IN A SECOND LANGUAGE 573

detours, and teachers, who often take other routes, are frequently condemned for not
basing their teaching on “scientific” research results. These are dangerously simplistic
beliefs, because teaching and research call for very different kinds of knowledge and
skills. As Ellis (1998) observes:

Teachers operate in classrooms where they need to make instantaneous decisions regard-
ing what and how to teach. Researchers, more often than not, work in universities, where
a system of rewards prizes rigorous contributions to a theoretical understanding of is-
sues. Teachers require and seek to develop practical knowledge; researchers endeavor to
advance technical knowledge. . . .

Technical knowledge is acquired deliberately either by reflecting deeply about the object
of inquiry or by investigating it empirically, involving the use of a well-defined set of
procedures for ensuring the validity and reliability of the knowledge obtained. Technical
knowledge is general in nature; that is, it takes the form of statements that can be applied
to many particular cases. For this reason, it cannot easily be applied off-the-shelf in the
kind of rapid decision making needed in day-to-day living. . . .

In contrast, practical knowledge is implicit and intuitive. Individuals are generally not
aware of what they practically know. . . . [It] is acquired through actual experience by
means of procedures that are only poorly understood. Similarly, it is fully expressible
only in practice, although it may be possible, through reflection, to codify aspects of it.
The great advantage of practical knowledge is that it is proceduralized and thus can be
drawn on rapidly and efficiently to handle particular cases. (pp. 39–40).

As a major case in point, in the United States reading policy makers have recently
adopted a very strong version of this teaching-derived-directly-from-research fallacy.
In 1999, a committee of researchers dubbed “The National Reading Panel,” convened
by the director of The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
(NICHD) at the behest of Congress, submitted a report intended to assess the validity
of current reading research and the implications of that research for the teaching of
reading. This report attempted to establish (1) what constitutes valid reading research,
(2) what research is most relevant to teaching, and (3) what the implications are of
the research selected for “best practices” in the teaching of reading. As noted in the
appended “Minority View,” the findings of the panel are (not surprisingly, given the
magnitude of the charge and the few months the panel had to complete it) suspect on
all counts but especially on the question of teaching:

As a body made up mostly of university professors. . . its members were not qualified to be
the sole judges of the “readiness for implementation in the classroom” of their findings
or whether the findings could be “used immediately by parents, teachers, and other
educational audiences.” Their concern, as scientists, was whether or not a particular line
of instruction was clearly enough defined and whether the evidence of its experimental
success was strong. (Minority View, p. 2)

This has not, however, prevented the widespread adoption of the report by U.S. school
districts as the last word on reading and the teaching of reading, much to the detriment
of reading teachers whose experience has led them to different conclusions from those
of the report.
The real issue here is not whether teachers or researchers know best, but what con-
tributes most to success in the teaching of reading—or any other subject. The answer
is neither research-based practices nor particular approaches, methods, and materi-
als. The answer is good teaching. Speaking for himself and his associates, Richard
Allington (2000) writes:
574 ESKEY

A series of studies have confirmed what was probably obvious from the beginning.
Good teachers, effective teachers, matter much more than particular curriculum materials,
pedagogical approaches, or “proven programs.” It has become clear that investing in
good teaching—whether through making sound hiring decisions or planning effective
professional development—is the most “research-based” strategy available. If we truly
hope to attain the goal of “no child left behind,” we must focus on creating a substantially
large number of effective, expert teachers. . . . Effective teachers manage to produce better
achievement regardless of which curriculum materials, pedagogical approach, or reading
program they use. (pp. 742–743)

Thus the suggestions for teaching that follow are not offered as magic formulas
guaranteed to produce success, but as guidelines that might be helpful to good teach-
ers, who will know how to adapt them in practice for the particular students in their
particular classrooms.

Classroom Procedures
The problem for most teachers of reading in any language is that reading does not
generate any product that a teacher can see or hear. Reading is an invisible process. (It is
therefore much like listening, but a teacher can ask students to perform tasks while
listening—for example, giving students a dictation). Most teachers take the process
for granted and go directly to the creation of a related product—for example, asking
students to answer comprehension questions orally or in writing. These activities test
reading but do not teach it, and this contributes little to improving any student’s
reading performance.

Intensive/Extensive Reading
Historically, procedures for teaching reading have often been divided into procedures
for teaching intensive reading (working with small amounts of text in class to make
various points about the nature of texts and the reading process) and procedures for
teaching extensive reading (assigning whole texts to be read outside of class or in a
reading lab setting). These are useful categories for structuring programs, but they
do not shed much light on the purpose of asking students to engage in either kind of
activity—that is, on how engaging in such activities can help them to become better
readers.
One good way of addressing this question is to turn the question upside down:
How do people learn to read a language? And, once they have learned to do it, how do
they learn to read better? The answer to both questions is surprisingly simple. People
learn to read, and to read better, by reading. No one can teach someone else to read:
The process is largely invisible and thus cannot be demonstrated, and it mainly occurs
at the subconscious level and thus cannot be explained in any way that a reader could
make conscious use of.2 However, anyone can learn to do it, just as anyone can learn
to draw or to sing at some minimal level of competence. Every normal human being
is capable of learning to read, given the right opportunity and guidance.
The reading teacher’s job is thus not so much to teach a specific skill or content as
to get students reading and to keep them reading—that is, to find a way to motivate
them to read, and to facilitate their reading of whatever texts they have chosen to read
or been asked to read.

Motivation
Procedures for motivating students to read tend to focus on students as individuals or
as members of particular groups. To engage in something as challenging as reading
 31. READING IN A SECOND LANGUAGE 575

regularly in a second or foreign language, learners must be highly motivated, and

what motivates one reader or group of readers might not motivate another.

Matching Readers and Texts

The solution to this problem begins with locating appropriate texts, that is, texts that
the reader wants or needs to read. Since people learn to read, and to read better, by
reading, a major part of the reading teacher’s job is to introduce students to appropriate
texts—texts at the right level linguistically and texts that are both interesting to them
and relevant to their particular needs—and to induce them to read such texts in
quantity. For some students, it may be enough to make appropriate texts available,
but for others, more guidance may be required. For the full range of students, the
teacher must create his or her version of the literacy club and find ways to persuade
as many students as possible to join and to become literate—that is, to read texts and
to respond to those texts in the ways that typical club members do.

Extensive Reading Programs

As noted earlier, extensive reading programs have recently emerged as a major ped-
agogical response to the problem of finding appropriate texts for particular groups
of readers or for individuals, and for inducing them to read such texts in quantity.
Unlike earlier attempts to incorporate extensive reading in curricula, these programs
are not mere components in a larger program that also involves intensive reading:
The extensive reading is the program.
Often called Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) today, these programs come in various
forms. Under such additional acronyms as FVR (Free Voluntary Reading), DEAR
(Drop Everything and Read), and many others, all of them require L2 students to read
substantial amounts of L2 text. They differ with respect to degree of student choice:
Some allow students to choose their own materials; some allow students to make
choices from prescribed reading lists; some assign readings; and various combinations
are possible. They also differ with respect to what is expected of participating students:
Some require nothing more than the reading; some require summaries or book reports;
and some require, more traditionally, exams or writing assignments based on the
readings.

Facilitation
Procedures for facilitating L2 reading tend to focus on teaching the reader (any reader)
how to manage reading as a cognitive process more painlessly and efficiently—that
is, on making L2 reading as easy as possible for the learner. Most current work on the
teaching of such reading takes this general approach, possibly because this is the one
area in which reading teachers can justify doing some direct teaching. It also gives
publishers something to publish, that is, materials for teaching strategies for reading.

Teaching Cognitive Strategies

Thus in addition to providing—or providing access to—appropriate materials, read-
ing teachers often teach cognitive strategies for reading, both for bottom-up pro-
cessing (e.g., reading at a reasonable rate—which, as noted, really means reading in
meaningful groups of words—and reading without stopping to look up words in the
dictionary) and for top-down processing (e.g., skimming a text before reading and
formulating specific questions that the text might be expected to answer). The follow-
ing checklist provides an overview of the kind of strategies reading teachers often
teach:
576 ESKEY

A CHECKLIST OF READING STRATEGIES:

1. Prereading.
A. Bottom up, e.g., vocabulary building
B. Top down, e.g., schema bulding
C. Text attack, e.g., skimming
2. While reading.
A. Bottom up, e.g., employing knowledge of morphology (any word with tempor
in it has something to do with time)
B. Top down, e.g., reading to find the answers to questions (SQ3R)
3. Post reading
For example, asking questions based on purpose of text or asking questions that
call for critical reading
4. Follow-up
For example, moving on to other texts on the same topic or to other language
modes (listening, speaking, writing)

There is a substantial literature on the teaching of such strategies, both in the form
of resources for teachers and text materials for students. In one of the better texts for
teachers, Anderson (1999), for example, identifies, discusses, and promotes eight use-
ful teaching strategies—activating background knowledge, cultivating vocabulary,
teaching for comprehension, increasing reading rate, verifying reading strategies,
evaluating progress, building motivation, and selecting appropriate materials—many
of which entail teaching students to employ specific cognitive strategies for success-
fully decoding and interpreting texts. In fact, most of the current literature on the
teaching of second language reading is largely devoted to the teaching of such strate-
gies (e.g., Aebersold & Field, 1997; Nuttall, 1996; Urquhart & Weir, 1998; Day, 1993).
So, for that matter, is much of the literature on the teaching of first language reading
(e.g., Mikulecky, 1990). The first L2 textbook based on a psycholinguistic model and
the first to incorporate this approach was Reader’s Choice by Silberstein, Dobson, and
Clarke (2002), which is now in its fourth edition, but many others have appeared
during the past 20 years (e.g., Zukowski-Faust, Johnson, & Templin, 2002; Rosen &
Stoller, 1994; and Mikulecky, 1990).

Teaching Metacognitive Strategies

As interest in the teaching of strategies developed, many reading specialists and teach-
ers discovered that simply teaching students a list of cognitive strategies for read-
ing did not help every student to become a better reader. As it happens, successful
cognition, or thinking, must be directed and monitored by higher levels of cognition
called metacognition, or thinking about thinking. The issue is not just what strategies
can be used and how to use them, but when to use them and for what purpose. In
dealing with real texts, the issue is always what problems the text is creating for the
reader and what strategies he or she might employ to address and hopefully solve
these problems. More recent work on reading incorporates these insights.
In support of this approach, a number of research studies suggest that teaching
reading strategies can have positive effects on the reading performance of second
language learners. Carrell, Gajdusek, and Wise (1998) attempted to determine which
of these studies met the criterion of teaching both cognitive and metacognitive strate-
gies; they cite Carrell (1985) and Raymond (1993) as having fully met this criterion.
Other studies of note include Carrell, Devine, and Eskey (1988), Kern (1989), and
Zimmerman (1997) for the teaching of vocabulary.
 31. READING IN A SECOND LANGUAGE 577

Classroom Procedures: A Final Note

In addition to motivating students, successful L2 reading teachers do their best
to facilitate reading for them. These two kinds of procedures are, it should be noted,
complementary, since students who enjoy reading are more likely to read successfully,
and students who read successfully are more likely to enjoy it.
Because no two classes are alike, however, it cannot be assumed that any reading
teacher can know in advance what his or her students’ major problems will be. That
must be determined by interacting directly with a given group of readers as they read.
Good second language reading teachers create, as noted, a new kind of literacy club
for their students, sharing their own reading and responding to it as native speakers
normally do. They also read with their students, making use of such simple protocols
as asking students to paraphrase what they are reading or to speculate on where the
text might be going in order to determine what their real problems are. Bernhardt
(1998) makes a compelling case for this, and reminds the profession that teaching any
kind of reading successfully most often requires a skillful and dedicated teacher as well
as motivated and competent students. There are no magic approaches or methods for
the teaching or learning of second language reading, but good teachers and students,
working together, sometimes get the job done successfully.

NOTES

1. To the great loss of the applied linguistics community, David Eskey passed away in October 2002 after
completing the first draft of this chapter. Thanks to Eleanor Black Eskey for materials used in the final
revisions of the manuscript.
2. It has been noted, however, by Birch (2002) and others that L2 readers whose L1 does not have a
Romanized alphabet can experience difficulties with orthographic and phonological correlations that
can be taught.

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580
32

Teaching and Learning

Vocabulary
I.S.P. Nation
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

THE STATISTICAL NATURE OF ENGLISH VOCABULARY

The vocabulary learning task facing a learner of English is partly determined by the
nature of vocabulary in general, and by the particular nature of English vocabulary.
For well over 100 years, researchers into the frequency distribution of vocabulary
have been aware that some words occur more frequently than others. If we take a
long coherent written text and count the different words it contains and how often
each one occurs, we see a pattern that is repeated in other kinds of texts. The following
observations are typical.
r The most frequent word in a text, usually the, will account for about 6%–7% of
the running words in the text.
r The ten most frequent words will account for about 25% of the running words in
a text.
r The 100 most frequent words will account for about 50% of the running words
in the text.
r The 1,000 most frequent words will account for at least 70%–80% of the running
words in the text.

This pattern of initially very high coverage for the most frequent words and then a
rapidly decreasing coverage for subsequent words is a very striking one. The percep-
tive scholar George Zipf (1949) attempted to explain this in one of his laws. In essence,
Zipf’s law says, “If we multiply the frequency of an item in a ranked frequency list
of vocabulary by its rank on the frequency list, the result is a constant figure.” This
constant figure is typically around 10% of the total length of the corpus. Table 32.1
shows these figures for the most frequent lemmas in the 1,000,000 token Brown corpus
(Francis & Kucera, 1982) at rank intervals of 10. The match is not perfect and there is
clearly a decrease in the frequency times rank figure as we move to lower frequency
items. Nevertheless, there is a pattern here. It is possible to make some observations
based on this pattern.
581
582 NATION

TABLE 32.1
Ranked Frequency Figures and the Product of Rank Times Frequency from
the Francis & Kucera Count (1982)

Word Rank Frequency Frequency × Rank

to 10 11,165 111,650
as 20 6,029 120,580
an 30 3,727 111,810
make 40 2,312 92,480
could 50 1,782 89,100
come 60 1,561 93,660
may 70 1,307 91,490
must 80 1,017 81,360
so 90 932 83,880
just 100 795 79,500

r Some words occur much more frequently than other words.

r In a ranked list, the frequency of items initially drops very quickly and then drops
gradually.
r There is a small number of very frequent words and a very large number of low
frequency words.
r If we want to separate high frequency from low frequency words, the dividing
line will be arbitrary.

These observations have direct implications for course design for the teaching and
learning of vocabulary.
r There is a group of between 1,500 and 2,000 high frequency words that are the
most important vocabulary learning goal (West, 1953). These words are so fre-
quently and widely used that they need to be well learned as quickly as possible.
Because of their usefulness, they deserve all kinds of attention from teachers and
learners.
r The low frequency words, of which there are thousands, do not deserve teaching
time, but gradually need to be learned. The most effective way of dealing with
them is for the learners to work on strategies for learning and coping with them.
These strategies can be the focus of the teacher’s efforts.

We have looked briefly at the statistical nature of English vocabulary and the broad
implications of this for vocabulary learning. Now let us look at the origins and struc-
ture of English vocabulary with the same purpose of drawing implications for teaching
and learning.

THE ETYMOLOGICAL NATURE OF ENGLISH VOCABULARY

The vocabulary of modern English largely comes from two major sources and this
has a direct effect on the task facing a learner of English both as a first language or
as a second language. Germanic languages, particularly Anglo-Saxon, are the main
source of the high frequency words of English. According to Bird (1987), Germanic
words make up 97% of the most frequent 100 words of English (for example, the, all,
have, time, say), 57% of the first 1,000, 39% of the second 1,000, and around 36% of the
 32. TEACHING AND LEARNING VOCABULARY 583

remaining vocabulary. These words are the oldest words of English, are typically short,
and combine with other words rather than prefixes or suffixes to refer to related ideas
(lunch time, horse flesh, head of the school, back door). The other major source is Latin
either directly through the influence of the church or indirectly through French. The
single major historical event that established the influence of Latin through French
was the Norman invasion of England in 1066. Latin-based words make up 3% of
the first 100, 36% of the first 1,000 (for example, research, company, information, social,
important), and 51% from the second 1,000 on. Typically these words are multisyllabic,
have prefixes and suffixes and can make related words by adding prefixes and suffixes,
and have some degree of formality about them. Often there are less formal Anglo-
Saxon words that convey roughly the same idea, but with less formality or status (get–
obtain; make–construct; be–exist; see–perceive). This type of contrast is well illustrated
by the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000). The AWL is a list of 570 word families
that occur reasonably frequently across a wide range of academic disciplines and that
are not in the most frequent 2,000 words of English. The AWL covers about 10% of
the words in academic texts. Over 90% of the words in the AWL come from French,
Latin, or Greek. In academic texts a large number of these words can be replaced by
Anglo-Saxon words. What is partly lost by this replacement is the air of precision and
seriousness that the academic vocabulary conveys.
Having vocabulary from both Germanic and Latinate sources (and also Greek,
although this makes up at most 6% of English vocabulary) complicates the learning of
English. First, there is more vocabulary to learn. Second, words referring to the same
general concept are not visibly related to each other. The classic examples are:

sheep - mutton
cows - beef
pigs - pork.

Third, although Anglo-Saxon and Latinate words may refer to roughly the same
ideas, they carry different status messages. Corson (1985, 1997) describes the Greco-
Latin vocabulary of English as being a lexical bar (or barrier). In order to achieve in
academic study, learners must cross this lexical bar by gaining control, both receptively
and productively, of the Greco-Latin vocabulary of English. If they do not cross this
bar they will be unlikely to succeed in academic study. According to Corson, this
bar is difficult to cross because the Greco-Latin vocabulary is more difficult to process
because the words are long and made up of prefixes, stems, and suffixes, because some
native speakers feel that using this vocabulary is like “putting on airs,” and because
there needs to be considerable reading of formal language to meet and acquire this
vocabulary.
Now that we have seen what English vocabulary is like, let us now look at what
needs to be learned about it.

KNOWING A WORD

Table 32.2 lists various aspects of knowledge that are involved in knowing a word.
These aspects of knowledge fit into three groups: knowing the form of a word
(its spelling, sound, and word parts); knowing the meaning of a word (linking its
form and meaning, knowing a concept for the word and what it can refer to, and
knowing what other words of related meaning it can be associated with); and knowing
how a word is used (the grammar of the word including part of speech and the
sentence patterns it fits into, collocates of the words, and whether the word is formal or
584 NATION

TABLE 32.2
What Is Involved in Knowing a Word

Form spoken R What does the word sound like?

P How is the word pronounced?
written R What does the word look like?
P How is the word written and spelled?
word parts R What parts are recognizable in this word?
P What word parts are needed to express the
meaning?

Meaning form and meaning R What meaning does this word form signal?
P What word form can be used to express this
meaning?
concept and referents R What is included in the concept?
P What items can the concept refer to?
associations R What other words does this make us think of?
P What other words could we use instead of this
one?

Use grammatical functions R In what patterns does the word occur?

P In what patterns must we use this word?
collocations R What words or types of words occur with this
one?
P What words or types of words must we use with
this one?
constraints on use R Where, when, and how often would we expect to
meet this word?
(register, frequency, etc.) P Where, when, and how often can we use this
word?

Note. In column 3, R = receptive knowledge. P = productive knowledge. Adapted from Nation, 2001,
p. 27.

informal, polite or rude, used mainly by children and so on, or has no restrictions on its
use).
A substantial part of the difficulty of learning a word (its learning burden) depends
on whether these aspects of an L2 word are similar for its L1 translation or are regular
and predictable from already known L2 words of similar or related meaning (Nation,
1990, 1994). For example, a Japanese learner of English learning the term ice cream
does not have a lot to learn because the concept is already familiar from first language
experience; the form is very similar “aisu kurimu” because the Japanese word is a loan
word from English, it is the same part of speech, and has no restrictions on its use.
The differences in pronunciation may be a little interfering but are typical of changes
that need to be made to loan words. Learning a word like yacht is more difficult. The
spelling does not relate to L1 patterns and in English it is an irregularly spelled word.
It is not difficult to pronounce and does not contain any prefixes or suffixes. Linking
its meaning and form will require some effort unless it is a loan word, and learning its
precise meaning may require learning a new concept. It is a regular countable noun
and, if learners are familiar with the behavior of countable nouns in English, should
not be difficult to learn.
 32. TEACHING AND LEARNING VOCABULARY 585

Teachers can use an analysis of the learning burden of a word to guide their teaching
of high frequency words. Such an analysis can help them focus on difficult aspects
and help them draw attention to regular features of the word so that learners can see
useful patterns.
Notice that each part of Table 32.2 is divided into receptive and productive knowl-
edge. Receptive knowledge is sometimes called passive knowledge and is the kind of
knowledge needed to deal with a word in listening and reading. Productive knowledge
is sometimes called active knowledge and is the kind of knowledge needed to use
a word in speaking and writing. Productive knowledge requires more learning than
receptive knowledge (Ellis & Beaton, 1993).
These different kinds of knowledge require different kinds of teaching and learning,
which we will now look at by seeing how vocabulary can be learned through listening,
speaking, reading, and writing.

Vocabulary and Listening

The research on learning vocabulary through listening reveals a principle that holds
true for all kinds of vocabulary learning—the more the teacher can help the learn-
ers give deliberate attention to particular words, the more likely these words are
to be learned (Hulstijn, 2001). Although it has often been stated that learning best
occurs through meaning-focused use—meeting words in context—this statement is
not supported by research. In fact, the opposite is true. The more deliberate, de-
contextualized attention a learner gives a word, the more likely it is to be learned.
This research finding should not be interpreted as saying that words should not
be learned in context. It is more usefully interpreted as saying that every course
should involve some deliberate attention to vocabulary as well as opportunities to
meet the words in meaning-focused use. Target vocabulary should be met in the
four strands of learning through meaning-focused input, learning through meaning-
focused output, learning through deliberate study, and learning through fluency-
focused activities.
Elley (1989) found that vocabulary learning from listening to stories was positively
affected if the story was interesting, comprehensible, and involved repetition, and if
the teacher drew attention to some words by quickly providing a definition. There
are several studies where learners have the opportunity to negotiate the meaning of
unknown vocabulary either with the teacher (Ellis, Tanaka, & Yamazaki, 1994; Ellis,
1994, 1995; Ellis & Heimbach, 1997; Ellis & He, 1999), or with each other (Newton,
1995). Negotiation provides favorable conditions for learning, greatly increasing the
likelihood that a word will be learned. Negotiation, which involves working out
the meaning of a word through discussion, sets up all the conditions needed for effec-
tive learning: interest, understanding, repetition, deliberate attention, and generative
use (the use of a word in a new context). Negotiation, however, takes time and takes
time away from focus on the message of the text. Thus it is not possible for learners
to negotiate every unfamiliar or partly unfamiliar item. Newton (1995) found that al-
though negotiation usually resulted in learning, most learning occurred through the
less certain procedure of simply putting the word in context without negotiation. This
kind of meeting is less likely to result in learning but, because it is the more common
default procedure with more likelihood of occurring, accounted for the bulk of the
vocabulary learning. Thus, teachers should feel happy when they observe learners
orally negotiating unknown words, but they should also realize that there will be a
lot of other nonobservable learning taking place. The negotiation studies also show
that a learner need not be an active negotiator in order to learn. Those who quietly
observe negotiation and have a stake in the task seem to learn equally well (Stahl &
Clark, 1987).
586 NATION

Although there is no clear research on this for listening, it is likely that there should
not be more than one or two unknown words per 100 running words in order for
unassisted learning from context to occur. To learn from listening, the unknown
words need to occur in easily understood texts with a great amount of supportive
context.
If the goal is listening fluency that will develop fluent access of known vocabu-
lary, then the listening input should contain no unknown words and there should be
some pressure to perform faster than usual. This can be done by hearing the same
story several times with each retelling done at a slightly faster speed, and by listen-
ing to graded readers at levels below the level for learning from meaning-focused
input. That is, learners who would usually read at Stage 4 in a graded reading series
should be listening to develop fluency with stories read to them from readers at Stages
2 or 3.
When presenting listening material for learning through meaning-focused input,
teachers should draw on a range of procedures for getting the learners to give deliber-
ate attention to vocabulary. These include quickly giving definitions or translations of
unknown words, encouraging learners to signal when they don’t understand a word
or part of the story, questioning learners on parts of the story as it is told, quickly not-
ing words on the blackboard and indicating their related derived or inflected forms,
and putting up a list of target vocabulary before the reading.

Vocabulary and Speaking

The vocabulary needed for listening and speaking tends to be smaller than the vo-
cabulary needed for reading and writing. Part of the reason for this is that listening
and speaking tend to be informal activities using colloquial language. This colloquial
language consists largely of words within the first 2,000 words of English. A few of
these words, like hello, yeah, please, good-day are largely limited to spoken language.
In his study of text types, Biber (1989) found that in the text types of intimate inter-
personal interaction and informational interpersonal interaction, the only written text
was friendly letters; all the rest were spoken. Schonell, Meddleton, and Shaw’s (1956)
study of the oral vocabulary of the Australian worker found that the most frequent
1,000 words covered 94% of the running words, and the most frequent 2,000 words
almost 99%. This contrasts with the most frequent 2000 words covering barely 80% of
the running words in academic text (Coxhead, 2000).
We have seen how negotiation can be a means of setting up conditions for vo-
cabulary learning in spoken activities. Newton’s (1995) research showed that all the
negotiated vocabulary occurred in the written input to the task, that is, the handout
setting out the background, task, and procedure for the speaking activity. Observing
learners doing speaking activities and noting what vocabulary is used and how it is
used can help teachers get a good feel about how to design such tasks. The careful
design of the input sheets can be a major factor influencing vocabulary learning from
spoken activities.
Vocabulary learning can be made more deliberate, and thus more likely to occur if
the focus of the activity is on a particular word. The following example, focusing on
registration, comes from Nation and Hamilton-Jenkins (2000).

Group these jobs into those that you think require registration (like nursing) and
those that do not.
teacher doctor shop assistant
lawyer plumber bus driver
cleaner engineer computer programmer
 32. TEACHING AND LEARNING VOCABULARY 587

There are several activities for developing spoken fluency with vocabulary. The
simplest of these involve hearing words like numbers, days of the week, months of
the year, and names of objects and quickly responding by pointing to first language
translations or representations of the words. For example, to practice fluency in lis-
tening to numbers, the learners can listen to numbers and quickly write or point to
them in figures as in the following list.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Considerable repetition with increasing speed is needed to get real fluency. When
listening fluency is good, then the learners act as the teacher and say the items while
the teacher responds by pointing or writing.
The classic activity for developing spoken fluency is the 4/3/2 activity, which sets
up the conditions typically needed to develop fluency of access to vocabulary. In the
4/3/2 activity the learners work in pairs. One member of each pair, A, is the speaker
and the other, B, is the listener. A talks on a topic for 4 minutes while B listens and
says nothing. Then the learners change partners and A gives exactly the same talk
again to a new B but in only 3 minutes. Once again B simply listens and says nothing.
Finally, the learners change partners again. A gives the same talk for the third time
to a new partner B but in only 2 minutes. Thus, A has to give the same talk three
times in a decreasing amount of time. After this, all the Bs become speakers and the
As listeners and the same procedure is followed. Research on 4/3/2 shows that not
only does speed of speaking increase from the 4-minute talk to the 2-minute talk, but
there is also a decrease in errors and an increase in grammatical complexity (Arevart
& Nation, 1991).

Vocabulary and Reading

As with the skills of listening and speaking, reading can be an opportunity for learning
through meaning-focused use, deliberate vocabulary learning, and fluency develop-
ment. A distinction is often made between extensive reading and intensive reading.
Extensive reading involves reading for pleasure and reading large quantities of ma-
terial. From a vocabulary perspective, extensive reading can be a way to learn new
vocabulary through meaning-focused input, and to establish, enrich, and develop
fluency with known vocabulary. Where the goal is to learn new vocabulary, this un-
known vocabulary should appear at a density not more than 1 unknown word in
every 50 running words (Hu & Nation, 2000). It should also be repeated with an
optimal space between the repetitions so that previous knowledge is still retained
and yet there is some degree of novelty to the repetition. Ideally, many of the rep-
etitions should involve some degree of generative use, that is, the word occurs in a
new context. For most learners of English, these conditions are most likely to occur in
the numerous series of graded or simplified readers, where books are written within
a limited vocabulary usually with about six vocabulary stages such as 300 words,
700 words, 1,000 words, 1,500 words, 2,000 words, and 2,500 words. Thus at Stage
1, learners at an elementary level (learners with a vocabulary of around 300 words)
can read substantial texts and be familiar with most of the words used in these texts.
Descriptions and evaluations of the books and the various series can be found in Day
and Bamford (1998) and Hill (1997). Nation and Wang’s (1999) research suggests that
learners should be reading at least 1 graded reader every 1-2 weeks, and be reading
at least 20 graded readers a year.
There is some prejudice against graded readers, largely by teachers, because they
feel that graded readers are not authentic in that they involve controlled or adapted
text rather than text intended for native speakers. However, these texts should be
588 NATION

seen as authentic in that they provide conditions under which learners at all levels
of proficiency can read with a degree of comprehension, ease, and enjoyment that
is near that of a native speaker reading unsimplified text. Without graded readers,
reading for a second language learner would be one continuous struggle against
an overwhelming vocabulary level (Nation & Deweerdt, 2001). Teachers need to be
familiar with the various series of graded readers and the procedures for setting up
and running an effective extensive reading program.
Intensive reading usually involves the interactive reading of a text that contains
a fairly heavy vocabulary load. That is, learners are familiar with less than 95% of
the running words in the text. Traditionally, intensive reading involves the teacher
explaining a text to the learners often using the first language for the explanation.
There are other types of intensive reading including Palincsar and Brown’s (1986) re-
ciprocal reading, Scott et al.’s (1984) standard reading exercise, and learners reading
individually with the help of a dictionary. Vocabulary learning during intensive read-
ing fits into the strand of language-focused learning (Nation, 2001) where learners
pay deliberate attention to vocabulary. There are various vocabulary aids and exer-
cise types that are used in intensive reading. These include preteaching of vocabulary,
glossing, matching words in the text with definitions provided at the end of the text,
word part building and analysis, and finding collocations. Nation (2001, pp. 98–108)
has an extensive list of these.
There are important vocabulary coping and learning strategies that can be first
approached through reading. These are guessing the meaning of unknown words
from context clues, using word cards to learn new vocabulary met in reading, using
word parts to help words stick in memory, and using dictionaries to find the meanings
of new words and to enrich knowledge of previously met words. We will look at these
strategies in detail later.
Developing fluency in reading can be done very effectively through the use of speed
reading texts. Typically, these are texts around 500–1,000 words long that contain
no unknown vocabulary and which are accompanied by comprehension questions.
These texts are read under timed conditions and the speed of reading in words per
minute and the comprehension score are noted on charts. Most learners are expected to
double their reading speed after 3–4 weeks’ practice, reading four or five texts a week.
It is usually not difficult for learners to increase their reading speed because initially
they tend to read very slowly at speeds around 100 words per minute. Untrained
native speakers can read at 250 words per minute and it is possible with practice
to reach speeds around 500 words per minute. Speed reading courses encourage
fluent access to vocabulary. The conditions needed for fluency development are (1)
no unfamiliar language features including no unknown vocabulary in the text, (2)
a focus on the message of the text, (3) some pressure to perform at a higher than
normal speed, and (4) quantity of such practice. These conditions may also be met
by getting learners to read graded readers that are below their normal level. That is,
a learner who is reading a Stage 4 graded reader for meaning-focused vocabulary
growth where 98% of the running words are already known, should be reading a
Stage 2 or 3 reader for fluency development where 100% of the running words are
known.

Vocabulary and Writing

Studies have shown that there is a relationship between richness of vocabulary in
writing, the learners’ level of proficiency, and raters’ assessment of the quality of the
writing. There does however seem to be a considerable lapse of time before items that
are learned receptively become a part of learners’ productive use in writing. Corson’s
 32. TEACHING AND LEARNING VOCABULARY 589

(1995) work on the lexical bar suggests that it is important for learners to be able
to display their knowledge of academic vocabulary in writing to show that they are
members of the academic community.
Just as it is possible to design speaking activities to help learners focus on and use
target vocabulary, so it is possible to design writing activities that help items in the
input to the writing task become a part of the written output. This is likely to be most
effective if the items focused on are already part of the learners’ receptive vocabulary.
Linked skills activities can be a major means of bringing receptive vocabulary into
productive use.
A linked skills activity consists of about three activities that build on each other
in a sequence and involve a mixture of listening, speaking, reading or writing. In
linked skills activities aimed at writing, the writing activity will be the final part of
the sequence. For example, a reading, speaking, and writing linked skill sequence
could be arranged in the following way: (1) The learners read a text on a topic
like family violence, (2) they then form small groups and discuss what they have
read, guided by some discussion questions prepared by the teacher or by following
a set format of questions, and (3) after discussing, they then work together to pro-
duce a written report of the results of their discussion. If the topic is a difficult one,
or if learners’ proficiency is low, step 2, the discussion, could be carried out in the
first language. Research (Lameta-Tufuga, 1994) has shown that discussion in the first
language can result in better performance in the final task in the second language,
partly because learners truly get to grip with the ideas, and the necessary second lan-
guage vocabulary gets clarified and set in a helpful context during the first language
discussion.
The Dictogloss activity (Wajnryb, 1988) is a linked skills activity where learners lis-
ten to a text, take notes while they listen, work together in small groups to reconstruct
the text, and then compare their text with the original.
Activities that directly focus on vocabulary can encourage the use of the vocabulary
in later writing, but research indicates that preteaching has to be substantial before it
affects the following task (Graves, 1986).
Linked skills tasks encourage the development of writing fluency, largely because
by the time the learners do the final writing task, they are well in control of the
language and ideas that they have to deal with. They are thus able to perform at a
higher level than normal because of this preparation, and this is one of the conditions
necessary for fluency development.

Vocabulary Strategies
There are four major vocabulary learning and coping strategies that need to be worked
on until learners are able to use them with confidence and ease. This means that each
strategy needs to be studied, practiced with feedback, and developed to a high level
of fluency. Typically this will involve working on the strategy for several weeks for a
few minutes several times a week. The strategies deserve such time and effort because
they enable learners to deal with the thousands of low frequency words that they
will meet in their use of English. After learners know the high frequency words of
the language, the teacher’s main focus should be on strategy development. Strategy
development, however, should start while the learners are working on high frequency
vocabulary.

Guessing from Context. The most important strategy is guessing the meaning
of unknown words from context clues. Some researchers do not like to use the term
“guessing” and prefer a term like “inferring” because the process should be systematic
590 NATION

and focused on a range of available clues. It is most convenient to develop the strategy
through reading and there are several important prerequisites if guessing is going to
be successful. The learners must have developed some skill in reading and should
read a lot. Ninety-eight percent of the running words in the texts that are used for
guessing should be already familiar to the learners. This means that there will be a
substantial amount of comprehensible supportive context for each unfamiliar word,
on average about 50 familiar words. If these prerequisites are satisfied, then training in
guessing can have useful effects. Training can focus on the linguistic clues available for
guessing—the part of speech of the word, its immediate context, and its wider context
of conjunction relationships—and on the background knowledge clues. Because the
linguistic clues are more generalizable, these should get more attention, but successful
guessing depends on a combination of a language item and a message focus. Initially
guessing may be slow, but the aim is to reach a level of skill where guessing does not
disrupt the flow of reading.

Learning from Word Cards. Rote learning of second language words and their first
language translations has long been out of favor in language teaching. However, there
is a very substantial amount of research to show that such learning is very efficient and
effective and that there are useful guidelines to follow to optimize such learning. It is
important that this direct learning supports and is supported by opportunities to meet
and use words in context and to develop fluency in using the words. The four strands of
learning from meaning-focused input, deliberate study (of which learning from word
cards is a part), learning from meaning-focused output, and fluency development
should be equally present in a course, each occupying about the same amount of
course time.
The learning from word card strategy involves learners in making small cards
about 1.5 inches (4 cm) by 1.2 inches (3 cm) and writing useful vocabulary taken from
lists, reading, or lessons on one side and the first language translation on the other
side of the card. Phrases may be written as well as words. Other information can be
added to the card, but in general it is best to keep the cards simple. Some dictionaries,
the COBUILD dictionary and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, mark
high frequency words in the dictionary and learners should initially focus on these.
The learners should carry a pack of about 50 cards around with them held together
by a rubber band and when they have a free moment, for example while traveling
on the bus or train or waiting for someone, they quickly go through the cards trying
to recall the meaning of each word and turning the card over when they cannot in
order to see the meaning. Learning is most effective if the following guidelines are
followed.

1. Try to retrieve the meaning of the word before turning the card over to look at
the translation. This retrieval is the factor that is important for learning.
2. Space the repetitions so that going through the cards is not concentrated in
an hour of study, but is spread a few minutes at a time across the day and
week. Ideally the repetitions should become increasingly spaced, eventually
with intervals of a month or more between repetitions.
3. Keep changing the order of the cards in the pack. This avoids serial learning
where one word becomes the cue for the following word. It also allows words
requiring more attention to be placed at the beginning of the pack and others
that are easily learned to be placed in other packs or later in the pack.
4. Say the word to yourself when looking at the card. This helps words enter long-
term memory.
 32. TEACHING AND LEARNING VOCABULARY 591

5. Use L1 translations when making the cards. These are preferable to L2 defini-
tions because they are easier to understand. Several pieces of research have
shown the superiority of L1 translations over L2 definitions (Nation, 2001,
p. 304).
6. Where a word is difficult to learn, make sure you have a clear idea of its pro-
nunciation, and use mnemonic tricks like the keyword technique (Nation, 2001,
pp. 311–314) or breaking the word into prefix, stem, and suffix to see related
forms and the meaning of the parts. Putting the word in an illustrative sentence
may also make it easier to learn.
7. Avoid putting related words together in the same pack of cards. Opposites,
synonyms, and members of the same lexical set like names of fruit, months of
the year, or things in the kitchen should not be learned at the same time because
they tend to interfere with each other and make learning more difficult (Nation,
2000).
8. When the words have been learned receptively (see the L2 word recall the
L1 translation) they should then be learned productively (see the L1 transla-
tion and recall the L2 word). Productive learning is more difficult than recep-
tive learning. If time is short and there is a need to choose between receptive
and productive learning, it is more effective to do productive learning because
this includes the knowledge needed for receptive use as well as for productive
use.

Learning from word cards is a very effective way to quickly boost vocabulary size.
Learners should make their own cards because making the cards is the first important
meeting with the words that allows later retrieval. It is not unusual to be able to
correctly retrieve the meaning of about 70% of the words in a pack after one run
through the pack.
Word cards are much more preferable than vocabulary notebooks. Vocabulary note-
books have the disadvantages of presenting the word and its meaning together and
thus not providing an opportunity for retrieval. The words are in a fixed sequence
and thus flexibility of attention is lost.
Learners need training and encouragement in the use of word cards and this can
take the form of rules to learn, demonstrations of learning, display of cards, and
reports on successes and problems in learning.

Using Word Parts. As we have seen, a large proportion of English words come
from French, Latin, or Greek. As a result many English words have prefixes and
suffixes, and have stems that appear in other words, for example, transport, porter,
importation, deportation, important, reporter, supportive, export. In general, the suffixes
mostly signal the part of speech of the word, although some like -less, -ful, and -able
have strong lexical meanings. The prefixes often add a strong lexical meaning to the
word, sometimes more than the stems do.
There have been several frequency counts of prefixes that show that a small num-
ber of prefixes occur very frequently while the remainder are of rather low frequency.
Bauer and Nation (1993) created a graded list of affixes based on the criteria of fre-
quency (the number of different words containing the affix), regularity (how much
the spoken or written form of the stem or affix changes when they are joined), pro-
ductivity (how much the affix is still used to create new words), and predictability
(the number and relative frequency of different meanings of the affix i.e., how easy
it is to predict that a particular form will have a particular meaning). This list can be
used as a rough syllabus for dealing with affixes.
592 NATION

Level 1
A different form is a different word. Capitalization is ignored.

Level 2
Regularly inflected words are part of the same family. The inflectional categories
are: plural; third person singular present tense; past tense; past participle; -ing;
comparative; superlative; possessive.

Level 3
-able, -er, -ish, -less, -ly, -ness, -th, -y, non-, un-, all with restricted uses.

Level 4
-al, -ation, -ess, -ful, -ism, -ist, -ity, -ize, -ment, -ous, in-, all with restricted uses.

Level 5
-age (leakage), -al (arrival), -ally (idiotically), -an (American), -ance (clearance), -ant
(consultant), -ary (revolutionary), -atory (confirmatory), -dom (kingdom;
officialdom), -eer (black marketeer), -en (wooden), -en (widen), -ence (emergence),
-ent (absorbent), -ery (bakery; trickery), -ese (Japanese; officialese), -esque (pic-
turesque), -ette (usherette; roomette), -hood (childhood), -i (Israeli), -ian (phoneti-
cian; Johnsonian), -ite (Paisleyite; also chemical meaning), -let (coverlet),
-ling (duckling), -ly (leisurely), -most (topmost), -ory (contradictory), -ship (stu-
dentship), -ward (homeward), -ways (crossways), -wise (endwise; discussion-wise),
anti- (anti-inflation), ante- (anteroom), arch- (archbishop), bi- (biplane), circum-
(circumnavigate), counter- (counter attack), en- (encage; enslave), ex- (ex-president),
fore- (forename), hyper- (hyperactive), inter- (inter-African, interweave), mid- (mid-
week), mis- (misfit), neo- (neo-colonialism), post- (post-date), pro- (pro-British),
semi- (semi-automatic), sub- (subclassify; subterranean), un- (untie; unburden).

Level 6
-able, -ee, -ic, -ify, -ion, -ist, -ition, -ive, -th, -y, pre-, re-.

Level 7
Classical roots and affixes

The main value in learning word parts is to use them as a kind of mnemonic for
new vocabulary. This works in a way similar to the keyword technique in that the new
word is broken into parts, then its meaning is rephrased to contain the meaning of the
parts. This then relates the new knowledge of the word form and its meaning to the
old knowledge of the word parts and their meaning. So, the word progression would
be broken into pro- (forward), -gress- (to move), -ion (noun) and have its meaning
phrased as “a movement forward.”
Using this word part strategy involves learning a relatively small number of prefixes
and suffixes (about 20–40), being able to recognize them in words, and being able to
relate their meanings to the meaning of the word with the help of a dictionary. Like
all the vocabulary strategies we have looked at, this strategy deserves teaching time
because of the large number of words it can be applied to.

Using a Dictionary. The guessing from context strategy can provide access to the
meaning of a word in a given context. One of the steps in such a strategy can be check-
ing that a guess is correct by looking up the word in a dictionary. The guessing from
 32. TEACHING AND LEARNING VOCABULARY 593

context strategy can also be a way of acquiring new vocabulary. Dictionary use may
also have this goal, especially if the learner is able to make use of the various kinds
of information in a dictionary. Learners’ dictionaries like the (COBUILD English dic-
tionary, like the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, and the Oxford Advanced
Learner’s Dictionary) contain a wealth of information on the range of aspects of what is
involved in knowing a word. In addition, they attempt to present this information in
as clear and as accessible a way as possible, through the use of controlled defining vo-
cabularies, numerous examples of words in use, and information about related words.
Research on dictionary use, however, shows that most learners make limited use of
this information and are largely unfamiliar with how to make use of the information
provided. Training in the use of dictionaries can have benefits both for receptive and
productive vocabulary knowledge.
Because most defining vocabularies are around 2,000 words, learners will need to
have control of the high frequency words of English before making use of monolingual
dictionaries. Before this, bilingual and bilingualized dictionaries need to be used, and
training in dictionary use can begin with these.

Vocabulary Testing
The need to focus on the high frequency vocabulary has often been mentioned in this
survey of vocabulary learning and teaching. There are now several tests that help
teachers discover whether their learners know the high frequency words of English
and to what extent the low frequency vocabulary is known.
The Vocabulary Levels Test (Schmitt, Schmitt, & Clapham, 2001: Schmitt, 2000;
Nation, 2001) uses the following format:

1 business
2 clock part of a house
3 horse animal with four legs
4 pencil something used for writing
5 shoe
6 wall

It is divided into five levels: the 2,000 word level (high frequency words), the 3,000
word level (low frequency), the 5,000 word level (low frequency), the AWL level
(high frequency for learners with academic purposes), and the 10,000 word level (low
frequency). Each level contains ten blocks of items like the one illustrated here and
thus tests 30 words. It tests receptive knowledge and does not require the learners to
have a precise knowledge of the meaning of each word because the distractors are
not related in meaning. It measures whether there is some knowledge of the word to
build on. There is also a productive levels test (Laufer & Nation, 1999) that uses items
like those shown next. It is also divided into the same five levels as the Vocabulary
Levels Test.

They need to spend less on adminis and more on production.

He saw an ang from Heaven.
The entire he of goats was killed.
Two old men were sitting on a park ben and talking.
She always showed char toward those who needed help.

The tests are diagnostic tests intended to help teachers find out whether their
learners know the high frequency words, and how many low frequency words they
594 NATION

know. This is important because the way teachers deal with high frequency and low
frequency words should differ considerably.
There is now a growing body of research on vocabulary testing and an excellent
book (Read, 2000) devoted solely to this topic. A common finding in vocabulary testing
research is that if learners are tested on the same words using different test formats, the
results correlate at .7. This indicates that while there is a substantial amount of shared
variance, there are also substantial differences between the tests. Different formats
tap different aspects of vocabulary knowledge with different degrees of sensitivity.
This has implications for choosing vocabulary tests and for measuring vocabulary
learning in experimental research.
When choosing a test to use with learners, it is important to think clearly about
what aspects of knowledge need to be measured (see Table 32.2) and what kind of
knowledge (receptive/productive, precise knowledge/partial knowledge) is most
suitable and fair to measure (Joe, Nation, & Newton, 1996).
For example, when designing a weekly test to encourage vocabulary learning and
to see what is remembered of the new words met during the week, the teacher should
be aware that learning a word is a long-term cumulative process and only partial
knowledge could be expected after one or two meetings. This partial knowledge,
however, is a very important first step toward gaining full control of the word. The
most appropriate kind of test in these circumstances is one that focuses on a very
central aspect of word knowledge, knowing the meaning of a word, and that allows
the learners to make use of partial knowledge. A receptive multiple-choice test using
first language synonyms, or a matching test with three or four words and six or seven
simply expressed definitions, could be a sensible choice.
When measuring vocabulary learning in experimental research, it is very useful
to test the same words in several different ways. For example, in an experiment in-
vestigating the amount of vocabulary learning from graded reading, if there were
three tests of the same words, say a multiple-choice test, an interview test, and a col-
location test, then the strength of knowledge of each word could be determined and
different types and strengths of knowledge could be related to the different ways the
words occurred in the texts.
Vocabulary teaching is usually seen as teaching words. A major aim of this review
has been to show that there is much more to it than this. Vocabulary teaching should
have different focuses when learners move from high frequency to low frequency
vocabulary learning. For the teacher this means a move from a focus on particular
high frequency words to a focus on strategies. For the learners, the change will not be so
noticeable as learners should continue to expand their vocabulary. Vocabulary teach-
ing must also be seen as ensuring that there is a balance of opportunities to learn from
each of the strands of meaning-focused input, language-focused learning, meaning-
focused output, and fluency development. Neglect of one or more of these strands will
mean that learning is not efficiently done and that vocabulary is unlikely to be ready for
use. Vocabulary learning needs to occur within a well-planned vocabulary program.

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596
33

Taking Stock of Research and

Pedagogy in L2 Writing
John S. Hedgcock
Monterey Institute of International Studies

Like facets of second language (L2) learning examined elsewhere in this volume, L2
writing entails a spectrum of theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical developments
that are difficult to synthesize in a single, coherent survey. Silva (1993) noted that, even
as recently as the early 1990s, the discipline lacked a “comprehensive theory” (p. 668).
L2 writing has nonetheless come into its own as a field of inquiry, generating diverse
research and scholarship. This chapter examines several of the field’s central under-
pinnings, drawing on developments in applied linguistics, TESL/TEFL, cognitive
psychology, and composition studies that have led to the dynamic, interdisciplinary
nature of L2 writing studies. The discussion likewise explores trends that have en-
gaged L2 writing experts in recent decades, among them the conceptualization of L2
writing as a specialized literacy, the interplay among literate skills, advances in peda-
gogy, studies of expert and peer response, and the reshaping of assessment practices.
Through this review, I hope to highlight ways in which L2 writing, as a commu-
nity of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), has become diversified in terms of its goals,
knowledge sources, and methods of inquiry. As in many emergent disciplines, the
growing pains experienced by the field have been characterized by no shortage of
self-conscious questioning and polemics (Benesch, 1993, 2001; Leki, 2000; Pennycook,
2001). Two significant and related influences are sure to affect the focus of research
and pedagogy as the L2 writing community shapes its future agenda. The first of these
involves social constructionism, whereas the second concerns an increasingly critical
approach to scholarship and pedagogy among the field’s experts.

SURVEYING THE DISCIPLINARY LANDSCAPE IN L2 WRITING

RESEARCH AND PEDAGOGY

Unlike research in L1 composition and literacy, with its long and well-documented his-
tory (Berlin, 1987), L2 writing research has a comparatively short biography. With the
exception of research in contrastive rhetoric and ESL, scant findings were reported in
the literature prior to 1980. Leki (2000) echoed this assessment, noting that “relatively
597
598 HEDGCOCK

little writing research appears in the main applied linguistics periodicals” (p. 101).
Despite its embryonic nature, L2 writing research merits serious attention as a vital
area of inquiry in L2 learning and teaching. To establish principles for formulating a
coherent research agenda and instructional paradigm, Silva (1990) proposed that the
following “basic elements” needed to be featured prominently in the research agenda:
(1) the writer, (2) the L1 reader, (3) the L2 text, (4) the contexts for L2 writing, and (5)
the interaction of these elements (pp. 18–19).
Given the increasing influence of socioculturally oriented approaches to L2 literacy,
I propose merging Silva’s (1990) second and fourth elements and expanding the scope
of several others, as follows:
r The L2 writer (including his or her personal knowledge, language proficiency,
academic skills, attitudes, motivation, cultural orientation, educational needs,
and so on).
r The L2 writer’s texts (as described in terms of genre, purpose, rhetorical mode,
discourse structure, morphosyntactic patterns, lexical features, and so forth).
r The contexts for L2 writing (educational, social, cultural, political, economic, sit-
uational, and physical), including the L2 writer’s audience (e.g., L2 teachers,
instructors in academic disciplines, peer readers, disciplinary peers, correspon-
dents, employers, and so on).
r The dynamic interaction among these components in authentic contexts for writ-
ing (including classrooms, the academic community, the workplace, and so forth).

These primary themes will provide a framework for the major sections of this chapter,
which will examine theoretical and empirical strands, as well as pedagogical issues
that have taken center stage in the professional dialogue in recent years.

Focus on the L2 Writer

With increasing systematicity, L2 writing researchers and educators have focused
more squarely on L2 writers as complex individuals who approach writing in unique
ways. Appropriately, the unique features of L2 writers and their relationships with
their target communities have been examined by a number of authorities (e.g., Bräuer,
2000; Ferris & Hedgcock, 1998; Leki, 1992; Raimes, 1998; Silva, 1993). L2 professionals
have long recognized the sometimes extraordinary literacy demands placed on L2
writers. L1 compositionists have likewise begun to recognize individual and collective
variation among L2 writers, whose needs as language learners and novice writers set
them apart in terms of their linguistic, sociocultural, and educational needs (Cooper
& Odell, 1999). In line with trends in language socialization research (e.g., Norton,
2000), the issue of the writer’s identity has become an influential theme in L2 writing,
focusing researchers’ attention on individual and collective factors such as L1 and
L2 development, ethnicity, race, class, gender, power, and social affiliation patterns
(Benesch, 2001; Clark & Ivanic, 1997; Ivanic, 1998).
A significant implication of writer-based research is that L2 writers represent a dis-
tinct population from monolingual writers. Scholarship has likewise suggested that
L1-based methods should not be applied uncritically to L2 writing research and peda-
gogy (Cumming, 1998; Silva, 1993). L2 writers’ implicit and explicit linguistic knowl-
edge, educational backgrounds, multilingual literacy skills, and strategic abilities may
necessitate instructional practices geared sensitively to the needs of L2 populations
(Leki, 1995a, 2000). Raimes (1985) argued that L2 writers might need “more of every-
thing” in terms of heuristics, content, writing practice, and feedback than their mother
tongue counterparts (p. 250). Moreover, some authorities have proposed that L2
writers should be taught by professionals who have expertise in L2 learning and who
 33. TAKING STOCK OF RESEARCH AND PEDAGOGY 599

are equipped to devote “time and attention across the board to strategic, rhetorical,
and linguistic concerns” (Silva, 1993, p. 670). Although the pedagogical imperative in
L2 writing is certainly more complex than it was in the mid-1980s, Raimes’ appeal for
the profession’s recognition of the unique needs of L2 writers is more prescient than
ever.

Focus on Text: Contrastive Rhetoric and L2 Writing

L2 writers’ texts are likewise inherently distinct from texts produced by mother
tongue writers (Leki, 1991). Following on Kaplan’s (1966) pioneering study, con-
trastive rhetoricians have carefully investigated “the organization of discourse
paradigms and rhetorical structure of text in languages other than English” (Hinkel,
2002, p. 5). Contrastive rhetoric (CR) similarly examines “the effects of NNSs’ L1
rhetorical construction of textual frameworks on the texts that NNSs produce in ESL”
(p. 5). With its primary focus on writers’ products, CR research has ignited lively
discussions of the putative influences of L2 writers’ mother tongues, L1 rhetorical
patterns, and educational traditions on the construction of their written products.
Arguably one of the more controversial strands of L2 writing research, CR has con-
tributed markedly to our understanding of rhetorical patterns in written text, the
frequency of rhetorical features across genres, and patterns of text construction across
languages. CR has similarly informed comparative descriptions of the interactions
among L1 and L2 written genres, morphosyntactic properties, lexical range, textual
devices for building coherence and cohesion, and the role of audience in diverse
rhetorical traditions (Connor & Kaplan, 1987; Panetta, 2001).
In her detailed synthesis of the CR literature, Connor (1996) described ways in
which CR has shaped current knowledge about discursive paradigms in non-
anglophone rhetorical traditions. Connor situated CR as a domain of applied linguis-
tics that has “expanded across interdisciplinary boundaries” to encompass theories
of linguistic relativity, rhetoric, text linguistics, discourse types and genres, literacy,
and translation (p. 7). Connor characterized written discourse as embedded in culture
and inextricably linked with conceptions of literacy. However, lacking a truly unified
theory, CR continues to rely on divergent research methods and sometimes disparate
data sources (Connor, 1996; Hinkel, 2002; Leki, 1991; Panetta, 2001).
Consequently, CR findings can be difficult to compare, and their interpretation has
been subject to serious criticism. Some, for example, have asserted that CR research
is ethnocentric (if not anglocentric) and culturally deterministic (Leki, 1997, 2000;
Raimes, 1998). Others have charged that CR represents L2 texts as static, essentializes
L2 writers and their home cultures, and neglects to address the importance of audience
in L2 writing (Kubota, 1999; Scollon, 1997). Nonetheless, CR research has not only
expanded the knowledge base about the nature of text and written discourse but
also informed L2 instruction by suggesting principles for guiding L2 writers toward
structuring their texts to meet the expectations of L2 readers (Kirkpatrick, 1997).

Socioeducational Contexts for L2 Writing

A key premise of CR and related disciplines such as text linguistics and corpus analy-
sis holds that all written communication is embedded in communities of readers and
writers (Connor, 1996; Panetta, 2001). These fields have generated quantitative and
qualitative studies of particular groups of novice writers and their unique needs. This
research has effectively demonstrated that all texts, text types, and genres transacted
within communities of writers reflect the purposes and values of those communities
(Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Johns, 1997, 2002b; Swales, 1990, 1998). Although much
exploration of context remains to be done, contextually oriented inquiry has, in fact,
600 HEDGCOCK

profoundly influenced the character, content, and practices of L2 writing research and
instruction.

Social Constructionism, Genre Studies, and ESP/EAP. Current-traditional ap-

proaches to composition pedagogy entailed the imitation and reproduction of rhetor-
ical patterns or modes (e.g., exposition, illustration, comparison, classification, argu-
mentation, and so on) based on literary models and student-generated samples. L2
writing instruction designed along these lines was also characterized by a focus on
morphosyntactic and lexical accuracy (Kroll, 2001; Silva, 1990). In the 1970s, how-
ever, ESL writing instruction at the postsecondary level “began to turn away from
a linguistic approach and look to L1 perspectives for insights” (Leki, 2000, p. 100).
Although traditional, product-oriented approaches have hardly become extinct in L1
and L2 composition classrooms, L2 writing researchers and scholars have developed
an understanding of the inherently social nature of literacy development—writing
skills, in particular.
The acceptance of social constructionist, or socioliterate, views of L1 and L2 literacy
development has precipitated considerable progress in theory building and classroom
instruction. Johns (1997) defined and synthesized approaches to the social construc-
tion of discourses, maintaining that, according to socioliterate principles, “literacies
are acquired through exposure to discourses from a variety of social contexts” (p. 14).
By means of this exposure, which may entail an array of locally designed instructional
practices, learners construct their own genre theories: “In this view, the role of learn-
ers is an active one: Students are constantly involved in research into texts, roles, and
contexts and into the strategies that they employ in completing literacy tasks within
specific situations” (Johns, 1997, p. 15). By acknowledging this socially-informed,
discursively-based perspective on writing instruction, L2 professionals have realized
that effective writing instruction must enable students to become readers and writ-
ers of the genres and text types associated with the Discourses (Gee, 1996, 1999),
communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), and literacy clubs (Smith, 1988) that
they aspire to join. These Discourses include educational, professional, and vocational
communities comprising all manner of expert and novice practitioners.
As L2 writing and literacy studies have “become more interested in literacy as
social practice” (Leki, 2000, p. 101), inquiry and instructional practice over the last
two decades have identified L1 and L2 writing activities as components of a complex
process of literacy development. The cultures and social contexts in which various
literacies emerge inevitably influence these developmental processes (Berkenkotter &
Huckin, 1995; Cook-Gumperz, 1986; K. Hyland, 2000, 2002; Schleppegrell & Columbi,
2002; Spack, 1997). Thus, literacy experts no longer view the emergence of literacy as
a unitary psychocognitive process that unfolds independent of sociocultural context:
“Different sorts of literacy skills . . . develop to serve the needs of each social/cultural
group” (Grabe & Kaplan, 1996, p. 14).
Against the backdrop of social constructionist and socioliterate views, some L2
writing experts have suggested that L2 writing instruction may produce optimal
results when it focuses on genre-specific rhetorical features, audience expectations,
and tools for improving lexicogrammatical variety and accuracy (Byrd & Reid, 1998;
Ferris, 2002; Ferris & Hedgcock, 1998). As a construct and a practical instrument,
genre has achieved a prominent position in the field of L2 writing. In her appraisal of
the uses and misuses of genre analysis, Hyon (1996) referred to genre as “a popular
framework for analyzing the form and function of nonliterary discourse” and “a tool
for developing educational practices in fields such as rhetoric, composition studies,
professional writing, linguistics, and English for specific purposes (ESP)” (p. 693).
Echoing Hyon’s (1996) portrayal of the value of genre studies in the ESL/EFL context,
Johns (2002c) identified eight principles that suggest directions for L2 writing theory,
research, and educational practice:
 33. TAKING STOCK OF RESEARCH AND PEDAGOGY 601
r “Texts are socially constructed” (p. 12). Community and culture strongly influ-
ence text processing and production.
r Texts are purposeful, their functions being determined by the context and com-
munity.
r Some genres enjoy more prestige than others.
r Community constraints may govern textual conventions, and novice writers may
need to work within these boundaries.
r The grammar of expository texts and the associated metadiscourse serve collec-
tive and individual purposes within a genre and context.
r Communities and contexts regulate the features of texts (e.g., content, argumen-
tation style, and so on).
r “Genres are ideologically driven” (p. 13). All texts reflect the values and purposes
of those who produce and process them.
r The linguistic features of texts and the associated metadiscourse “should never
be taught separately from rhetorical considerations,” as expert writers select and
use language purposefully (p. 13).

In this socially grounded framework, genre serves as a vehicle for understanding

the formal properties of L1 and L2 texts, as well as the value systems and “ways of
being” (Geertz, 1983) aligned with them (Paltridge, 1997, 2001). Genres “provide ways
for getting things done among readers and writers whose cultures and communities
mold their literacy practices” (Johns, 1997, p. 15). Consequently, L2 writing profes-
sionals who work in English for Special Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic
Purposes (EAP) have embraced the commonsense precept that, in order to become
proficient in using and producing particular genres, one must learn to understand,
analyze, reproduce, and even critique those genres.
ESP, originally a pedagogical approach designed for ESL and EFL learners seeking
to develop English language skills rather quickly, had pragmatic aims. ESP profes-
sionals emphasized registers, morphosyntactic features, and rhetorical patterns in
particular disciplines, as in the English for Science and Technology (EST) tradition
(Johns & Dudley-Evans, 1991; Robinson, 1992; Swales, 1985). Investigators embracing
a functional-systemic approach gradually shifted their research focus from discrete
features of register (e.g., lexical repetition, pronoun anaphora, prepositional phrases,
and so on) to more global discursive patterns, including the arrangement of infor-
mation in texts and rhetorical variation across text domains (Bhatia, 1993; Halliday &
Martin, 1993; Martin, 1992).
EAP has taken a somewhat different direction, given its mission to equip ESL
and EFL writers with more broadly defined academic literacy skills necessary for
undergraduate and graduate study in English-medium institutions. For example,
EAP curricula in North American universities are often designed to prepare stu-
dents for required composition courses (Harklau, Losey, & Siegel, 1999). Accordingly,
EAP courses aim to guide students through the instructional challenges that English-
speaking students confront (Dudley-Evans & St. John, 1998). The usual purpose of
EAP instruction “is to enable students to write better not for EAP writing classes but for
academic purposes” (Leki & Carson, 1997, p. 39). Nonetheless, critics have identified
disjunctions between the tasks and texts required in EAP courses and those required in
academic disciplines. EAP writing courses may not, in fact, demand the same genres
and text types required in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Leki and Car-
son (1994, 1997) reported that EAP writing prompts largely involved personal topics
leading to self-expressive text forms. Meanwhile, assignments in academic disciplines
primarily demanded writing about source texts, with expressive writing representing
but a small fraction of the total.
Genre knowledge, of course, is not an instructional aim in itself; rather, it serves
as a vehicle for engaging with core content. Early ESP and EAP models focused on
602 HEDGCOCK

rhetorical and grammatical descriptions of discipline-specific texts (e.g., laboratory re-

ports, bibliographic summaries, political briefs, memos, analytic essays, and so forth),
with a view toward enabling writers to imitate textual prototypes. In contrast, soci-
oliterate and genre-based instructional models aim to represent texts and genres as
socially constructed artifacts exemplifying dynamic interactions among participants
within (and across) disciplinary communities (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Johns,
1997; Swales, 1990). Rather than training novice writers simply to reproduce “recog-
nisable genres,” genuine genre-based literacy instruction views writing “as an act of
communication” in which literacy constitutes “a joint journey through ideas” (Lit-
tlewood, 1995, p. 433). Those who have successfully investigated and experimented
with socioliterate and genre-based writing pedagogies likewise stress the instability
and fluidity of genres, which can only be fully understood when linked to the social
practices of experts and novices who write in them (Freedman & Medway, 1994; Johns,
2002a, 2002c; Ramanathan & Kaplan, 2000).

Critical Pedagogy and L2 Writing. With a number of scholars appealing to

“Freirean notions of liberatory literacy practices” (Grabe & Kaplan, 1996, p. 32), the
ethical and political dimensions of L2 writing instruction, including socioliterate mod-
els and ESP/EAP, have come under careful scrutiny in recent years (cf. Freire, 1970,
1985, 1994; Freire & Macedo, 1987). Zamel (1993) argued that academic literacy in-
struction should enable writers to comprehend, analyze, and negotiate the demands
of academic disciplines. Because academic writing varies widely across disciplines,
L2 writers may find themselves underequipped to investigate this variation and to
produce writing deemed successful by disciplinary faculty. Zamel thus recommended
the adoption of a critical view of “academic” genres as presented in writing courses
and the disciplines, encouraging professionals and students to question the discourse
and its power relations. Benesch (2001) and others have similarly challenged assump-
tions about the genuine educational “needs” of L2 writers—and how they are served
by teachers and institutions—in the context of economic and political influences on
literacy education at the tertiary level.
In line with a growing number of L2 writing experts, Belcher and Braine (1995)
pointed out that we should no longer understand academic literacy instruction as
“neutral, value-free, and nonexclusionary” (p. xiii). L2 writing scholarship has thus be-
gun to address issues of critical pedagogy, including critical needs analysis
(Benesch, 1993, 1996; Leki, 2000), critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995), criti-
cal writing about academic genres (Benesch, 2001; K. Hyland, 2002), the complexity
of text appropriation and plagiarism (F. Hyland, 2000; Pennycook, 1996), race and
class issues (Canagarajah, 1993; Vandrick, 1995), gender (in)equality (Belcher, 1997),
and identity (Norton, 1997). A major thread in applications of critical pedagogy to L2
literacy education stems from the charge that social constructionist approaches over-
look “sociopolitical issues affecting life in and outside of academic settings” (Benesch,
2001, p. xv). Whereas ESP/EAP and socioliterate approaches maintain that writing
instruction always has social purposes, critical pedagogy challenges the precept that
those purposes are necessarily beneficial to novice writers.

Toward Multidimensionality and Interdisciplinarity

The L2 writing literature reveals progress toward developing a comprehensive frame-
work for understanding L2 writers, L2 texts, and the socioeducational contexts of L2
writing (see Silva, Brice, & Reichelt, 1999). The field unquestionably needs extensive,
in-depth research on writers, their strategies, their processes, their perceptions of dis-
course communities, and the influences of writing instruction. The preceding review
nonetheless implies progress, albeit uneven, toward a broadly based portrayal of the
 33. TAKING STOCK OF RESEARCH AND PEDAGOGY 603

complexity of L2 writing processes, a situation that Pennycook (1997) described as a

positive “pluralisation of knowledge” (p. 263).
An imperative of L2 research and instructional practice should entail promoting a
deeper, broader appreciation of the complex, multilayered relationships among the
variables that drive L2 writers, L2 teachers, literate communities, and educational
institutions. Grabe and Kaplan (1996) formulated three generalizations to summarize
the state of the art in L2 writing as of the mid-1990s: (1) Research findings are often
contradictory; (2) Numerous outcomes and interpretations reflect anticipated find-
ings and coincide with L1 findings; (3) Advances in L2 writing research will partly
depend on “carefully developed studies and research designs” and “more carefully
controlled research situations” (p. 143). I would argue that these global assessments
aptly characterize the state of the art at the beginning of the 21st century.
Conscious of its role in shaping theory and practice, the discipline has identified
salient issues of concern to researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and students
(Leki, 2000; Smoke, 1998; Tannacito, 1995). The preceding discussion surveys themes
of interest and urgency in L2 writing; the following section touches on empirical and
practical issues that have gained prominence in the field’s professional agenda. Before
shifting to a treatment of pedagogical praxis and innovation, I would like to suggest
that L2 writing professionals stand to benefit from establishing inter- and crossdis-
ciplinary alliances as a means of invigorating dialogue and deepening awareness of
how much we have yet to learn about L2 writers, their struggles, and the complexity of
their written products. The divergent directions taken by applied linguists and com-
positionists (cf. Leki, 2000) could possibly lead the field’s participants back toward
converging interests. L2 writing may, indeed, lack a unified set of purposes. How-
ever, singleness of mind and unity of mission are perhaps neither likely nor desirable
(Hedgcock, 2002).
Silva, Leki, and Carson (1997) maintained that L2 writing could be fixed somewhere
near “the intersection of second language studies and composition studies” (p. 399).
In a similar appraisal of disciplinary boundaries, Matsuda (1999) called for enhanced
interaction among TESL/TEFL professionals and composition specialists, noting that
“until fairly recently, discussions of [ESL] issues in composition studies have been few
and far between “ (p. 699). I would tentatively concur with Matsuda in disfavoring a
merger. Such an alliance would be impractical, given the vast differences in orientation
and agenda between the applied linguistics/TESL/TEFL/FL constituencies on the
one hand and L1 composition communities on the other. Furthermore, as a community
of practice, L2 writing stands to gain from a plurality of voices and the insights of
diverse empirical and pedagogical traditions.

L2 WRITING INSTRUCTION: INNOVATIONS AND

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

In light of socially and contextually grounded views that recognize multiple litera-
cies, L2 writing research and pedagogy have extended their boundaries to include
cognitive and linguistic skills previously viewed as only marginally relevant to com-
position instruction. Among the proficiencies now associated with developing aca-
demic, professional, and vocational literacies, reading represents perhaps the most
important skill area to have been systematically examined by researchers concerned
with the acquisition of L2 literacy. Ferris and Hedgcock (1998) observed that em-
pirical findings supporting “strong connections between reading ability and writing
performance have led . . . researchers to infer that efficient reading skills lay a founda-
tion for the growth of writing proficiency . . . ” (p. 34). Belcher and Hirvela’s (2001) vol-
ume brought together studies of reading-writing links in L2 literacy, at the same time
604 HEDGCOCK

addressing the influences of L1 literacy skills on the development of L2 abilities. In his

state-of-the-art review of L2 reading-writing connections, Grabe (2001) addressed five
literacy interactions: “reading to learn, writing to learn, reading to improve writing,
writing to improve reading, and reading and writing together for better learning”
(p. 15). Thus grounded in the view that L2 writing must be situated with respect
to models of literacy, the discussion will now address instructional issues that have
gained prominence in the recent professional dialogue and that are likely to inform
L2 composition instruction and teacher education in the near future: process-oriented
pedagogies, peer response, expert (teacher) feedback, error treatment, and L2 writing
assessment.

Process-Oriented Writing Instruction

Instructional approaches in L2 composition have in some respects paralleled devel-
opments in L1 composition. In its early days (roughly the mid-1960s), L2 writing
instruction emphasized the production of well-formed sentences. Influenced largely
by audiolingualism, composition pedagogy served mainly to reinforce oral patterns
and to test grammatical knowledge. The writing curriculum typically included con-
trolled compositions designed to give writers practice with selected morphosyntactic
patterns. Also product-oriented, the current-traditional model featured the produc-
tion of connected discourse and the arrangement of sentences into paragraphs based
on prescribed templates. Writing tasks included the imitation of selected rhetorical
patterns (e.g., exposition, classification, comparison, argumentation, and so forth)
based on models (Berlin, 1987).
Still “alive and well in L1 writing instruction” (Grabe & Kaplan, 1996, p. 31), current-
traditional approaches frequently characterize the teaching of writing in many L2 set-
tings. However, process-oriented pedagogies are increasingly pervasive in the North
American educational milieu, including ESL settings, though they are certainly not
widespread in EFL environments. Emig’s (1971) pioneering study of Grade 12 stu-
dents’ composing procedures is often cited as the first to reveal that text construction
processes did not correspond to the linearity of traditional and current-traditional
models. Emig discovered that successful writers seldom followed a straightforward,
cumulative path in creating texts, an observation that led to significant changes in
how L1 composition was taught and eventually to innovations in L2 writing in-
struction. Whereas insights into writing processes have had a profound impact on
L1 and L2 composition theory and practice, no singular “process pedagogy” re-
sulted from this paradigm shift. I have thus deliberately selected the term “process-
oriented” to describe current instructional models. Expressionist views (e.g., Elbow,
1981, 1994; Zamel, 1982, 1983) and cognitivist models in composition theory (e.g.,
Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987; Flower, 1989; Manchón-Ruiz, 1997), for example, have
led to the formulation of a range of methods, procedures, and practices that can all
be characterized as promoting “process writing” (Ferris & Hedgcock, 1998; Kroll,
2001).
We can nonetheless identify core characteristics of process-oriented pedagogies,
which reflect the premise that composing involves the management of numerous
structural and rhetorical systems, with expository and argumentative prose requiring
the greatest complexity (Grabe & Kaplan, 1996). In contrast to the current-traditional
approach, process-oriented pedagogies are marked by the following features, among
others:

r Discovery and articulation of writers’ authorial voices.

r Free writing, journaling, and private writing activities designed to enhance
writers’ fluency, creativity, and exploration of source texts.
 33. TAKING STOCK OF RESEARCH AND PEDAGOGY 605
r Localization of writing processes and texts in authentic contexts to develop writ-
ers’ sense of audience and reader expectations.
r Constructing purposeful tasks that engage writers and promote their investment
in creating meaningful texts.
r Modeling and monitoring of invention, prewriting, and revision strategies.
r Recursive practices such as multidrafting, which demonstrate that writing for an
authentic audience is often a nonlinear, multidimensional process.
r Formative feedback from real readers in peer response workshops, student-
teacher conferences, collaborative writing projects, and so on.
r Provision of meaningful content for writing tasks, with a corresponding emphasis
on representing ideas, rather than solely on producing grammatically accurate
prose.

It has become almost axiomatic that L2 writing instruction should be solidly

grounded in what writers “actually do as they write” (Raimes, 1991, p. 409). In addition
to pointing toward the legitimacy of cognitively and socially informed instructional
options, “the writing process perspective has captured certain important truths about
language” (Grabe & Kaplan, 1996, p. 87). At the same time, we should avoid the pre-
supposition that process approaches represent “a wholly positive innovation” (p. 87).
That is, the principles and practices of process writing are not always compatible with
the cultural, philosophical, and educational orientations of all educational settings or
institutions.

Peer Response
A prevalent practice in process-oriented writing instruction, peer response is em-
braced by many L1 and L2 practitioners and theorists. In their theoretically oriented
yet practical guide on peer response, Liu and Hansen (2002) characterized peer re-
sponse as “the use of learners as sources of information and interactants” for one
another, with the purpose of guiding learners to “assume roles and responsibilities
normally taken on by a . . . trained teacher, tutor, or editor in commenting on and cri-
tiquing . . . drafts in both written and oral formats” (p. 1). In peer groups, novice writers
collaborate to generate ideas, exchange texts, and construct feedback on the content
and form of written drafts. Peer response proponents emphasize the importance of
valuing diversity and cooperative inquiry, as well as the positive affect and learner-
centeredness associated with peer interaction. Nonetheless, classroom practitioners
sometimes report that student writers (particularly novices for whom L2 writing es-
sentially constitutes a form of language practice) resist peer review, strongly preferring
“expert,” teacher feedback (Ferris, 1995, 1997; Hedgcock & Lefkowitz, 1996). Empirical
findings now strongly suggest that, to produce pedagogically valuable results, peer
response processes “must be modeled, taught, and controlled if it is to be valuable”
(Kroll, 2001, p. 228).

Expert Response
Along with peer response, expert teacher feedback processes and their effectiveness
have ignited interesting and spirited exchanges among L2 writing experts, particularly
in the last decade. L2 writing research has consequently produced a growing corpus
of quantitative and qualitative studies of teacher response behaviors, teacher-written
comments and corrections, novice writers’ perceptions of teacher feedback, writers’
feedback incorporation processes, and the formal development of writers’ texts as a
result of teacher intervention. We can divide the theme of expert response into two
broad categories: formative feedback and error feedback.
606 HEDGCOCK

A complement to error feedback and grammatical correction, formative feedback

primarily aims to provide writers with between-draft written or oral commentary to
promote subsequent revisions. The role of expert intervention in L2 writing has be-
come extremely important because process-oriented pedagogies feature multidrafting
as a fundamental aspect of syllabus design and classroom practice and thus rely on
this important form of input. Like peer feedback, teacher intervention can have a
strong impact on the quality of revised texts (Conrad & Goldstein, 1999; Ferris, 2003).
However, studies have shown that expert feedback may not convert to intake or long-
term uptake. Furthermore, expert feedback may not necessarily improve text quality
or develop writers’ autonomous revision skills (F. Hyland, 2000). Ferris et al. (1997),
for example, claimed that reliable and comparable investigations of L2 teacher re-
sponse were “surprisingly rare” (p. 157). A global insight offered by this research is
that the effects of expert feedback depend on writers’ proficiency levels, their edu-
cational needs and expectations, curricular and institutional constraints, the nature
of writing tasks, the focus of teacher commentary, and learner training (Ferris, 2002,
2003; Ferris & Hedgcock, 1998).
The common wisdom that teachers’ marks and corrections are noticed and pro-
cessed by student writers has come under careful scrutiny among experts on both
sides of the error feedback/correction debate. In his critical review of L2 error treat-
ment research, Truscott (1996) proposed that there was “no evidence” favoring gram-
mar correction in L2 writing instruction, boldly asserting that “correction is harmful
rather than simply ineffective” and that “grammar correction should be abandoned,”
in light of the putative absence of “valid reasons” for continuing the practice (p. 360).
Ferris (1999) responded to Truscott’s controversial thesis by acknowledging the latter’s
informed reservations concerning the inadequacy and impracticality of conventional
correction systems. However, Ferris described Truscott’s (1996) appeals as “premature
and overly strong” (p. 1), taking him to task for presenting “limited, dated, incomplete,
and inconclusive evidence” to attack a “pedagogical practice that is. . . highly valued
by students” and on which “many thoughtful teachers spend a great deal of time and
mental energy” (p. 9). In his riposte, Truscott (1999) held his ground by reasserting
that correction is “in general, a bad idea” (p. 121), while supporting Ferris’ (1999) call
for strengthening the error treatment research agenda. Given the state of the error
treatment controversy, conclusions regarding the impact of form-focused feedback
in L2 writing may be a long way off. Nonetheless, Ferris (2002, 2003) summarized
and evaluated numerous studies of teacher intervention, observing that the expres-
siveness and formal accuracy of L2 writers’ texts can, indeed, be improved through
well-constructed teacher commentary.

L2 Writing Assessment
The quality, quantity, frequency, and timing of expert feedback in L2 writing exemplify
several of the evaluative purposes of formative feedback and error treatment, issues
that are connected to performance and proficiency assessment. As an instructional
procedure at the core of an important research effort, summative writing assessment
should perhaps be distinguished from formative feedback, as summative appraisals
are often used by educational agencies and institutions for purposes such as admis-
sions, placement, and exit screening. Because L2 writing represents a “worthwhile
enterprise in and of itself,” practitioners and researchers now recognize the “ever
greater demand for valid and reliable ways to test writing ability, both for classroom
use and as a predictor of future professional or academic success” (Weigle, 2002,
p. 1). The expanding body of books and articles related to writing assessment, as well
as the 1994 debut of the journal, Assessing Writing, attest to the prominent role played
by assessment in the field.
 33. TAKING STOCK OF RESEARCH AND PEDAGOGY 607

Research on the construction, deployment, scoring, validation, and revision of

large-scale instruments such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL)
writing component (formerly the Test of Written English, or TWE) has demonstrated
that measuring student writers’ performance fairly and meaningfully requires metic-
ulous attention to an array of linguistic, rhetorical, and psychocognitive operations
(Cumming, Kantor, & Powers, 2002; Hamp-Lyons & Kroll, 1997). In addition to iden-
tifying principles underlying equitable measurement tools, experts have emphasized
that informative writing assessments must be situated with respect to their contexts
and functions. Weigle’s (2002) review of recent advances in L2 writing research iden-
tified seven key questions concerning the design and implementation of assessment
tools:
r What are we trying to test?
r Why do we want to test writing ability?
r Who are our test takers?
r Who will score the tests, and what criteria . . . will be used?
r Who will use the information that our test provides?
r What are the constraints . . . that limit the amount and kind of information we
can collect about test takers’ writing ability?
r What do we need to know about testing to make our test valid and reliable?
(p. 2)

In response to inquiry into large-scale and classroom assessment practices, the

perils and pitfalls of evaluating students’ texts have become increasingly apparent
(Cumming, 1990; Hamp-Lyons, 1991). Kroll (1998), for example, underscored the
complexity of assessing the writing performance and proficiency of ESL and EFL
writers, stressing the overwhelming evidence that “writing abilities develop in in-
teraction with other language skills” (p. 219). Linguistic accuracy serves as an in-
fluential, and therefore problematic, formal dimension known to influence raters’
perceptions of writing quality (Chiang, 1999; Wolfe-Quintero, Inagaki, & Kim, 1998).
Further complicating the task of appraising student writing is the variation seen across
tasks and texts (Connor & Mbaye, 2002; Reid & Kroll, 1995; Way, Joiner, & Seaman,
2000), as well as reader expectations and raters’ complex (and often biased) decision-
making processes (Cumming, Kantor, & Powers, 2002; Hamp-Lyons & Mathias, 1994;
Weigle, 1999). Leki (1995b) observed that a text judged as “good” in one situation may
not be “successful for all circumstances.” In fact, “different contexts impose differ-
ent, even contradictory, constraints on writers” (p. 24). Furthermore, a single writing
sample (e.g., a timed in-class essay or a research paper) can only represent a single
performance; thus, it may not fairly or fully reflect a writer’s progress or range of abil-
ities. Purves (1992) brought this point home in his comparison of traditional writing
assessments to sporting competitions: Like a novice writer undertaking a summa-
tive writing assessment (e.g., a placement test or the TOEFL writing component), an
athlete succeeds or fails based on an evaluation of a single performance on a single
occasion—not on a longitudinal appraisal of his or her record over time on an array
of tasks (Hamp-Lyons & Condon, 2000; White, 1994, 1995).
Such commonsense insights and criticisms, coupled with scrupulous empirical
studies of numerous assessment variables, have led practitioners and researchers
to raise serious concerns about both reliability and validity—particularly construct
validity—in measuring L2 writing performance. According to Hamp-Lyons and Kroll
(1996), conventional wisdom holds that “no test can be more valid than it is reliable; if
scores are not stable and consistent then they are essentially meaningless and cannot
be valid” (p. 65). Nonetheless, they also noted that “the knife cuts both ways: If a test
is not valid, there is no point in its being reliable since it is not testing any behavior of
608 HEDGCOCK

interest” (p. 65). The complex synergy between reliability and validity has generated
intense discussion and inquiry in the writing assessment community, where experts
continually express reservations regarding the stability and consistency of scoring
procedures, particularly those deployed by raters using holistic scales (Connor &
Mbaye, 2002; Cumming, 1990). Yet, as Cumming, Kantor, and Powers (2002) pointed
out, little research has precisely described what evaluators “attend to when they score
compositions and, in particular, how such assessments correspond to students’ actual
proficiency in writing in a second language.” As a result, “most holistic and other
analytic rating scales lack firm empirical substantiation” (p. 68).
Systematic inquiry into these crucial relationships is well under way; meanwhile,
methodologists and curriculum specialists have situated assessment as fundamental
to the instructional process (e.g., Alderson, Clapham, & Wall, 1995; Bailey, 1998). Ferris
and Hedgcock (1998) maintained that “writing assessment is pedagogical in the sense
that, when reliable and valid, its outcomes inform writers in ways that will directly
and indirectly promote their progress” (p. 227). In the context of process pedagogies
and the increased emphasis on authenticity in L2 literacy instruction, Cohen (2001)
effectively summed up the assessor’s dilemma: “Perhaps the main thing to be said
about the testing of written expression is that it is a poor substitute for repeated
samplings of a learner’s writing ability while not under the pressure of an exam
situation.” Indeed, he wrote, process approaches to L2 composition suggest that “it
is unnatural for a learner to write a draft of a composition and submit it for a grade”
(p. 534).
In view of these contradictions, assessment experts have recognized the lack of
face and construct validity in traditional forms of direct writing assessment. One can
find consensus that instruments must be situated in their contexts before their effec-
tiveness can be measured: “Only when we know what we are seeking to discover
can we claim that a particular kind of assessment is appropriate . . . ” (White, 1995,
p. 34). In addition to constructing suitable instruments that coincide with their contexts
and functions, valid instruments must reflect fundamental measurement precepts. To
remedy the problems identified by Cohen (2001), to promote the interdependence be-
tween valid assessment and meaningful writing instruction, and to match assessment
practices with genuine purposes, the field has moved toward “changing the assess-
ment paradigm” through alternative assessment (Hamp-Lyons & Condon, 2000, p. 7).
The writing portfolio is perhaps the standard-bearing alternative instrument in
L2 composition assessment (Ferris & Hedgcock, 1998; Kroll, 1998; Weigle, 2002). A
writing portfolio consists of multiple samples of student writing that demonstrate
performance on multiple tasks. A portfolio presents a collection “that is a subset of a
larger archive. Theoretically, the archive is the whole of a student’s work, but more
practically and more frequently, it is a subset of writing completed in a class, a program,
a school” (Yancey, 1992, p. 86). Although U.S. educators introduced portfolios in the
1970s, the “current explosion in portfolio-based writing assessment” can be traced to
the mid-1980s (Hamp-Lyons & Condon, 2000, p. 15). Because portfolios “have spread
like wildfire” and so many K-12 and tertiary institutions have created and adapted
portfolio systems, “an incredibly broad range is found” (Hamp-Lyons & Condon,
2000, p. 15).
Due in part to this variation, assessment experts have discouraged instructors from
embracing portfolio assessment uncritically. Although referring primarily to trends
in L1 composition, Elbow’s (1996) observation concerning alternative assessment ap-
plies equally well to L2 writing instruction: “Portfolios are not perfect: They suffer
from being a fad and thus are sometimes used in ill-considered or degraded ways.
But they represent a huge improvement over assessment based on single samples of
writing” (p. 120). To rectify flaws in portfolio designs and assessment procedures, the
L1 and L2 composition communities have produced a considerable body of empirical
 33. TAKING STOCK OF RESEARCH AND PEDAGOGY 609

and critical work aimed at strengthening portfolio assessment (Calfee & Perfumo,
1996; Hamp-Lyons, 1991; Hamp-Lyons & Condon, 2000; Weigle, 2002; White, Lutz,
& Kamusikiri, 1996). A significant outcome of this work has been the formulation of
clear, useful criteria for developing portfolio systems and for specifying the actual
substance of a portfolio document. In their comprehensive book, Hamp-Lyons and
Condon (2000) identified the following characteristics as crucial to constructing and
implementing an effective portfolio instrument: context, range, context richness, de-
layed evaluation, selection, student-centered control, reflection and self-assessment,
growth along specific parameters, and development over time. These principles in
some respects distill the best practices of portfolio-based assessment of L2 writing
as now reflected in the impressive body of theoretical and practical resources on the
topic. Of course, considerable progress remains to be made in perfecting portfolio as-
sessment before it becomes widely adopted in foreign and second language education.

SUMMARY AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

As suggested in my prefatory comments, a chief purpose of this chapter was to trace

dimensions of L2 writing that reflect the discipline’s diversification and growth as a
community of practice. With a research agenda that explicitly features the L2 writer,
L2 texts, contexts for L2 writing, L2 writers’ disciplines, and the dynamic interaction of
these components in authentic contexts, the field has achieved a fuller understanding
of the diverse population of learners and the written products they generate. Cog-
nitively, socially, and culturally based research strands have in numerous respects
complemented formal traditions in empirical writing research. Social constructionism
and genre analysis have demonstrated that texts and their forms are most meaning-
fully described with reference to the sociocultural contexts in which they emerge and
evolve. This productive interplay between research paradigms has led to a realiza-
tion that researchers and practitioners need to understand the value systems driving
writers and their texts.
Notwithstanding these promising developments, a curious gap in the L2 writing
literature is worth examining and addressing. It is perplexing that the procedural di-
mensions of day-to-day classroom writing instruction are so rarely examined in a pro-
fession dedicated to teaching. With a number of exceptions (e.g., Ferris & Hedgcock,
1998; Kroll, 2001; Leki, 1992; Raimes, 1985, 1998), the L2 literature offers a dearth
of extensive discussion of, and explicit guidelines for, the practices and processes of
teaching L2 writing. Instructional activities such as feedback techniques, needs analy-
sis, and assessment have received welcome and appreciated treatment. Nonetheless,
the nuts-and-bolts aspects of planning and delivering instruction are topics worthy of
more extensive discussion and scrutiny. Few sources are available to assist classroom
teachers in developing curricula, constructing syllabi, designing lessons, devising as-
signments, creating effective teaching materials, and perfecting classroom techniques
such as presenting information, facilitating student interaction, and managing student
activities. Given the inevitable growth of the L2 writer population and the consequent
need to prepare teachers who can serve their needs, it is incumbent upon the profes-
sion to develop practical tools for guiding effective instruction.
As empirical inquiry in L2 writing has broadened and become more self-aware, crit-
ical, and socioculturally grounded, pedagogical practices have similarly gravitated
toward a more sociocognitive orientation in how instruction is planned, delivered,
and evaluated. That is not to suggest that the L2 writing profession will not con-
tinue to suffer from an identity crisis due to its sometimes awkward positionality
vis-à-vis applied linguistics, TESOL/TEFL, foreign language education, and the L1
composition/rhetoric community. However, leaders in the field seem to have taken
610 HEDGCOCK

discernible steps toward establishing the discipline’s role and purposes with more
confidence by drawing systematically and reflexively on educational, intellectual,
and empirical traditions that can (and should) inform our practices (Ramanathan &
Atkinson, 1999). Process-oriented approaches to L2 writing instruction, for example,
have been widely (though not universally) embraced in many educational settings. To
evaluate the outcomes and desirability of this influential paradigm shift, researchers
and practitioners have engaged in grounded inquiry, to say nothing of sometimes
painful soul-searching.
No unitary theory or model of L2 writing has yet emerged as a foundation on which
to build a coherent disciplinary identity. In the current, relativist climate of scholarly
inquiry, perhaps a singular theory is neither necessary nor desirable. Be that as it may,
an influential trend that is sure to shape the profession in the 21st century involves
intensified reflexivity between research and pedagogy. Raimes (1998) suggested that
L2 writing teachers, researchers, and theorists should promote the field’s progress by
pursuing multiple types of inquiry. The pursuit of these objectives is perhaps well
under way. Furthermore, no single thematic area within the profession’s realm of
expertise can easily move forward without availing itself of the accumulated knowl-
edge of allied disciplines. The disciplinary conversation on issues such as instructional
processes, peer and expert response, and assessment, for instance, can no longer rely
solely on applied linguistics, TESOL/TEFL, and L1 composition studies. L2 writing
professionals will inevitably be required to call on discoveries in second language
acquisition, computational linguistics, cognitive and educational psychology, critical
studies, semiotics, and so on. In the same way that the boundaries of expertise in L2
writing instruction have broadened to include the social contexts and purposes for
which writers write, research on L2 writers, texts, and contexts now more intentionally
avails itself of a wide sphere of knowledge.

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614
34

Analyses of Second Language

Text and What Can Be Learned
From Them
Eli Hinkel
Seattle University

INTRODUCTION

Analyses of second language (L2) text largely examine L2 writing, while L2 spoken
production is usually investigated in the field of conversational analysis (see Markee,
chap. 20, this volume). Since the emergence of applied linguistics as a discipline in the
1950s and 1960s, three large domains of research have focused on various properties
of L2 written text: structuring of the information flow in discourse, syntactic, lexical,
and rhetorical features employed in L2 text, and to a smaller extent, L2 grammar, and
lexical errors.
In general terms, the analysis of grammatical and lexical errors in L2 written text is
derived from the contrastive (error) analysis that predominated in L2 learning research
between the 1950s and 1970s. Error analysis was based on an assumption that many
(if not most) L2 errors are an outcome of L1 to L2 transfer of syntactic and lexical
regularities and language properties.
Discourse analysis accounts for global features of text and the organization of ideas
in writing. Contrastive rhetoric, as a subdomain of applied linguistics (Kaplan, 1966),
gave rise to and continues to promote an examination of discourse features in the L2
writing of non-native speakers of English (NNSs) (see also chap. 33). It is important to
keep in mind, however, that relatively little research on L2 writing had been carried
out prior to the 1980s, when the numbers of NNSs in U.S. colleges and universities
began to climb dramatically.
Historically, important advancements in contrastive rhetoric were reflected in a
growing body of knowledge about the order and ideational structure of discourse
and discourse moves, also called Discourse Blocs (Kaplan, 1983), in L2 writing. The
innovations in contrastive rhetoric studies coincided with rapid advances in text lin-
guistics. Speaking broadly, text analysis had the goal of identifying global discourse
features that can be marked by means of syntactic and lexical elements, such as

615
616 HINKEL

verb tenses or sentence transitions (Coulthard, 1985; de Beaugrande & Dressler, 1972;
Halliday & Hasan, 1976, 1989; van Dijk, 1985).
In a distinct domain of applied linguistics, investigations in contrastive rhetoric and
discourse structuring in various rhetorical traditions and across different cultures have
also been extended to studies of comparative uses of textual features in L2 written
prose. Analyzing written discourse paradigms and text attributes became the objective
of many studies that worked with L1 writing of native speakers of English (NSs) in, for
example, Australia, Canada, the United States, United Kingdom, and New Zealand,
and those in the English L2 writing of speakers of many other languages. A vast
body of research has thus far compared discourse and textual features employed in
L2 writing of speakers of such languages as (in alphabetical order) Arabic, Chinese,
Czech, Dutch, Farsi, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Hindi, German, Indonesian, Japanese,
Korean, Malay, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Vietnamese, as well as several
varieties of English.
Most studies of various features of L2 discourse and text have been motivated
by immediate and long-term research and curriculum development goals, as well
as pedagogically driven needs of particular groups of L2 students and learners in
various locations, specific interests of individual researchers, available sources of text
data, and/or attempts to apply the findings of predominantly English language-based
text linguistics to L2 text (e.g., Al-Khatib, 2001; Carlson, 1988; Clyne, 1987; Grabe,
1987; Hinkel, 1994; Johnson, 1992; Taylor & Chen, 1991). To date, a coherent picture
of syntactic, lexical, rhetorical, or discoursal features of L2 text has yet to emerge.
However, in sum total, much has been learned about features of text produced by L2
writers in different contexts and for divergent academic, social, and communication
purposes.
This chapter provides an overview of the methods widely used for analyzing L2
discourse and text, and the findings of research on macro and micro features of text.
Additionally, computerized databases of L2 writing and the constraints that seem to
confound analyses of L2 written corpora are briefly discussed.

QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE METHODS OF

L2 TEXT ANALYSIS

Analyzing L2 writing is a time-consuming and laborious process. Investigations of L2

text have varied dramatically in the size of their data samples and types of writing.
Most analyses have consisted of small-scale studies that utilized written texts pro-
duced by one to a half dozen writers (e.g., Arndt, 1993; Choi, 1988; Mauranen, 1996),
and only a few had access to (or resources to work on) larger numbers of texts written
by dozens or hundreds of L2 writers. On the other hand, studies that focused on spe-
cific excerpts of discourse or narrowly defined textual features, such as introductions
to research papers or hedges and modal verbs, include larger samples written by
10 to 25 NNSs (e.g., Basham & Kwachka, 1991; Swales, 1990).
To a great extent, the theoretical frameworks and research methodologies for anal-
yses of L2 discourse and text rely on those developed and formulated in such domains
of applied linguistics as text linguistics, discourse analysis, ethnography, and cogni-
tive psychology. Although much research on L1 English-language writing has been
carried out in such disciplines as rhetoric and composition, on the whole, the study
of rhetoric has had a minimal impact on analyses of L2 text. The philosophical un-
derpinnings of the Anglo-American and other western rhetorical traditions draw on
the classical Aristotelian and Greco-Roman foundational premises (e.g., invention,
organization, and language and stylistics) not easily applicable to L2 discourse and
text. On the other hand, quantitative and qualitative research methods designed for
 34. ANALYSES OF SECOND LANGUAGE TEXT 617

applied linguistics analyses of texts, written primarily in English, have been a great
deal more useful in studies of L2 discourse moves and markers, text construction,
and lexicogrammatical features (Halliday, 1994; Hoey, 1991; Grabe & Kaplan, 1996;
Kaplan, 1988; Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992).
To date, the majority of investigations into L2 writing have focused on the organiza-
tional and ideational structure of L2 discourse and the features of L2 text. Comparative
studies have sought to account for differences and similarities between the proper-
ties of L2 discourse and text and those identified in the L1 writing of native English
speakers who can be, for example, university students or authors of published re-
search articles. In such examinations, comparisons can be made in regard to L1 and
L2 global (macro) discourse construction, arrangements of ideas, cohesion, and co-
herence. Additionally, researchers can scrutinize textual (micro) features that have the
function of marking discourse organization and aiding in the development of cohe-
sive and coherent prose. As with the research on L2 discourse, the primary objectives
of practically all L2 text analyses and comparative studies have stemmed from the
pedagogical needs of L2 writing instruction for university students and academically
bound language learners and professionals.

L2 DISCOURSE AND MACRO FEATURES OF TEXT IN

BROAD STROKES

The contrastive rhetoric hypothesis (Kaplan, 1966) is largely concerned with discourse
structuring and logical organization of information in various rhetorical traditions.
The crosscultural analysis of discourse postulates that systematic differences exist in
how topic continuity is established and coherence is developed in rhetorical traditions
and writing in different languages and cultures. In the case of literate and educated
speakers of various languages, L1-specific ways of organizing discourse and infor-
mation may be transferred to the discourse organization in L2 writing. Thus, the
overarching goal of the contrastive rhetoric hypothesis was to assist teachers and aca-
demically bound ESL students who needed to learn to write in L2 by identifying the
differences among patterns in written discourse.
Global features of L2 written discourse, such as discourse moves, organization,
structuring, as well as attendant issues of clarity, explicitness, fluidity, and contents of
writing, represent broader and more abstract constructs than those commonly exam-
ined in analyses of text (Grabe & Kaplan, 1996; Hinkel, 1997, 1999; Indrasuta, 1988;
Johns, 1997; Kaplan, 2000). For example, a number of studies has been devoted to
stylistic properties of various types of L2 writing, such as textual indirectness in aca-
demic essays or narrative personalization.
In the 1980s and 1990s, research on the L2 writing of university students in a
number of English-speaking countries established that discourse construction and
rhetorical paradigms differ in consistent and important ways in the L1 writing of NSs
and L2 written prose. Additionally, investigations devoted to discourse construction
across languages and cultures have been able to determine that, for instance, marked
similarities exist in the rhetorical development of text written in some European lan-
guages, such as Czech and German, or Asian languages, such as Chinese, Japanese,
and Korean. For example, in German and Czech academic writing, as well as in the
L2 prose of German learners of English and scholars, digressions and deviations from
the main topic are considered to be acceptable, as are repetitions, recapitulations, and
restatements, abstract argumentation, and broad generalizations (e.g., Clyne, 1987;
Cmejrkova, 1996).
On the other hand, classical rhetoric and discourse construction in Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean writing, as well as in the L2 prose of speakers of these languages,
618 HINKEL

have been shown to include predictable organizational paradigms with the main idea
at the end, indirect argumentation, allusions, and references to history and authority
as evidence (Hinds, 1983, 1987, 1990; Matalene, 1985; Park, 1988; Scollon, 1991). Cai
(1999, p. 294) points out that classical Chinese rhetoric and style has an indelible effect
on the academic writing of L2 students in U.S. colleges and universities. According
to the author, in L2 writing instruction, Anglo-American discourse strategies, topic
development, rhetorical and linguistic norms, as well as the “sociocultural contexts
in which these norms are embedded” should be explicitly taught because these “are
essential in English academic writing.”
The division of discourse organization paradigms into what has become known as
“reader-responsible” or “writer-responsible” text was originally proposed by Hinds
(1987, 1990), based on his research on Japanese, Korean, and Chinese writing. Hinds
noticed that in the written discourse in these languages, the main point or the thesis
is not necessarily presented to the reader at the beginning or, alternatively, can re-
main implicit throughout the text. In such texts, the responsibility for determining the
writer’s main idea is left to the reader, who then needs to deduce the writer’s posi-
tion and the central argument from context. On the other hand, in writer-responsible
prose, explicitness, clarity, and lexical precision are considered to be requisite. Hence,
it is the writer’s job to construct discourse and text in which the purpose of writing is
directly stated at the outset, and the writer’s discourse and argument is expected to be
clear and easy to follow. At present, in L2 writing instruction, the concepts of reader-
or writer-responsible texts have become commonplace. Today, it would be difficult to
find an ESL writing textbook that does not mention that in Anglo-American writing,
it is the writer who is responsible for making the text transparent and explicit to the
reader.
Other studies examined discourse construction and rhetorical organization in such
diverse languages as Arabic and Spanish. Specifically, Ostler (1987) found that the L2
writing of Arabic speakers included a significantly higher rates of parallel and coor-
dinate constructions, as well as greater numbers of discourse moves and rhetorical
support elements than were found in the writing of NSs. Sa’adeddin (1989) further
explains that in argumentation and rhetorical persuasion, colloquial Arabic discourse
relies on parallelism, repetition, and broad generalizations, as well as ornate and elab-
orate vocabulary. Thus, according to Sa’adeddin, when writing in English, Arabic
speakers may simply transfer from L1 the usage of coordinate and parallel construc-
tions prevalent in interactive rhetorical style and persuasion. In his study of modern
Arabic writing, Hatim (1991) similarly found that considerations of audience and
interaction with audience play an important role in how Arabic written discourse,
persuasion, and rhetorical moves are constructed.
In regard to the L2 writing of Spanish speakers, research has consistently demon-
strated that they write longer essays and longer, more complex, and elaborated sen-
tences than NSs do (e.g., Carlson, 1988; Montano-Harmon, 1991). In addition, Spanish
speakers use significantly higher rates of coordinate clauses and phrases, long abstract
words, and broad generalizations when compared to those in the writing of NSs of
similar age and educational levels. In fact, Reid’s (1992) study of writing of English,
Spanish, and Arabic speakers demonstrated that the prose of Spanish L1 writers ex-
hibits coordination patterns similar to those that Ostler (1987) identified in the L2
writing of Arabic-speaking university students.
According to some researchers, however, the divergences between L1 and L2 dis-
course structuring can also be attributed to L2 writers’ developmental constraints
and inexperience rather than the transfer of L1 rhetorical paradigms (Mohan & Lo,
1985). Additionally, the studies of published articles written by Chinese and English
speakers (Taylor & Chen, 1991), and essays written by Korean students in a U.S. uni-
versity (Choi, 1988) demonstrated that discourse structuring in L1 and L2 writing can
 34. ANALYSES OF SECOND LANGUAGE TEXT 619

show both differences and similarities. In both cases, the authors note that due to the
internalization of scientific discourse and the effects of English writing instruction in
many countries, the structural divergences between the Anglo-American discourse
organization patterns and those in other rhetorical traditions have been continuously
diminished over time and are likely to become even less pronounced in the future.
On the whole, however, the influence of L1 discourse and rhetorical paradigms in
organizing information represents an established venue in numerous investigations
on writing and text across cultures and languages. To a great extent, a large body of
research on discourse construction patterns in writing in various rhetorical traditions
has led to a greater understanding of many issues that confound ESL writing and its
teaching and learning.
In particular, Silva (1993) highlights the most pronounced differences between prac-
tically all facets of writing in L1 and L2. In his synthesis of 72 published research reports
and empirical studies, Silva points out that L2 writing is crucially distinct from L1 writ-
ing in regard to the writing process, such as composing and revision, and macro fea-
tures of discourse organization. Based on the findings of dozens of studies carried out
prior to 1993, Silva emphasizes that the processes of writing in L2 are fundamentally
different from those entailed in writing in L1, L2 writers engage in less discourse and
text planning, reviewing, and revising than L1 basic writers, while producing L2 text
is far more work- and time-consuming, and revision is demonstrably more difficult.
To summarize Silva’s conclusions, compared to the discourse structuring and de-
velopment in L1 basic and student writing, L2 writers:

r Organize and structure discourse moves differently.

r Take a logically and conceptually different approach to rhetorical argumentation,
persuasion, and exposition/narration.
r Over- or underestimate the amount of readers’ background knowledge and the
need for textual clarity, explicitness, and specificity.
r Differently orient the reader, and introduce and develop topics.
r Employ different strategies for extracting/citing information from sources, as
well as paraphrasing, quoting, and including source material in their writing.
r Develop text cohesion differently, with weak lexical/semantic ties and theme
connections, and a preponderance of overt conjunctive markers.

Silva concludes his overview of research by saying that “L2 writing is strategically,
rhetorically, and linguistically different in important ways from L1 writing” (p. 669).
In light of these fundamental differences, Silva points out that the learning needs of
L2 writers are distinct from those of L1 writers, whether basic or skilled, and that
teachers who work with L2 writers require special and focused training to deal with
cultural, rhetorical, and linguistic differences of their students.
To this end, research into how L2 discourse and text are constructed, as well as
contrastive analyses of discourse, have proven to be very useful in the teaching of
L2 writing and creating more appropriate curricula (e.g., Leki, 1992; Reid, 1993). In
particular, an important outcome of research into L2 written discourse is the increased
knowledge about discourse and text in writing traditions other than Anglo-American,
including such written genres as news reports, academic publications, student writing,
e-mail messages, and business correspondence.

ANALYSES OF MICRO FEATURES OF L2 TEXT

In addition to the analysis of discourse in L2 writing, a large number of studies have

been devoted to the comparative analyses of lexical, syntactic, and rhetorical features
620 HINKEL

of L1 and L2 texts, usually produced in the contexts of their academic endeavors.

Much research, for example, investigated the uses of discourse markers, cohesion and
coherence devices, modal verbs, hedges, and modifiers in L1 and L2 prose (Connor &
Johns, 1990; Field & Oi, 1992; Flowerdew, 2000; Hinkel, 1995, 2001a; Johns, 1984, 1990;
Johnson, 1992; Khalil, 1989; Mauranen, 1996; Reid, 1992; Swales, 1990).
A typical study of L2 text features may undertake to determine, for example, how
explicit cohesive devices are used in L1 and L2 academic essays. For this purpose,
researchers may compare the frequencies and contexts of sentence conjunctions (e.g.,
furthermore, however, and thus), coordinating conjunctions (e.g., and, but, yet, and so),
and/or summary markers (e.g., in short and in sum) (e.g., Field & Oi, 1992; Hinkel,
2001b; Johns, 1984; Khalil, 1989; Schleppegrell, 1996). Similarly, to analyze the uses
of modal verbs, usage measurements can be computed separately or together for
possibility and ability modals (e.g., can, may, might, could) or obligation and necessity
modals (e.g., must, should, need).
A study methodology can entail counting the number of conjunctions or modal
verbs by type in each essay, followed by obtaining a mean (or median) value of
occurrences of a particular conjunction in all essays in a sample of texts or in a single
essay. In quantitative analyses, for instance, descriptive values for uses of similar
features can be obtained for NS and NNS texts. Then these are usually compared and
analyzed statistically to determine whether they are used similarly or significantly
differently in the two samples.
For example, a short excerpt from an L2 text on the topic of international sports
events and competitions is presented here. In this 94-word passage, the writer employs
the ability modal can six times and the obligation modal should twice, and it is easy to
notice that the text probably relies on the usage of can to excess.

We can see that sports make people show their love of their own country. You can hear
special team songs in every game. This is not just about individuals, but nations. We
can see passion, happy or sad around audiences and players because sports bring us
energy and living. In the sports world, everyone is equal, every player can have the same
condition to do what he or she should do the best. Also, we can understand every country
is equal. So, we should be proud of our country, and we can enjoy the success together.

In this case, a computation of the frequency rate of can is approximately 6.4% (6/94)
and should is 2.1% (2/94). Of course, no generalizations about the writer’s uses of
these two modals or their frequency rates can be made based on such a short excerpt.
However, in larger and representative samples of L1 and L2 writing, comparisons of
descriptive measurement values by means of appropriate statistical tests can allow
researchers to gauge whether in an L2 writing sample of, say, 15,000–20,000 words, the
overall usage of specific syntactic and lexical features approximates that in a parallel
L1 writing sample. In L2 writing instruction, such comparisons can (and often do)
lead to fine-tuning course curricula, added attention to specific areas of teaching, or
individualized assistance for L2 learners.
In analyses of L2 text, the degrees of fluency, for example, can be assessed by means
of measuring relative text lengths, as well as lengths of sentences, clauses, or words,
in combinations with supplemental measures of accuracy, and lexical and syntactic
complexity (e.g., Carlson, 1988; Hinkel, 2003a; Park, 1988; Schleppegrell, 2002). In
large-scale assessments that involve hundreds or thousands of writers, developmental
indexes have also been driven by research into specific attributes of L2 writing and
text (e.g., Basham & Kwachka, 1991, Hamp-Lyons, 1991a; Hamp-Lyons & Kroll, 1996;
Reid, 1993; Weigle, 2002).
Analyses of L2 text have further delved into various textual genres commonly
associated with various L2 writing tasks. These include formal essays, university term
 34. ANALYSES OF SECOND LANGUAGE TEXT 621

and diploma projects, business letters, recommendations letters, e-mail messages, and
journals produced by L2 writers (Al-Khatib, 2001; Bouton, 1995; Choi, 1988; Hinkel,
2001b; Jenkins & Hinds, 1987). Furthermore, research has examined the properties
of L2 text produced by adult L2 writers in colleges and universities with an English
medium of instruction (e.g., in Hong Kong, India, or Singapore), as well as the writing
of young language learners in the course of their schooling.
Among the investigations of ESL children’s writing, Edelsky (1986) and Hudel-
son (1988) found that texts produced by young ESL writers are very similar to those
of young native speakers, although L1 culture has a definitive influence on L2 chil-
dren’s view of writing and its functions and purposes. On the other hand, Maguire
and Graves (2001, p. 588) reported that school-age L2 learners “use different genres,
rhetorical styles, modalities, and semantic and syntactic structures” and that their
writing should be viewed as a means of facilitating the development of children’s
language proficiency. Other researchers who carried out empirical investigations of
writing development indicate that it takes years of persistent, knowledgeable, and
attentive teaching for L2 school-age learners to attain sufficient language control to
produce academic writing effectively similar to that of L1 children of matching ages
(Hakuta, Butler, &Witt, 2000; Scarcella & Chunok, 1989; Valdes & Sanders, 1999).
It is important to note, however, that relatively little research has been specifi-
cally devoted to the proficiency, development, and text features in the L2 writing of
school-age children. A great majority of published reports deal with the discourse
and linguistic features of text produced by adults in academic, professional, language
learning, or literacy contexts.

FINDINGS OF L2 TEXT ANALYSES

As was mentioned earlier, Silva’s (1993) synthesis of research on L2 writing processes

and discourse also addresses the research findings that deal with morphosyntactic
and lexical features of L2 text. Specifically, according to Silva’s summary, L2 writers
employ simpler sentences with more authoritative warnings, admonitions, personal
references and narratives, and repetitions of ideas and vocabulary. In regard to its
linguistic features, NNS prose contains fewer syntactically complex constructions,
such as subordinate clauses, descriptive adjective phrases, hedges, modifiers of most
types, compound noun phrases, and possessives, but more coordinators, sentence
transitions, and pronouns1 . To summarize, compared to L1 writers, L2 writers have
a restricted syntactic and stylistic repertoire, as well as severely limited range of ac-
cessible lexis that can be used in writing. In all, Silva points out that “L2 writers’ texts
were less fluent . . . , less accurate . . . , and less effective” (p. 668) than those of NSs, and
“in terms of lower level linguistic concerns, L2 writers’ texts were stylistically distinct
and simpler in structure.”
Based on earlier research, Silva (1993, p. 669) calls for a reconceptualization of
how L2 writing and text production are taught in U.S. colleges and universities: “The
prevalent assumption that L1 and L2 writing are, for all intents and purposes, the
same” is unexamined and has remained largely unvalidated, and the many findings of
research “make this assumption untenable.” Silva emphasizes that L1 “composition
theories, which are, incidentally, largely monolingual, monocultural, ethnocentric,
and fixated on the writing of NES [native English speaker] undergraduates in North
American colleges and universities” are inapplicable to teaching L2 writing, do L2
writers a great disservice, and are, quite possibly, counterproductive.
Almost a decade later, a large scale empirical analysis of 68 lexical, syntactic, and
rhetorical features of L2 text was carried out by Hinkel (2002), who examined 1,457
(around 435,000 words) NS and NNS placement essays written in several universities
622 HINKEL

across the United States. The L2 text corpus included texts written by speakers of six
languages: Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. All NNS
students (1,215) were advanced and trained L2 writers, a large majority of whom
were holders of U.S. academic degrees. Hinkel reports that, even after years of ESL
and composition training, L2 writers’ text continues to differ significantly from that
of novice (first-year) NS students in regard to most features examined in her study.
The results of her analysis indicate that even advanced and trained L2 writers have a
severely limited lexical and syntactic repertoire that enables them to produce simple
texts restricted to the most common language features that occur predominantly in
conversational discourse. Hinkel concluded that L2 texts do not approximate those in
L1 basic academic writing because NSs of English already have a highly developed
(native) language proficiency that a majority of NNSs require years to develop, in most
cases as adults. Like Silva (1993), Hinkel calls for changes in the methodologies for
teaching L2 writing that are based on the pedagogy intended for teaching composition
to NSs.

COMPUTER TEXT BASES AND ANALYSES OF L2

WRITTEN CORPORA

Beginning in the late 1980s, due to the advancements in computer technology that
permitted analyses of large amounts of printed or typed text, corpus-based studies
dramatically altered the methodologies for analyzing syntactic, lexical, and colloca-
tional features employed in various written genre in English (e.g., Biber, 1988; Leech,
Rayson, & Wilson, 2001; Renouf & Sinclair, 1991; Sinclair, 1991; Stubbs, 1996). The
rapid changes in text linguistics and the new knowledge obtained from the analyses
of large text corpora have also influenced the methods and scope of research in L2
writing.
As an outcome, the studies of the syntactic, lexical, and other micro features of
L2 text have similarly changed their methodological approaches, as well as the sizes
and types of L2 written corpora. To illustrate, the new genres of L2 text that lend
themselves to computerized investigations, NS and NNS e-mail messages can be
examined in regard to their grammar structures, syntactic accuracy, lexical ranges
and complexity, and common politeness formulae (Chang & Hsu, 1998; Gonzalez-
Bueno & Perez, 2000; Li, 2000).
Other research projects investigate L2 academic writing in corpora that range from
50,000 to 500,000 words and include texts produced by tens or hundreds of students
(Flowerdew, 2001; Granger, 1998; Hyland & Milton, 1997). In L2 writing assessment,
the size and scope of analyses evolved from exclusive reliance on impressionistic rat-
ings of essays by specially trained readers to computations of frequency and percent-
age rates with which particular syntactic, lexical, and discourse features are employed
in learner prose (Frase et al., 1999; Hamp-Lyons, 1991b; Reid, 1993; Weigle, 2002).
It is important to note, however, that despite the increase in the size of L2 writ-
ten corpora, the investigations of discoursal, syntactic, and lexical features largely
remained focused on the attributes of text similar to those examined in the numerous
studies carried out prior to the technological and methodological innovations in text
linguistics (e.g., Choi, 1988; Field & Oi, 1992; Hinkel, 2001a, 2002, 2003a; Johns, 1984;
Ostler, 1987). In particular, language errors, coherence and cohesion markers (such as
coordinating conjunctions and demonstrative pronouns), clause subordinators, modal
verbs, personal pronouns, prepositions, adjectives, hedges, and intensifiers remained
among the mainstays of research on computerized textual databases (Flowerdew,
1998, 2000; Granger, 1998, 2002; Granger & Tribble, 1998; Green, Christopher & Lam,
2000; Hyland & Milton, 1997; Lorenz, 1998; Reid, 1992; Ringbom, 1998; Tribble, 2001).
 34. ANALYSES OF SECOND LANGUAGE TEXT 623

To some extent, the reason that computer analyses of written learner corpora have
continued to focus on syntactic, lexical, and rhetorical features very similar to those
extensively examined in a large number of earlier studies is that, compared to pub-
lished English-language texts, most L2 writing includes a limited range of linguistic
constructions (Granger, 2002; Hinkel, 2001b, 2002, 2003b). Another issue with the cur-
rent L2 learner corpora is that such databases as International Corpus of Learner
English consist exclusively of L2 texts written by speakers of European languages,
such as Dutch2 , Finnish, French, German, Spanish, and Swedish.
On the other hand, the innovations brought about by the advances in computer-
ized L2 text analyses permit insights into the characteristics of L2 text that cannot be
attained by means of manual studies (Granger, 2002; Granger & Rayson, 1998), for
example:

r Frequent co-occurrences of words in different genres of L2 text.

r Overuse or underuse of particular lexis or grammar constructions, for example,
find, want, and know are by far the most common verbs in the L2 writing of
Swedish speakers (Ringbom, 1998).
r L1 to L2 transfer of specific lexical and syntactic patterns, for example, distinctive
phrases and patterns can be found, for example, in the writing of the speakers of
French but not Dutch and German (Granger, 2002).
r Classification of errors by types (e.g., grammatical, collocational, or stylistic) and
frequencies of their occurrence.

Meunier (1998) points out, however, that the typical computations of type/token
ratio of words in a text used to measure the amount of lexical variation do not seem
to reflect a relative quality of L2 texts because lexically varied prose is not necessarily
of good quality. For example, if some NNS writers have a good vocabulary range but
poor discourse organization or grammar skills, their text would not be of high quality,
even when it is lexically rich. To be specific, Lorenz (1998) found that in the case of
advanced German speakers with substantial and developed L2 English vocabulary
repertoires, it was not so much a lack of accessible lexis that made their L2 writing
appear non-native, but the ways in which particular lexical items were used (see
also Lewis, 1993, 1997, and Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992, for additional discussion on
idiomaticity, collocations, and formulaic lexical phrases in written text).
Similar to the findings of studies carried out earlier based on smaller samples of
various genres in L2 writing, the results of the computerized analyses of L2 writing
have also clearly demonstrated that L2 written discourse and text are crucially and
significantly distinct from those produced by L1 writers in English.

ISSUES AND COMPLEXITIES IN L2 TEXT RESEARCH

Technological advances in computerized text analyses of English-language corpora

have allowed researchers to shed light on the real-life uses of syntactic, lexical, and col-
locational features in native speaker language production. In the past several decades,
some of the large native English corpora have worked with spoken and written text
bases as large as 30 million words (Biber et al., 1999; Leech, Rayson, & Wilson, 2001;
Stubbs, 2001) (see also Collins COBUILD corpus-based learner dictionaries developed
by researchers at the University of Birmingham).
One of the key differences between analyses of corpora of L1 English-language
corpora and L2 text analyses lies in the fact that, for instance, the corpora of written
English include large amounts of published (i.e., polished and edited) texts. On the
other hand, L2 texts are either handwritten or typed by NNSs, whose language usage
624 HINKEL

(e.g., spelling, word formation, or phrasing) is distinct from that in practically any
type of native speaker prose.
One of the stumbling blocks in investigations of L2 handwritten texts is that cur-
rent software for converting handwriting into typed text is highly unreliable, and to
overcome software problems, L2 texts are keyed after they are written (e.g., Meunier,
1998; Shaw & Liu, 1998). However, to allow computer programs to count a number of
occurrences of, for example, particular words or constructions, decisions need to be
made whether to correct spelling, grammar, or lexis to make them uniform or leave
the original text intact.
Although studies of L2 text have mainly been driven by the growing body of
findings and publications in computerized analyses of English language corpora,
to date a consistent methodology for L2 corpus research has not yet emerged. Some
researchers, such as Ferris (1993), claimed that computer analyses of L2 text may not be
possible in the near future. Computerized analyses of typed L2 essays obtained in large
scale assessments (e.g., the Test of Written English) reported significant proportions
(up to 21%) of misidentified L2 textual features (Frase et al., 1999).
Developers of L2 written corpora also reported additional confounding complexi-
ties associated with building and analyzing text bases (Granger, 2002; Meunier, 1998):

r When L2 text is keyed or scanned, a number of errors are routinely introduced

(e.g., omissions, additions, and misrepresentations), and proofreading typed L2
texts against the originals is an extremely laborious, time-consuming, and itera-
tive process.
r Computerized analyses of L2 corpora do not permit analyses of global and
abstract discourse features (e.g., sufficient/explicit rhetorical support), many
grammar features (e.g., referential/nonreferential pronouns, as in they tell me . . . ),
sentence or T-unit counts, or measurements of lexical density; these have to be
carried out manually.
r In analyses of L2 errors, error tagging is a manual and time-consuming process,
and the classification of errors is often subjective.
r Word counts of the same texts can diverge significantly (up to 10%), when dif-
ferent types of software are used (e.g., hyphenated words or contractions can be
counted as either one or two words). In such cases, statistical analyses, funda-
mentally dependent on baseline word counts, can be invalidated.

The following example is excerpted from a L2 university essay on taking risks in

order to succeed to illustrate the difficulties of computerized parsing and tagging of
L2 text.

I think that the adecatte combination between this aditudes in life is the key for open the
succed’s door. In one way, take a risk can be important to rich some relevant chance, for
example, “shakira”, who is a very important pop singer, take a risks when she and her
family recordered her first Long play. They spend all the money that they had in the bank
and now they are rich and she is a important artist. but in and other way, people have lost
all them fortune for a bat business so many people preffer work hard and work for sure.
In conclusion. In all the success cases we will discoves that the combination between take
risk and take care is the key.

In many cases, even if the writer’s spelling is corrected, computer tagging of syntactic
and lexical features, as in this example, would be very difficult. In fact, this particular
text may need to be sounded out at least to understand what it says.
In light of the fact that reliable automatic analyses of L2 text still lag behind
those of published or transcribed L1 English language corpora, most L2 text studies
 34. ANALYSES OF SECOND LANGUAGE TEXT 625

published to date have relied on manual analyses of discourse, syntactic, lexicalized,

and rhetorical features. Tagging and hand-counting features are extremely work- and
time-consuming processes that impose limitations on the amounts of text that can be
analyzed by a single researcher or even a group of researchers.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

In the past half century, numerous studies have examined discoursal, lexical, syntactic,
and rhetorical properties of L2 writing. Practically all research on L2 written prose has
focused on the features of discourse and text identified in research in text linguistics
that accounts for how lexical, syntactic, stylistic, and rhetorical elements combine to
create particular types of prose and genres. Investigations into L2 text have identified
the important and significant differences that exist between L1 and L2 writing. In part,
these differences stem from divergent written discourse paradigms valued in various
rhetorical traditions and often transferred from L1 to L2. Such global features of L2
discourse as organization and information structuring, topic development and conti-
nuity, as well as text cohesion, coherence, and clarity appear to be greatly influenced
by the rhetorical and text construction norms that differ widely across languages and
cultures.
Research has also demonstrated that other crucial factors that confound L2 writing
and text have to do with shortfalls of writers’ language proficiencies and restricted
linguistic repertoire that significantly undermine L2 writers’ ability to produce high
quality texts. Based on the results of their studies, many researchers of L2 learning
and development have emphasized that even school-age children or highly educated
adult L2 learners require years of language training to attain the levels of proficiency
necessary to create effective written prose.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My sincere thanks to Robert B. Kaplan and Rodney Hill for their insightful comments
and suggestions on an earlier draft of this chapter. Through the years, their unfailing
help and support have become indispensable.

NOTES

1. For similar findings of large-scale empirical investigations, see also, Carlson (1988), Flowerdew (2000,
2001), Hinkel (2001a, 2001b, 2002, 2003a, 2003b), Johns (1997), Reid (1992), Ringbom (1998), Schleppegrell
(1996, 2002), and Shaw and Liu (1998), to mention just a few.
2. Other L2 corpora, e.g., Longman’s Learner Corpus and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Learner Corpus, are proprietary and accessible only to the researchers affiliated with these institutions.

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V

Methods and Curricula in

Second Language Teaching

629
630
Introduction

Ideally, the purpose of a method for second language (L2) teaching is to connect
the theories or research findings on how second languages are learned with how
they can be taught. Thus, in real terms, teaching methods are theories translated
into practical classroom applications. Various methods can emphasize different facets
of L2 learning and teaching. For example, the communicative method that today
represents a prevalent approach to teaching L2 and foreign language (FL) in many
English-speaking countries aims to improve learners’ oral communication skills and
spoken fluency. On the other hand, the grammar translation method widely popular
in the countries where FL is learned in the classroom is geared toward developing
and enhancing the knowledge of formal grammar and vocabulary.
The concept of an L2 teaching method has traditionally occupied a central role in
teacher training and curriculum development. Usually, divergent L2 teaching meth-
ods are accompanied by specific syllabuses (not to be confused with class syllabi)
or curricula that in effect constitute rather well-delineated guidelines for teaching.
Although many methodologists of L2/FL teaching believe that syllabuses are dis-
tinct from curricula, equally many see them as different terms for largely the same
thing, that is, the specifications of what is to be taught and learned with reasoned
explanations of why these facts of language are to be taught and learned. The syl-
labus specifications or curriculum guidelines, together with other aspects of ascribed
classroom instruction, in effect represent what is referred to as teaching method.

A Side Note: Syllabuses should not be confused with teaching methods, even
though each method includes a particular type of syllabus (otherwise known as
curricular guidelines). Depending on a point of view, two major varieties of syl-
labuses can be identified: synthetic and analytic. Among the synthetic syllabuses,
one can count five or six main varieties: structural, lexical, notional, functional,
and situational/topical. Additionally, analytic syllabuses include such exemplars
as procedural, process, and task-based. Depending on one’s interpretation, though,
at some juncture teaching methods and syllabuses can merge and/or be grouped
into, for example, process methods with learner/learning-focused syllabi or pro-
cedural methods with cognitive-focused/task-based syllabi.

The methods for teaching practically always include such requisite features as
learning objectives and techniques for L2/FL teaching in order to accomplish these
objectives, as well as types of suitable classroom activities and the roles of teachers
(e.g., student-centered/teacher-centered methods or the teacher as enabler or facili-
tator), teaching materials, and learning tasks. In most cases, the teachers are expected
to connect the characteristics of specific methods and curricula to the daily practice
of teaching and student learning.
631
632 PART V: METHODS AND CURRICULA IN L2 TEACHING

Teaching methods have evolved rapidly during the past several decades, although
the creation of new methods for L2 teaching had been dramatically slower in the
previous millennia. For instance, between the 1940s and the 1970s, L2 practitioners
saw a number of methods wax and wane:
r The Audiolingual method (also called Situational Language Teaching in some
English-speaking countries) was the coin of the L2 realm for almost four decades
until the 1960s.
r With the fall of audiolingualism, the Silent Way, Suggestopedia, and Total Phys-
ical Response arrived on the scene. Another method, sometimes called Commu-
nity Language Learning, was also popular in some locations and contexts.

These L2 teaching methods that have since fallen out of favor are not included in the
overview of methods in Part V.
The chapters in Part V discuss the two main L2 and FL teaching methods that
are widely adopted today, although in divergent contexts and for different types of
learners.

1. The humanistic and interactive/interactional methods became predominant in

L2 teaching in the 1980s and 1990s with the arrival of the Communicative Lan-
guage Teaching (CLT). One of the fundamental principles of CLT is that learners
need to engage in meaningful communication to attain communicative fluency
and thus become enabled to carry out authentic communication, predominantly
in ESL/L2 settings. Chapter 35 by Sandra Savignon presents a thorough dis-
cussion of CLT goals and evolution over time.
2. Many researchers claim, however, that in EFL contexts, where learners do not use
FL outside the classroom, the need for authentic communication is dramatically
reduced. In the case of FL learners, the primary objective of FL teaching and
learning is to prepare learners to pass exams that crucially determine a learner’s
future careers. Thus, for such learners who represent a great statistical majority
of all students of English, the Grammar Translation Method (GMT) is far more
appropriate. In Chapter 36, Sandra Fotos discusses the origins and the current
developments in GMT.

While the instructional objectives of these (and other) broad-based methodolo-

gies for L2/FL teaching can be relatively well defined, an immense amount of con-
troversy has accompanied the ways in which they can be achieved. Although the
main thrust of the prevalent teaching methods largely adhere to the fundamental and
distinct methodological principles, the curricula for achieving teaching and learn-
ing objectives can differ greatly across a large number of variations of the popular
methods. Many of these are rooted in CLT and advocate communicative fluency,
meaningful and authentic communication, and minimal explicit teaching and error
correction.
The following important variations of CLT are also covered in Part V:
r Chapter 37, by Jessica Williams, reviews the many incarnations of Focus-on-
Form Instruction that have emerged in the past few decades since its origination
in the early 1980s.
r Chapter 38, by Ann Snow, takes a close look at the Content-based Instruction
that has proven to be highly influential in the schooling of learners of various
ages.
r Chapter 39, by Rod Ellis, examines the benefits of instructed (versus purely
naturalistic) language learning and teaching and emphasizes the benefits of Task-
based Teaching.
 PART V: METHODS AND CURRICULA IN L2 TEACHING 633

In addition to the development of communicative fluency, however, researchers on

L2 teaching and learning have underscored the need for accuracy in L2 production
and use. The CLT emphasis on fluency without great regard for accuracy and quality
in L2 production has led to dissatisfaction among large numbers of methodologists
and practitioners alike. Thus, without completely and explicitly rejecting CLT, which
is probably the dominant methodology in L2 teaching in most English-speaking coun-
tries, recognized experts have proposed a variety of methods and curricula to improve
the quality of L2 learning and learner language. These teaching methods have the goal
of combining L2/FL communicative fluency with an important emphasis on linguistic
accuracy:

r Chapter 40, by Marianne Celce-Murcia and Elite Olshtain, discusses Discourse-

based teaching that seeks to explicitly address the issues of accuracy and the uses
of linguistic features in L2.
r Chapter 41, by Carol Chapelle, explains how Computer-Assisted Language
Learning can lead to enhancements in terms of both fluency and accuracy of
L2/FL learner production and teaching.

A number of other methods have also been created, but with diferent degrees of
popularity. Many of these represent derivatives of CLT with added ingredients fre-
quently borrowed from teaching and disciplines other than those developed specifi-
cally for L2/FL instruction, such as educational theories for teaching in urban schools
or adult education.
As has been mentioned, large numbers of L2/FL teaching methods, often found
under different names, are likely to be found in many textbooks for teachers and
teaching, the work of many L2 theoreticians, various L2/FL contexts, settings, and
geographical locations. Many of these were originally designed to imitate how chil-
dren learn their first language, even though research has demonstrated that adult
learners have entirely different language learning constraints and learn the language
in completely different ways.
The following and often overlapping CLT-based teaching methods and curricula
are not included in Part V due to their reduced or waning popularity. The list is not
exhaustive but consists merely of examples:

r Whole-Language Teaching.
r The Natural Approach.
r Cooperative Language Learning.
r Collaborative Teaching/Learning.
r Community-based Learning.

In addition, the chapters in Part V do not include an overview of the Lexical Ap-
proach, as well as a large number of syllabus-based methods, such as those mentioned
earlier, for example, the Notional-Functional Syllabus, the Structural Syllabus, the
Functional Syllabus, or the Situational/Topical Syllabus (see The Side Note).

A Caveat Emptor
A number of key issues with the view of L2 instruction that pivots on particular
methods have emerged to highlight the fact that teaching methods find themselves
in a perpetual state of flux.

1. No single method can be useful or even beneficial to all learners in all teaching
contexts.
634 PART V: METHODS AND CURRICULA IN L2 TEACHING

2. Methods often become subject to changing points of view on what is best for
whom at a particular time.
3. The continual shifts in the development of “best,” the “most effective,” or “the
most appropriate” method have led to what is occasionally termed “band-
wagon-ism” when fleeting fashions in teaching come to dominate instructional
objectives, curricula, mind-sets, and materials.
r Part V concludes with Chapter 42, by Neil Anderson, on L2 Learning Strategies
and learner strategy training. The goal of learning strategies is to improve lan-
guage learning and performance in the use of a second language. To this end, the
use of effective learning strategies can represent an advantage when employed
in conjunction with any L2 teaching method or in the context of practically any
type of language learning. Although many productive language learning strate-
gies can and have been identified, as with language teaching methods, relying
on any one strategy can rarely be effective in isolation. Most learning strategies
are interconnected and should be used in process and in combination, similar to
L2 learning processes overall.
35

Communicative Language
Teaching: Strategies and Goals
Sandra J. Savignon
Pennsylvania State University

On the threshold of the 21st century, communicative language teaching (CLT) has
become as familiar to discussions about the practice and theory of second and foreign
language teaching as the Big Mac is to fast food. The appeal is worldwide. And while
the particular characteristics may vary from one context to another, the identifiable
features remain the same. Or do they? Just what is CLT? Is it a method of teaching?
Does it have characteristics that are universally understood and implemented? If
so, what are they? Most important, is CLT a meaningful and lasting reorientation of
classroom language teaching, or does it represent but one more swing of the pedagogy
pendulum?
This chapter considers CLT within the broader historical spectrum of methods
or approaches to language teaching, the theoretical grounding for the epistemology
of practice offered by CLT, and the interpretation or implementation of that prac-
tice in language teaching contexts around the world. In conclusion, we will consider
the implications of CLT for teaching training or education, both preservice and in-
service.

LINGUISTIC THEORY AND CLASSROOM PRACTICE

The essence of CLT is the engagement of learners in communication to allow them to

develop their communicative competence. Use of the term communicative in reference
to language teaching refers to both processes and goals in classroom learning. A
central theoretical concept in CLT is communicative competence, a term introduced in the
early 1970s in discussions of language (Habermas, 1970; Hymes, 1971) and second or
foreign language learning (Jakobovits, 1970; Savignon, 1971). Competence is defined
in terms of the expression, interpretation, and negotiation of meaning and looks to
second language acquisition research to account for its development (Savignon, 1972,
1983, 1997). The identification of learner communicative needs provides a basis for
curriculum design. Terms sometimes used to refer to features of CLT include process
oriented, task based, and inductive, or discovery oriented.
635
636 SAVIGNON

The elaboration of what has come to be called CLT can be traced to concurrent 20th
century developments in linguistic theory and language learning curriculum design
both in Europe and in North America. In Europe, the language needs of a rapidly
increasing group of immigrants and guest workers along with a rich British linguistic
tradition, which included social as well as linguistic context in the description of
language behavior, led to development of a syllabus for learners based on notional-
functional concepts of language use. This notional-functional approach to curriculum
design is derived from neo-Firthian systemic or functional linguistics, which views
language as meaning potential and maintains the centrality of context of situation
in understanding language systems and how they work (Firth, 1930; Halliday, 1978).
With sponsorship from the Council of Europe, a Threshold Level of language ability
was proposed for each of the languages of Europe in terms of what learners should be
able to do with the language (van Ek, 1975). Functions were based on the assessment
of learner needs and specified the end result or goal of an instructional program. The
term communicative was used to describe programs that followed a notional-functional
syllabus based on needs assessment, and the Language for Specific Purposes (LSP)
movement was launched.
Concurrent development within Europe focused on the process of classroom lan-
guage learning. In Germany, against a backdrop of social democratic concerns for
individual empowerment articulated in the writings of the philosopher Jürgen Haber-
mas (1970), language teaching methodologists took the lead in the development of
classroom materials that encouraged learner choice (Candlin, 1978). Their systematic
collection of exercise types for communicatively oriented English language teaching
was used in teacher in-service courses and workshops to guide curriculum change.
Exercises were designed to exploit the variety of social meanings contained within
particular grammatical structures. A system of “chains” encouraged teachers and
learners to define their own learning path through principled selection of relevant ex-
ercises (Piepho, 1974; Piepho & Bredella, 1976). Similar exploratory projects were also
initiated by Candlin at his academic home, the University of Lancaster, England, and
by Holec (1979) and his colleagues at the University of Nancy, France. Supplementary
teacher resource materials promoting classroom CLT became increasingly popular
(e.g., Maley & Duff, 1978). There was also a renewed interest in learner vocabulary
building. The widespread promotion of audiolingual methodology with a focus on
accuracy in terms of so-called “native” grammatical or syntactic form had resulted in
the neglect of learner lexical resources (Coady & Huckin, 1997).
At about this same time, pioneering research on adult classroom second language
acquisition at the University of Illinois (Savignon, 1971, 1972) used the term com-
municative competence to characterize the ability of classroom language learners to
interact with other speakers, to make meaning, as distinguished from their ability to
recite dialogues or to perform on discrete-point tests of grammatical knowledge. At
a time when pattern practice and error avoidance were the rule in language teaching,
this study of adult classroom acquisition of French looked at the effect of practice
in the use of coping strategies as part of an instructional program. By encouraging
them to ask for information, to seek clarification, to use circumlocution and whatever
other linguistic and nonlinguistic resources they could muster to negotiate meaning,
to stick to the communicative task at hand, teachers were invariably leading learners
to take risks and to speak in other than memorized patterns.
Test results at the end of the instructional period showed conclusively that learners
who had engaged in communication in lieu of doing laboratory pattern drills per-
formed with no less accuracy on discrete-point tests of grammatical structure. On the
other hand, their communicative competence as measured in terms of fluency, com-
prehensibility, effort, and amount of communication in unrehearsed communicative
tasks significantly surpassed that of learners who had had no such practice. Learner
 35. COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING 637

reactions to the test formats lent further support to the view that even beginners re-
spond well to activities that let them focus on meaning as opposed to formal features.
A collection of role-plays, games, and other communicative classroom activities
was developed subsequently for inclusion in the adaptation of the French CREDIF
materials, Voix et Visages de la France. The accompanying guide (Savignon, 1974/1978)
described their purpose as that of involving learners in the experience of communi-
cation. Teachers were encouraged to provide learners with the French equivalent of
expressions like “What’s the word for . . . ?”, “Please repeat,” “I don’t understand,”
expressions that would help them to participate in the negotiation of meaning. Not
unlike the efforts of Candlin and colleagues working in Europe, the focus was on
classroom process and learner autonomy. The use of games, role-play, pair and other
small group activities gained acceptance and was subsequently recommended for
inclusion in language teaching programs generally.
The coping strategies identified in the Savignon (1971, 1972) study became the
basis for the subsequent identification by Canale and Swain (1980) of strategic com-
petence in their three-component framework for communicative competence, along
with grammatical competence and sociolinguistic competence. Grammatical compe-
tence represented sentence-level syntax, forms that were the focus of Chomskyan
theoretical linguistic inquiry and a primary goal of both grammar-translation and
audiolingual methodologies. Consistent with a view of language as social behavior,
sociolinguistic competence represented a concern for the relevance or appropriacy of
those forms in a particular social setting or context.
Inclusion of sociolinguistic competence in the Canale and Swain framework re-
flected the challenge within American linguistic theory to the prevailing focus on
syntactic features. Dell Hymes (1971) had reacted to Noam Chomsky’s (1965) charac-
terization of the linguistic competence of the “ideal native speaker” and had used the
term communicative competence to represent the use of language in social context, the
observance of sociolinguistic norms of appropriacy. His concern with speech commu-
nities and the integration of language, communication, and culture was not unlike
that of Firth and Halliday in the British linguistic tradition. Hyme’s communicative
competence may be seen as the equivalent of Halliday’s meaning potential. Social
interaction rather than the abstract psycholinguistic functioning of the human brain
would become an identifying feature of CLT.
In subsequent interpretations of the significance of Hymes’ perspective for lan-
guage learners, methodologists working in the United States tended to focus on na-
tive speaker cultural norms or accepted ways of behaving and the difficulty if not the
impossibility of authentically representing these norms in a classroom of nonnatives.
In light of this difficulty, the appropriateness of communicative competence as an in-
structional goal for classroom learners was questioned (Paulston, 1974). CLT thus can
be seen to derive from a multidisciplinary perspective that includes, at least, linguis-
tics, psychology, philosophy, sociology, and educational research. The focus has been
the elaboration and implementation of programs and methodologies that promote the
development of functional language ability through learner participation in commu-
nicative events. Central to CLT is the understanding of language learning as both an
educational and a political issue. Language teaching is inextricably tied to language
policy. Viewed from a multicultural intranational as well as international perspective,
diverse sociopolitical contexts mandate not only a diverse set of language learning
goals, but a diverse set of teaching strategies. Program design and implementation de-
pend on negotiation between policy makers, linguists, researchers, and teachers, and
evaluation of program success requires a similar collaborative effort. The selection of
methods and materials appropriate to both the goals and context of teaching begins
with an analysis of socially defined language learner needs as well as the customary
styles of learning in a given educational setting.
638 SAVIGNON

DISCOURSE COMPETENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF ENGLISH

AS A GLOBAL LANGUAGE

Along with a better understanding of the second language acquisition process itself,
the emergence of English as a global or international language has had a profound
influence on language teaching, confronting language teacher education with new
demands worldwide.
With specific reference to English, CLT includes recognition that the norms followed
by those in the “inner circle” of English language users, to adopt the terminology pro-
posed by Kachru (1992), may not be an appropriate goal for learners (Pennycook, 2001;
Savignon, 2001, 2002). School programs typically have identified as an instructional
goal one variety of English or another. British English has long been a preferred model
in many contexts, and American English has become increasingly popular, particu-
larly in Asia (Wang, 2002). Recruitment of “native” speakers from Britain, the United
States, and other English-speaking nations is often seen to enhance an instructional
program. Whether or not they are qualified teachers, such recruits may benefit from
a prestige and privileges not shared by local teachers. When this happens a program
may in fact be harmed more than it is helped by their participation.
In a postcolonial, multicultural world where users of English in the “outer” and
“expanding circles” outnumber those in the inner circle by a ratio of more than two to
one, reference to the terms “native” or “nativelike” in the evaluation of communica-
tive competence seems in some settings simply inappropriate. Even the decision as to
what is or is not one’s “native” language is arbitrary and seems best left to the individ-
ual concerned. Teachers need also to remember that learners differ markedly in their
reactions to learning a language for communication. Some may welcome apprentice-
ship in a new language and view it as an opportunity. For others however the need to
find new ways of self-expression may be accompanied by feelings of alienation and
estrangement.
These phenomena may be individual or generalizable to an entire community
of learners. In Spanish-speaking Puerto Rico, for example, a long-standing general
resentment of U.S. domination exerts a powerful negative influence on English lan-
guage instruction. Not only learners but sometimes teachers may consciously or sub-
consciously equate communicative English language learning with disloyalty to the
history and culture of the island. Studying the rules of grammar and memorizing
vocabulary lists are one thing. Using English for communication in other than stereo-
typical classroom exercises is quite another. Where they exist, such feelings are a strong
deterrent to second or foreign language use, even after 10 or more years of instruction.
The influence of community values and attitudes on instructional programs can
be found in language programs worldwide and is often precipated by economic or
political events. At the turn of the 20th century, for example, German was the most
popular modern foreign language in U.S. school curricula. These programs in turn
supported numerous departments of German literary and linguistic studies at U.S.
colleges and universities. With the entry of the United States into World War I, enroll-
ments in German plummeted and teachers of German were viewed with suspicion.
Many lost their jobs. This enrollment pattern persisted throughout World War II, and
today many higher education programs have been merged or deleted.
Attitudes toward a new language can of course be highly individual. They find
expression in many different forms. For example, when she was asked what it was
like to write in English, Korean novelist Mia Yun (1998) replied that it was “like putting
on a new dress.” Writing in English makes her feel fresh, lets her see herself in a new
way, offers her freedom to experiment. Note the sharp constrast of her sentiments
with those of the protagonist in a short story by novelist Salomon Rushdie.
 35. COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING 639

Give me a name, America, make of me a Buzz or Chip or Spike. . . . No longer a historian

but a man without histories let me be. I’ll rip my lying mother tongue out of my throat
and speak your broken English instead. (Rushdie, 2001, p. 75).

With respect to the documentation of crossvarietal differences of English, research

to date has focused most often on sentence-level lexical and syntactic features. Con-
sequently, attempts such as the Educational Testing Service (ETS) Test of English
for International Communication (TOEIC) to represent norms for a standard English
for international communication reflect a primarily lexical and syntactic emphasis
(Lowenberg, 1992). The hegemony of essentially Western conventions at the levels of
discourse and genre is less easily represented or challenged. Pressures for a “democ-
ratization” of discursive practices (Fairclough, 1992) have in some settings resulted
in genre mixing and the creation of new genres. In professional communities, how-
ever, conformity to the practices of an established membership continues to serve an
important gatekeeping function (Foucault, 1981). The privilege of exploiting generic
conventions becomes available only to those who enjoy a certain stature or visibility.
With particular reference to the academic community, Bhatia (1997) summarizes the
situation as follows:

Much of the academic discourse still fails to acknowledge the sources of variations, espe-
cially those of marginality and exclusion, giving the impression that there is, or should
be, no variation in the way genres are constructed, interpreted, and used. (p. 369)

Differences in the way genres are constructed, interpreted, and used clearly extend
beyond lexical and syntactic variation. Such differences are currently thought of as
discursive in nature and included in discourse competence, a fourth component of
communicative competence identified subsequently by Canale (1983).

SOCIOCULTURAL CONTEXTS OF COMPETENCE

In her discussion of the contexts of competence, sociolinguist Margie Berns (1990)

stresses that the definition of a communicative competence appropriate for learners re-
quires an understanding of the sociocultural contexts of language use. In addition, and
as we discussed earlier, the selection of a methodology appropriate to the attainment
of communicative competence requires an understanding of sociocultural differences
in styles of learning. Curricular innovation is best advanced by the development of
local materials, which, in turn, rests on the involvement of local classroom teachers.
Perhaps the best summary of the core tenets of CLT is that offered by Berns (1990;
see Savignon, 2002, p. 6):

1. Language teaching is based on a view of language as communication. That is,

language is seen as a social tool that speakers and writers use to make meaning;
we communicate about something to someone for some purpose, either orally
or in writing.
2. Diversity is recognized and accepted as part of language development and use
in second language learners and users as it is with first language users.
3. A learner’s competence is considered in relative, not absolute, terms of correct-
ness.
4. More than one variety of a language is recognized as a model for learning and
teaching.
5. Culture is seen to play an instrumental role in shaping speakers’ communicative
competence, both in their first and subsequent languages.
640 SAVIGNON

6. No single methodology or fixed set of techniques is prescribed.

7. Language use is recognized as serving the ideational, the interpersonal, and the
textual functions and is related to the development of learners’ competence in
each.
8. It is essential that learners be engaged in doing things with language, that is, that
they use language for a variety of purposes, in all phases of learning. Learner
expectations and attitudes have increasingly come to be recognized for their role
in advancing or impeding curricular change.

What About Grammar?

Discussions of CLT not infrequently lead to questions of grammatical or formal accu-
racy. The perceived displacement of attention to morphosyntactic features in learner
expression in favor of a focus on meaning has led in some cases to the impression that
grammar is not important, or that proponents of CLT favor learner self-expression
without regard to form.
While involvement in communicative events is seen as central to language de-
velopment, this involvement necessarily requires attention to form. Communication
cannot take place in the absence of structure, or grammar, a set of shared assumptions
about how language works, along with a willingness of participants to cooperate
in the negotiation of meaning. In their carefully researched and widely cited paper
proposing components of communicative competence, Canale and Swain (1980) did
not suggest that grammar was unimportant. They sought rather to situate grammati-
cal competence within a more broadly defined communicative competence. Similarly,
the findings of the Savignon (1971, 1972) study did not suggest that teachers forsake
the teaching of grammar. Rather, the replacement of language laboratory structure
drills with meaning-focused self-expression was found to be a more effective way to
develop communicative ability with no apparent decrease in morphosyntactic accu-
racy. Learner performance on tests of discrete morphosyntactic features also was not
a good predictor of their performance on a series of integrative communicative tasks.
The nature of the contribution to language development of both form-focused and
meaning-focused classroom activity remains a question in ongoing research. The op-
timum combination of these activities in any given instructional setting depends no
doubt on learner age, nature and length of instructional sequence, opportunities for
language contact outside the classroom, teacher preparation, and other factors (Light-
bown & Spada, 2000). Regardless of such differences, however, research findings over-
whelmingly support the integration of form-focused exercises with meaning-focused
experience. Grammar is important; learners seem to focus best on grammar when it re-
lates to their communicative needs and experiences. Nor is explicit attention to form
to be perceived as limited to sentence-level morphosyntactic features. Broader fea-
tures of discourse, sociolinguistic rules of appropriacy, and communication strategies
themselves may be included.

TEACHERS AND TESTS

By definition CLT puts the focus on the learner. As we have seen, learner communica-
tive needs provide a framework for elaborating program goals in terms of functional
competence. This implies global, qualitative evaluation of learner achievement as
opposed to quantitative assessment of discrete linguistic features.
Debate on appropriate language testing persists, however, and curricular innova-
tion is often doomed in advance by a failure to make corresponding changes in learner
evaluation. Current efforts at educational reform favor such things as essay writing,
 35. COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING 641

in-class presentations, and other more holistic assessments of learner competence.

Some programs have initiated portfolio assessment, the collection and evaluation of
learner poems, reports, stories, videotapes, and similar projects in an effort to bet-
ter represent and encourage learner achievement in terms of their communicative
competence. Such efforts are not without problems and often encounter resistance
from teachers, administrators, parents, and learners themselves. Current controversy
surrounding U.S. education policy that seeks to establish national standards of pro-
ficiency for all learners is but one illustration of the continuing debate as to the best
ways to assess learner achievement and, ultimately, program effectiveness (Schwartz,
2002). As we will see next, the elaboration and acceptance of appropriate assessment
procedures remains a central issue in the implementation of CLT worldwide.
Depending on their own preparation and experience, teachers clearly differ in their
reactions to CLT. Some feel understandable frustration at the seeming ambiguity in
discussions of communicative ability. Negotiation of meaning may be a lofty goal,
but this view of language behavior lacks precision and does not provide a universal
scale for the assessment of individual learners. Ability is viewed, rather, as variable
and highly dependent on context and purpose as well as the roles and attittudes of
all involved. Other teachers welcome the opportunity to select and/or develop their
own materials, providing learners with a range of communicative tasks. And they are
comfortable relying on more global, integrative judgments of learner progress.
An additional source of frustration for some teachers are second language acqui-
sition research findings that show the route, if not the rate, of language acquisition to
be largely unaffected by classroom instruction (see Ellis, 1985, 1997). Crosslinguistic
studies of developmental universals in first language acquisition initiated in the 1970s
were soon followed by second language acquisition studies. Acquisition, assessed on
the basis of expression in unrehearsed, oral communicative contexts, seemed to follow
a similar morphosyntactic sequence regardless of learner age or context of learning.
Although they served to bear out the informal observations of teachers, namely that
textbook presentation and drill do not ensure learner use of these same structures
in their own spontaneous expression, the findings were nonetheless disconcerting.
They contradicted both grammar-translation and audiolingual precepts that placed
the burden of acquisition on teacher explanation of grammar and controlled practice
with insistence on learner accuracy. They were further at odds with textbooks that
promise “mastery” of “basic” French, English, Spanish, and so forth. Teacher rejection
of research findings, renewed insistence on tests of discrete grammatical structures,
and even exclusive reliance in the classroom on the learners’ native or first language,
where possible, to be sure they “get the grammar,” have been in some cases reactions
to the frustration of teaching for communication.

VARIATION AND OTHER SOCIOLINGUISTIC ISSUES

Numerous sociolinguistic issues await attention. Variation in the speech community

and its relationship to language change are central to sociolinguistic inquiry. Sociolin-
guistic perspectives on variability and change highlight the folly of describing native
speaker competence, let alone non-native speaker competence, in terms of “mastery”
or “command” of a system. If the “ideal non-native speaker” is nonexistent, a creature
who exists only in our imagination, what does this tell us about the “ideal non-native
speaker”? Is she someone who has attained an imagined native speaker competence?
Or is she rather someone who is eager to develop communicative competence in a
new language and looks to native speaker “experts” for instruction and advice? The
professional stance adopted by some linguists and methodologists suggests that they
would consider her to be the latter.
642 SAVIGNON

The point is that all language systems show instability and variation. Learner lan-
guage systems show even greater instability and variability in terms of both the
amount and the rate of change. Sociolinguistic concerns with identity and accom-
modation help to explain the construction by bilinguals of a “variation space” that
is different from that of a native speaker. It may include retention of any number of
features of a previously acquired system of phonology, syntax, discourse, or com-
munication strategies. As is the case with learner attitudes, the phenomenon may be
individual or, in those settings where there is a community of learners, general.
Such sociolinguistic perspectives have been important in understanding the im-
plications of norm, appropriacy, and variability for CLT. They continue to suggest
avenues of inquiry for further research and materials development. Use of authentic
language data has underscored the importance of context—setting, roles, genre, and
so forth—in interpreting the meaning of a text. A range of both oral and written texts
in context provides learners with a variety of language experiences, experiences they
need to construct their own variation space, to make determinations of appropriacy
in their own expression of meaning. “Competent” in this instance is not necessarily
synonymous with “nativelike.” Negotiation in CLT highlights the need for interlin-
guistic, that is, intercultural awareness on the part of all involved (Byram, 1997). Better
understanding of the strategies used in the negotiation of meaning offers a potential
for improving classroom practice of the needed skills.
Although we have become accustomed to thinking of communication in terms of
two channels, oral and written, such distinction is far from neat and is becoming
increasingly blurred. The rapid adoption of electronic messages, or e-mail, has led
to the development of styles that appear at once to be both written and oral. Norms
of appropriacy in this new medium continue to evolve and will undoubtedly show
considerable fluctuation before they achieve some semblance of stability. To be sure,
language use is governed by norms. However, as we have observed earlier in reference
to discourse style and genre, language practice is also creative and evolves with time
in response to changes in communicative needs and opportunities. Established norms
are forever susceptible to challenge.
Along with other sociolinguistic issues in language acquisition, the classroom itself
as a social context has been neglected. Classroom language learning was the focus of
a number of research studies in the 1960s and early 1970s. However, language class-
rooms were not a major interest of the second language acquisition research that
rapidly gathered momentum in the years that followed. The full range of variables
present in educational settings was an obvious deterrent. Other difficulties included
the lack of well-defined classroom processes to serve as variables and lack of agree-
ment as to what constituted learning success. Confusion of form-focused drill with
meaning-focused communication persisted in many of the textbook exercises and
language test prototypes that influenced curricula. Not surprisingly, researchers ea-
ger to establish second language acquisition as a worthy field of inquiry turned their
attention to more narrow, quantitative studies of the acquisition of selected mor-
phosyntactic features.

SOCIOCULTURAL COMPETENCE FOR A DIALOGUE

OF CULTURES

Consistent with a view of language as social behavior, sociolinguistic competence is,

as we have seen, integral to overall communicative competence. Second or foreign
language culture and its teaching have of course long been a concern of language
teachers. If early research addressed the possibility of including some aspects of cul-
ture in a foreign language curriculum (e.g., Lado, 1957), most recent discussion has
 35. COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING 643

COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE CONTEXTS

GRAMMATICAL
L

E
RA

OURS
GIC
U LTU

ATE

DISC
C
CIO

STR
SO

FIG. 35.1. Components of communicative competence. (Reprinted with permission

from Sandra J. Savignon (2002), Interpreting Communicative Language Teaching: Con-
texts and Concerns in Teacher Education. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

underscored the strong links between language and culture and their relevance for
teaching and curriculum design (Valdes, 1986; Byram, 1989; Damen, 1990; Kramsch,
1993, 1995, 1998). So dominant has become the view of culture and language as inte-
gral, one to the other, that the term sociocultural has come to be substituted for the term
sociolinguistic in representing the components of communicative competence (Byram,
1997; Savignon, 2002; Savignon & Sysoyev, 2002) (see Fig. 35.1).
Inadequate attention to stereotypes and overgeneralizations in relation to culture
have often served to perpetuate one of two widespread myths: 1) people are all the
same, or 2) everyone is different. To be sure, all myths can be seen to contain some
element of truth. In the comparison of representatives from different contexts and
cultures, psychologists have identified traits that appear to differentiate one culture
from another (Hofstede, 1980). On the other hand, each individual is unique and may
not conform to a more general norm. In the final analysis, efforts to identify similarities
and differences between cultures have sometimes served to raise more questions than
they have provided answers.
Interest in teaching culture along with language has led to the emergence of vari-
ous integrative approaches. The Russian scholar Victoria Saphonova (1991, 1992, 1996)
has introduced a sociocultural approach to teaching modern languages that she has
described as “teaching for intercultural L2 communication in a spirit of peace and a
644 SAVIGNON

dialogue of cultures” (Saphonova, 1996, p. 62). In addition to the grammatical, discour-

sal, and strategic features of language use in the L2 curriculum (see Savignon, 1983,
1997), Saphonova and her German colleague Gerhard Neuner (1994) place particular
emphasis on the development of sociocultural competence.
Dialogue of cultures is a term introduced by Bakhtin (1981, 1986) and Bibler (1991).
For these philosophers, dialogue is the very essence of humanity and mutual under-
standing. As for culture, it is said to be a “concentration of all other meanings (social,
spiritual, logical, emotional, moral, aesthetic) of human existence” (Bibler, 1991, p. 38).
Elaborating on these two concepts, scholars have suggested that culture can be seen
as a special form or link of interaction between civilizations and epochs. Seen in this
way, culture can exist only in the special relationships between past, present, and
future in the history of humankind. For example, inasmuch as it provides a link of
the present with both the past and the future, the 20th century can be seen as a period
of interaction between the cultures of the 19th and 21st centuries. Given the dialogic
nature of culture, we cannot fully understand one culture in the absence of contact
with other cultures. Thus, dialogue can be seen to be at the very core of culture, where
culture is understood as a dialogical self-consciousness of every civilization.
For Saphonova (1996), learning a foreign culture does not start from an absolute
zero. By the time most learners begin the study of a foreign or second language
and culture they have already formed certain concepts, stereotypes, and expectations
about this culture. These expectations are by no means fixed, but they will influence
the way learners comprehend and interpret a given culture. In addition, the learner’s
own sociocultural environment will also considerably impact learning. Neuner (1994)
identifies three groups of factors that influence learner interpretation of a second
culture (C2).

1. Dominant social and political factors. The sociopolitical nature of the learner’s home
context, including the ideological attitude toward the foreign or second language
and the historical, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts in which it is used.
2. Factors of socialization including family, school, neighborhood, work, and friends
through interpersonal relations, education, and mass media.
3. Individual factors such as age, personal experience, specific knowledge of sec-
ond or foreign language context and its representatives, cognitive development,
interests, and needs.

Immersion into a dialogue of cultures begins with a text. A text can take one of
three forms: (1) the written representation of speech, (2) an individual oral utterance
in a communicative event or, and (3) any sign or symbol (a drawing, a thing, or
activity). Numerous scholars have argued that text extends far beyond the borders of
the semiotic meaning of the term (Bakhtin, 1986; Bibler, 1991; Kramsch, 1993; Shannon,
1995). Actual physical presence in a second or foreign language context can of course
offer a particularly rich context for the interpretation of texts. However, immersion
in itself does not guarantee readiness for intercultural communication. Conversely,
preparation for dialogue can begin well ahead of such immersion. The challenge lies
in selecting an appropriate text as well as devising ways for learners to produce their
own texts as subjects in a dialogue of cultures (Savignon & Sysoyev, 2002).
The emergence of a focus on sociocultural competence can be seen in other Euro-
pean nations as well. The free flow of people and knowledge within the European
Union has increased both the need and the opportunity for language learning and in-
tercultural understanding. To meet this need, increased learner autonomy is essential
to language education (Schalkwijk, van Esch, Elsen, & Setz, 2002).
Network-based computer-mediated communication (CMC) is currently being used
to create discourse communities. Brammerts (1996), for example, describes the
 35. COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING 645

creation of the International E-Mail Tandem Network, a project funded by the Eu-
ropean Union that involves universities from more than ten countries. Developed to
promote “autonomous, cooperative, and intercultural learning” (p. 121), the project is
an extension of the tandem learning that was initiated in the 1970s in an effort to unite
many states in a multicultural, multilingual Europe. Pairs of learners from different
language backgrounds create a “learning partnership” in the pursuit of the mutual
development of both communicative and intercultural competence. The network has
expanded to include a number of bilingual subnets, for example, Danish-German,
French-English, German-Arabic, each with a bilingual forum to provide an opportu-
nity for questions and discussion (see also Wolff, 1994). A more elaborate telecollab-
oration between entire classrooms of learners is a focus of ongoing research in the
development of communicative proficiency (Kinginger, 2004).

WHAT CLT IS NOT

Disappointment with both grammar-translation and audiolingual methods for their

inability to prepare learners for the interpretation, expression, and negotiation of
meaning, along with enthusiasm for an array of alternative methods increasingly
labeled communicative, has resulted in no small amount of uncertainty as to what
are and are not essential features of CLT. Thus, a summary description would be
incomplete without brief mention of what CLT is not.
CLT is not concerned exclusively with face-to-face oral communication. The prin-
ciples of CLT apply equally to reading and writing activities that involve readers and
writers engaged in the interpretation, expression, and negotiation of meaning; the
goals of CLT depend on learner needs in a given context. CLT does not require small
group or pair work; group tasks have been found helpful in many contexts as a way
of providing increased opportunity and motivation for communication. However,
classroom group or pair work should not be considered an essential feature and may
well be inappropriate in some contexts. Although it may be recognized worldwide,
CLT has not gained acceptance in all settings (for examples, see Richards & Rogers,
2001; Rao, 2002; and Fotos, chap. 36, in this volume). Applied linguists who are more
theoretically inclined may consider discussion of CLT to be passé (Bhatia, 2002; Sav-
ignon, 2003). Finally, CLT does not exclude a focus on metalinguistic awareness or
knowledge of rules of syntax, discourse, and social appropriateness.
CLT cannot be found in any one textbook or set of curricular materials inasmuch
as strict adherence to a given text is not likely to be true to the processes and goals
of CLT. In keeping with the notion of context of situation, CLT is properly seen as an
approach or theory of intercultural communicative competence to be used in devel-
oping materials and methods appropriate to a given context of learning. No less than
the means and norms of communication they are designed to reflect, communicative
teaching methods will continue to be explored and adapted.

CLT AND TEACHER EDUCATION

Considerable resources, both human and monetary, are being deployed around the
world to respond to the need for language teaching that is appropriate for the commu-
nicative needs of learners. In the literature on CLT, teacher education has not received
adequate attention. What happens when teachers try to make changes in their teach-
ing in accordance with various types of reform initiatives, whether top-down ministry
of education policy directives or teacher-generated responses to social and technolog-
ical change. A number of recent reports of reform efforts in different nations pro-
vide a thought-provoking look at language teaching today as the collaborative and
646 SAVIGNON

context-specific human activity that it is. Themes appear and reappear, voices are
heard in one setting to be echoed in yet another. Such first-hand observation provides
valuable insights for researchers, program administrators, and prospective or prac-
ticing teachers who work or expect to work in these and other international settings.

Curricular Reform in Japan

Several recent studies have focused on curricular reform in Japan. Redirection of En-
glish language education by Mombusho, the Japan Ministry of Education, includes
the introduction of a communicative syllabus, the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET)
Program, and overseas in-service training for teachers. Previous encouragement to
make classrooms more “communicative” through the addition of “communicative
activities” led to the realization by Mombusho that teachers felt constrained by a
structural syllabus that continued to control the introduction and sequence of gram-
matical features. With the introduction of a new national syllabus, structural controls
were relaxed and teachers found more freedom in the introduction of syntactic fea-
tures. The theoretical rationale underlying the curriculum change in Japan includes
both the well-known Canale and Swain (1980) model of communicative competence
and the hypothetical classroom model of communicative competence, or “inverted
pyramid,” proposed by Savignon (1983).
Minoru Wada (1994, p. 1), a university professor and senior advisor to Mombusho
in promoting English language teaching reform in Japan, explains the significance of
these efforts:

The Mombusho Guidelines, or course of study, is one of the most important legal precepts
in the Japanese educational system. It establishes national standards for elementary and
secondary schools. It also regulates content, the standard number of annual teaching
hours at lower level secondary (junior high) schools, subject areas, subjects, and the
standard number of required credits at upper level secondary (senior high) schools. The
course of study for the teaching of English as a foreign language announced by the
Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture in 1989 stands as a landmark in the history
of English education in Japan. For the first time it introduced into English education at
both secondary school levels the concept of communicative competence. [. . . . .] The basic
goal of the revision was to prepare students to cope with the rapidly occurring changes
toward a more global society. The report urged Japanese teachers to place much more
emphasis on the development of communicative competence in English.

Following the educational research model for classroom language teaching adapted
by Kleinsasser (1993) in considering language teachers’ beliefs and practices, Sato
(2000) reports on a year-long study of teachers of English in a private Japanese senior
high school. Multiple data sources, including interviews, observations, surveys, and
documents, offer insight into how EFL teachers learn to teach in this particular context.
Among the major findings was the context-specific nature of teacher beliefs that placed
an emphasis on managing students, often to the exclusion of opportunities for English
language learning.

High Stakes Public Examinations in Hong Kong and Costa Rica

Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, Cheng (1997) has documented the
influence of a new, more communicative English language test on the classroom teach-
ing of English in Hong Kong, a region that boasts a strong contingent of applied
linguists and language teaching methodologists and has known considerable polit-
ical and social transformation in recent years. In keeping with curricular redesign
to reflect a more task-based model of learning, alternative public examinations were
 35. COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING 647

developed to measure learners’ ability to make use of what they have learned, to
solve problems, and complete tasks. At the time curricular changes were introduced,
English language teaching was characterized as “test-centered, teacher-centered, and
textbook-centered” (Morris et al., 1996). Cheng’s ambitious multi-year study found
the effect of washback of the new examination on classroom teaching to be limited.
There was a change in classroom teaching at the content level but not at the method-
ological level.
The role of washback in Costa Rica, a small nation with a long democratic tradition
of public education, contrasts with the findings of the Hong Kong study. Quesada-
Inces (2001), a teacher educator of many years experience, reports the findings of
a multi-case study to explore the relationship between teaching practice and the
Bachillerato test of English, a national standardized reading comprehension test ad-
ministered at the end of secondary school. Although teachers expressed a strong in-
terest in developing learner communicative ability in speaking and writing English,
the reading comprehension test was seen to dominate classroom emphasis, partic-
ularly in the last two years of secondary school. The findings match what Messick
(1996) has called “negative washback,” produced by construct underrepresentation
and construct irrelevance. The Bachillerato test of English does not cover all the con-
tent of the curriculum; ultimately it assesses skills less relevant than those skills that
go unmeasured. The English testing situation in Costa Rica is not unlike that de-
scribed by Shohamy (1998) in Israel where two parallel systems can be seen to ex-
ist, one the official national educational policy and syllabus, the other reflected in
the national tests of learner achievement. Quesada-Inces concludes his report on a
personal note:

I cannot understand that so much effort is lost in pretending to have quality education
when all we care about is a percentage that tells us that things are right on the surface . . .
[ ] . . the Ministry of Education division that is concerned with national tests is the Quality
Control Division, a denomination which suggests mass production of merchandise in a
factory. I hope this project can help so that my children, my children’s children, and
all Costa Rican children are treated more like human beings in schools than as mere
production merchandise. (p. 249–250)

English in Taiwan
In another Asian setting, Wang (2000; see also Savignon & Wang, 2003) looks at the use
and teaching of English in Taiwan. Adopting a sociocultural perspective on language
use and language learning prerequisite to pedagogical innovation, Wang considers
attitude, function, pedagogy (Berns, 1990), and learner beliefs with respect to class-
room teaching practice. A national initiative to promote CLT in schools has led to
the introduction of English at the fifth grade level. On a visit in the spring of 2001 to
address an islandwide meeting of university professors of English, I had occasion to
hear the newly elected mayor of Taipei affirm (in English) his ambitious goals for the
city. He wants to make Taipei a bilingual environment, with all signs in English as
well as in Chinese. He emphasized the need for English if Taiwan is to remain eco-
nomically competitive and made specific reference to the TOEFL scores of students in
mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The very presence of the mayor at a pro-
fessional meeting of English teachers signals a recognition of the need for cooperation
in attaining goals of communicative competence.

Much has been done to meet the demand for competent English users and effective
teaching in Taiwan. Current improvements, according to the teacher experts, include
the change in entrance examinations, the new curriculum with a goal of teaching for
648 SAVIGNON

communicative competence, and the islandwide implementation in 2001 of English edu-

cation in the elementary schools. However, more has to be done to ensure quality teaching
and learning in the classrooms. Based on the teacher experts’ accounts, further improve-
ments can be stratified into three interrelated levels related to teachers, school authorities,
and the government. Each is essential to the success of the other efforts. (Wang, 2002)

DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

In each of the studies included in this brief overview, the research was both initiated
and conducted by local educators in response to local issues. While each study is
significant in its own right, they are by no means comprehensive and can only suggest
the dynamic and contextualized nature of English language teaching in the world
today. Nonetheless, the settings that have been documented constitute a valuable
resource for understanding the current global status of CLT. Viewed in kaleidoscopic
fashion, they appear as brilliant multi-layered bits of glass, tumbling about to form
different yet always intriguing configurations. From these data-rich records of English
language teaching reform on the threshold of the 21st century four major themes
emerge, suggestive of the road ahead:

1. The highly contextualized nature of CLT is underscored again and again. It

would be inappropriate to speak of CLT as a teaching ‘method’ in any sense of that
term as it was used in the 20th century. Rather, CLT is an approach that understands
language to be inseparable from individual identity and social behavior. Not only
does language define a community; a community, in turn, defines the forms and uses
of language. The norms and goals appropriate for learners in a given setting, and the
means for attaining these goals, are the concern of those directly involved.
The challenge for teacher education is considerable. From the perspective of post-
modern critical theory, Kinginger (2002) provides a potentially useful overarching
discussion of both theoretical and practical issues in meeting the challenge. Using the
notion of “error” in language learning/teaching, Kinginger illustrates how teachers
can be helped to develop interpretive skills for evaluating and using competing expert
discourses in making decisions concerning their own teaching practice. The develop-
ment of interpretive and reflective skills offers a very practical and fruitful alternative
for language teacher education that currently seems compelled to choose between a
single methodological stance or a bewildering smorgasbord of options from which
teachers are invited to make their selection.
2. Directly related both to the concept of language as culture in motion and to the
multilingual reality in which most of the world population finds itself is the futility
of any definition of a native speaker. The term came to prominence in descriptive
structural linguistics in the mid 20th century and was adopted by language teaching
methodologists to define an ideal for language learners. Currently, sales by British
and American presses of profitable publications for learners and teachers of English
as a global language are aided by lingering notions that “authentic” use of English
somehow requires the involvement of a “native” speaker.
3. One cannot help but be struck by the richness of the data found in many of
the texts, including surveys and interviews with teachers. As is true within the social
sciences more generally, we are increasingly aware that in our attempts to discern
system or rationality, we have been led to focus on certain observable patterns while at
the same time disregarding all that defies classification. Just as the implementation of
CLT is itself highly contextualized, so, too, are the means of gathering and interpreting
data on these implementations. When I shared these and other reports with a group
of graduate students in applied linguistics, I was pleased by their response to one
 35. COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING 649

text in particular. They liked the account by a Japanese teacher of how she relates the
communicative teaching of English to precepts of Zen Buddhism (Kusano Hubbell,
2002). Many found her narrative to be “novel,” and “refreshing,” For an Argentinean
woman it “represented CLT not only as a theoretical ideal but also as something highly
adaptable to the realities of many different settings.” She found it annoying that “CLT
has primarily been depicted from a Eurocentric or North American point of view”
(Savignon, 2002, p. 210).
4. Time and again, assessment appears to be the driving force behind curricular
innovations. In many settings, demands for accountability along with a positivistic
stance that one cannot teach that which cannot be described and measured by a com-
mon yardstick continue to influence program content and goals. Irrespective of their
own needs or interests, learners prepare for the tests they will be required to pass.
High stakes language tests often determine future access to education and opportu-
nity. They may also serve to gauge teaching effectiveness. And yet, tests are seldom
able to adequately capture the context-embedded collaboration that is the stuff of
human communicative activity. A critical reflexive analysis of the impact of tests on
language teaching practice, then, would seem a good place to enter into a considera-
tion of how language teaching practices in a given context might be adapted to better
meet the communicative needs of the next generation of learners.

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652
36

Traditional and Grammar

Translation Methods for Second
Language Teaching
Sandra Fotos
Senshu University

It is a time-honored adage that there is “nothing new under the sun” and this statement
certainly applies to second language instruction. One historian reviewing language
teaching pedagogy in Europe and different English-speaking countries observed,
“[M]uch that is being claimed as revolutionary in this century is merely a rethink-
ing and renaming of early ideas and procedures . . . the total corpus of ideas accessible
to language teachers has not changed basically in 2,000 years” (Kelly, 1969, p. ix;
p. 363). The same methods have come in and out of fashion, and the same arguments
for and against a particular approach presented today have been made many times
in the past.
This chapter discusses traditional approaches to second language instruction, in
particular the Grammar Translation approach, although communicative approaches
must also be considered traditional because they were repeatedly introduced over
the centuries. The history of language teaching in Europe is considered in order to
appreciate the historical basis of the various approaches and methods used in teaching
English as a Second Language (ESL) today, and aspects of current grammar pedagogy
are discussed, especially in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context, where
accuracy concerns are often paramount.

SOURCES

Many works on second language (L2) instruction begin with a simplified survey
of the history of language teaching (e.g., Celce-Murcia, 2001; Larsen-Freeman, 2000;
Hymes, 1980; Mackey, 1965; Hinkel & Fotos, 2002; Richards & Rodgers, 2001; Ruther-
ford, 1987; Stern, 1983), usually drawing on information published in two seminal
works, Howatt’s A History of English Language Teaching (1984; also see Howatt’s recent
update, 1997), and Kelly’s 25 Centuries of Language Teaching (1969). The former chrono-
logically examines L2 learning pedagogy in Europe from the Middle Ages (during
653
654 FOTOS

and after the fall of the Roman Empire in the third to fifth century to 1400), the period
considered to mark the transition from classical Greco-Roman cultures to the modern
era. The latter work, as its title suggests, treats language teaching practices from 500 BC
to 1969 from a pedagogical rather than chronological perspective, and is organized by
sections such as “Teaching Meaning,” “Teaching Grammar,” and “How is the Course
Ordered.” Other often-cited summaries of linguistic and grammatical development
and pedagogy are Titone’s (1968) Teaching Foreign Languages: An Historical Sketch and
Robin’s early Ancient and Mediaeval Grammatical Theory in Europe (1951) and his widely
known A Short History of Linguistics (1997), which is now in its fourth edition. An ex-
amination of Latin reading pedagogy in the Middle Ages, Reynolds’ Medieval Reading:
Grammar, Rhetoric and the Classical Text (1996), discusses the role of grammar instruction
in reading, and a recent volume on Middle Age language teaching, Law’s Grammar
and Grammarians in the Early Middle Ages (1997), reviews linguistic thought from 600
to 1100, and traces the changes in Latin grammar teaching pedagogy, especially the
shift in focus from second language to foreign language teaching methodology. A
late 19th century work, Sweet’s The Practical Study of Languages (1899/1964) is often
cited, as is his New English Grammar (1892). Critical summaries of historical trends ap-
pear in Mackey’s Language Teaching Analysis (1965), Richards and Rodgers’ Approaches
and Methods in Language Teaching (2001), and Stern’s Fundamental Concepts of Language
Teaching (1983). The history of linguistics, as distinct from grammar, is overviewed in
the final chapter of Hudson’s textbook, Essential Introductory Linguistics (2000).
These works inform the following discussion of L2 teaching pedagogy in Europe
and North America from the Classical Period to the present. The teaching of English
as a second and foreign language is a special focus.

GRAMMAR AND LANGUAGE TEACHING DURING THE

CLASSICAL PERIOD (500 BC TO 300 AD)

The Origin of Grammar in Greece

It has been suggested that interest in grammar is a natural outcome of contact with
people speaking a language other than their own (Robins, 1997, pp. 14–15). Thus, the
systematic treatment of grammar in language teaching and learning is considered to
have begun 4,000 years ago as a result of the large-scale expansion of the Greek sphere
of influence. Records indicate that non-Greek speaking subjects of city–states studied
Greek as an L2 with home tutors or slaves in order to develop both oral and literacy
skills. Phonology was taught using letters, syllables, words, and phrases, with empha-
sis on correct pronunciation. Texts were studied by reading aloud and by paraphrase,
defined as rewriting the text into an easier form with simplified vocabulary and gram-
mar. The rhetorical style of the text was also studied. Dialogues were used to teach
the spoken language, and memorization of texts was encouraged. The earliest records
of linguistic study date to the sixth and fifth centuries, the start of the Classical Age.
Grammar and rhetoric were therefore closely related from the beginning of language
studies.
The Greek philosopher Plato (circa 429–347 BC) is considered to be the first to
have examined the relationship between the form and meaning of words and to have
distinguished between the grammatical categories of nouns and verbs. During Plato’s
time the term grammatikos referred to someone who could read and write. Gramma—
the root of the word “grammar”—meant “letter” (Robins, 1997, p. 17). In Poetics
Book 20, Plato’s pupil Aristotle (384–322 BC) added the concept of conjunctions (the
construct at that time including considerably more than current usage since it referred
to anything that was not a noun or a verb), articles, adjectives, and the idea of the word
 36. TRADITIONAL AND GRAMMAR TRANSLATION METHODS 655

as the smallest meaningful unit. Aristotle also identified verb tenses, noting that they
expressed time.
In the third century BC, pronouns, active and passive voice, intransitive verbs, and
the concepts of case and mood were described in the first Greek grammars developed
by the Stoic philosophers of Athens, a group who considered grammar to be part
of philosophy and rhetoric. The Stoics also combined proper and common nouns,
previously treated separately, into a single grammatical category, creating an early
linguistic theory and developing a term for linguistics, grammatiké. Robins considers
that modern grammar began with the work of the Stoics (1997, p. 34).
Formal study of grammar as a field commenced in the third century BC when
scholars at the great library in the Greek colony of Alexandria, Egypt, began to collect
and compare different versions of Greek literary texts, especially the works of Homer
(Hudson, 2000). This process required the ability to identify the “correct” version of a
given text, and resulted in the development of grammatical rules as the standard for
determining text correctness. One of the oldest western grammar books was written
in the second century BC and presented rules based on the six parts of classical Greek
grammar: prosody (rules for reading aloud), exegesis (critical interpretation) of tropes
(figurative usages), study of diction and content, study of etymologies, study of criti-
cism, and study of analogies, the final category corresponding to formal grammar and
consisting of rules for inflection, declension, and other regularities (Reynolds, 1996,
p. 20). Grammar was thus considered to be the basis of both language and rhetoric,
which was defined as the letter, the syllable, the word, and the phrase. Learning correct
grammar, therefore, began with study of penmanship and letters, followed by study
of the correct combination of letters into syllables, syllables into words, and words
into phrases (Reynolds, 1996, p. 18), recognized as a bottom-up approach today.
Dionysius Thrax, a scholar in Alexandria in the first century BC, produced a short
treatise on Greek grammar that became the standard textbook of that time, continuing
to be used until well into the 18th century. Defining grammar as “empirical knowl-
edge of the language of poets and prose-writer” (Dionysius, as quoted in Robins, 1997,
p. 38), Dionysius emphasized the link between grammar and literature, identifying
and defining Greek’s eight parts of speech: noun, verb, participle, article, pronoun,
preposition, adverb, and conjunction. These, he suggested, were determined by mor-
phology (inflection) and syntax (referring to function and position in the sentence
matrix). Tenses were divided into past, present, and future, with past divided into the
imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, and indeterminate, and he also identified three voices,
active, middle, and passive. He recommended that instruction of grammar should
consist of six steps: (1) Reading a work aloud, “with due regard to the prosodies,”
(2) Explanation of the literary expressions used in the work, (3) Provision of notes
on phraseology and subject matter, (4) Discovery of etymologies, (5) Working out the
regularities of the language, or the analogies, and (6) “Appreciation of literary com-
positions, which is the noblest part of grammar” (Robins, 1997, p. 38–39). Indeed, this
pedagogy survives energetically into the present!
Dionysius’ work is considered to be one of the first pedagogical grammars (Odlin,
1994, p. 7), as well as a model for both Latin grammars and the grammars of vernacu-
lar languages of Western Europe and other regions. Thus, by the first century BC the
grammatical framework was developed that has remained the foundation of gram-
mar pedagogy to the present. As Robins noted, such Alexandrian scholars brought
grammar to “the state in which the later Latin grammarians, and through them the
European tradition, took it over” (1997, p. 36).
Although a treatment of syntax is missing from Dionysius’ work, this was later
provided by Appolonius Dyscolus, a scholar living during the Roman Empire who
studied Greek grammar and suggested that conjunctions function to join other parts
of speech. Appolonius also noted that definite articles could be anaphoric (referring
656 FOTOS

to previous mention of the noun) and he clarified the grammatical and semantic
functions of Greek case inflections (Robins, 1951, p. 43). Apollonius’ work was later
used as a framework by a major Latin grammarian, Priscian.
It should be noted, however, that the Greek grammar system was derived from
literature, not from colloquial speech. Thus, no distinction was made between de-
scriptive grammar (the structure and function of language within a community) and
normative or prescriptive grammar (defining correct usage).

Grammar and Language Teaching Pedagogy During the Roman Empire

After Greece was conquered by the Roman Empire around 146 BC, Latin became the
major language of the Western world, with a concomitant rise of Latin grammars
based on the eight Greek grammatical categories. Since the two languages were not
dissimilar, Greek grammatical categories fit Latin fairly well despite the fact that Latin
had six case endings for nouns (Greek had five) and also had no article system. This
situation is entirely different from using the eight Greek grammatical categories with
substantially dissimilar language such as English (e.g., see the beginning of Curme’s
1947 textbook for a treatment of English grammar organized according to the eight
parts of speech). Instructional pedagogy also followed the Greek emphasis on reading
sentences aloud, paraphrasing passages, and studying rhetoric. During this period,
grammar was defined as “the art in which the skills and structures of reading the
[classical] authors are learned” (Reynolds, 1996, p. 2).
As before, the letter was considered the basis of grammar, followed by the syllable,
the word, and the phrase, grammar being seen as the means for teaching the correct
combination of these components. Correctness was the core of the classical view—a
position still found in many foreign language classrooms today—and Latin was the
only medium of instruction in schools (Mackey, 1965). Regardless of the student’s first
language, education was conducted in Latin, and grammar was viewed as the way
to read classical texts, regarded as important vehicles of moral education. Word by
word, heavily supported by interlinear and/or marginal glosses in the vernacular, and
parallel translation (placing the vernacular text next to the target language text on the
page), students read edifying passages and single sentences from classical literature
and the Bible, and memorized sayings, metaphors, and adages intended to build a
worthy character. Education was appreciated not only for the acquisition of literacy
and rhetorical skills, but was also conceived as important for the development of
morality 2 .
During this period, there was no use of visual aids for grammar study. Papyrus
records from the first to the third centuries AD, the earliest written copies of gram-
matical texts from a European civilization, did not used columns, tables, or diagrams
(Law, 2003, p. 249). However students performed grammar drills and read dialogues,
often in question-and-answer format.
During the late Latin period (from the third century AD), noted grammarians such
as Donatus (c. AD 400) and Priscian (c. AD 500), followed Greek grammarians, par-
ticularly Appolonius, closely to produce Latin grammar textbooks. These works, par-
ticularly the Ars Minor of Donato, which was based on a question-and-answer format
and is considered to be the most successful textbook in Western history (Reynolds,
1996, p. 10), were the major Latin texts during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, even
surviving into the 20th century.3 The rise of Christianity and the subsequent conver-
sion of European tribes to Roman Christianity during the Late Latin period resulted
in the spread of Latin into Irish, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and other popula-
tions, necessitating the development of form-oriented, descriptive grammars (Law,
2001) and the development of methodology for the widespread teaching of Latin as a
second language.
 36. TRADITIONAL AND GRAMMAR TRANSLATION METHODS 657

Regarding the notional/functional, oral, situational and Audio-Lingual approaches

(see discussions in Richards & Rodgers, 2001 and Howatt, 1997) of the early to middle
20th century—pedagogy which linked target language structures to situations and
functions through oral practice and taught grammar inductively through input—and
contemporary communicative pedagogy today, it is interesting to note that as early
as 398 AD St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) advocated linking form and meaning
within the context of the speech act by introducing new material through dialogues
set within the social situation requiring its use, a basic principle of functional, situa-
tional and communicative approaches (e.g., see Breen, 1986; Brumfit & Johnson, 1979;
Canale & Swain, 1980; Howatt, 1997; Krashen, 1981; Krashen & Terrell, 1983, Savignon
1991).

GRAMMAR AND LANGUAGE TEACHING DURING THE MIDDLE

AGES (ca.300 AD THROUGH THE LATE 1400s)

The civilization of this period was a combination of institutions from the Roman
Empire, Christianity, and the cultures of other European peoples. Strongly relying on
theories, approaches, and pedagogy from the Classical period, grammar study during
the early Middle Ages (from the 8th to the 12th century) was based on the works of
Priscian and Donatus, particularly the Ars Minor of the latter, and was characterized
by continuity with the past despite the fact that classical Latin differed from the
language of the Bible, composed in fourth and fifth century Latin, the Vulgate. Latin
was the only language studied at school, although students spoke French or English
as the vernacular (the first language, or the L1, as compared with the second/foreign
language, the L2 or FL). Thus, as noted by Reynolds, during this period, learning
to read meant learning to read a foreign language (1996, p. 8). Law sums up the
contribution of this period:

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the early Middle Ages was the descriptive grammars—
the transformation of the language-centered grammars of Antiquity into the Latin-centered
textbooks of the Insular grammarians. These were the first comprehensive, formally based
descriptions of Latin—the first Western foreign language grammars. (1997, p. 85)

The early Middle Ages, especially from the seventh and eighth centuries, was also
characterized by content-based instruction, the use of Latin to instruct students in
other, nonliterary subjects. In fact, during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it
was assumed that all classes, not only language classes, would be conducted in Latin,
although the use of spoken Latin began to die out from the 1700s, being replaced by
the L1 as the medium of education.
During the later part of the Middle Ages, from the twelfth century to the Renais-
sance, interest in grammar grew due to translations into Latin and commentaries on
Greek literature. As noted, the L1 of students at the time was not Latin, so there was
increasing need for grammar teaching texts as distinct from scholarly works on gram-
mar rules and the philosophy of grammar. One widely used L2 textbook, the Doctrinale
of Alexander of Villedieu (c. 1200), followed the grammatical works of Priscian but
did not include rules; rather verse was used to model grammar forms (Robins, 1997),
resembling the current emphasis on meaning-focused instruction where students in-
ductively acquire knowledge of grammar rules through exposure to large amounts
of communicative input containing target grammar structures (Fotos, 1998, 2002).
During this period philosophers speculated on the nature of grammar and its re-
lationship to language and philosophy, developing theories about the structure of
language. This approach was called Speculative Grammar and its adherents, the
658 FOTOS

Modistae, believed that grammar rules existed outside of language—a universal gram-
mar structure that was independent of any particular language. The Modistae held
that, “There is one grammatical system fixed and valid for all language which the
philosopher alone is able to discover and justify; the observed differences between
languages must be treated . . . as a matter of vocabulary not of structure” (Robins,
1951, p. 79). This concept of grammar as a universal property of the human mind has
emerged several times, most recently in the 20th century work of Chomsky (1957) and
his successors.
Reynolds characterizes Middle Age Latin teaching (1996, pp. 20–21) as closely
derived from classical pedagogy and consisting of: (1) prosody, or reading the text out
loud correctly; (2) exegesis of tropes; (3) study of diction and content—the rhetorical
analysis of texts; (4) study of words; (5) study of analogies, this constituting the formal
study of grammar; and (6) criticism. Reading took place word by word, and was
accompanied by glosses, L1 comments written between the lines or in the margins.
Such glosses translated the text into the L1 and explained or elaborated the meaning.
Thus, “the mother tongue of the students was an essential explanatory mode in the
learning of Latin vocabulary” (Reynolds, 1996, p. 71), and determined the pedagogical
approach for understanding the words of the text. It is noteworthy that the use of L1
to study the L2 remains a feature of many foreign language classrooms today.
Dictation was used, as well as paraphrase, to determine whether the text was under-
stood correctly. Rhetorical analysis examined the style of the text and was especially
focused developing students’ ability to speak well. Rhetoric at this time consisted of
five parts: finding a subject, arrangement, diction and style, memorization, and de-
livery (Reynolds, 1996, p. 26–27). The texts themselves were either isolated sentences,
dialogues, or passages and often contained moral lessons intended to build character.
As mentioned, notable quotations, phrases, and adages were used frequently and the
students were expected to memorize these to acquire a high level of culture and a
moral character.
Although grammatical correctness was heavily emphasized during this period, use
of the classical eight parts of speech as an approach to grammar instruction became
problematic since English expresses syntactic relations by word order, whereas Latin
inflections indicate word relationships.4 This incongruity led to a teaching technique
whereby students were given parallel sentences in English and Latin, with deliberate
mistakes in the Latin sentences, and were told to correct them. Thus, the tradition of
reading and writing sample sentence based on models continued strongly through
this period. Another problem was syntax. In Middle English, relationships among
sentence components were expressed by word order but in Latin, word relationships
were expressed by inflections; so learners had to memorize inflections and rely on
glosses indicating parts of speech to learn Latin syntax from the reading passages.
By the eighth century, visual aids such as column layout, diagrams, pictures, and
charts had become common (Law, 1997), resulting in “double translation” books that
presented the target language in one column and a vernacular translation in the other,
the first published about 1483 (Howatt, 1984). In addition, foreign language textbooks
teaching English, French, and other languages made their first appearance as a result of
trade among European nations and immigration (Law, 1997). For example, an early
EFL teacher, the Frenchman Gabriel Meurier, wrote a widely used double manual,
A Treatise for to Learn to Speak French and English, in Antwerp in 1553 particularly
aimed at merchants. Such bilingual texts contained no grammatical explanation and
were usually organized according to situation and function: for example, greetings,
household conversations, shopping, and so forth (Kelly, 1969).
The dictionaries and phrasebooks that appeared in the early 1500s followed this
double manual format, with the target language and a vernacular translation side by
side. By the mid-1500s situational and functional dialogues were common, especially
concerning commercial affairs, and were used by the many Protestant European
 36. TRADITIONAL AND GRAMMAR TRANSLATION METHODS 659

refugee teachers fleeing religious persecution who taught English and other languages
to their fellow refugees in England. In a chapter titled “‘Refugiate in a Strange Coun-
try:’ The Refugee Language Teachers in Elizabethan London,” discussing the impact
of these religious refugees on the teaching of English, Howatt (1984) presents sample
dialogues from such early textbooks as Familiar Dialogues, a bilingual, dialogue-based
EFL textbook published in 1586. This book was arranged in three columns with En-
glish in the left column, a semiphonetic transcription in the middle, and French in the
right. Penmanship and dictation were used, and grammar drills were common.
These functional/situational works are strikingly similar to those multidimen-
sional second/foreign language teaching textbooks used from the middle 20th century
up to the present characterized by both situational and function dialogues on topics
such as “Apologizing” or “At the Post Office.”

THE RENAISSANCE

Based on the intellectual and artistic progress in the early 1400s in Italy that had
spread to other parts of Europe by the 1500s, the Renaissance was characterized by
exploration, advances in geography and map making, and the colonization of new
lands, the latter resulting in considerable language contact as well as the rise of hu-
manist philosophies. The printing press was also developed during this period. An
immediate use of the printing press was production and distribution of Greek and
Latin classics throughout Europe (Mackey, 1965) and it was during this period that
grammar teaching was separated from the study of literature.
A typical grammar teaching plan was presented in 1627 by Brinsley (quoted in
Kelly, 1969, p. 50):

Thus to goe forward in every rule:

1. Reading it over to the children;
2. Shewing the plaine meaning in as few words as you can;
3. Propounding every piece of it in a short question, following the words of the
booke, & answering it yourself out of the words of the book;
4. Asking the same questions of them & trying how themselves can answer them,
still looking upon their books. Then let them goe in hand with getting it amongst
themselves.

It is interesting to compare this question-based procedure, which continued until

the 19th century, with Dionysius Thrax’s recommendations for grammar instruction in
the first century BC, with examples of EFL lessons described in the subsequent section
on contemporary pedagogy, and with current debates about the place of grammar
instruction in the writing curriculum for native speakers of English (e.g., see the
arguments in Hunter & Wallace, 1995).
According to Howatt (1984, p. 33), there were two alternative approaches to tradi-
tional translation and rule memorization methods of language education in the late
16th and early 17th century. The first was the humanist tradition derived from Erasmus
and Vives, and the second was an antigrammar tradition, represented by the works
of Francis Bacon and the Czech educator, Jan Comenius (1592–1670)5 . This reformist
approach stressed the use of literacy for moral education (see end note 2), double
translation, and inductive rule learning rather than formal grammatical instruction on
rules followed by practice. Publishing the major textbook Inanua Linguarum Reserata,
in 1331, which taught vocabulary through key sentences, Comenius later published
the Orbis Sensualium Pictus in 1654, an innovative text using pictures to teach vocab-
ulary. He recommended that the teachers also show the students real examples of
the pictured objects and involve all the senses in experiencing them. Although this
660 FOTOS

approach did not become widely accepted, the book was reissued several times in
the early 1700s and again in 1887. Other educators, such as Vives (1500), who taught
Latin by inductive principles, G. H. Cominius (1520), Erasmus (1520), and Lubinus
(1550) recommended that grammar teaching be discontinued or be limited to begin-
ners, more advanced students inductively generating rules by exposure to texts. Kelly
comments:

Lubinus’s attack had a surprisingly modern touch: for him grammar repels the pupils
and bores the master; its emphasis on rules encourages, rather than presents, bad stylistic
habits; it clutters the mind with reasons and connections before the facts to be reasoned
out are known (1969, p. 37–38).

Lamy (1645–1751) recommended an approach that was the basis of the 19th century
natural methodology: the idea that languages could be learned in the same way that
first languages are learned. This theory reappeared in the early 1980s in the work of
researchers such as Krashen (1981, Krashen & Terrell, 1983), and these early works
also evoke comparison with contemporary approaches advocating use of material
appealing to different learning styles and strategies (Oxford, 2001; Reid, 1998).
Polyglot dictionaries also appeared in the Renaissance and were often multilingual,
with as many as seven languages (Kelly, 1969, p. 25).

THE 1600s AND 1700s: PEDAGOGICAL GRAMMARS,

DICTIONARIES, AND GRAMMAR TRANSLATION

As noted in a preceding section, the distinction between grammar usage (prescription)

and grammar description was lacking in Classical and early Middle Age treatments.
However, by the 1500s, the role of common usage in the formulation of grammat-
ical rules was increasingly accepted. Defining pedagogical grammars as “the types
of grammatical analysis and instruction designed for the needs of second language
students,” Odlin (1994, p. 1) discusses grammar as prescription, description, an inter-
nalized system, and as an axiomatic system—this latter being pedagogical grammar.
As an example of usage change driving grammar rules, Odlin notes the replacement
of thou by you during the 1600s (1994, p. 2).
This distinction is extended by Corder (1988), who notes that pedagogical gram-
mars are basically “textbooks in the methodology of grammatical presentation”
(p. 127) and are distinct from expositions of grammatical theory. In his treatment
of pedagogical grammar, Corder identifies four parts of grammar instruction: (1) data
on and examples of the target language, (2) descriptions and explanations, (3) in-
duction exercises, and (4) hypothesis testing exercises (1988, p. 134). These sections
are clearly present in Johnson’s 1640 pedagogical grammar, English Grammar. John-
son used both the Classical grammatical theory of Donatus, Priscian, and the Middle
Age grammarians, the post-Renaissance “standard theory” represented by “Lily’s
Grammar”6 (Howatt, 1984, p. 95), as well as a new theory following a “reasoned
approach” pioneered by the French scholar Petrus Ramus.
The Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae by John Wallis (1616–1703) was a second peda-
gogical grammar appearing during this period. It used a contrastive approach to focus
on pronunciation, concentrating on “ those features of English which are most likely
to strike the foreign learner as especially characteristic of English” (Howatt, 1984,
p. 98). This approach resembles the Contrastive Analysis approach of the early and
mid 20th century, in which linguists conducted contrastive analyses of the L1 and
target languages to predict where learners might be expected to experience difficul-
ties, (see Ellis, 1994, for a full discussion). This work is also considered notable because
of its efforts to separate English from Latin. As Howatt notes:
 36. TRADITIONAL AND GRAMMAR TRANSLATION METHODS 661

It is not, perhaps, entirely inappropriate that the best grammars of English in the sev-
enteenth century should have been written with foreigners in mind, or that the best
grammars of the twentieth century . . . should be rooted in the same soil. (1984, p. 100)

During this period there was a growing distinction between the grammar teach-
ing practices of traditional Latin-based curriculums and innovative educators who
opened progressive schools offering instruction in English. Thus, literacy in the L1
moved to the fore as Latin was gradually replaced by the use of English and French
as mediums of instruction. Also during this period English orthography, pronuncia-
tion, and usage were standardized through the publication of dictionaries by Johnson,
Walker, and Webster (Kelly, 1969).

THE RISE OF THE GRAMMAR-TRANSLATION METHOD

Although translation has always been a part of language learning, the beginnings of
the modern Grammar-Translation method (GTM) are found in Renaissance lessons
aimed at teaching both style and grammar. Formal use of translation to teach lan-
guages was common from the Classical period through the third century AD, but was
not officially used—in the sense of appearing in textbooks—after that until the late
Middle Ages, with the development of parallel translations or double texts. However,
it must be recalled that glosses (translations and notes in the L1 made in between lines
of Latin text or in the margins) were common throughout the Middle Ages and thus
provided essential but unofficial translations and support in the learners’ L1.
As mentioned, at first grammar structures and rules were taught in Latin, the target
language, regardless of the learners’ L1, but by the end of the 1700s, the teaching of
Latin grammar had become separated from the study of literature. Grammar was thus
studied independently, with explanations of rules provided in the L1. The basic con-
cept of the developing GTM was that students had to know the grammar of their own
language in order to learn an L2 through translation, paraphrase, and dictation. Since
the GMT was developed to teach Greek and Latin through the L1 it focused heavily
on learning vocabulary and rote memorization of syntax, morphology, and grammar
rules. Until the end of the 18th century it was customary to translate from the students’
L1 into the target language. However, by the end of the 1700s, the direction was often
reversed, with translation from the L2 into the L1, using memorized grammar rules as
a guide. This trend continued into the 19th century and remains a feature of the strong
position of the GTM in many foreign language classrooms. For example, a grammar
text in the 1840s described the following three-part lesson plan: (1) a statement of the
grammar rule; (2) presentation of new vocabulary; (3) and translation of a text into
the target language.
The best-known GTM texts of the 1800s were based on German scholarship
(Richards & Rodgers, 2001) such as Ollendorf’s textbook, A New Method of Learning
to Read, Write, and Speak a Language in Six Months teaching German to speakers of
English and French, these following grammar textbooks written by Meidinger at the
end of the 1700s. Ollendorf (1803–1865) used a structural syllabus with grammar
points graded from easy to difficult, and introduced grammar structures one at a
time. Lessons followed a set format (Kelly, 1969, p. 52): (1) statement of the grammar
rule; (2) study of new vocabulary; (3) translation of sentences from the L1 to the L2;
(4) some translation of sentences from the L2 into the L1; and, later in the course,
when the students had gained proficiency, (5) translation of a L1 prose passage into
the L2.
In the later part of the 1800s, another German language teacher, Karl Plötz (1819–
1881), continued the trend toward an exclusive focus on rules and exactness by his
method based on memorization of rules and paradigms and translation of
662 FOTOS

disconnected, artificial sentences exemplifying rules to and from the L1 (Mackey,

1965). Regarding this period, Kelly notes that through the strict application of the GTM:

Language teaching drifted further from the languages taught by reason of the abandon-
ment of authentic specimens of literature for synthetic passages that were built around
rules, exceptions, and restricted vocabulary selected for its congruence with grammatical
rules. Language skill was equated with ability to conjugate and decline. (1969, p. 53)

THE REFORM MOVEMENT: A REACTION AGAINST THE GTM

The GTM became the major language teaching pedagogy in Europe and North Amer-
ica for a 100-year period from the 1840s to the 1940s, and continues to be used today,
primarily in the foreign language or EFL teaching situation. Although, as seen in the
preceding sections, there were continual movements against formal grammar teach-
ing throughout the Medieval Period and the Renaissance—many inspired by the work
of Comenius—the 19th century witnessed a particularly strong reaction against the
GMT, especially during the last half of the century. In 1867 the Frenchman Claude
Marcel (1793–1876) used a “rational method” recommending abolishment of rule
memorization and translation in favor of communicative comprehension of texts, lis-
tening materials, and extensive reading of simple material, this followed by speaking
and writing activities (Mackey, 1965, p. 143). Similar natural methods were proposed
by other authors, for example, in The Art of Teaching and Studying Languages published
in Paris 1880 by Francois Gouin (1831–1896). This method recommended physically
acting out sentences (similar to Asher’s Total Physical Response approach of the late
1970s [1977]), visualization, linking new material with previously learned material,
and relating new vocabulary to previous activities, all of which were related to the
interests of the learner. Again, it should be noted that such activities remain common
today as a means of assisting processing and subsumption of newly learned material.
Mackey comments on this approach: “The language was first introduced through
the ear, then reinforced through the eye and hand by reading and writing (1969,
p. 144).
Harkening back to Middle Age and Renaissance educators who criticized study
of grammar, memorization of rules, and practice with isolated sentences designed to
exemplify the rule or structure studied—and foreshadowing the focus on commu-
nicative competence in the final quarter of the 20 century (see, Brumfit & Johnson,
1979; Canale & Swain, 1980; Hymes, 1971; Krashen, 1981; Krashen & Terrell, 1983;
Savignon, 1972, 1991)—such concepts became the basis of reform movements at the
end of the 19th century based on the primacy of oral methods and discourse level
input. Strongly resembling communicative approaches of the 1980s such as the Nat-
ural Approach (Krashen & Terrell, 1983),7 the 19th century reform approaches held
that the best way to learn languages was through conversation, with no formal study
of grammar rules, and no comparison of the L1 and the target language. By the end
of the century, these approaches had developed into the Direct Method, which used
conversation and cultural content to teach grammar inductively.

METHODS OF THE EARLY 1900s

The Direct Method, Natural Method, Conversation Method

Regarding the relationship of these oral-based approaches of the late 1800s and early
1900s to the rise of communicative and humanistic approaches in the 1970s and 1980s,
Howatt observes:
 36. TRADITIONAL AND GRAMMAR TRANSLATION METHODS 663

The communicative language teaching methods which have attracted a good deal of
interest over the last ten years [the 1980s] are the most recent manifestation of ideas
which were last revived about a hundred and twenty years ago by. . . immigrant teachers
in America. (1984, p. 192)

According to Mackey (1965, p. 146), the term “direct method” was first formalized in
1901, and the approach was officially adopted by France and German shortly after.
Based on the work of Montaigne in the 16th century, languages were taught following
a situational approach that emphasized politeness, behavior at home and at work,
and eschewed formal grammar teaching entirely. Writing about GTM, in particular
the isolated sentence of Ollendorff and Plötz, the English linguist Henry Sweet (1845–
1912) identified an “arithmetical fallacy.” This was the tendency for word-by-word
translations, built up like an arithmetic progression, resulting in contrived and artifi-
cial sentences such as The philosopher pulled the lower jaw of the hen (Sweet, 1899, 1964,
p. 73), the famous sentence often cited to illustrate the futility of a word-based ap-
proach to syntax. Although the isolated words make sense, the sentence as a whole is
strange and unnatural and would never be spoken in normal discourse. To overcome
this, the Direct Method did not allow translation but presented the target language
in meaningful contexts, using visual aids and pantomime to introduce new vocabu-
lary. Students were required to only speak target language, and grammar rules were
presented inductively. Reading and writing were based on oral practice and correct
pronunciation was emphasized.
The Direct Method was introduced to the United States under the name of the
Natural Method in 1869, when the Frenchman Lambert Sauveur (1826–1907) moved
to Boston, met the German Gottlieb Heness, and opened the Sauveur-Heness School
of Modern Languages, later publishing textbooks teaching French and German based
on dialogues. In 1878 Maximilian Berlitz (1852–1921) opened a language school in
Rhode Island and subsequently published dialogue and question-and-answer based
textbooks using the Direct Method and a structural syllabus. By 1914, there were
more than 200 Berlitz schools in Europe and the United States (Howatt, 1984, p. 203).
The chain is now worldwide and continues to be successful, particularly with adult
learners, and still uses Direct Method pedagogy. Richards and Rodgers summarize
the features of the Direct Method and other Natural Methods of the period (2001,
p. 8): (1) An oral methodology is used, with attention to pronunciation; (2) students
listen to the target language before reading or writing it; (3) vocabulary is presented
in communicative contexts and is not taught as an isolated list of terms; (4) grammar
is presented inductively and practiced in communicative contexts; (5) translation is
avoided, and (6) the L1 is used as little as possible.

The Rise of EFL Teaching in the 20th Century

Similar methods were used by the British linguist Harold Palmer (1877–1949), a fol-
lower of the Direct Method who is considered to have developed the profession of
teaching EFL in modern times. During the 1920s Palmer was linguistic advisor to
the Japanese Ministry of Education and conducted research in Tokyo. Although he
advocated an Oral Method using vocabulary study and actions, this approach did not
find wide acceptance among Japanese educators for reasons discussed in a subsequent
section. A colleague and collaborator of Palmer’s, Michael West (1888–1973), who was
involved in EFL teaching in India, emphasized vocabulary study and the need to read
simplified materials as the first step in language learning. In the United States, EFL
teaching benefited from the work of linguists such as Leonard Bloomfield and Charles
Fries8 , first through their involvement in war-time language training, then through
their work on teaching English as a second and foreign language—work that followed
664 FOTOS

a structural approach and led to the establishment of the U.S. Army’s Monterey Lan-
guage School and the development of the Audiolingual Approach using a structured
oral practice approach. Like Palmer, Fries also went to Japan as a consultant for de-
velopment of that nation’s EFL program. In the mid 1950s, the British Council began
its own activities in EFL education, often using the works of the British linguist M.A.
K. Halliday, whose work relates “elements of grammatical structure to their use in
discourse” (Howatt, 1984, p. 276).

The Grammar-Translation Method

Discussing his own use of the GTM for learning Latin, Cordor (1988) observes that this
method typically required three books—a dictionary, a grammar, and a reader—since
the main activities were oral translations from Latin into English using the reader, drill
and practice on grammatical forms such as conjugations of verbs and declensions of
nouns, and written translations from Latin into English. He notes that formal instruc-
tion on grammatical rules and categories was lacking: “The teaching and learning of
the theoretical foundations on which the description of the language was based were
largely inductive . . . very little was said about syntax” (p. 128). In contrast, he contin-
ues, the late 20th century GTM is characterized by grammatical instruction based on
pedagogical grammar—grammar designed to promote communicative competence
in the second/foreign language learner, not grammar designed for the native speaker.
Richards and Rodgers summarize the main features of the contemporary GTM:

The goal of foreign language study is to learn a language in order to read the literature or in
order to benefit from the mental discipline and intellectual development that result from
foreign language study. Grammar Translation is a way of studying a language . . . first
through detailed analysis of its grammar rules, followed by application of this knowledge
to the task of translating sentences and texts into and out of the target language. It hence
views language learning as consisting of little more than memorizing rules and facts . . . .
(2001, pp. 3–4)

The authors also note that the L1 is the medium of instruction, a structural syllabus
is generally used, accuracy is emphasized, grammar is taught deductively through
rule learning, speaking and listening are generally neglected, vocabulary is drawn
from the reading texts, and the sentence is the unit of teaching and practice. As a
subsequent section will show, this approach differs in several important areas from
contemporary GTM as used in many EFL settings.
In a discussion of assessing language proficiency, Sharwood Smith makes the in-
teresting observation that translation is now considered to be a special skill, without
a direct link to proficiency in the target language (Sharwood Smith, 1994). If this is so,
one may well ask why it has survived for thousands of years as a pedagogical tool.
Kelly suggests that translation has been remarkably robust in modern times because
of its importance in examination syllabuses (1969, p. 176), a situation continuing to
the present in many EFL contexts.

METHODS OF THE MIDDLE TO LATE 20th CENTURY

In her overview of pedagogical trends in the past 100 years, Celce-Murcia (2001, p. 5)
discusses the terms approach, method, and technique, suggesting that the first is the
broadest concept, intended to operationalize a particular theory, whereas the second
is a set of procedures, and the third is a specific activity.
There are a number of reviews of the various approaches and methods of the mid
to end of the 20th century (see Celce-Murcia, 2001; Howatt, 1997; Larsen-Freeman,
 36. TRADITIONAL AND GRAMMAR TRANSLATION METHODS 665

2000; Richards & Rodgers, 2001; Stern, 1983). These include the Oral-Situational Ap-
proach in England from the 1920s; various structural/behavioral approaches such
as the Audiolingual Approach in the United States from World War II; the func-
tional approaches of the 1970s in Europe—continued in the text-based work of Hal-
liday; the impact of Chomsky’s argument for Universal Grammar (1957)—an idea
that has emerged several times during the history of language teaching; cognitive
approaches that have developed since the mid 1980s through the impact of cogni-
tive psychology and psycholinguistics (see Skehan, 1998); communicative pedagogy
(Savignon, 1972) developing into various affective-humanistic approaches such as
Krashen and Terrell’s Natural Approach (1983); lexical-based approaches built on
corpora; and—based on the failure of purely communicative approaches to produce
high levels of learner accuracy, thus indicating the need for instructed L2 learning (see
Norris & Ortega, 2000)—the recent interaction-based (Gass, 1997) and focus-on-form
(Long, 1991) approaches that allow for explicit or implicit grammar instruction during
meaning-focused interaction and input (for example, see Ellis, 2002; Fotos, 1998, 2001,
2002; Samuda, 2001). These posit an interface between formal instruction and language
acquisition, and represent a middle position between a structure-based presentation
of grammar points and a purely communicative approach that holds that formal in-
struction does not impact upon L2 acquisition (e.g., Krashen, 1981). This is basically
the langue/parole distinction (language as a system/language in use) posited by Saus-
sure (1916) at the beginning of the 20th century (see Stern, 1983, pp. 126–129 for a
discussion). Other chapters in this volume treat these diverse approaches in more
detail.
Regarding such pendulum swings in language teaching methodology, Mackey’s
1965 observation that many of the methods developed in the past are still in use
remains true today. He summarizes a basic pedagogical tension that endured through
the centuries and continues to the present:

If we now glance back at the development of language-teaching method we see that it first
swings from the active oral use of Latin in ancient and medieval times to the learning by
rules of the Renaissance grammars, back to oral activity with Comenius, back to grammar
rules with Plötz, and back again to the primacy of speech in the Direct Method. (1965,
p. 151)

Thus, from this perspective, the term “traditional approaches” not only refers
to grammar-based instruction, translation, rule memorization, pattern practice, and
other methods associated with the GTM, but also to the use of meaning-focused situ-
ational and functional dialogues, content-based instruction using the L2, oral-based
inductive approaches, and the interactive communicative approaches developed since
the 1970s, since they, too, have been used since antiquity.

GRAMMAR TRANSLATION VERSUS COMMUNICATIVE

LANGUAGE TEACHING IN THE EFL CONTEXT

This section uses the teaching of English as an example of foreign language instruction
since one third of the world’s population either speaks English as a first or second
language, or is studying it as a foreign language (Crystal, 1985). In addition, it is
widely recognized that most English language instruction in the world occurs in the
foreign language situation, generally with teachers who are non-native speakers of
English themselves (Braine, 1999). It has also been noted (Fotos, 2001, p. 142) that many
EFL situations have a centrally controlled education system with a set curriculum,
prescribed textbooks, and highly competitive nationwide examinations determining
666 FOTOS

admission to middle, secondary, and tertiary institutions. Such examinations usually

have an English component requiring reading comprehension, knowledge of gram-
mar rules, vocabulary, and translation skills. As a result, English language teaching
is often aimed at mastery of the points tested on such examinations. Therefore, it is
not surprising that traditional EFL instruction usually emphasizes the development
of knowledge about English, including grammar rules, and the development of vo-
cabulary and translation skills, rather than the development of communicative ability
(e.g., see Bright, 1968, on teaching English in Africa and Robinson, 1960, in teaching
English in Southeast Asia).
For example, in a typical EFL reading class, the teacher presents an L2 reading
passage and explains L2 grammar points and new vocabulary in the L1. This is of-
ten followed by student repetition of the new words. The teacher then reads the L2
passage aloud, sentence by sentence, as a model for the students’ repetition. The
teacher translates the L2 text into the L1, usually word by word, and discusses the
grammar, rhetorical, and stylistic features in detail. Students take notes, frequently
writing the L1 translation above the word or sentence, in a manner reminiscent of
medieval glosses. This is followed by grammar practice drills in the L2, sentence and
text level translation exercises into the L1, and occasionally, L2 sentence production
using the newly introduced target structures and/or vocabulary words (Anderson,
1993; Fotos, 2001; Gorsuch, 1998; Li, 1998; Shih, 1999), although both Shih (1999) and
Gorsuch (1998) note that students often do not write in the target language at all since
translation generally takes place from the L2 into the L1. Thus, there is no output, a
component that, together with target language input, is suggested to be necessary for
second language learning (Swain, 1985) (see Swain, chap. 26 this volume).
In a typical EFL grammar or general English classes, the teacher presents the new
structure, explaining it in the L1, and introducing new vocabulary. Perhaps a tape of
a dialogue containing the structure and vocabulary is played, and the students repeat
the sentences, later practicing them again in pairs. After this, the students usually
translate the L2 dialogue into the L1, often word by word, again supported by L1
glosses for meaning and usage written in the lines of the L2 passage, and as a final
activity, listening and L2 grammar practice exercises are given (Fotos, 2001; Li, 1998;
Shih, 1999).
In the strongest use of the GTM, students are presented with a difficult target
language text and are required to make a word-by-word translation into the L1. Then
the translation is reordered to match L1 syntax and finally, the rough translation
is improved (Gorsuch, 1998, pp. 8–9). The result is that students are more focused
on the L1 end-product than on the grammar, vocabulary, and meaning of the L2, a
practice that has been suggested to produce washback effects on the English section
of secondary and tertiary entrance examinations (Gorsuch, 1998). Since no production
of the L2 is required, L2 communicative gains are minimal.
Characterizing the GTM in the 19th century as driven by the Oxford and Cam-
bridge Local Examinations initiated in 1858, which increased the status of modern
languages, including English, Howatt (1984, pp. 133–134) notes its “stress on accu-
racy, obsession with ‘completeness,’ and neglect of spoken language,” a situation
continuing in many EFL situations to this day. It is therefore no surprise that, similar
to protests in the past, the GTM has been widely criticized over the past decades for
its focus on word/sentence level meanings, its extensive use of the L1, and its failure
to provide opportunities for the development of the English communicative skills
increasingly needed in a global society (e.g., see Anderson, 1993; Canagarajah, 1999;
Gorsuch, 1998; Lamie, 2000; Li, 1998; Shih, 1999; Yu, 2001). Furthermore, L2 gram-
mar rules are not presented in ways that allow the development of form-meaning
relationships, encouraging processing and proceduralization. Consequently many of
 36. TRADITIONAL AND GRAMMAR TRANSLATION METHODS 667

the centralized educational agencies, particularly in Asian EFL contexts, have re-
cently adopted plans for the introduction of communicative approaches based on
the model of Canale and Swain (1980), which holds that communicative competence
includes both linguistic knowledge and the ability to use this knowledge for meaning-
focused communication. In many EFL situations, communicative language teaching
(CTL) is considered to have the following general features (Sato & Kleinsasser, 1999):
(1) provision of meaning-focused input and opportunities for meaningful output in
the form of tasks, dialogues, and activities rather than the explicit study of gram-
mar and translation; (2) use of real-life content for material that is relevant to the
needs of the learners; (4) use of pair/group activities; (5) a nonthreatening classroom
atmosphere, with learner independence promoted and the teacher as facilitator.
However, there are severe problems operating against success of this model of CLT
in many EFL situations (see Anderson, 1993; Canagarajah, 1999; Lamie, 2000; Li, 1998;
Liu & Littlewood, 1997; Rao, 2002; Yu, 2001). First, the difficulty of obtaining adequate
access to communicative use of the target language is paramount since CLT requires
large amounts of input and opportunities for output so that the students can acquire
grammatical and vocabulary knowledge indirectly. Target language use within the
classroom is often quite limited, particularly if the teacher discusses grammar, vo-
cabulary, and stylistic concerns in the students’ L1—a common feature of the current
GTM—and, outside the classroom, there is usually no access to the target language.
Second, many non-native speaking EFL teachers lack adequate preparation in using
Western style CLT methodology and feel that their spoken English ability as well as
their pragmatic and cultural knowledge is not adequate (Canagarajah, 1999; Lamie,
2000; Li, 1998; Yu, 2001). In addition, in many areas there are few opportunities for
professional development in use of CLT pedagogy. A survey of Japanese high school
teachers’ professional development (Lamie, 2000) indicates this clearly, and points out
the difficulty of expecting teachers to embrace CTL without adequate in-service prepa-
ration. Furthermore, since teachers are often required to use official textbooks—these
usually based on a structural approach—it is necessary to convert these materials to
communicative activities. Many teachers report a lack of both time and expertise for
such conversion (Lamie, 2000; Li, 1998, Sato & Kleinsasser, 1999). Finally, the presence
of grammar-and translation-based examinations in English requires that a major part
of each English lesson be spent teaching grammar, vocabulary, translation, and test-
taking skills. As Savignon notes (1991), failure to change evaluative procedures has
often rendered curricular innovations useless.
Thus, many attempts to introduce CTL in EFL contexts have only had limited
success (Brindley & Hood, 1990; Li, 1998; Liu & Littlewood, 1997; Rao, 2002; Sato &
Kleinsasser, 1999, Yu, 2001). Access to the target language remains a problem, and the
need for students to develop sufficient accuracy to pass proficiency examinations in
English remains a paramount teaching objective.
A final consideration is whether CLT is always appropriate for specific EFL cultural
contexts—although this should perhaps be the first consideration. Researchers such
as Braine (1999), Canagarajah (1999), Li (1998), Liu and Littlewood (1997), Pennycook
(2000), and Rao (2002) have discussed the cultural politics and critical pedagogy of
English language teaching in the light of imposing CLT and other Western pedagogies
on teachers and students who may not welcome it because of their lack of familiarity
with the activities, their need to spend time on grammar, vocabulary, and translation
activities because of examinations, and the existence of cultural factors mitigating
against CLT practices of oral production, including question asking and active partic-
ipation in groups. Thus, CLT pedagogy may not match the traditional teaching and
learning styles of the culture (see Li, 1998; Liu & Littlewood, 1997; Rao, 2002). These
points and the previous considerations often lead teachers to employ CLT sparingly
668 FOTOS

in their classrooms, even though it is generally believed to be valuable, and weak or

strong versions of the GTM continue to prevail.

COMBINING GRAMMAR TRANSLATION AND

COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING

An obvious solution to the tensions between GTM and CLT in the EFL context is
an eclectic combination of methods and activities, with grammar, vocabulary, and
translation activities retained and communicative activities added that contain abun-
dant uses of target L2 structures and vocabulary, thus permitting exposure to target
structures and providing opportunities for negotiated output in the target language.
Considerable research has been done recently (see the review in Ellis, 2003) on the
benefits of task-based learning for providing input and opportunities for students
to negotiate meaning, this producing “pushed output” where the students improve
their target language communication when responding to questions from their part-
ners (Long & Porter, 1985; Pica, Young, & Doughty, 1987; Swain, 1985), and the use of
interactive tasks has been proposed as a communicative method of grammar study.
Researchers such Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, and Thurrell (1998), and Ellis (2002, 2003)
suggest that both grammar explanation and communicative activities are necessary
to promote comprehension of the target structure and to allow for practice of gram-
mar structures and vocabulary, and task-based activities offer the means to combine
traditional and communicative pedagogies.
Thus, rather than advocating the either/or positions regarding the GTM and CTL
that have characterized the past, it is time to take the position that a combination of
grammar instruction and the use of communicative activities provide an optimum
situation for effective L2 learning.

NOTES

1. Regarding such reviews Stern cautions, “But because books of this kind are mainly concerned with
modern thought, the historical antecedents are often no more than a backdrop to set off with bold
strokes those aspects the writer wishes to emphasize, and the historical treatment is necessarily brief
and often reveals a definite bias” (1983, p. 77). He also notes the lack of “comprehensive and authoritative
general histories of language teaching” (ibid), a situation continuing to the present.
2. It is interesting to observe that even today literacy is still strongly linked to morality. This derives from
the fact that literacy was historically associated with the Bible since the Middle Ages in the West, and to
Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic religious scripture as well.
3. Robins (1951, p. 63) notes a striking similarity between the organization of grammatical categories and
the presentation of material in the standard Latin textbook used in the 1940s and 1950s, Kennedy’s Latin
Primer, and ancient texts by Donatus and Priscian.
4. Since Latin did not have articles, Latin demonstrative pronouns such as hic, hec, and hoc were sometimes
glossed as articles in French or English. Reynolds speculates that the “Latin of the text is being made to
conform to the structures of the mother tongue of the students . . . ” (1996, p. 68).
5. See Howatt’s Chapter 3, “Towards ‘The great and common world”’ (1984, pp. 32–51) for a discussion of
Comenius.
6. A Short Introduction of Grammar, a Latin textbook written by William Lily (1468–1522) and reissued by
a committee established by Henry VIII in the 1530s, was the accepted method for grammar teaching
in English schools, remaining in use until the 19th century. Called “Lily’s Grammar” or the “Royal
Grammar” it was written in two parts, the first titled “A Short Introduction to the Parts of Speech” and
the second Brevissima Institutio, a long description of Latin rules written in Latin (Howatt, 1984, p. 32–33).
7. Commenting on the similarities over the centuries of the GTM and repeated communicatively oriented
opposition to memorization of rules and translation, Howatt observes, “In writing a history of language
teaching, and, possibly, of many other human activities, it is always tempting to prick the balloon of
contemporary self-satisfaction by demonstrating that what has been taken as evidence of progress in
our time has, in fact, ‘all been done before”’(1984, p. 152).
8. Howatt (1984, p. 265) notes that Bloomfield and Fries, especially the latter’s work at the English Language
Institute at the University of Michigan, are considered to have developed the field of applied linguistics.
 36. TRADITIONAL AND GRAMMAR TRANSLATION METHODS 669

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Yu, Liming. (2001). Communicative language teaching in China: Progress and promise. TESOL Quarterly,
35, 194–197.
37

Form-Focused Instruction
Jessica Williams
University of Illinois at Chicago

Focus on Form (FonF), a term first coined by Long (1988, 1991; Long & Crookes,
1992) to describe a brief, often instructional focus on linguistic features embedded
in meaningful communication, has come to mean different things to those who have
adopted the term. The widespread embrace of the term in all of its interpretations
is perhaps an effect of the inevitable swing of the pendulum: In the early days of
communicative language teaching, during which some meaning-focused approaches
eschewed any attention to form at all, many researchers and teachers, who had perhaps
always been skeptical, now saw FonF as permission to reintroduce grammar into their
classrooms, where it had long been taboo or taught surreptitiously. It is also likely
that many teachers, especially those outside of the United States, never abandoned
the teaching of grammar in spite of this trend (Skehan, 1998; Thornbury, 1998).

MULTIPLE TERMS AND DEFINITIONS

Whatever the reason, the notion of focus on form seems to have struck a chord among
many teachers. However, the varied interpretations and plethora of rather similar
terms have resulted in some inevitable confusion with regard to definitions. R. Ellis
(2001) uses form-focused instruction (FFI) as an umbrella term for all approaches that
draw learner attention to formal aspects of language. This definition, “any planned
or incidental instructional activity that is intended to induce learners to pay attention
to linguistic form,” (pp. 1–2) includes FonF but potentially also decontextualized,
highly metalinguistic, teacher-centered grammar instruction, characteristic of what
Long calls focus on formS. He reserves the more specific term incidental focus on form to
refer to the type of instruction described by Long and Robinson (1998). Spada (1997)
also uses the term FFI but her use appears to be quite similar to the term FonF as used
by Doughty and Williams (1998a).
This chapter is an attempt to clarify what has been written about FonF and to explore
some of the important features of such an approach. Long and Robinson operationalize
FonF in terms of the allocation of the learner’s focal attention, explicitly tying it to
Schmidt’s “noticing” hypothesis (1994, 1995).

671
672 WILLIAMS

. . . during an otherwise meaning-focused classroom lesson, focus on form often consists

of an occasional shift of attention to linguistic code features—by the teacher and/or one
or more students—triggered by perceived problems with comprehension or production.
(p. 23)

This definition includes minimally the following features:

r An overall emphasis on the communication of meaning.

r A brief diversion from that emphasis on communication to focus on language
as object.
r A problem-based trigger for the diversion.

The problem-oriented trigger, with the focus of attention on a particular item, is

brought about incidentally by a breakdown or error of some sort, or perhaps some
difficulty in either production or comprehension. From a pedagogical perspective,
this means that teachers should wait for issues to emerge and respond to them as
needed. Doughty and Williams (1998a) and many of the authors in that volume
(e.g., Harley, 1998; Swain, 1998) broaden this definition somewhat, allowing for a
planned, and even separated, instructional focus on form that need not begin with
a real-time problem-trigger. R. Ellis (2001) suggests that this is an abandonment of
the incidental nature of FonF central to its definition and that this change is likely to
have important consequences for instruction. Doughty and Williams (1998b) clearly
suggest that an optimal FonF technique would be one in which meaning and form
are processed simultaneously, but offer alternatives as well (see also Doughty, 2001).
Given the strict definition offered by Long and Robinson and the varying interpreta-
tions offered in the literature, it is important to explore what is meant by the various
understandings of the term FonF. Table 37.1 offers a comparative view of how these
terms have been defined1 . The one thing that all of these share is the feature focus on

TABLE 37.1
Definitions of Focus on Form

Long & Doughty & Williams Spada Ellis Ellis

Robinson (1998) FonF (1997) (2001) (2001)
(1998) (including others in FFI FFI Incidental
FonF volume) FonF

Overall and primary

focus on meaning ++ ++ ++ + ++
Attention to
language as object ++ ++ ++ ++ ++
Brief ++ + + + ++
Proactive − + + + −
Explicit − + + + +
Separate from
meaning focus − + + + −
Problem-oriented
trigger for
attention to form:
Real-time problem ++ + + + +
IL-based problem ++ ++ ? + +

Note. ++ required feature; + possible feature; − prohibited feature; ? not specified

1 I am indebted to Charlene Polio for her contributions to this table.
 37. FORM-FOCUSED INSTRUCTION 673

language as object. Some of the features will be discussed a greater length later in this
chapter.
I will now explore these definitions in more detail, beginning with the one used
in Doughty and Williams. The term FonF consists of two parts: the focus and the
form. The first F is perhaps the more crucial in that it points to cognitive engagement
and learning processes. In Doughty and Williams (1998b), focus is taken to mean any
brief turning or dividing of learner attention during an act of communication, such
as reading, conversing, listening, and so forth, toward some feature of language. The
essential characteristic is that although there is a brief or simultaneous focus on code
features: pronunciation, inflectional morphology, word form, word definition, and the
like, the overriding focus is on the processing of meaning as part of an act of commu-
nication, and furthermore, that the diversion to form is in service of communication of
meaning.
In most studies, form is assumed to be a structural feature. In fact, though, it need
not be limited to these kinds of items. It can and should be viewed more broadly. FonF
could equally involve the drawing of learner attention to a second language pragmatic
convention (Bardovi-Harlig & Dörnyei, 1998; Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, & Thurrell, 1997;
Takahashi, 2001; see Kasper, 2001, for a general discussion). For example, Cook (2001)
describes the morphological contextualization cues that are crucial to pragmatically
appropriate discourse in Japanese. Learners often will not notice these morphemes
because they are not salient and because they have no referential meaning. If they are
not noticed, they are unlikely to be learned. Such features might be a candidate for
FonF.
Indeed, Long (1996) himself offers an example of using FonF to call attention to
problematic words. In this case, the form would be lexical. FonF might include the use
of a typographic enhancement or glossing of words in a reading, to heighten learner
attention to a word’s meaning, not just its structural features. This flagging of lexical
items and in particular, their meaning rather than a grammatical form, is a broader
view of FonF; in that, instead of processing form along with meaning, the learner is
processing word meaning in the context of comprehending spoken or written text
(see Hulstijn, 2001). This falls within the general perspective of simultaneous or dual
processing, which is at the heart of FonF. An example of this can be found in Rott,
Williams, and Cameron (2002), a study that applies FonF techniques to lexical acquisi-
tion, in a treatment that combines the possibilities of structured input, guided output,
and subsequent access to input to encourage learners to notice new lexical items. The
defining characteristic of form in all of these examples of FonF is that, however briefly,
language is treated as an object rather than exclusively as a tool for communication
(see R. Ellis, Basturkmen, & Loewen, 2001b).

A FonF TAXONOMY

There are variety of techniques and activities that have been suggested to promote
FonF, many of which have been discussed in the literature (Doughty & Williams,
1998b; R. Ellis, 2001; Nassaji, 1999; Spada, 1997). Because of the diversity of these
ideas, it is useful to situate them within some sort of taxonomy. It seems evident that
some level of attention to form makes pedagogical sense, yet it is not always clear
which are aspects of various FonF activities and techniques that make them effective,
or more likely, sometimes effective and sometimes not. A taxonomy can help isolate
the features of the various instructional techniques in order to analyze them separately,
and ultimately, manipulate them for more effective instruction. Doughty and Williams
(1998b) made a first attempt at this. In this paper, I reevaluate several of these features,
and consider new ones, shown here in Figure 37.1.
674 WILLIAMS

Problematicity
• Planning


• proactive
reactive*


• targeted
general


• Obtrusive
unobtrusive* (interrupts processing)


• Teacher
learner responsibility

FIG. 37.1. Some features of FonF for (re)consideration

*from Doughty and Williams (1998b)

Problematicity
One of the central features of FonF is that it revolves around a learner problem or
difficulty. Ellis et al. (2001b; R. Ellis, 2001) stress this point in particular. They take us
back to Long and Robinson’s original definition—that FonF arises out of a (perceived)
problem in communication and thus should perhaps be limited to incidental treat-
ment, that is, responses to problems as they emerge during a lesson. This is what is
referred to as a real-time problem in Table 37.1. They make the further claim that this is
likely to lead to what they call extensive FonF, that is, a scattershot treatment in which
various forms come into instructional focus as errors or communicative breakdown
occur. They contrast this with intensive FonF, in which a limited number of forms
are selected in advance for repeated emphasis. Clearly, such treatment is only likely
to occur if the focus is preplanned rather than incidental. For example, the forms in
Doughty and Varela (1998) were selected on the basis of an earlier analysis of the
learners’ interlanguages (ILs). This type of problem trigger is referred to an IL-based
problem in Table 37.1. This is an important distinction, given the divergent results
from studies of recasting, a technique that is often cited as useful in FonF instruction
(see Nicholas, Lightbown, & Spada, 2001). A recast is defined by Long (to appear) as
an immediate reformulation of a learner’s nontargetlike utterance as a targetlike ut-
terance, with as little change in meaning as possible. Research by Lyster (1998; Lyster
& Ranta, 1997) suggests that recasting is not terribly effective, whereas Ayoun (2001),
Braidi (2002), Doughty and Varela (1998), and Long, Inagaki, and Ortega (1998) report
the opposite. Lyster’s findings may stem from the fact that the teachers in these stud-
ies provided extensive recasting. That is, a variety of forms were recast, others were
ignored, and few forms came into focus more than once, resulting in their potential
ambiguity for learners. Learners were unsure whether the recasts were corrections or
simply affective or meaning-based feedback. In the second set of studies, in contrast,
forms were preselected for narrow and intensive focus, based on an earlier analysis
of the learners’ ILs.
There is one other implication of Ellis’ emphasis on perceived communication
problems in the definition of FonF. In addition to the proactive (preplanned)-reactive
distinction, Ellis, Basturkmen, and Loewen (2001b) use the term preemptive FonF. In
this case, the trigger may not be an actual or perceived problem; instead, it may simply
be a problem that is anticipated. In other words, no problem-based trigger is required.
For instance, if the teacher thinks learners might encounter difficulty with a form or
structure, she may preempt this possibility by initiating a brief sequence focusing on
form and providing learners with positive evidence about the form in question. Be-
cause the sequence was not planned, but rather, Ellis et al. maintain, initiated on the
spur of the moment, they classify it as incidental. Although such moves are inevitably
represented in communicative classrooms and may be an important instructional
move to investigate further, the question is: Is it FonF? The question brings us back
to problematicity, which is a central and essential feature of FonF. Broadly speaking,
all manifestations of FonF are in response to problems that learners have with form.
 37. FORM-FOCUSED INSTRUCTION 675

In some cases, the problem is noted by the teacher or researcher, resulting in planned
and specifically targeted FonF instruction (e.g., Doughty & Varela, 1998; Izumi &
Bigelow, 2000; Swain, 1998; Williams & Evans, 1998); in other cases, the teacher re-
sponse is spontaneous feedback on error (Lyster & Ranta, 1997; Williams, 2001), or
attention to form may be initiated by the learners themselves in requests for assistance
(R. Ellis, Basturkmen, & Loewen, 2001a; Williams, 1999) or as an outcome of negoti-
ation (de la Fuente, 2002; R. Ellis, 1999; Mackey, 1999; Oliver, 1995, 2000; Pica, 1994,
1997, 2002; Pica et al., 1989; Shehadeh, 1999, 2001).
In the case of learner requests for assistance, it is important to note that the problem
trigger need not be an error. The learners may encounter a word they do not under-
stand, a form they do not know how to use, or find that they are unable to express
their intended meaning because of a “hole” in their interlanguage (de la Fuente, 2002;
Izumi & Bigelow, 2000; Rott, Williams, & Cameron, 2002; Shehadeh, 2001; Swain &
Lapkin, 1995; Swain, 1998; Williams, 1999). This need may prompt them to ask the
teacher for assistance. Need is an important element in successful learning, at least
of vocabulary, according to Laufer and Hulstijn (2001). In all of these cases, as well
as in the much-explored case of negotiation, there is an actual problem. In this light,
it seems questionable whether this learner-initiated focus on form, as described by
R. Ellis, Basturkmen, and Loewen (2001a) and Williams (1999), can actually be called
preemptive.
In Ellis’ teacher-initiated preemptive focus on form, the claim is that this focus is
purely incidental, that the teacher decides on the spur of the moment that learners
might encounter difficulty processing a word or form that is part of the lesson, and that
he or she therefore launches into a brief, (explicit) instructional sequence. However, in
contrast to learner-initiated FonF, the “problem” here is only anticipated and, as Ellis
et al. demonstrate, the guess is not always accurate. Because these kinds of sequences
potentially do away with a central feature of FonF, problematicity, one may question
whether this is FonF at all, at least as defined here. This is an example of how the
term has been stretched to fit our need to describe various kinds of communicative
interaction and instruction in which learners and teachers treat language as object.

Planning
Doughty and Williams offered proactive versus reactive as a fundamental distinc-
tion in making FonF decisions. However basic, this distinction may be too broad
and has been subject to varied interpretation, probably due to confusion with the
more general term, planning. It may be more useful to consider several related fea-
tures, in particular, to distinguish among the following: (a) overall lesson planning,
(b) whether a technique or approach is proactive or reactive, and (c) the degree to
which a technique or an activity has a specific instructional target (i.e., a form that
will be focused on).
Overall planning (a) simply means that the use of specific techniques and activ-
ities can (should) be planned. For example, recasting is clearly a reactive technique
(b), yet the decision to recast, as well as the target of the recasting (c) may be made in
advance (a). Reactive FonF techniques, such as recasting, may be either targeted in or-
der to provide intensive treatment or may be general, resulting in extensive treatment.
Within our definition of FonF, targeted recasting (c) would be based on a previously
established IL profile, rather than a real-time communication problem, although the
individual recasts would be in response to real-time errors (b).
This targeted-general distinction can also be applied to proactive FonF. If a specific
form is to be in focus, a teacher might opt for a proactive technique such as some
form of input enhancement, perhaps textual highlighting or input flooding (see Wong
& Simard, 1999, for examples and discussion). Another possibility for planned and
specifically targeted FonF is a focused communication task, during which, it is hoped,
676 WILLIAMS

learners will use the preselected form while performing some meaning-centered task
(Loschky & Bley-Vroman, 1993; Samuda, 2000; Spada & Lightbown, 1999).
Alternatively, general (nontargeted) accuracy might be promoted without specify-
ing any particular form by increasing learner planning time, and/or giving instruc-
tions to attend to accuracy. Mehnert (1998), Ortega (1999) and Foster and Skehan (1999)
all report ways in which opportunities to plan production allow learners to focus on
form spontaneously and increase accuracy, as well as try out more complex forms at
the forward edge of their ILs.
Attention to form can also be encouraged with the use of two-way convergent tasks,
which can promote negotiation (Pica, Kanagy, & Faludon, 1993; Pica, 2002). Some of
these have been shown to increase learners’ attention to some forms (Mackey, 1999;
Pica, 1994; Shehadeh, 2001). However, in most sequences involving morphosyntax,
it is difficult to predict what the locus of negotiation will be, and thus these must
be considered nontargeted FonF activities. Task repetition can also increase learner
attention to form, though in this case, the changes documented in empirical studies
are mainly in complexity and sophistication rather than accuracy (Bygate, 2000; Gass
et al., 1999). Again, the effect is general improvement in language use rather than on
specified forms. These nontargeted proactive choices do present a potential problem
for our definition of FonF, however. Do they conform to the problematicity criterion?
In fact, they probably do, simply more indirectly. Learners with more planning time
and opportunity to repeat activities may be better able to identify their difficulties
and address them more autonomously in these activities.
Thus, the proactive-reactive feature is related to, but separate from, the targeted-
general feature, and both can be related to advance planning. In summary, planning
can be seen in three levels of instructional design:
r Planned choice of techniques and activities.
r Reactive versus proactive techniques.
r Specification of instructional target.

Some examples of instructional activities as they reflect these features may be help-
ful. Figure 37.2 illustrates these graphically.
So far, we have discussed the planned side of Figure 37.2. It is also possible to
focus on form without having made a decision to do so in advance. It is common for
a teacher to notice a general problem that students are having and to address it in
some way, with a brief mini-lesson on form or by calling learner attention to the issue
more implicitly (Lightbown, 1991; Lightbown & Spada, 1994; Long & Robinson, 1998;
VanPatten, 1993). This would be unplanned, reactive FonF. Another quite different
example of unplanned FonF would be the case of learners independently choosing
to focus on form as a result of individual difficulties in production or comprehension
(e.g., Ellis, Basturkmen, & Loewen, 2001b; Williams, 1999). The final possibility, in
parentheses in Figure 37.2, is teacher-initiated preemptive FonF, as described by Ellis,
Basturkmen, and Loewen (2001b), in which a teacher anticipates learner difficulty.
This falls outside of FonF as defined here, because it does not involve the crucial
feature of problematicity.

Obtrusiveness
Asecondbasicfeaturediscussed in Doughty andWilliams is obtrusiveness. InDoughty
and Williams, obtrusiveness simply refers to the degree to which an activity or tech-
nique interrupts the flow of communication. A more crucial issue for acquisition, per-
haps, is whether it interrupts the processing of meaning. This is a cognitive rather than
communicative perspective. Whether this interruption of processing is even possible,
 37. FORM-FOCUSED INSTRUCTION 677

Focus on form

Planned Spontaneous

Reactive Proactive Reactive g. (Preemptive)

a. Targeted b. General c. Targeted d. General e. Teacher initiated f. Learner initiated

(intensive) (extensive) (intensive) (extensive)

Examples of activities/instructional sequences with these features:

a. Narrow recasting of preselected form(s)
b. General recasting of learner error
c. Enhanced input, focused communicative tasks
d. Increased planning time for task; negotiation tasks
e. Scattershot response to learner error, e.g., "mini-lessons" in response to learner problems
f. Learner-initiated FonF, e.g., learner requests for assistance
g. (mini-lessons in anticipation of learner problems)

FIG. 37.2. Planning in FonF activities and techniques

and if so, what its effect on second language learning might be, is not yet clear. De
Bot (2000) argues that processing, and in particular, retrieval, cannot be interrupted.
However, many pedagogical techniques appear to be predicated on the assumption
that some interruption is required in order to actively direct learners’ attention to a
form, or to engage learners in the deeper processing that some claim is necessary for
transfer to long-term memory (see R. Ellis, 1999, for discussion). At the other end of
the spectrum is the prospect of simultaneous processing of form and meaning. Unfor-
tunately, it is not certain whether this is possible either (Robinson, 1995; see Doughty,
2001, for relevant research on this topic from the psychology literature).
In part, any determination regarding these debates will depend on whether (and
what level of) awareness is considered a requirement for the conversion of input
to intake, a question that remains controversial (Leow, 1997b, 2000; Rosa & O’Neill,
1999, Schmidt, 2001, in press; Simard & Wong, 2001). If higher levels of awareness are
required, this could limit the possibilities for simultaneous processing of form and
meaning. VanPatten (1990, 1996) has long maintained, based on a limited capacity
model, that the simultaneous processing of form and meaning is unlikely, at least in
the initial stages of acquisition. His claim is that form will only be processed when
meaning is already clear to the learner (and therefore is processed at little or no cost).
There is some evidence that even supposedly unobtrusive interventions can result in
a diminution of performance in the processing of meaning, even as the enhancement
may increase noticing of form. Overstreet (1998), for instance, reports lower compre-
hension scores for texts with multiple kinds of typographic enhancement than for
unenhanced texts. A number of other studies of textual enhancement report only its
effect on the noticing or use of form, without controlling for an effect on compre-
hension, making it difficult to determine its overall impact (Alanen, 1995; Jourdenais
et al., 1995; Leeman et al., 1995).
On the other hand, it has been argued that greater awareness allows for more elabo-
rate forms of learning (see Rosa & O’Neill, 1999; Simard & Wong, 2001; Schmidt, 1995,
for discussion) and a variety of experimental studies have suggested an advantage for
explicit instruction for the noticing and/or learning of at least some rules or structures
678 WILLIAMS

and under some conditions (e.g., Carroll & Swain, 1993; DeKeyser, 1995; N. Ellis, 1993;
R. Ellis, 2002; Kupferberg & Olshtain, 1996; Nassaji & Swain, 2000; Robinson, 1996,
1997; Rosa & O’Neill, 1999; Spada & Lightbown, 1993, 1999; Takahashi, 2001; L. White,
1991; see N. Ellis & Laporte, 1997, for a discussion). Norris and Ortega (2000), in their
meta-analysis of effect-of-instruction studies, conclude that more explicit forms of
intervention lead to greater gains than implicit instruction (though see Doughty, in
press, for an alternate interpretation).
R. Ellis (1998) refers to most of these pedagogical options as “explicit instruction”
and some would be considered obtrusive in that communication is interrupted in
order to direct learner attention to language form. Indeed, some may not qualify as
FonF. For instance, although they are included on the FonF continuum in Doughty
and Williams (1998b), there is some question as to whether the consciousness-raising
tasks in studies by Fotos (1993, 1994, 2002) should actually be called FonF at all, as
defined by the criteria of meaning focus, brief diversion, and problematicity. Fotos
(2002) argues that an explicit focus is required in foreign language settings, in which
copious target language input is absent. Some of these tasks have as their content fo-
cus the grammatical rules themselves. Although the learners are indeed interacting,
they are simply communicating about grammar. The entire activity treats language
as an object rather than as a tool for communication. This constitutes an important
difference between these activities and others that are aimed at increasing metalin-
guistic awareness, such as the tasks used by Swain and her colleagues, in collaborative
writing (1998, 2000; Swain & Lapkin, 1995) or in feedback on writing errors (Nassaji
& Swain, 2000). In these tasks, too, the interaction may focus on formal features of the
language, but the discussion is in service of a wider communicative purpose. That
said, such tasks, for example, the dictogloss reconstruction, stand at the outer edge of
the FonF continuum.
A less obtrusive possibility, mentioned earlier, is to expose learners to a new form
in the input (for which they are developmentally ready), or a Target Language (TL)
alternative to an IL form, with that form highlighted or flagged in some way, what
R. Ellis (2001) calls enriched input. The input may also be enriched by increasing the
frequency of a preselected form in a text in order to direct the learner’s attention to it.
De Bot (2000) suggests that for learning to be facilitated, instructional tasks must make
TL candidates in the input more attractive for selection than non-TL candidates. Tex-
tual enhancement and flooding may serve this goal. Various forms of typographic and
other textual enhancement of written input have been discussed at length in the litera-
ture (e.g., Alanen, 1995; Jourdenais et al., 1995; Leow, 1997a; Takahashi, 2001; J. White,
1998). According to a review of these studies by Wong and Simard (1999), the results
for this type of intervention are mixed. Although the bulk of the studies on which
they report do demonstrate some positive effect for such enhancement, the authors
make the point that the results are often difficult to interpret because of inconsistencies
in research design. Specifically, the enhancements have often been mixed with other
interventions, and other effects, such as on comprehension, may not be reported. In
addition, the positive effects varied: Some only reported an improvement on noticing
measures, some on use, and rather fewer, on measures of accuracy or acquisition.
A more explicit and obtrusive approach can be found in the processing instruction
procedures of VanPatten (1996, in press). R. Ellis uses the term, structured input (1998,
2001) and argues that this is focus on formS because it gives primary attention the
forms to be learned. VanPatten argues that it is precisely because these activities
require learners to attend to form in order to process meaning that they are effective
(VanPatten, 1996; VanPatten & Lee, 1995). In this approach, learners are exposed to
input containing relevant problematic structures, but they are also explicitly instructed
as to how the structures should be processed. Most studies of input processing have
examined the effect of this technique on forms known to cause learners difficulty,
 37. FORM-FOCUSED INSTRUCTION 679

either because they carry little meaning (e.g., redundant inflectional morphology)
or because they violate learner expectations (e.g., declarative sentences in which the
first noun is not the subject). This would meet the problematicity criterion of FonF.
Whether input processing qualifies as a brief diversion and meaning focused is open
to question, but results suggest that it is an effective technique for learning these forms
(VanPatten, in press). One reason for this may be that the aim of this technique is to
guide learner processing of input, perhaps a more realistic goal compared to explicit
techniques that are aimed at immediate acquisition and use. Doughty (in press) argues
that it is these units of processing, rather than units of language, which should be
the target of instruction. Other approaches combine input-based techniques, such
as floods/typographic enhancement with feedback and production practice, with
positive effects generally reported (e.g., Alanen, 1995; Leeman et al., 1995; Spada &
Lightbown, 1999; Williams & Evans, 1998).

Locus of Responsibility
FonF activities have thus far been described in terms of four features: problematicity,
proactive-reactive, targetedness, and obtrusiveness. The first is a required feature; the
last three are continua along which activities may range. However, consideration of
these three features neglects one crucial element in the learning process: who is doing
the planning, reacting, targeting, and interrupting. For the most part, the features
described so far refer to choices that the teacher makes. Since only the leaner can
do the learning, it seems appropriate to turn our focus to the role of the learner. In
Doughty and Williams (1998b, p. 259), this aspect of FonF was described in either/or
terms: Is the learner’s attention attracted (implicitly) or directed (more forcefully and
directly)? Does the learner or teacher manipulate the forms? Both of these point to the
locus of responsibility as another essential feature of FonF: Is it the teacher/materials
or the learner who takes responsibility for initiating the cognitive processes involved
in acquisition? (Always keeping in mind, of course, that ultimately, it is always up to
the learner.)
Again, there is a wide range, starting from traditional activities, in which the teacher
or materials take primary responsibility for focusing on formS. Those techniques, in
which the teacher controls the process, such as the provision of explicit explanations,
and present-and-practice activities, also tend to be the most obtrusive; indeed, most
could not be considered FonF. Thus, the extreme—teacher responsible—end over-
laps with a high level of obtrusiveness, that is, such activities tend to interrupt the
processing of meaning.
A second, intermediate position would include those techniques that, though still
teacher/materials-directed, place more responsibility with the learner in that they
provide learners with a guided opportunity to engage in cognitive processes that are
thought to facilitate acquisition of a targeted form. This would include many of the
techniques and activities already mentioned. Processing instruction (VanPatten &
Cadierno, 1993; VanPatten & Sanz, 1995; Wong, 2001) would be one example. Other
activities in this category, such as recasting and structured input activities, are those
that encourage learners to notice the gap, that is, to see where their IL falls short of
the target. Cognitive processes involved in intake might also be triggered by learners’
simply not knowing, but needing, the TL form, resulting in their noticing a so-called
hole in their IL. This in turn may increase the salience, and consequently, learner
noticing of forms in the TL that they need. This noticing may be occasioned by an
output task, as when learners became aware of holes in their ILs while reconstructing
a text. This is particularly evident in dialogic activities, as reported in Swain’s work
(Swain, 1998, 2000; Swain & Lapkin, 1998; see also de la Fuente, 2002; Izumi & Bigelow,
2000; Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001; Rott, Williams, & Cameron, 2002; Thornbury, 1997).
680 WILLIAMS

In their analysis of FonF features of various tasks and techniques, Doughty and
Williams (1998b) list almost no tasks in which the focus on form is NOT orchestrated
by the teacher. The tasks and activities just discussed are no exception. It is possible
to give somewhat more responsibility to the learner for focusing on language form.
However, this would most likely require that any specific target for the focus on form
be relinquished. One promising possibility already mentioned is allowing learners to
plan their production. A widely held assumption is that the human mind is a limited
capacity processor (see Schmidt, 2001). VanPatten (1996) has argued that learners have
a natural tendency to process meaning before form. One way of helping learners to
manage the cognitive load of simultaneous processing is to give them more time to
plan their production.
Mehnert (1998), Ortega (1999), and Foster and Skehan (1999) all report ways in
which opportunities to plan production allow learners to focus on form spontaneously
and increase accuracy, as well as try out more complex forms at the forward edge of
their ILs. Specifically, Mehnert (1998) found that, with even a minute of planning
time, accuracy increased significantly on an exposition task, with a longer period
needed for an instructional task. Some research has shown that the effect of planning
extends beyond increasing formal accuracy. Increased pretask planning time may
also affect fluency and complexity, depending on the task, the amount of time, and
the proficiency of the learners. In her review of planning studies, Ortega proposes
that “an increased focus on form during pretask planning . . . (provides) the space
for the learner to devote conscious attention to formal and systematic aspects of the
language needed for a particular task” (1999, p. 120). She notes that, in many stud-
ies, it is not clear whether planning time results in planning of actual language use
or whether it eases the cognitive load by allowing learners to manage more global
task demands initially, freeing up attention to devote to accuracy during execution
of the task. In her own study of the effect of planning time, she included retrospec-
tive interviews and found that, in fact, learners do both, often planning at the sen-
tence level. However, she found no significant effect for planning time on accuracy
in a story retell task. Overall, the results for effect of planning time on accuracy are
mixed and difficult to compare because they involve different tasks, planning con-
ditions, and proficiency levels. However, Ortega notes that there is enough evidence
of increased focus on form with additional planning time to make it a promising
avenue for further research. Although in some studies, the task has included in-
structions to pay attention to accuracy, the decision for how planning time should
be used rests with the learner. We can therefore classify such activities as learner-
responsible.

Manipulation of Task Features to Encourage Cognitive Processing

Beyond planning time, one can speak more broadly of the manipulation of task fea-
tures, which can help free up learners’ attention so that they can focus on form in-
dependently and as needed (Robinson, 2001; Skehan & Foster, 2001). Skehan (1996)
suggests, for instance, that if task familiarity is increased or complexity is decreased,
learners may be more able to focus on accuracy. In fact, however, Skehan and Foster
(1999) found that fluency was more likely to be influenced by the predictability of
a task than accuracy. Skehan and Foster (2001) now see these two performance de-
mands in competition with each other. Robinson (2001) argues that a reduction in the
cognitive task demands may actually work against IL development. He proposes that
increased cognitive demands will result in greater learner noticing and rehearsal in
memory, which in turn, will lead to more incorporation of input and greater modifi-
cation of output. Only empirical studies will reveal the effects of the manipulation of
these task features.
 37. FORM-FOCUSED INSTRUCTION 681

One such study, Gass et al. (1999), examined the effect of task repetition on accu-
racy, with the underlying assumption that with the increased content familiarity that
accompanied the repeated task, more attention might be available to improve accu-
racy. During the execution of a task with familiar content and structure, learners had
opportunity to draw on their knowledge of the TL and consequently, modify their
output in the direction of the target. They were able to compare their IL production,
not to the target input, but to an aspect of their IL knowledge that they did not yet fully
control but could access when they devoted more attention to retrieving it. Gass et al.
found some modest improvements, although they found that they did not carry over
to new tasks. Izumi et al. (1999) report similar effects for task repetition, in this case,
on noticing. This manipulation of task features may prove a useful pedagogical tool,
particularly for nontargeted proactive FonF, which is both unobtrusive and places a
large degree of the responsibility on the learner.

Focus on Form and Stages of IL Acquisition

Many models have been suggested for second language learning (e.g., Gass, 1997;
N. Ellis, 2001; R. Ellis, 1997; Johnson, 1996; VanPatten, 1996). They differ on funda-
mental points, such as the role of noticing, explicit knowledge, and output, and on
many details. An analysis and evaluation of these models are beyond the scope of
this chapter. What we can take from them is the notion that learner interaction with
language data changes at different stages of development, and that instruction may
impact the acquisition process differently at these various points. Instruction should
therefore be targeted thoughtfully, based on where learners are in this process. In fact,
very little work has explicitly addressed the need to differentiate the effect of FonF
at points of IL development although some have examined the differential effect of
drawing/attracting attention to form at different levels of proficiency or developmen-
tal readiness (Mackey, 1999; Mackey & Philp, 1998; Nassaji & Swain, 2000; Spada &
Lightbown, 1999; Williams & Evans, 1998).
The process begins with input. No matter what model one subscribes to, input is
necessary for the process to begin. It is not sufficient for input to be available however;
learners must somehow take in this data and process it. One widely held belief is that
in order for this to take place, the learner must attend to input (Schmidt, 1990, 1994,
1995). Attention, and its “subjective correlate” (Schmidt, 2001, p. 5), noticing, is a
construct that has been variously defined and subject to some controversy. Several
different kinds of noticing have been suggested in the literature. At the most general
level, we may think of noticing as simply the registration of a form or word that
has not been attended to before. What gets noticed may be influenced by a number
of factors, including frequency, salience, affect, and situational factors such as time
pressure. VanPatten has also argued that less salient or meaningful forms are unlikely
to be noticed until the message in which they are embedded is understood. These are
all features of materials and activities that can be manipulated in order to encourage
initial learner noticing.
Several studies have attempted to measure noticing or in some cases, simply mem-
ory, assuming that this is the first step on the way to acquisition. In other words, do
learners remember a word or form from a previous activity, text, or the like? As yet
though, we do not have a clear idea of how directly this relates to their acquisition.
One problem with most SLA research on noticing has to do with measurement. Most
measurements (Fotos, 1994; Izumi et al., 1999; Jourdenais et al., 1995; Leow, 1997b; Van-
Patten, 1990; Wong, 2001, interalia) are quite demanding, requiring that learners do
something—circle, underline, make checkmarks—or even verbalize their awareness.
As Schmidt (2001 and elsewhere) has repeatedly noted, registration does not require
the level of awareness that the measures used in these studies may require. Fewer
682 WILLIAMS

studies have used less direct techniques for measuring registration more common in
psychological research, such as reaction time or fixation time in eye-tracking.
At least two other types of noticing have been explored: noticing the gap and noticing
the hole (Swain, 1995, 1998). They appear to be related, but differ in crucial ways.
Noticing the gap occurs when learners notice that their IL differs from the target. This
is another way of saying that they figure out that they are making an error, perhaps
that they are using a stabilized IL form. It necessarily involves noticing both the IL
and TL forms, presumably input and output forms, a process sometimes referred to
as cognitive comparison (Doughty, 2001). Noticing the gap may require restructuring
of IL knowledge and the formation of new form-meaning connections. The second,
noticing the hole, takes place at the point at which learners realize that they do not have
the means to say something that they want to say. This differs from noticing the gap,
in that learners may not yet have developed an IL form to express what they want.
Activities that promote noticing the hole seek to intervene at the point at which input
becomes intake, an earlier stage in the acquisition process. There is no guarantee that
the hole will be filled by a TL form (although this would clearly be the pedagogical
goal). In addition, ideally, following the learner’s realization of need, input data will
be available to provide him or her with positive evidence about the IL.
In contrast, activities that facilitate noticing the gap attempt to destabilize the IL and
move it toward more targetlike accuracy, a later stage in acquisition, with a combi-
nation of positive and negative evidence. By definition, noticing the gap suggests the
presence of an IL form to which the TL form can be compared. Learners may believe
they already “know” the word or form and they must now notice that they do not,
at least not exactly or completely. From a pedagogical perspective, this may a signifi-
cantly more difficult goal than getting learners to notice an IL hole. Some have argued
(Long & Robinson, 1998; L. White, 1991) that it is in these cases that the provision of
negative evidence is necessary or at least helpful.
It is important to be precise about this issue since in many cases, techniques are
presented as “useful” or “effective” without specification of when they might best be
used. Some techniques involving explicit instruction and structured input are attempts
to modify IL in the early stages of acquisition. In other words, they are attempts to
impact the course of acquisition at the initial point of intake, either to ensure that
input becomes intake, or that intake is targetlike by structuring input appropriately.
This is one of the central claims of VanPatten’s input processing: that, in fact, this is
the only point at which classroom activities can have an impact on the developing
IL. He argues that output practice only impacts control; it can speed up access to IL
forms, increasing fluency, but will have no effect on the developing system. Only input
available during the process of comprehending meaning can do that. It is, of course,
possible for these pedagogical activities to take place prior to the learner developing
any IL form and this seems to be the intention, based on VanPatten’s model (1996).
However, in practical terms, it also seems likely that much of the input processing
work done in real classrooms occurs when learners have already developed somewhat
stabilized IL forms, which the teacher hopes can be destabilized with processing
instruction. An important research goal for processing instruction is to investigate
whether it is equally effective in destabilizing non-TL forms as it is at establishing
new form-meaning connections in the IL.
Opportunities for noticing the hole occur in activities in which learners feel the need
to use a form that they lack, presumably a task-useful or, better still, the ever-elusive
task-essential activity (Loschky & Bley-Vroman, 1993). Possibilities for noticing holes
in IL morphosyntax can be found in a number of studies (e.g., Day & Shapson, 1991;
Harley, 1998; Loschky & Bley-Vroman, 1993). Another familiar example is Swain’s
use of the dictogloss or other types of text recreation (1998, 2000; Thornbury, 1997).
The important difference between some of these activities and those using structured
 37. FORM-FOCUSED INSTRUCTION 683

input is that the noticing process is triggered by an output activity. Learners are asked
to reconstruct a passage that is fairly easily understood. However, actually recreating
it requires that they do so with a good deal of precision. The need to do this prompts
them to focus on forms they may not have in their IL. In other instances, it could
trigger a discussion among learners who may have contrasting forms in the ILs. The
discussion could begin a restructuring process, although it is not clear what the long-
term effect of these activities might be.
Izumi et al. (1999) describe a variation on this method of using output to encourage
noticing the gap or hole. In their study, learners were also required to reconstruct a
text, but had a subsequent opportunity to study relevant input. The intention here
was to focus the learners’ attention more narrowly on the subsequent input that they
would need for the next output task. In contrast, in Swain’s tasks, learners consulted
one another in dialogic reconstructions of meaning, but had no recourse to the original
input, thus allowing for the possibility that the target forms would be reconstructed
incorrectly. Indeed this did happen, though rarely. In the Izumi et al. study, learners
were allowed to recheck their hypotheses against the target before reattempting output
and this treatment did seem to increase noticing. Activities that draw learner attention
to holes in the lexicon are considerably easier to construct (e.g., de la Fuente, 2002;
R. Ellis & He, 1999; R. Ellis et al., 1999; R. Ellis, Tanaka, & Yamakazi, 1994; He &
R. Ellis, 1999; Loschky, 1994).
The difference between noticing the hole and noticing the gap may be crucial in
terms of these storage requirements and the cognitive processes involved. Noticing
the gap requires cognitive comparison. This means incoming input would have to
be compared either to representations stored in long-term memory or to traces left
in short-term memory. Precisely how this works is not clear (though see Doughty,
2001). De Bot (2000) maintains that direct comparison is unlikely, in that incoming
input is always processed before it is stored and any comparison to it can be made.
Noticing the hole, on the other hand, would seem to be a simpler process in that it does
not require comparison to representations that have been previously stored (except
possibly L1 representations).
The foregoing discussion has focused on noticing TL forms in the input. Clearly,
however, if this input never makes it to long-term memory, the activities that prompt
this noticing are of limited effectiveness. It is therefore necessary also to explore tasks
and techniques that encourage the incorporation of new input into the developing IL
system. One promising avenue is to encourage deeper processing of new forms. Al-
though the depth of processing theory (Wittrock, 1974; Craik & Tulving, 1975) has been
subject to much revision and criticism, psychologists seem to be in general agreement
that new knowledge that is processed more elaborately is more likely to be retained
than that which is processed less elaborately (R. Ellis, 1999; Hulstijn, 2001). Generative
models claim that learning and retention are improved when learners use, reformu-
late, or elaborate the new information, thereby creating connections between old and
new knowledge. In second language acquisition research, work in this area has pri-
marily focused on lexical acquisition and results have been mixed (Joe, 1998; Rott,
Williams, & Cameron, 2002; Zaki & R. Ellis, 1999).

NEGOTIATION AND FEEDBACK

Two of the most widely researched ways to encourage learner noticing occur (1) im-
plicitly, in the breakdown of communication followed by negotiation, and (2) more
directly, through feedback on error. Negotiation has traditionally been understood
as resulting from problems of message comprehensibility, that is, when interlocutors
restructure their utterances in an effort to understand or to be understood (e.g., de la
684 WILLIAMS

Fuente, 2002; R. Ellis, 1999; Mackey, 1999; Oliver, 1995, 2000; Pica, 1994, 1997; Pica et al.,
1989; Polio & Gass, 1998; Shehadeh, 1999; Van den Branden, 1997). Gass and Varonis
(1991) distinguish among several types of problems with message comprehensibility,
only some of which generally result in negotiation. Only what they call incomplete
understanding is likely to lead to negotiation because it is only in these circumstances
that a problem in comprehensibility is recognized. This incorporates the problematic-
ity that is central to Long and Robinson’s original definition of FonF. Although most
early research demonstrated the importance of negotiation for increasing the compre-
hensibility of input, Pica claims that negotiation also can focus learner attention on
language form: by making target input more noticeable and by providing feedback on
output, and in the process, calling attention to discrepancies between the IL and the TL.
What is not clear, however, is exactly what the cognitive consequences of breakdown
followed by negotiation might be. To what degree does it constitute an interruption
in the processing of meaning? On the one hand, the main virtue of negotiation, it is
said, is that it can offer a simultaneous focus on form and meaning, thus establish-
ing or strengthening the form-meaning connection. On the other hand, a breakdown
does imply some sort of interruption of communication and therefore, perhaps, also
of processing. Again, it is not apparent whether this interruption provides a favorable
condition for acquisition.
The benefits of negotiation as a FonF activity are not immediately obvious. First, it is
clear from many studies that most negotiation revolves around meaning, especially in
authentic communication. It is possible to negotiate a satisfactory outcome in which
communication is restored without ever focusing on form. Even if the negotiation
does involve form, the resolution may be ambiguous to the learner. Second, it is likely
that benefits of negotiation, whatever they might be, are not uniform. Two types,
corresponding, once again, to the two types of noticing described (of gaps and holes),
are generally claimed in experimental studies. Studies by R. Ellis and colleagues,
primarily of targeted lexical acquisition, demonstrate the facilitating effect on noticing
or recognition of unknown items (R. Ellis & He, 1999; R. Ellis et al., 1999; R. Ellis,
Tanaka, & Yamazaki, 1994; He & R. Ellis, 1999). The effect of negotiation in these
studies is to highlight for learners what they do not know and increase the salience
of the relevant data in the input.
Other studies have focused on modification of output, that is, changes in non-TL
forms in the direction of target accuracy. This comes either as a result of communicative
breakdown, usually among learners, or in the form of negotiation of form (Lyster &
Ranta, 1997) by a teacher or researcher. The latter will be taken up next. The former
has been explored extensively, primarily in experimental studies (e.g., de la Fuente,
2002; Pica, 1994, 2002; Pica et al., 1989; Mackey, 1999). These studies have demonstrated
positive effects for negotiation in situations where learners were required to address
problems in their own production and frequently, notice the difference between their
own production and the forms in the TL input.
Although the negotiation may provide for many of the acquisitional needs of learn-
ers, it is not a particularly dependable pedagogical technique. Pica (1997, 2002) and
others (Foster, 1998; Musumeci, 1996; Williams, 1999) have claimed that negotiation
in the classroom, either among learners or between learners and the teacher, are not
as frequent as might be wished. Nor can transfer-of-information tasks guarantee that
learners will negotiate (Foster, 1998), and certainly not on preselected forms if the
primary focus is to remain on the communication of meaning. With reference to the
FonF features already described, the advantages conferred by the interactional mod-
ifications resulting from negotiation would presumably be rather broad. It would be
difficult to provide targeted instruction through negotiation, at least with the tools
we have now. Because it most often revolves around message (in)comprehensibility,
it comes as no surprise that negotiation generally focuses on the lexicon and not
 37. FORM-FOCUSED INSTRUCTION 685

morphosyntactic features (e.g., Mackey, Gass, & McDonough, 2000; Pica, 1994; Pica,
Kanagy, & Faludon, 1993; Van den Branden, 1997; Williams, 1999). Skehan and Foster
(2001) maintain that this has little to do with limitations on attentional capacity. Rather,
the built-in redundancy of language allows learners to communicate effectively with-
out the need for TL accuracy. Pica (1997) notes, however, that the fact that learners
rarely negotiate morphosyntactic and other less salient features is not because it is
not possible to do so, but because the kinds of activities typical of communicative
classrooms rarely require them. This would be an important avenue to pursue: to get
learners to focus their negotiations on a wider variety of predetermined features.
Lyster (1998; Lyster & Ranta 1997) has distinguished between the negotiation of
meaning just described, and the negotiation of form, which has the more pedagogical
purpose of increasing accuracy and precision of message form, and is usually initiated
by the teacher or a researcher. In this case, message comprehensibility is not usually at
issue; rather, it includes various forms of feedback on error in message form. There is
a continuing controversy over the effectiveness of this technique since it is not always
certain that what the teacher (or other interlocutor) points out as an error will actually
be noticed as an error. Even if this does happen, it is not certain that the learner will
be able to do anything about it (see Nicholas, Lightbown, & Spada, 2001, for a review
of this issue).
Lyster and Ranta distinguish among various types of feedback and indeed, there
has been a proliferation of terms in the literature. Muranoi (2000) uses the term in-
teraction enhancement to describe a pedagogical technique that interweaves input and
output enhancement. In his study, in response to TL use, the teacher repeated learn-
ers’ output, helping to confirm learners’ hypotheses. In response to nontargetlike out-
put, the teacher requested repetition, and if necessary, recast learner output. Muranoi
found this technique effective in increasing accuracy in article use. Similar results can
be found in Noboyoshi and R. Ellis (1993) and Takashima and R. Ellis (1999).
Recasts are a subset of feedback on error. These have been defined as modifications
of learner output toward the target by an interlocutor/teacher, and have been found
effective as a method of providing focused feedback on errors in form, both in ex-
perimental (Braidi, 2002; Mackey & Philp, 1998; Long, Inagaki, & Ortega, 1998) and
classroom studies (Ayoun, 2001; Doughty & Varela, 1998). However, Lyster (1998)
argues that only those forms of feedback that push learners to use their own re-
sources in reformulating output are effective in destabilizing IL, and thus he doubts
the value of recasts as a classroom technique. He claims that learners may not know
that their nontargetlike output is being corrected, making it difficult for them to detect
any changes made in the teacher’s recast. Indeed, Seedhouse (1997) has shown that
teachers are exceedingly reluctant to tell learners explicitly that they are wrong, and
they are far more likely to affirm content or positive effort than point out learners’
errors.
There may be several reasons that Lyster found little effect for recasts in his class-
room study. First, it is clear from his results that the feedback to the learners was
extensive: Learners received feedback on many different errors, but feedback on any
one specific error was infrequent. This stands in contrast to the Doughty and Varela
study, in which the teacher targeted just two forms on which to provide feedback, and
they did so intensively. In addition, in their study, the errors were always recast in
the same way, by rising intonation to signal the error clearly, followed by a targetlike
recast of the error if the learner could not provide the TL form. This is perhaps another
reason for the effectiveness of the treatment in the Doughty and Varela study, as well
as the experimental studies on recasts and interaction enhancement. The teachers in
that study did not simply reformulate the utterance; rather, they first used emphatic
and rising intonation in their repetition of the learner error and only then provided
the TL form, perhaps reducing the ambiguity of the feedback.
686 WILLIAMS

If learners do not realize the teacher’s response is corrective, they may not notice the
gap between the production and the TL form offered in the recast. Mackey, Gass, and
McDonough (2000) report that learners are especially unlikely to notice the corrective
nature of recasts if the error is in morphosyntax. Nicholas, Lightbown, and Spada
(2001) point out that in first language learning, there is a difference in the rate of
recasts that caregivers provide, depending on whether the child’s utterance is ill-
formed or well-formed. They receive hundreds of such responses, yielding a very real
computational difference between those responses that get recast and those that do
not. No such rate difference has been observed in SL classrooms, perhaps increasing
the need for a clearly signaled negative evidence for these learners. Finally, Lyster’s
use of uptake, or immediate repetition of the reformulated learner utterance, as a
measure may unnecessarily limit our view of the effectiveness of recasts. Oliver (1995)
noted that often, the structure of turn-taking in classrooms may not provide learners
with an opportunity for uptake. Also, the delayed effects of attention to form, while
difficult to document in the classroom, have been documented experimentally (e.g.,
de la Fuente, 2002; Gass &Varonis, 1989; Mackey, 1999; Van den Branden, 1997). Ohta
(2000, 2001) has also shown that even when learners do not respond immediately to a
teacher’s or other learner’s recast, they may make use of them later, especially in private
speech, barely audible rehearsals that are not ordinarily picked up in studies of entire
classes. She also found that learners in teacher-fronted Japanese foreign language
classes would engage in silent rehearsal of recast utterances that were directed at other
learners, suggesting that the benefit of recasts may not be restricted to the learners
whose utterances are recast, but may extend to other listeners as well. Pica (1992)
found similar “observer” benefits for negotiation.
There is, of course, a voluminous literature on the effect of error correction more
generally, beyond the narrow considerations of recasting. Despite continuing heated
arguments on the subject, there appears to be a growing body of evidence from studies
in and out of the classroom that suggests that negative feedback of various kinds can
make input data more salient and help learners notice the gap between their own
production and the target.

Conclusion
In summary, a major role for FonF appears to be in the area of (1) noticing a form/word
for the first time in the input, potentially leading to a conversion to intake, (2) noticing
that an IL form is at odds with the TL input (“the gap”), leading to destabilization of
that form, or (3) incorporation of a new form into the developing IL. In addition, in
our consideration of the effectiveness of FonF at various points in IL development,
the possibility of FonF activities’ increasing learner control over IL knowledge has not
even been considered. Can the speed and efficiency with which learners can access
their knowledge be increased with the use of FonF activities? This possibility is dis-
cussed by Gass et al. (1999), specifically regarding the use of task repetition to free up
learner attention. Indeed, any of the possibilities discussed here that involve manip-
ulation of task features to adjust attention levels would also be promising candidates
for increasing learner access to knowledge. Thus, it is at least theoretically possible
to find suitable activities to facilitate language acquisition and increasing control at
many stages of development.
Along with all the supportive evidence, however, there is enough counterevidence,
both experimental and anecdotal, to warrant continuing careful and skeptical consid-
eration of the effect of FonF. Some suggest the FonF is more useful in later stages of
development (VanPatten, 1996; Williams, 1999) because in the early stages, learners
concentrate almost entirely on decoding and expressing meaning. However, further
critical discussion of the effectiveness of FonF even at later stages is also indicated,
 37. FORM-FOCUSED INSTRUCTION 687

specifically, on the destabilization of IL forms that have been used by the learner for
an extended period. Obviously, sometimes FonF works; sometimes it does not. The
more we know about the factors involved in the activities described here and about
the cognitive processes they engage, the more likely we will be to find the reasons for
the variable results for FonF reported in the literature, knowledge that can be turned
to increasing pedagogical effectiveness.

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38

A Model of Academic Literacy

for Integrated Language and
Content Instruction
Marguerite Ann Snow
California State University, Los Angeles

Mohan (1986) was the first to explicitly state the challenge of content-based instruction
(CBI): “What is needed is an integrative approach which relates language learning and
content learning, considers language as a medium of learning, and acknowledges the
role of context in communication” (p. 1). What this “integrative approach” entails
has been the subject of much discussion in the literature over the past 15 or so years.
Brinton and Holten (2001), for example, compared three definitions of CBI from Bycina
(1986), Brinton, Snow, and Wesche (1989), and Wesche (1993) noting five similarities
that can be summarized as follows:

r The goal of CBI is to provide a meaningful context for language teaching to occur.
r The organization of a CBI course centers on content.
r Content drives the curriculum, that is, it is the starting point for decisions about
what is taught.
r Language and content are taught concurrently.
r Comprehensible input, provided through the content materials leads to language
acquisition. (p. 240)

More recently, Davison and Williams (in Mohan, Leung, & Davison, 2001) defined
integrated language and content teaching as a “heuristic label for a diverse group
of curriculum approaches which share a concern for facilitating language learning,
broadly defined, through varied but systematic linking of particular subject matter
and language in the context of learning activities” (p. 57). In their review of current
approaches to communicative language teaching (CLT), Wesche and Skehan (2002)
singled out content-based instruction and task-based instruction as two trends in cur-
ricular design that conform to CLT principles, noting that contextual and pedagogical
features shared by different forms of CBI include:
693
694 SNOW
r The premise that learners in some sense receive ‘two for one,’ that is, content
knowledge and increased language proficiency.
r A language curriculum in which expository texts and discourse are central.
r Orientation into a new culture or ‘discourse community’.
r Adaptation of language input, interactional moves, and context to accommodate
learners’ limited language proficiency.
r Focus on academic language proficiency. (p. 221)

Finally, Pally (2000) added to the CBI terminology by introducing the term sustained
CBI, defined as “classes in which students practice English language skills—reading,
writing, speaking, listening, and grammatical forms—in the process of studying one
subject area, usually for a semester” (p. vii). Murphy and Stoller (2001) went a step
further, expanding on Pally’s term and offering a new acronym, sustained-content and
language teaching (SCLT). In their view, SCLT has two major components. The first is
a focus on the exploration of a single content area or what Murphy and Stoller call
a carrier topic. The second component is a complementary focus on second language
learning and teaching (which includes the teaching of the four skills; cognitive and
metacognitive strategies; study skills; vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, etc.).

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

While discussion of the parameters of CBI is clearly ongoing, the viability of CBI as
an approach to second and foreign language teaching is generally unquestioned, or,
as Davison and Williams have pointed out, “A common rationale has developed for
such programs, despite . . . different theoretical origins and orientations” (p. 52). As
content-based instruction enters its third decade, its place among language teaching
approaches is seemingly secure. Starting with Mohan (1986), the chronology of book-
length treatments reveals sustained growth of the approach (c.f. Brinton, Snow, &
Wesche, 1989, 2003; Crandall, 1987; Krueger & Ryan, 1993; Snow & Brinton, 1997;
Stryker & Leaver, 1997; Kasper, 2000; Pally, 2000) and subsequent editions of several
widely used methodology textbooks have either added CBI to the list of methods
described or expanded its coverage (c.f. Larsen-Freeman, 2000; Celce-Murcia, 2001;
Richards & Rodgers, 2001; Richard-Amato, 2003). With this growth, new trends in CBI
have arisen while implementation issues persist. This chapter looks at key trends and
issues in CBI from two vantage points: 1) the necessary conditions for CBI, and 2) the
blending of CBI and approaches to English for Academic Purposes (EAP).

THE NECESSARY CONDITIONS FOR

CONTENT-BASED INSTRUCTION

Wesche and Skehan (2002) noted that “CBI can be very effective for both language and
content learning. However, ensuring the necessary conditions to achieve this presents
an ongoing challenge” (p. 220). Indeed, the literature is rich with discussions of these
challenges. Some have taken on the discussion from the point of view of models or
curricular implementation. Others have focused on the roles of teachers the language
teacher or the content teacher, or both. Still others have approached the issue from the
point of view of teacher training.

Models
Brinton, Snow, and Wesche’s (1989) classification of CBI into three prototype models—
theme-based, sheltered, and adjunct—provided useful exemplars for program
 38. INTEGRATED LANGUAGE AND CONTENT INSTRUCTION 695

development in the early days of CBI and may have served as a catalyst for many pub-
lished reports over the years about factors involved in both the successes and failures
of CBI programs. In the theme-based model, the language instructor builds the teach-
ing language skills around selected topics or themes. The literature contains many
reports of successful theme-based initiatives across a wide variety of topics and levels.
Gianelli (1997), for example, described “dramatic” results in a Texas middle school
when teachers implemented a thematic curriculum and Rosser (1995) reported on
an academic writing and research class at the university level developed around the
theme of the life of Anne Frank in which students’ writing reflected a deepening in-
tellectual engagement with the topic over the course of the term. Concerns, however,
about the need to improve coherence in content-based curricula have been expressed.
Stoller and Grabe’s (1997) “6 T’s” framework developed out of the need to offer guide-
lines to CBI teachers.1
Other accounts over the years have focused on implementation of the adjunct
model—where a language course and a content course are linked for purposes of
instruction—and have reported many positive findings (see Brinton, Snow, & Wesche,
1989, 2003; Snow & Brinton, 1988; Benesch, 1988 for early examples). Others have
underscored the challenges of adjunct instruction. Iancu (1997), for instance, chroni-
cled the struggles of integrating separate ESL courses (writing and grammar, speech,
reading, listening, and note taking) with content courses in history and sociology.
Goldstein, Campbell, and Cummings (1997) described how issues of authority led
ESL adjunct writing instructors to compare themselves to “flight attendants” at the
service of the content professors “in the cockpit” and how issues of trust led students
to question the ESL instructors’ control of the content.
In the sheltered model, the instructor (usually a content specialist) teaches a content-
area course (e.g., social studies, science) using special strategies aimed at making
subject matter more comprehensible. In the original sheltered experiment at the Uni-
versity of Ottawa, second language students (both English as a second language and
French as a second language) enrolled in sections of sheltered psychology taught in
their second language. Results revealed that students in the sheltered psychology
classes significantly improved their language skills while mastering the course con-
tent, indicating that subject matter teaching can be language teaching under the right
conditions. With the expansion of the sheltered model into middle and high school
programs for ESL students, Kinsella (1997), however, decries the fact that sheltered
instruction has become too “teacher-driven” and “curriculum-centered.” Her solution
is for teachers to shift the focus to the learner by designing “learning to learn” activi-
ties so that students can become self-directed, independent learners when they leave
sheltered classes. More recently, Short (2002), in a study of sheltered social studies
classes at the middle school level, found that teachers, even those trained in shel-
tered instructional techniques, continued to place greater emphasis on content than
language, missing many “teachable moments” for explicit focus on language.
Another outgrowth of the focus on models has led to the adaptation of the three pro-
totype models to the specialized conditions of particular settings. Adamson (1993), for
instance, discussed the precourse, which combines elements of an adjunct course and
theme-based course. Students enrolled in a theme-based ESL course joined a regular
undergraduate course “Introduction to Linguistics” for three weeks. They attended
lectures, participated in discussions, wrote a research paper, and took an exam on the
content material covered during the three-week unit. In another variation, Brinton
and Holten (2001) described the simulated adjunct program in which “content is im-
ported into an ESL class via authentic video lectures from undergraduate content-
area classes” (p. 243). In a variation of the well-known writing fellows model, Blakely
(1997) designed a CBI model in which specially trained native-speaking undergrad-
uates paired up with non-native classmates to study the content of courses that both
696 SNOW

were taking. In another variation of the adjunct model, Snow and Kamhi-Stein (1997,
2002) designed a faculty development program in which content-area faculty paired
with language specialists and redesigned their courses to focus on the teaching of
academic literacy skills. Using an ESP-type format, Schramm (personal communica-
tion), described the “language specialist” model used in the Mechanical Engineering
Department at the University of Minnesota where he developed language resources
for ESL students that were independent of any particular courses. And in the EFL
setting, Murphey (1997) adapted theme-based instruction to a very traditional lan-
guage teaching context in Japan and described practical ways to integrate content
with English through a workshop model. Content-Based Instruction in Higher Education
Settings (Crandall & Kaufman, 2002) provides further examples of recent adaptations
of the three prototype models.
As an alternative to classifying CBI in terms of models, Davison and Williams (in
Mohan, Leung, & Davison, 2001) have proposed a comprehensive framework for lan-
guage and content integration that describes the focus of teaching at the level of pro-
gram, syllabus, unit of work, lesson, or activities within a lesson. The advantage, they
note, is that unlike Brinton, Snow, and Wesche’s (1989) prototype models, their frame-
work distinguishes between curriculum focus, theoretical model or approach, teach-
ing materials, organizational arrangements, and teacher roles. Onto this framework,
Davison and Williams map the many different initiatives in integrated language and
content teaching, including the prototype models discussed earlier as well as many
other types of instruction, for both native and non-native English-speaking students,
including the Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach (CALLA), genre-
based approaches, and language across the curriculum as well as approaches that do
not typically aim to integrate language and content instruction such as functional-
notional approaches.
In justifying the framework, Davison and Williams reject the term “content-based
language teaching” as “ . . . conflating a number of different models and approaches
with different emphases” (Mohan, Leung, & Davison, 2001, p. 60). Their framework in-
stead presents language and content integration as a “cline” ranging from “contextual-
ized” language teaching to “language-conscious” content teaching. Given the range of
definitions and approaches, the benefit of such a descriptive framework, according to
Davison and Williams, is to elucidate the important distinctions between approaches
and provide a common language to talk about language and content teaching.
This framework may indeed advance the discussion of language teaching in gen-
eral by highlighting key components of widely used approaches. It may also plot the
location of integrated approaches specifically within the array of approaches to sec-
ond and foreign language teaching; however, the conceptualization proposed by Met
(1998) may yet provide the most straightforward representation in the content-based
literature. Met (1998), envisioning a continuum, places “content-driven” approaches
like total immersion on one extreme; on the other extreme are “language-driven” ap-
proaches such as language classes that make frequent use of content for language prac-
tice. Along the continuum are other approaches (e.g., partial immersion, sheltered,
etc.). Classification along the continuum depends on the objectives of the program,
the target student population, and the requirements of the instructional setting. The
continuum includes a mixture of models, those typically used to teach second and
foreign languages and those that are typically implemented at different educational
levels (i.e., adjunct programs at secondary or postsecondary levels with adolescents
or adults or theme-based courses across all educational and age levels).

Curricular Implementation
Davison and Williams (in Mohan, Leung, & Davison, 2001) also identified two main
theoretical problems in relation to planning an integrated language and content
 38. INTEGRATED LANGUAGE AND CONTENT INSTRUCTION 697

curriculum: 1) the selection of the sequencing of language; and 2) the content and
scope of the curriculum. Snow, Met, and Genesee (1989) developed a framework to
address problems of selection and scope. In their framework, language and content
teachers work collaboratively to define two types of language teaching objectives.
The first type is “content-obligatory” language, defined as the types of language (i.e.,
grammar items, specialized vocabulary, rhetorical structures, etc.) that are necessary
for students to understand and master the subject matter of any given content. The sec-
ond objective is “content-compatible” language, which includes selection of language
forms and structures that pair naturally with a given content material. This kind of
objective allows teachers to provide extended practice, for example, with troublesome
grammar points.
The Snow, Met, and Genesee framework has been implemented extensively in
various projects at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Advanced Research on
Language Acquisition (CARLA). A sample science lesson plan, “Plantas: Las Partes y el
Ciclo de Vida” (“Plants: Their Parts and Life Cycle”) designed for a Grade 2 Spanish im-
mersion class utilizes the framework (Tedick, Jorgensen, & Gellert, 2001). In the lesson,
students learn about the parts of plants and their functions. The content-obligatory
language components included: 1) appropriate words to describe plant parts and func-
tions (e.g., semilla (seed), tallo (stem); 2) the phrase “Es la/el” (“It is the”) to identify and
classify plant parts; 3) the phrase “Es como un/una” (“It is like a/an”) to write similes
to describe the plant parts; 4) use of descriptive words to write similes; and 5) terms to
identify plants and their parts that we eat (e.g., zanahoria-raiz (carrot-root), lechuga-hoja
(lettuce- leaf), fresa-fruta (strawberry-fruit)). Content-compatible language objectives
such as using the phrase “Yo creo es” (“I think it is”) to classify plant parts, and writing
similes with accurate gender agreement were also included in the lesson to provide
further language practice. The teacher and students checked their work using a holistic
rubric that described the range of features of similes.
Stoller and Grabe (1997) developed the “6 T’s Approach” as a systematic framework
for dealing with issues of selection and scope of content in CBI. Theme is the first
“T”—the central ideas that organize major curricular units. Themes are selected for
their match with students’ interests and needs, institutional expectations, program
resources, and teachers’ abilities and interests. The second “T” is topics, the subunits
of content that explore a more specific aspect of the theme. Texts, the third “T,” are
defined by Stoller and Grabe as the content resources that drive planning of the theme
units. These might include readings, audio and video tapes, maps, software, Internet
sites, graphic representations, guest speakers, and field trips. The fourth “T,” threads,
creates linkages across units. They are generally abstract concepts such as responsibility,
which are used as the thread to link thematic units on civil rights, pollution, and Native
Americans. The fifth “T,” tasks, are the instructional activities designed by teachers
to fulfill language, content, and strategy training objectives. These are the everyday
activities of the class. Transitions, the sixth “T,” are specifically planned actions that
provide coherence across topics in a thematic unit and across tasks within topics. These
can include both topical transitions such as shifts in emphasis from global population
trends in a thematic unit on demography, to trends in developing countries, to trends in
students’ home countries. Task transitions might require students to interpret a graph
illustrating population trends, create a graph with new data, or write the information
contained in the graph into paragraph form.
In a more recent view, Stoller (2002) takes the position that the success of CBI de-
pends on the details of its implementation. She advocates adding “positive tension” by
selecting input with multiple perspectives, different but complementary views, and
opposing viewpoints. She also suggests employing techniques that incorporate “pos-
itive complexity” by devising tasks that require students to reinvest their language
skills, cognitive skills, and content knowledge to negotiate new information and to
incorporate problem-solving tasks into instruction that becomes progressively more
698 SNOW

complex. Stoller emphasizes that educators, outside public school contexts where
there is an inherent demand for sustained content, must aim for the systematic buildup
of content knowledge from multiple sources and from different perspectives, rather
than be satisfied with the superficial examination of limited content, in order to nur-
ture improvement of language skills and the acquisition of knowledge.
Frameworks such as the 6 T’s and the movement toward SCLT are a backlash against
the “potpourri” (Jacobs, 1990) problem that often plagues theme-based courses where
content is often parceled out in bits and pieces with little regard to maintaining its
integrity. Pally (2000) noted that the notion of sustained content evolved from think-
ing about how native English-speaking students acquire expertise, namely by learn-
ing subject matter and critical thinking skills required for academic study in content
classes. Sustained CBI mirrors how native speakers learn higher-level reading and
writing skills by studying one subject over time, the kind of study to which many
non-native students are exposed once they finish ESL classes. The special issue of
the TESOL Journal (Autumn, 2001), guest-edited by Murphy and Stoller, provides an
interesting glimpse into six settings where teachers have operationalized the notion
of sustained content teaching in both ESL and EFL settings and at a variety of ed-
ucational levels (middle school through university) for purposes such as teaching
academic vocabulary with the support of corpus linguistics tools (Donley & Reppen,
2001), to assisting health science majors improve their “listening-to-learn” skills in
Barcelona, Spain (Kerans, 2001). Others such as Heyden (2001) provided recent ac-
counts of the application of sustained content. In this example, Heyden, concerned
that the content of the typical ESL freshman composition class is “confusingly dis-
jointed,” replaced the typical essay anthology with a novel that his students read
over a 14-week semester. For each reading assignment, students wrote double-entry
journals, which helped them keep up with the reading and make sense in writing of
what they were reading. They also developed a selected topic from the novel into a re-
search paper that included a proposal, site visit, research report, synthesis, reflection,
and bibliography. In summing up the results of the experiment in sustained content,
Heyden (2001) referred to a student’s comment: “I felt like I was inside a world I like
learning about” (p. 20).

Instructional Interventions
In 1988, Swain remarked that in the immersion context, “. . . not all content teaching
is necessarily good language teaching” (p. 68) and more recently, Lyster and Ranta
(1997) reiterated the same point: “Subject-matter teaching does not on its own pro-
vide adequate language teaching: Language used to convey subject matter needs to be
highlighted in ways that make certain features more salient to L2 learners” (p. 41). A
large-scale project being conducted in Holland by a team of researchers interested in
CBI provides a classroom-based illustration of this ongoing concern (Hajer & Koole,
2001; van Eerde et al., 2001). The project, motivated by statistics that show that stu-
dents from large immigrant groups in Holland such as Turks and Moroccans perform
less well than their Dutch peers, focuses on the first year of secondary education,
specifically mathematics classes, where these same students are also overrepresented
in groups that quit subjects like math. Research questions being investigated ask: To
what extent do the teachers create opportunities to learn the language of mathematics?
To what extent do teachers give the students possibilities to verbalize their solutions
through language production? To what extent do teachers give feedback on content
and form?
In one of their studies, two teachers were followed extensively in multilingual math
classes in the course of instruction; research methods included classroom observation,
think-aloud protocols, and interviews (van Eerde et al., 2001). Both teachers used a
 38. INTEGRATED LANGUAGE AND CONTENT INSTRUCTION 699

methodology for teaching math called Realistic Mathematics Education, which as-
sumes that mathematics has its roots in real-life and students should be guided to
transform a context problem from daily life into a representation that can be manipu-
lated mathematically. Despite this purported instructional focus on real-life contexts,
the classroom observation data indicated that neither teacher paid much attention to
the introduction of contexts. In one example, think-aloud tasks revealed that second
language students frequently did not understand terms from daily life contexts that
were essential to solving the math problem (e.g., the word “stopper” in a problem
dealing with the volume of water in a bathtub). In other observations, researchers
found that sociomathematical norms such as the quality of mathematical solutions
remained implicit. In one math class, for instance, the teacher asked for a “more sim-
ple” solution than one provided by a student without ever explaining or exemplifying
the meaning of a “simple” solution in the context of math. Even though one of the
teachers deliberately promoted active participation and showed a wide repertoire of
strategies for stimulating thinking and meaning construction, both teachers missed
opportunities to “put the symbiosis of math and language learning theory into prac-
tice” (p. 26). The researchers concluded that in order to combine content and language
teaching into language sensitive content instruction, the teachers needed to pay more
attention to the selection of contexts that were familiar to all students and to better
introduce and orient students to the contexts and the mathematics textbook.
A series of investigations in immersion classes by Swain and Lapkin (Lapkin, 2002;
Swain, 2001; Swain & Lapkin, 1998) aimed to show how language instruction can be
integrated into content instruction through systematic intervention. They also sought
to extend the output hypothesis, results of which may have relevance for all kinds
of CBI. In these studies, collaborative tasks with the goal of linguistic accuracy were
designed to assist students to extend their language output. Three functions of out-
put underlie the collaborative tasks: 1) getting language learners to notice the target
language while attempting to produce it, 2) getting learners to use their output as
a means of hypothesis formulating and testing, and 3) getting learners to engage in
metatalk—to use language to reflect on language use. Collaborative tasks such as a
dictogloss, jigsaw, and reformulation were used in the studies to get students to pro-
duce language-related episodes (LREs). Results of the research to date indicate that
the collaborative tasks increased the amount of output, helped students focus atten-
tion on language as they formulated and tested hypotheses about their language, and
provided opportunities for output to function as a metalinguistic tool. Interventions
such as those used by Swain and Lapkin may indeed be one means to systematically
integrate language and content instruction by getting students to reflect on their own
language production as they attempt to create meaning.

Teacher Preparation
Another perspective on the necessary conditions for effective CBI is the role of teacher
preparation and training. Lorenz and Met (1988) were among the first to recognize,
in their case for immersion, that integrating language and content instruction may
require specialized skills. Kaufman (1997), however, almost 10 years later noted that
“ . . . documentation on new ways to prepare teachers for operating within interdis-
ciplinary paradigms is sparse” (p. 175). Kaufman described a preservice training
program that used a constructivist approach to create collaborative experiences for
ESL, science, and social studies teacher candidates to learn language and disciplinary
content for linguistically diverse classrooms. Peterson (1997) asked, “What type of
teacher preparation program is capable of empowering teachers to perform capably
in such demanding [CBI] contexts?” (p. 161). To answer this question, Peterson devel-
oped an inventory of the target competencies—beyond those of a general language
700 SNOW

teacher—that enable teachers to plan and implement CBI; she also provided sam-
ple scenarios reflecting the knowledge, skills, and attitudes they need for effective
integration of language and content teaching.
Promising work by Bigelow and Ranney (2001) goes a step forward. In a study that
focused on assisting preservice teachers to address learners’ language needs when
teaching content, Bigelow and Ranney collected the lesson plan assignments of pre-
service teachers, asked the teachers-to-be to reflect on their lesson planning processes
in the fall and spring, and conducted in-depth interviews with the student teachers.
Among many interesting findings, the researchers found that the difficulty of inte-
grating language and content went beyond the preservice teachers’ abilities to write
good objectives. Early on in the process, the preservice teachers’ conceptualization of
language aims focused mainly on vocabulary and what the researcher called “macro-
level” skills (e.g., “Students will read a text.”); the preservice teachers, however, had
trouble anticipating the forms and functions that ESL students needed to complete
such macro-level tasks. Over the course of their training, the preservice teachers be-
came more adept at articulating language objectives and they became more skillful
at linking the objectives to both instructional activities and assessment measures.
In addition, lesson plans began to show a better balance between vocabulary and
form. Furthermore, the overall quantity of micro-level language objectives increased.
However, macro-level objectives for the productive skills of speaking and writing re-
mained steady, suggesting that the preservice teachers had more difficulty breaking
down these skills in their lesson plans, prompting the researchers to note that the
preservice teachers in the study may have been limited by their lack of metalinguistic
knowledge.
Crandall (1998) pointed to the difficulty of crossing over disciplinary boundaries:
“It is not surprising that . . . both language and content area teachers may be fright-
ened at the prospect of integrating language and content instruction, since there is
limited attention to language needs in the preparation of content teachers, and lim-
ited attention to either the specific discourse of academic disciplines or the practical
concerns of needs analysis, text adaptation, curriculum development, or collabora-
tive teaching in most language teacher education programs” (p. 2). Wong, Fillmore,
and Snow (2002) concur, arguing that teachers need a thorough understanding of
how languages figure into education—or educational linguistics—a perspective that
few teacher education programs provide. Teachers should, they maintain, know about
characteristics of oral and written language and be offered such courses as “Language
and Linguistics,” “Sociolinguistics for Educators in a Linguistically Diverse Society,”
and “Second Language Learning and Teaching.”2
Wong, Fillmore, and Snow (2002), in fact, contend that all teachers, not only those
serving bilingual and second language students, should have a thorough grounding
in language and it role in education. Prospective educators need to know more about
language in order to take on five functions as teachers: 1) teacher as communicator—
how teachers can structure their own language output for maximum clarity to work
effectively with students from many different cultural, social, and linguistic back-
grounds; 2) teacher as educator—how teachers can help students learn and use as-
pects of language associated with the academic discourse of the various school sub-
jects; 3) teacher as evaluator—how teachers can make valid judgments about students’
abilities by understanding variation in language use such as vernacular varieties of
English, normal progress for second language learners, or developmental delays or
disorders; 4) teacher as educated human being—how teachers can understand ba-
sic concepts about language and literacy to engage in public discussions and make
informed decisions about issues underlying second language learning and bilingual
education; and 5) teacher as agent of socialization—how teachers can help students
learn the everyday practices, the system of values and beliefs, and the means and
 38. INTEGRATED LANGUAGE AND CONTENT INSTRUCTION 701

manners of communication of their cultural communities and, at the same time, how
they can help students make the transition in ways that do not undermine the role
played by parents and family members in their communities.

THE BLENDING OF CBI AND EAP

In comparing CBI and English for Specific Purposes (ESP), Johns (1997a) notes that
both movements stem from unease about the separation of language instruction from
the context and demands of real language use, or what Johns calls “TENOR” (Teach-
ing English for No Obvious Reason) (p. 364). Both CBI and ESP, according to Johns,
“encourage the transfer of language skills and content to real life by bringing gen-
uine language and authentic classroom activities to students” (p. 364). Johns notes,
however, that the movements differ in scope and focus. CBI has generally been im-
plemented in ESL settings, while ESP has primarily been applied to EFL settings. ESP
courses have mainly been designed for adult students and have traditionally focused
on reading since, at least, historically, learners have needed English to access science
and technology texts written in English. In contrast, CBI courses have typically been
developed for English learners across age groups and educational levels, typically in
classes with a multiskills focus.
EAP, coming out of the ESP tradition, has also primarily focused on adult learn-
ers of English, namely, international students preparing to study in English-medium
postsecondary settings or ESL students currently enrol1ed in English-medium tertiary
institutions. Over the years, CBI and EAP have essentially existed as separate tradi-
tions with different literatures with researchers and practitioners tending to identify
with one or the other traditions. Work in EAP has focused on genre analysis, for exam-
ple, of research papers or literature reviews (e.g., Swales, 1990; Swales & Lindemann,
2002), instructional strategies for teaching EAP (e.g., Jordan, 1997), and writing in the
disciplines such as engineering and business management (e.g., Belcher & Braine,
1995). EAP has also developed a healthy research tradition. Flowerdew and Peacock
(2001), for instance, offer a comprehensive survey of research in EAP in such areas as
needs assessment, academic vocabulary, and the skill areas of lecture comprehension,
academic reading, and oral discussion. Work in CBI, on the other hand, has tended
to focus more on models and curricula, but it also benefits from a solid research base,
provided mainly from nearly four decades of immersion research, but gradually be-
ing informed by a wider cross-section of research (see Grabe & Stoller; 1997, Snow,
1998; and the special issue of the Canadian Modern Language Review (Wesche, 2001) for
recent reviews of immersion and content-based research).
Underlying the EAP tradition is the notion of academic literacy, conceptualizations
of which have been influenced by various epistemologies, including composition and
rhetoric. Zamel and Spack (1998) noted the evolving definition:

Academic literacy, which once denoted simply the ability to read and write college-level
texts, now must embrace multiple approaches to knowledge. Hence, our use of the term
literacies. College classrooms have become sites where different languages and cultures
intersect, including the various discourses of students, teachers, and researchers. In our
experience, the result of this interaction, even when (perhaps because) it involves struggle
and conflict, is most often intellectual growth, for these different languages and cultures
build on and give shape to one another. (p. ix)

Academic literacy in Johns’ (1997 b) view must have at its core social factors in
literacy development. In “socioliterate” views, students acquire literacies primarily
through exposure to discourses from a variety of social contexts. Johns advocates an
approach in which “. . . literacy classes become laboratories for the study of text, roles,
702 SNOW

and contexts, for research into evolving student literacies and developing awareness
and critique of communities and their textual contracts” (p. 19).
Indeed Cummins (1981, 1984, 2000a) must be credited with starting the dialogue
about academic language proficiency as it relates to younger learners. Drawing on
the work of Skutnabb-Kangas and Toukomaa (1976) in Finland, his well-known the-
oretical framework for conceptualizing language proficiency makes the distinction
between social language, or Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS), and
academic language, or cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP)—notions
that have heavily influenced the field and perhaps, more important, started bridg-
ing the gap between EAP focused on postsecondary learners and settings and CBI
concerned with second language learners in K-12 contexts.
More recently, other conceptualizations of academic literacy have emerged. Adam-
son (1993) was one of the first to suggest a model of second language academic compe-
tence. In his view, academic competence consists of at least three abilities: 1) the ability
to use a combination of linguistic, pragmatic, and background knowledge to reach a
basic understanding of content material; 2) the ability to use appropriate strategies to
enhance knowledge of content material; and 3) the ability to use appropriate strategies
to complete academic assignments with less than a full understanding of the content
material. When understanding falls below a certain level, the process of learning fails
and the student’s only alternative is to apply coping strategies such as copying and
memorization.
Short (1998, 2002) developed the Language-Content-Task (LCT) framework, a
model of academic literacy that can guide teachers as they organize language and
content instruction. Using the example of social studies, the framework is depicted
graphically as three intersecting rings: Task, Content, and Language. Within the Task
ring is procedural knowledge, within the Content ring are content topics for social studies,
and within the Language ring are semantics, syntax, pragmatics, and functions. The Task
and Content rings share tasks related to the habits of the minds of historians (i.e.,
the approach a given discipline might take to exploring a problem or performing a
task); the Content and Language rings overlap in the area of social studies register
and the Task and Language rings share explanations of the task and the language
needed to perform the task. In the center, the three rings have interaction in common.
Interaction, in Short’s framework, implies the ability to understand and participate in
the co-construction of knowledge in the classroom.
Solomon and Rhodes (1996) went to the field to determine how ESL educators de-
fine academic language. Respondents to their survey were elementary, middle, and
high school ESL teachers, graduate students in training to become ESL professionals,
ESL teacher trainers, and administrators. Most of the respondents identified vocabu-
lary as a key feature of academic language and gave examples of terms like “circle,”
“community,” and “carbohydrate” from content areas such as math, social studies, and
science. Others contrasted academic language with social language, noting that use
of the word “show” may be appropriate in social conversation, but “indicate” would
be more typical in an academic context. One K-12 program coordinator emphasized
that academic language can only be acquired at school: “Academic language is the
language of lecture and textbooks. It is filled with expectations of prior knowledge
and background and cultural uniformity” (p. 6).
More recently, Bailey and Butler (2002) have developed an evidentiary framework
for operationalizing academic language proficiency. Targeting K-12 education, the
framework is motivated in part by the U.S. government’s No Child Left Behind Act
(2001), which requires states to assess the English language development of all English
language learners despite the fact that available assessments generally do not reflect
the requisite academic language needed for demonstrating content knowledge and
participating in mainstream classes. The framework, which is based on multiple data
 38. INTEGRATED LANGUAGE AND CONTENT INSTRUCTION 703

points including classroom observation and course textbook analyses, will lead to
the development of test specifications and prototype tasks that can be used by test
developers to design tests of academic language proficiency.
In Bailey and Butler’s framework, academic language is characterized as “language
that stands in contrast to the everyday informal speech that students use outside the
classroom environment” (p. 7). More specifically, it can be characterized at the lexi-
cal, syntactic, and discourse levels, and also includes language functions used in the
classroom. Stevens, Butler, and Castellon-Wellington (2000) identify three categories
of words: 1) high frequency general words used regularly in everyday contexts, 2)
nonspecialized academic words that are used across content areas (while not specific
to any one content area, they constitute a special register of academic language use
as illustrated in the contrast between “show” and “indicate” provided by the respon-
dent in the Solomon and Rhodes survey), and 3) specialized content-area words that
are unique to specific disciplines. At the syntactic level, academic language includes
complex grammatical structures such as embedded clauses and preference for nom-
inalization. At the discourse level, academic language has been described as “inter-
textual” (Gibbons, 1998)—that is, students must integrate oral and written discourse
in classroom activities. The challenge of negotiating oral and print domains lies in
their varying linguistic features. Textbook language, for example, has greater lexical
density and syntactic complexity than oral classroom discourse (Schleppegrell, 2001).
The term “language function” takes on an expanded scope in these attempts to de-
fine academic language proficiency. Perhaps we can now best characterize functions
such as “inviting” or “complementing” as social language functions, while those func-
tions used in classrooms by students to learn and demonstrate mastery of academic
content as academic language functions. Several investigations have begun to enhance
our understanding of academic language functions in K-12 classrooms. Short (1994),
for instance, in analyzing middle school social studies classes, found that teachers
and students used the following language functions: comparison, definition, description,
evaluation, exemplification, explanation, justification, and sequencing. In addition, teach-
ers asked recall questions, gave directions, encouraged, clarified/restated, rephrased, extended,
previewed, and reviewed. More recently, Bailey et al., (2001) observed fourth and fifth
grade science classrooms to analyze the academic language functions used by both
teachers and students. Teachers primarily used four language functions: assessment,
comparison, description, and explanation. Student talk consisted of five academic lan-
guage functions: commenting, comparison, description, explanation, and questioning.
In a 2-year ethnographic study, Duff (2001) investigated the discourse contexts for
mainstreamed ESL students in two 10th grade social studies classes in Canada. Results
of the study revealed that, for the ESL students to succeed in class, they needed to
participate in a variety of reading and writing activities that required them to express
a range of critical perspectives on social issues and to enter into “quick-paced” class-
room discussions and interactions. In order to interact effectively in this discourse con-
text, students needed not only knowledge of current local and world current events,
but also of the popular culture of mainstream Canadian high school students to under-
stand references to television programs, teen magazines (and celebrities), and sports
teams. Based on her results, Duff suggested three broad areas for intervention with
mainstreamed ESL students such as those who participated in the study. The first two
underscore the need for teachers to teach academic literacy skills. Duff recommends
greater emphasis on listening and speaking skills. The ESL students in her study
had difficulty with the oral “texts” of the classroom. Both the ESL students and the
mainstream students reported having problems understanding one another. Second,
Duff found that there was very little explicit attention to text structures and vocab-
ulary that students read, heard, or were asked to produce. Acknowledging that her
final suggestion deviates from “. . . the usual prescriptions and practices” (p. 120) for
704 SNOW

integrated language and content instruction, Duff notes that the ESL students in her
study not only needed in-depth knowledge of textbook content, but also “a repertoire”
of newsworthy current events and knowledge of North American popular culture and
the confidence and “. . . accompanying sense of entitlement or license to speak about
their concerns, backgrounds, issues, and views” (p. 120).
Cummins (2000b) adds the dimension of intercultural identity to considerations of
academic language proficiency, a concern underscored by Duff’s findings in which the
ESL students in her study found themselves marginalized, often mocked and laughed
at for their mispronunciations or incorrect uses of grammar. Cummins maintains that
our aim must be more than “. . . a technical issue of how to implement appropriate
forms of literacy and content instruction when students have weaker language skills. It
is equally or more a question of how to create within the classroom and school an inter-
personal space that affirms students’ developing sense of self” (p. 163). Walqui (2000)
keys in as well on the social and cultural contexts of schooling, arguing that struc-
tural obstacles, particularly at the secondary level, such as fragmented school days
and age-grade inflexibility, inhibit students’ academic success. These sociocultural
dimensions may somewhat parallel work in critical literacy, in particular Benesch’s
(2001) work in critical EAP in postsecondary contexts.
Mohan’s knowledge framework (Mohan, 1986; Mohan, Leung, & Davison, 2001)
offers another lens through which to define academic language proficiency. The frame-
work works within the general perspective of systemic functional linguistics; it pro-
vides a perspective on language as a medium of learning that, according to Mohan,
differs from but is complementary to genre approaches. It views language as dis-
course in the context of social practice, a characterization also made by Johns (1997 b).
In Mohan’s view, social practice is a combination of knowledge (theory) and action
(practice). The theory aspect of activity includes knowledge structures like classifi-
cation, principles, and evaluation; the practice aspects of activity include knowledge
structures such as description, sequence, and choice. Mohan believes that teachers
and students can use knowledge structures as “. . . hinges between content issues and
language issues” (Mohan, Leung, & Davison, 2001, p. 114). Furthermore, he notes,
knowledge structures might provide the means for a common agenda for language
teachers and content specialists.
Tang (1997) reported on the application of some components of the knowledge
framework in a seventh grade social studies class in which the teacher organized
the content of the textbook according to knowledge structures and then prepared
graphic organizers for students that summarized the contents of the chapters and
helped students to see the connections across topics. In various activities to practice
the language and the content, the teacher explicitly taught the linguistic and cohesion
devices of text/knowledge structure. Students completed tasks in which they con-
structed graphics from expository prose and wrote expository prose from graphics.
Similarly, Early (2001) reported on a Vancouver, British Columbia school district’s
approach to achieving schoolwide emphasis on integrated language and content in-
struction using Mohan’s knowledge framework in combination with principles of
social constructivist learning. The case study revealed that the approach was success-
ful in drawing teachers’ awareness to the role of language as a medium of learning.
Strategy instruction is another avenue for making the complex, abstract cogni-
tive structures of academic content more transparent. Influenced by CALLA, Chamot
and O’Malley’s (1987) well-known approach, teachers in integrated language and
content settings have come to recognize the value of systematic strategy instruction.
Kinsella (1997) observed that teachers have become too concerned with access to con-
tent and have failed to teach students strategies to demystify academic learning. She
recommends strategies for autonomous learning like techniques for active learning,
systematic vocabulary acquisition, and study reading. In the same vein, Walqui (2000)
 38. INTEGRATED LANGUAGE AND CONTENT INSTRUCTION 705

places the explicit teaching of academic strategies, sociocultural expectations, and aca-
demic norms as one of her ten priorities for designing effective instruction for second
language students.

Standards and Accountability

Another vantage point for exploring the notion of academic language is through
the standards that have been developed for both the content areas and ESL (Bailey &
Butler, 2002). In the United States, standards for the content areas have been developed
by professional associations such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics,
the first to release content standards in 1989. In the language arena, ESL standards
for school-age learners have been developed in Australia, Canada, England, and the
United States in recent years (McKay, 2000). Content-area and ESL standards reflect
what students should know and be able to do within the various subjects, and, there-
fore, make assumptions about uses of academic language.
Bailey and Butler (2002) examined the implicit and explicit statements of requisite
language in the content standards of four U.S. states with large ESL populations
(California, Florida, New York, and Texas). Their analysis of the science standards,
for example, revealed common language functions and descriptors among the four
states. Academic language functions that appeared in all four sets of science standards
at the elementary level were: analyze, compare, describe, observe, and record. The New
York science standards at sixth grade, for instance, state that students should be able
to explain seasonal changes on Earth. They must be able to create an Earth model
and describe the arrangement, interaction, and movement of the Earth, moon, and sun
(Bailey & Butler, 2002). At the middle school level, four academic language functions
were found in common across the science standards: compare, explain, identify, and
recognize. At the high school, three functions were shared across the four sets: describe,
explain, and recognize.
ESL standards make assumptions about requisite language skills that second lan-
guage learners must attain. TESOL’s ESL Standards for Pre-K-12 Students specify the
language competencies needed by English language learners in elementary and sec-
ondary schools: ”. . . to become fully proficient in English, to have unrestricted access
to grade-appropriate instruction in challenging academic subjects, and ultimately to
lead rich and productive lives” (TESOL, 1997, pp. 1–2). The ESL Standards consist of
three goals: 1) to use English to communicate in social settings; 2) to use English to
achieve academically in all content areas; and 3) to use English in socially and cul-
turally appropriate ways. Bailey and Butler (2002) also analyzed the nine standards
contained within the ESL Standards. Across the three grade level clusters, students are
expected to know and be able to use a wide array of language functions. Academic
language functions that could be found across all three goals and all three grade level
clusters are: express, imitate, listen, negotiate, participate, request, and respond. Within the
standards that focus on academic language, functions in common across the grade
level clusters include: analyze, contrast, define, elaborate, hypothesize, justify, paraphrase,
and summarize. Functions that are unique to the social language standards are: clarify,
communicate, describe, elicit, engage, restate, recite, and talk.
Findings from these analyses of selected content-area and ESL standards illuminate
the explicit and implicit assumptions of academic language use expected of school-age
learners and, therefore, deepen our understanding of the complexities of language as
a medium of learning. They also raise issues for further examination. For example,
Bailey and Butler (2002) point out that the verbs describe and clarify, categorized under
social uses of language (not academic) in the ESL Standards, were language func-
tions used for academic purposes in their observations of science classrooms (Bailey
et al., 2001). Similarly, as noted, the function describe was prominently featured in the
706 SNOW

example from the New York state science standards. Thus, while standards may pro-
vide useful resources for identifying the features that underlie academic language
proficiency, Bailey and Butler (2002) caution that standards must be validated against
actual classroom uses of academic language and, hence, echo McKay’s (2000) call for a
sound theoretical base for the construction of standards for ESL. Furthermore, Butler
and Bailey’s results remind us not to characterize language proficiency as a dichotomy
between social and academic language, but rather to view it as a developmental con-
tinuum for school-age English language learners.
The forces that brought about the trend toward standards-based instruction also
emphasize accountability and high stakes testing. Gottlieb (2000) noted that, in the
United States, “The success of the standards-based reform movement depends on the
accurate and equitable measurement of students’ achievement, which must be tied
to challenging academic content” (p. 167). The issue is a complicated one for English
language learners, particularly as noted, because current assessment measures gener-
ally do not tap academic language. Stevens, Butler, and Castellon-Wellington (2000)
found that while the language proficiency and content tests used in their study over-
lapped in terms of high-frequency general vocabulary and grammatical structures,
the vocabulary and sentence structures that appeared on the content test were more
complex. They contained nonspecialized academic words, specialized content words,
more embeddings, and test language. This point is underscored by a finding from the
van Eerde et al. (2001) study in Holland, where classroom observation captured one
of the second language learners, Hennia, actively participating in whole group in-
teraction in the math class and orally demonstrating understanding of a key concept
of graphing, but failing to demonstrate mastery later on when tested on the same
concept on a paper and pencil math test.
Butler and Stevens (2001) stress that academic language emerges as a critical factor
in assessing content knowledge because it is the vehicle for acquiring the knowledge
being assessed. Academic language proficiency measures are necessary, they main-
tain, to: 1) make decisions about a second language student’s readiness for taking
standardized content tests; 2) to apply in research on test accommodations in order to
determine the appropriacy of specific accommodations for students at different levels
of language proficiency; and 3) to measure student growth in academic language.
Implementation of the standards also provides a vehicle through which to view
classroom application of academic language. Bunch et al. (2001) reported on a
university-school collaboration in which middle school English language learners
were placed in mainstream social studies classes specifically designed to meet the
needs of underprepared students of linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds.
In the project, teachers and students use a chart based on the ESL Standards (TESOL,
1997) and the national foreign language standards to plan instruction that capital-
ized on opportunities for identifying, modeling, and guiding practice of academic
language skills. For example, in the unit “How Do Historians Know about the Cru-
sades?” one group of students made an oral presentation in which they explained how
the Crusaders defended against attack; they also wrote expository essays in which
they used the discourse of social studies to describe, explain, justify, and persuade.
All the activities were designed as progress indicators for ESL Goal 2: “Students will
use English to obtain, process, construct, and provide subject matter information in
spoken and written form” (TESOL, 1997).

A MODEL OF ACADEMIC LITERACY FOR INTEGRATED

LANGUAGE AND CONTENT INSTRUCTION

This chapter has considered two main areas of research and activity in integrated lan-
guage and content teaching by 1) examining some of the necessary conditions for CBI
 38. INTEGRATED LANGUAGE AND CONTENT INSTRUCTION 707

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FIG. 38.1. A Model of Academic Literacy for Integrated Language

and Content Instruction.

such as models, curricular implementation, instructional interventions, and teacher

preparation, and 2) reviewing descriptions of academic literacy from the extant adult
EAP literature and exploring the developing work in academic language proficiency
for school-age learners. Informed by this work, Figure 38.1 presents a model of aca-
demic literacy for integrated language and content instruction that takes into account
the CBI and EAP traditions in order to produce a more powerful understanding of
integrated approaches. The model incorporates the work of the many researchers
and practitioners reviewed in this chapter who have contributed key pieces to our
understanding of characteristics of academic literacy.
The centerpiece of the model, academic literacy, is comprised of (at least) four com-
ponents. The first component is linguistic characteristics that include understand-
ings of the lexicon (i.e., general vocabulary, nonspecialized academic vocabulary, and
content-specific or technical terminology), syntactic structures, academic language
functions, and discourse/text structures. The second component consists of the back-
ground knowledge that learners bring to bear on learning, including the learners’ de-
gree of familiarity with the content under study, cultural expectations, and scripts for
literacy based on prior or current academic exposure to educational settings. The third
component includes the cognitive knowledge inherent in the learning process; this
entails the knowledge structures that reveal the systematic relationship between the
content and the form and patterns in which it is presented (e.g., hierarchical structures,
temporal relationships among events), and patterns of critical thinking that experts
(teachers) model and apprentices (students) practice. In the fourth component, knowl-
edge of the discourse community, learners develop their understanding of the specific
content area (e.g., biology, mathematics) or what Short (2002) referred to as the “habits
of the mind” of biologists, mathematicians, or any practitioners within a particular
discourse community.
Contributing to the development of academic literacy for integrated language and
content instruction are the cornerstones of curriculum and instruction, assessment,
and, of course, the teacher and the student. Curriculum and instruction must neces-
sarily include the models selected for content-based instruction, choice (and rationale)
708 SNOW

for the content, instructional practices that should reflect language, content, and study
skill objectives, and (depending on the setting) standards appropriate for the subject
area and level of the students to guide instruction. Assessment, a key cornerstone
of the model, is in place to collect essential information about student performance
through the use of multiple measures—both informal and formal—to determine stu-
dent achievement and/or whether learners meet standards (where relevant).
The teacher, depending on the model selected, is a language teacher, a content
teacher, language and content teachers working collaboratively, or, in the case of
elementary school, a teacher handling both roles. In integrated language and content
instruction, teachers, to borrow Hawkins’ (2001) notion of “layering” of teacher knowl-
edge, must necessarily have both content and language knowledge and the requisite
training that allows them to plan and deliver instruction that will enhance academic
literacy. In this role, they also assume the role of agent of language (and academic) so-
cialization practices that will increase their second language students’ opportunities
for academic success. To this mix, student factors such as sociocultural (e.g., family
background, Ll literacy practices, etc.) and affective variables (i.e., attitudes and mo-
tivation) are added. And, while all integrated instruction should incorporate strategy
training, the students’ learning styles and strategy use repertoires become factors as
the learners mediate the complex learning process that is entailed in the development
of academic literacy.
The model of academic literacy for integrated language and content instruction
presented in this chapter attempts to be expansive enough to cover both second and
foreign language teaching contexts across educational levels, with components of the
model applying differentially to different educational settings and student popula-
tions. The common ground for the blending of CBI and EAP traditions is content—
challenging subject matter, in whatever form, core curricula, themes, or sustained
content. Crandall’s (1994) statement is pertinent: “. . . students cannot develop aca-
demic knowledge and skills without access to the language in which that knowl-
edge is embedded, discussed, constructed, or evaluated. Nor can they acquire aca-
demic skills in a context devoid of content” (p. 256). The increased spotlight on K-12
ESL populations may have accelerated accountability, but enhanced understanding
of the necessary conditions for developing academic literacy has the possibility to
strengthen all types of integrated language and content instruction for learners at all
levels.

NOTES

1. Stoller and Grabe’s framework is described in detail in the next section of this chapter.
2. Increasingly, materials specially designed for preparing teachers for integrated language and content
instruction are becoming available. See Making Content Comprehensible for English Language Learners:
The SIOP Model (Echevarria, Vogt, & Short, 2000); Handbook of Undergraduate Second Language Educa-
tion (Rosenthal, 2000); Dual Language Instruction: A Handbook for Enriched Education (Cloud, Genesee,
& Hamayan, 2000); Language Minority Students in the Mainstream Classroom (Carrasquillo & Rodriguez,
2002); and the Hawkins (2001) and Snow (2001) chapters in Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language
(Celce-Murcia (Ed.), 2001) .

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39

Instructed Language Learning

and Task-Based Teaching
Rod Ellis
University of Auckland

INTRODUCTION

A distinction is often drawn between ‘instructed’ and ‘naturalistic’ second language

(L2) learning (see, for example, Pica, 1983). However, defining these two types of
learning is problematic. In terms of setting, the distinction is relatively straightforward;
instructed learning occurs in a classroom or, perhaps, in a self-access center, whereas
naturalistic learning occurs in everyday contexts of language use where the L2 is
the medium of communication. In terms of motive, however, the distinction is less
straightforward, for in both instructional and naturalistic settings learners can choose
to function as learners or users and treat the target language as an object or a tool. In
terms of the processes involved in L2 learning, the distinction is even more problematic,
as the same processes are likely to arise in both settings to a greater or lesser extent.
In this chapter, instructed language learning will be taken to refer to the L2 learning
that takes place in a classroom setting.
Instruction constitutes an attempt to intervene in the process of language learning.
This intervention can be of two broad types. In direct intervention, the instruction
specifies what it is that learners will learn and when they will learn it. This takes place
via what White (1988) has called a Type A Curriculum, characterized by a structural
syllabus consisting of a graded list of items to be learned and an accuracy-oriented
methodology. In indirect intervention, the purpose of instruction is to create conditions
where learners can learn experientially through learning how to communicate in the
L2. This takes place via a Type B Curriculum consisting of a series of “tasks” that
motivate communication among the classroom participants. Direct intervention is
aimed at “skill-getting,” an investment for future use, as Widdowson (1998) puts
it. Indirect intervention seeks to integrate ‘skill getting’ into ‘skill using,’ the two
occurring simultaneously. This chapter will examine research that has addressed the
acquisitional outcomes of these two types of instruction.

713
714 ELLIS

DIRECT INTERVENTION IN L2 LEARNING

The key questions here are; (1) Do learners learn the specific L2 features/skills they
receive instruction in? and (2) Are some forms of direct intervention more effective
than others? These questions can be addressed by examining any level of language
(pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, discourse structure, and functions) in any of
the four language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing). For reasons of
space, this chapter will limit consideration to grammar (a traditional focus for direct
interventional programs) and will consider, in particular, whether teaching grammar
enables L2 learners to use the targeted features in their communicative speech.

The Effectiveness of Grammar Instruction

The first question—whether learners learn the grammatical features they are taught—
is of considerable practical and theoretical importance. From a practical point of view,
teachers (and policy makers) need to know whether trying to teach specific gram-
matical forms is worth the effort. Its theoretical significance lies in claims advanced
by Krashen (1981) and Schwartz (1993) that grammar can only be acquired uncon-
sciously through natural exposure, a view that is antithetical to a direct approach to
instructional intervention. These claims were motivated originally by research that
demonstrated that learners acquire grammatical features in a more or less fixed ‘nat-
ural’ order and also that they invariably pass through a series of transitional stages
in acquiring each feature (see R. Ellis 1994, chap. 3). They are reinforced by current
connectionist accounts of L2 learning (e.g., N. Ellis, 1996, 2002), according to which
L2 knowledge is not represented implicitly in the form of rules but as an elaborate
network of connections that is built up through massive exposure to sequences of
language in context. What both the ‘natural route’ and the ‘connectionist’ view of
L2 learning have in common is that acquisition is viewed as a very gradual process,
involving constant restructuring of the interlanguage grammar. Such a view does not
appear to be consonant with attempts to intervene directly in interlanguage develop-
ment. If it takes time (often months) for a learner to fully internalize a grammatical
form, what chance is there of instruction of limited duration (usually no more than a
series of lessons) having any effect?
In fact, determining whether grammar instruction is effective has proven a difficult
question to answer. One reason for this is that it is not clear what ‘effective’ means.
One possible meaning is ‘ability to use’ but this raises the further problem of whether
this refers to performance in experimentally elicited use of the target feature (e.g.,
a discrete-point test) or in communication (either written or oral). Another possible
meaning of ‘effective’ is ‘advancing learners along the natural route of L2 acquisition.’
A third possible definition of ‘effective’ is ‘to show awareness of the correct form.’ To
demonstrate that instruction is effective in this sense it is necessary to show that
learners understand a grammatical form, even if they cannot use it correctly. We will
explore whether instruction is ‘effective’ in each of these different senses.
There is now ample evidence to show that grammar instruction can help learners
to perform grammatical features more accurately in experimentally elicited perfor-
mance. Long (1983) reviewed a number of early studies and concluded that learners
who received form-focused instruction outperformed those who did not. Norris and
Ortega (2001) carried out a meta-analysis of some 51 studies that utilized either ‘se-
lected response’ or ‘constrained constructed response’ as the measure of learning.
They report an effect size of 1.46 and 1.20 respectively for these two types of measure,
indicating that, overall, form-focused instruction is effective when the learning out-
comes are measured in these ways. Furthermore, the beneficial effects of instruction
are also durable, as evident in delayed posttests. One conclusion to be drawn from
 39. INSTRUCTED LANGUAGE LEARNING 715

the research, then, is that learners can benefit from instruction in specific grammatical
features if their goal is to perform well on discrete-point tests like the TOEFL.
The evidence relating to the effects of grammar instruction on learners’ ability to
use the targeted features in communicative language use (especially unplanned oral
language use) is somewhat meager. This reflects the difficulty researchers have in
designing instruments to elicit spontaneous use of specific L2 features (see Loscky
& Bley-Vroman, 1993, for a discussion of this issue). Norris and Ortega could only
locate eight studies that included a measure of ‘free constructed response.’ Instruction
appears to have a much reduced effect when the learning outcome is measured in this
way, the effect size being less than half of that for ‘selected response’ and ‘constrained
constructed response.’ They note that “particular outcome measure types may result
in very different observations about the effectiveness of a treatment” (p. 199). In R.
Ellis (2002), I examined 11 studies that included a measure of free oral production. In-
struction was found to have a significant effect in only six of these. However, this effect
was also evident in delayed posttests and, in fact, in two of the studies, was stronger in
these. Two conclusions are in order. First, grammar instruction does not always result
in more accurate use of the targeted features in free oral production. Clearly, more
research is needed to discover when instruction ‘works’ for communicative language
use and when it does not. Second, when an effect is found it is durable.
Grammar instruction does not enable learners to ‘beat’ the natural route of acqui-
sition. Studies comparing instructed and naturalistic learners (e.g., Pica, 1983; Pavesi,
1986; R. Ellis, 1989) report the same order of acquisition for grammatical morphemes
and the same sequence of acquisition for syntactic structures such as English relative
clauses and German word order rules. These findings led Pienemann (1985) to ad-
vance the ‘teachability hypothesis’, which states that for instruction to be effective it
needs to target features that lie within the developmental stage next to that which the
learner has already reached. Pienemann’s own research (e.g., Pienemann, 1989) lent
support to this hypothesis. However, a more recent study (Spada & Lightbown, 1999)
challenges it. Using Pienemann’s account of five developmental stages for English
questions forms, they exposed learners to an input flood of question forms at Stages
4 and 5, predicting that learners at Stage 3 would be better placed to benefit from
this than learners at Stage 2. However, it was the latter who benefited most from the
instruction, although only by advancing to Stage 3. This study, then, indicates that
instruction does not alter the natural route of acquisition but that it may not be neces-
sary to ensure that it is fine-tuned to the proximate developmental stage of individual
learners. This is encouraging to teachers as it suggests that they may not need to en-
gage in the laborious task of identifying learners’ precise developmental stages as a
basis for instruction. A general conclusion of these studies is that instruction enables
learners to progress more rapidly along the natural route.
Finally, the effectiveness of instruction can be gauged by its success in helping
learners to understand grammatical features—that is, the extent to which they de-
velop an explicit understanding of rules. This is usually determined either by means
of a grammaticality judgment test or by asking learners to verbalize a rule. Research by
Fotos (1993, 1994) indicates that both direct and indirect consciousness-raising aimed
at developing explicit knowledge are effective in promoting awareness of grammati-
cal features, both in terms of learners’ ability to judge the grammaticality of sentences
and also their ability to subsequently notice the features in input. Norris and Ortega
(2001), however, found that the magnitude of the effect of instruction when assessed
through ‘metalinguistic judgment’ was much less than that for ‘selected response’ or
‘constrained constructed response’ although notably higher than that for ‘free con-
structed response.’ Also, the validity and reliability of grammaticality judgment tests
has been called into question (see R. Ellis, 1991a). Few studies have investigated
the effects of instruction on learners’ ability to verbalize grammatical rules so no
716 ELLIS

conclusions can be drawn. However, there would appear to be only a weak rela-
tionship between this ability and learners’ general language proficiency (Alderson,
Clapham, & Steel 1997). In conclusion, the extent to which instruction can help learners
to an explicit understanding of grammatical structures remains uncertain as indeed
does the value of instruction directed at this type of L2 knowledge.
To summarize, the research to date indicates:

1. Grammar instruction results in greater accuracy in testlike performance.

2. However, it is much less likely to lead to improved accuracy in spontaneous oral
language use.
3. Grammar instruction does not enable learners to beat the natural route but it is
effective in helping them to progress more rapidly along it.
4. It may not be necessary to fine-tune grammar instruction to the learner’s devel-
opmental stage.
5. Grammar instruction can contribute to learners’ metalingual understanding of
L2 grammar rules but doubts exist as to the utility of this kind of knowledge.
6. When grammar instruction does have an effect, this effect is durable.

The Relative Effectiveness of Different Types of Instruction

Given that direct instructional intervention has been shown to be effective, at least
in the case of grammar, the next obvious question is whether some kinds of direct
intervention work better than others. To answer this question it is necessary to iden-
tify a set of instructional options. Long (1991) distinguishes two broad approaches
to form-focused instruction (FFI), which he refers to as ‘focus-on-forms’ and ‘focus-
on-form.’ The former requires a planned approach to FFI (i.e., the prior selection of a
specific form for treatment). Learners are required to treat forms as discrete entities
that can be accumulated systematically one at a time. Such an approach, Long claims,
is incompatible with what is known about the nature of L2 acquisition. In contrast, the
latter involves attention to form in ‘tasks’ (i.e., activities that are primarily meaning-
centered), as, for example, when a communication problem arises and attempts are
made to negotiate meaning in order to resolve it. As defined by Long, then, ‘focus-on-
form’ is a characteristic of indirect rather than direct instructional intervention. Here,
therefore, we will consider only options relating to ‘focus-on-forms,’ reserving dis-
cussion of ‘focus-on-form’ to later when indirect instruction is considered. Table 39.1
describes the main focus-on-forms options.
Instruction typically involves combinations of options. For example, a fairly typical
grammar lesson might begin by asking learners to read a dialogue in which examples
of the form have been italicized (Implicit Instruction/Enhanced Input). This might
by followed with a formal presentation of the form to be taught (i.e., Explicit Instruc-
tion/Didactic). The students could be asked to complete a number of exercises of
the fill-in-the-blank kind (Production Practice/Controlled) before finally attempting
a role-play to provide an opportunity to use the form they have been practicing in
free production (Production Practice/Functional). In the production stages of the les-
son the teacher might point out and correct any errors the students make (Negative
Feedback/Explicit). However, in researching the effects of FFI, it is desirable to try to
isolate the different options in order to evaluate their contribution to learning. Un-
fortunately, as Norris and Ortega (2001) point out, this has not always been the way
that researchers have proceeded, making it difficult to draw firm conclusions about
the effectiveness of specific instructional options.
A number of studies have sought to compare the relative effectiveness of explicit
and implicit instruction. These were examined in Norris and Ortega’s meta-analysis,
with instructional treatments being coded as ‘explicit’ if ‘rule explanation comprised
 39. INSTRUCTED LANGUAGE LEARNING 717

TABLE 39.1
The Main Options in Focus-on-Forms Instruction

Option Description

1. Explicit instruction Instruction that requires students to pay deliberate attention

a. Didactic to the targeted form with a view to understanding it.
b. Discovery Students are provided with an explanation of the form.
Students are provided with L2 data that illustrate the form
and are asked to work out how the form works for
themselves.
2. Implicit instruction Instruction that requires learners to infer how a form works
a. Non-enhanced input without awareness.
b. Enhanced input Students are asked to memorize L2 data that illustrate the
form.
The L2 data is presented to the students without any special
attempt to draw their attention to the targeted form.
The targeted form is highlighted in some way (e.g., using
italics) to induce noticing.
3. Structured input Instruction requires learners to process L2 data that has been
specially designed to induce ‘noticing’ of the targeted form
and that can only be comprehended if the targeted form
has been processed.
4. Production practice Instruction requires learners to produce sentences containing
a. Controlled the targeted form.
b. Functional Students are given guidance in producing sentences contain-
ing the targeted form (e.g., by filling in blanks in sentences
or transforming sentences).
Students are required to produce their own sentences contain-
ing the targeted form in some kind of situational context.
5. Negative feedback Instruction consists of feedback responding to students’ ef-
a. Implicit forts to produce the targeted structure.
b. Explicit The feedback models the correct form without explicitly in-
dicating that the student has made an error.
The feedback makes it clear to the student that an error has
been made.

any part of the instruction’ and as ‘implicit’ when ‘neither rule presentation nor di-
rections to attend to particular forms were part of the treatment’ (p. 167). Explicit in-
struction proved to be significantly more effective than implicit instruction. However,
they note that the measurement of learning outcomes in many of the studies favored
explicit learning (i.e., in 90% of the studies they examined, learners’ knowledge of the
targeted structures was measured through experimentally elicited responses rather
than in communicative use). They also note that the implicit treatments were typi-
cally operationalized in very restrictive ways (e.g., through instructions to learners
to memorize a set of sentences) whereas the explicit treatment often involved other
instructional options. For these reasons caution needs to be exercised in concluding
that explicit instruction is more effective than implicit.
There is also the important question of how best to provide explicit instruction.
Table 39.1 suggests a distinction between ‘didactic’ and ‘discovery’ based approaches.
The former involves the direct explanation of grammar points. The latter involves the
use of various types of consciousness-raising tasks (see Rutherford, 1987; R. Ellis,
1997a) that guide learners into discovering a grammatical rule by providing them
with L2 data to analyze and instructions about how to set about this. A number of
studies have compared these two approaches. Fotos and Ellis (1991) found that while
718 ELLIS

both were effective in promoting understanding of a grammatical rule, as measured

by a grammaticality judgment test, the didactic option worked best. However, they
speculated that this might be because the students in this study were unfamiliar with
working in groups, as was required by the discovery option. Fotos (1993) conducted
a more extensive study with learners who were well rehearsed in group work. She
found that both approaches worked equally well. She argues that the discovery op-
tion is to be considered preferable because it also affords opportunities for students
to communicate in the target language when they do the tasks in groups. Another
reason for preferring discovery tasks is that learners find them more intrinsically mo-
tivating (Mohamed, 2001). However, as I have pointed out elsewhere (R. Ellis, 1991b),
consciousness-raising tasks have their limitations. Because they are directed at ‘under-
standing’ grammar, not using it, their utility rests on claims that explicit knowledge
of the L2 facilitates the acquisition of implicit knowledge, which, while theoretically
defensible, has not been empirically demonstrated. Also, talking about grammar may
not appeal to all learners (e.g., young children).
The relative effectiveness of structured input and production practice has also at-
tracted the attention of researchers. VanPatten (1996) argues that interlanguage de-
velopment occurs as a response to learners processing input not from their efforts at
production, although the latter may help them to automatize forms they have already
internalized. He proposes that attempts to intervene directly in interlanguage devel-
opment be accomplished through “input processing instruction.” This consists of (1)
explicit instruction directed at helping learners overcome ‘default’ processing strate-
gies (e.g., treating the first noun in a sentence like ‘The dog was bitten by Mary’ as the
agent of the verb) and (2) structured input as described in Table 39.1. VanPatten and his
co-researchers carried out a number of studies designed to compare the effects of in-
put processing instruction and ‘traditional instruction’ involving production practice.
Learners receiving input-processing instruction outperformed those receiving tradi-
tional instruction on comprehension posttests and did as well on production posttests.
Furthermore, the effectiveness of input processing instruction owed more to the
structured input component than to the explicit instruction (VanPatten & Oikennon,
1996). Subsequent studies (e.g., Allen, 2000) have failed to show a clear advantage
for structured input over production practice, whereas others (e.g., Erlam, 2001) have
found that production practice that forces attention to form-meaning mappings can
be more effective. VanPatten (2002), however, argues that studies that have failed to
demonstrate an advantage for input-processing instruction did so either because they
failed to address structures subject to default processing strategies or were method-
ologically flawed. Irrespective of whether input-processing instruction is superior, the
research does show that the structured input option is effective in promoting learn-
ing, whether this is measured in terms of comprehension or production. This finding
suggests the need to revise current approaches to grammar teaching to make fuller
use of this option. In particular, structured input would seem to be an appropriate
option for computer-delivered instructional materials.
Of all the options described in Table 39.1, functional grammar teaching receives the
strongest empirical support. Studies by Harley (1989), Day and Shapson (1991), Lyster
(1994), and Murunoi (2001) all testify to the effectiveness of this option. Furthermore,
the effectiveness is evident in measures of learning derived from both testlike and more
communicative performance. Also, the success of the instruction does not appear to be
dependent on the choice of target form. Hawkins and Towell (1996) argue that form-
focused instruction is likely to be more effective if the targeted feature is “simple
and easily-explained” (p. 208) but, in fact, in some of the studies cited earlier, the
target structure was highly complex. For example, Day and Shapson investigated
French hypothetical conditionals and Murunoi targeted English articles, both of which
are notoriously complex and difficult to learn, even as explicit L2 knowledge. Some
caveats are in order, however. In many of the studies, functional production practice
 39. INSTRUCTED LANGUAGE LEARNING 719

was combined with explicit explanation. In the case of Murunoi, functional instruction
with and without explicit explanation was compared, with the former proving the
more effective. Also, a feature of most of these studies is that the instruction provided
was very extensive in nature. In Harley’s study, for example, the instruction lasted
8 weeks and in Day and Shapson it lasted 5–7 weeks. In most teaching contexts it
is difficult to imagine that teachers will have so much time to devote to a single
grammatical feature.
The role of negative evidence in L2 acquisition is controversial. From one the-
oretical perspective it is seen as contributing significantly because learners lack the
acquisitional mechanisms to learn purely from positive evidence (Bley-Vroman, 1989).
Truscott (1999), however, has argued that correcting learners’ errors has no effect on
learners’ acquisition of new L2 forms. Negative feedback has been examined in both
descriptive and experimental studies. Seedhouse (2001) offers a comprehensive ac-
count of the various strategies teachers employ to repair learners’ linguistic errors.
He reports that teachers show a strong dispreference for direct and overt negative
feedback and instead opt for various forms of indirect, mitigated feedback. In other
words, teachers prefer ‘implicit’ to ‘explicit’ feedback (see Table 39.1). This raises the
important question as to the relative effectiveness of these two options. Seedhouse
argues that teachers would do better to choose the explicit option. He comments:

Teachers are avoiding direct and overt negative evaluation of learners’ linguistic errors
with the best intentions in the world, namely to avoid embarrassing and demotivating
them. However, in doing so, they are interactionally marking linguistic errors as embar-
rassing and problematic. (pp. 368–369)

This may offer an explanation for why negative feedback fails to effect changes in
learners’ interlanguages, as claimed by Truscott. However, experimental studies (e.g.,
Carroll & Swain, 1993) suggest that negative feedback, especially of the explicit kind,
does contribute to learning. While quite a lot is known about how teachers provide
negative feedback, few conclusions are currently possible about whether it works or
about what kind works best.
It should be clear from this account of the research that has investigated the relative
effectiveness of different options for focus-on-forms instruction that any conclusions
must be tentative. The research indicates the following:

1. Explicit instruction may be more effective than implicit instruction when learn-
ing is measured in testlike performance.
2. Consciousness-raising tasks catering for discovery-based explicit instruction are
as effective as didactic explicit instruction at developing explicit L2 knowledge
and also afford opportunities for meaning-centered communication.
3. Irrespective of whether input-processing instruction is more effective than
production-based instruction, structured input clearly contributes to L2 learn-
ing and may prove a useful option for the development of self-instructional
materials.
4. Functional grammar teaching results in learning whether this is measured in
testlike or more communicative performance.
5. Negative feedback may contribute to learning especially if it is pitched at a level
appropriate to the learner’s developmental stage.

Research on Direct Interventions and Language Pedagogy

Much of the research previously discussed was carried out to test the claims of different
theories of L2 acquisition and only secondarily to address practical issues to do with
720 ELLIS

teaching. As Mitchell (2000) points out, this is problematic in the current educational
climate, where outcome-driven educational models predominate and policy makers
want to be told what ‘works.’ In such a context, research that provides evidence that
can be used as a basis for making instructional decisions is required. In this respect,
Mitchell concludes that research that has investigated direct intervention through
focus-on-forms does not measure up very well:

. . . applied linguists are not at present in a position to make firm research-based pre-
scriptions about the detail of ‘what works’ in FL grammar pedagogy. There has been
considerable research activity. . . . However, the research has been diverse in its theoreti-
cal foundations and procedures, patchy in scope, and has led to some mixed patterns of
findings. (p. 296)

Borg (1998) reaches a similar conclusion but argues that the problem lies with the
reliance on experimental research. He proposes that research efforts be redirected at
teachers’ craft beliefs about grammar teaching and their actual teaching practices.
While such an approach may provide valuable insights into what constitutes ‘good
practice’ (as teachers understand this) it will not tell us what works. For that, as
Mitchell emphasizes, we need carefully designed process-product studies.
Mitchell and Borg are perhaps overly harsh on the experimental research to date.
As the above review suggests, it does afford some conclusions, albeit often tentative
ones. There is clear evidence that focus-on-forms is effective and there are clues as to
what types work best (see the earlier summaries).

INDIRECT INTERVENTION IN L2 LEARNING

A good example of indirect intervention in L2 learning is content-based language

instruction. In immersion programs (see Johnson & Swain, 1997, for reports on a sam-
ple of such programs) the L2 is used as the medium of instruction for a range of
subjects in the school curriculum and so is learned as part and parcel of mastering
academic content. The results of evaluations of these programs are encouraging. As
Genesee (1987) documents, immersion learners achieve high levels of general lan-
guage proficiency and are able to interact confidently in the L2. They also develop
excellent L2 reading skills. However, their production often continues to be marked by
grammatical inaccuracies and they do not acquire much in the way of sociolinguistic
competence. The explanation commonly offered for this is that the classroom context
does not afford sufficient opportunities for “pushed output” (Swain, 1985). For exam-
ple, student output has been shown to consist of single words or short phrases with
little opportunity for extended discourse. Another reason is that the students’ are so
focused on message content that they do not attend to form and consequently fail to
acquire grammatical features that lack saliency (e.g., verb tense endings). To remedy
this problem, content-based instruction was modified to include direct intervention
by means of supplementary focus-on-forms instruction involving functional gram-
mar teaching, as in Harley (1989) and Day and Shapson (1991) (see previous section).
Such instruction, however, is time consuming and incompatible with the noninterven-
tional principles of content-based instruction. For this reason, an alternative solution
involving focus-on-form (i.e., attention to form in the context of meaning-centered
instruction) has been proposed. Researchers have consequently turned their attention
to examining what opportunities for focusing on form arise in immersion classrooms
(see, e.g., Lyster & Ranta, 1997) and also the kinds of instructional activities and
methodological procedures that can promote a focus-on-form (e.g., Swain, 1988).
Indirect intervention is also evident in proposals for task-based instruction. Tasks
are defined as activities where (1) meaning is primary, (2) there is some communication
 39. INSTRUCTED LANGUAGE LEARNING 721

problem to solve, (3) there is some relationship to real-world activities, (4) task com-
pletion has some priority, and (5) the assessment of the task is in terms of outcome
(Skehan 1998, p. 95). However, although tasks are intended to induce a primary focus
on meaning, the importance of a focus-on-form has also been emphasized. The fol-
lowing sections outline the rationale for task-based teaching and offer a brief review
of current research.

The Rationale for Task-based Instruction

Proposals for task-based instruction arose out of the conviction that it was not possible
to specify what a learner would learn in linguistic terms. Thus, as Prabhu (1987) ar-
gued, it was necessary to abandon the preselection of linguistic items in any form and
instead specify the content of teaching in terms of holistic units of communication,
that is, tasks. In this way, he claimed, it would be possible to teach “through commu-
nication” rather than “for communication.” Prabhu’s procedural syllabus was a first
attempt to develop a syllabus on such grounds. The syllabus consisted of a set of tasks,
sequenced according to difficulty. Interestingly, it was developed for use in secondary
schools in southern India, a challenging context for what was an innovatory approach
to language teaching.
A somewhat different approach to task-based teaching has been advanced by Long
(see Long, 1985; Long & Crookes, 1992). Like Prabhu, Long explicitly grounds his pro-
posal on a theory of L2 acquisition but the theory differs in one key respect. Whereas
Prabhu views language acquisition as an implicit process that takes place when learn-
ers are grappling with the effort to communicate, Long emphasizes the need for
learners to attend to form consciously while they are communicating—what he calls
‘focus on form.’ Tasks then have to be designed in ways that will ensure a primary
focus on meaning but also allow for incidental attention to form. Long also advances
proposals for using tasks in courses for specific purposes. He distinguishes between
what he calls target tasks and pedagogic tasks and argues that to ensure the relevancy
of a task-based syllabus, the starting point is a needs analysis to establish the target
tasks that a specific group of learners need to be able to perform. For Long, ‘task’ is
the ideal unit for specifying the content of specific purpose courses because it most
closely reflects what learners need to do with the language.
It can be seen, then, that the rationale for task-based syllabuses draws on a variety of
arguments. First and foremost it is premised on the theoretical view that the instruction
needs to be compatible with the processes involved in L2 acquisition. Second, as in
the case of Prabhu, the importance of learner ‘engagement’ is emphasized; tasks,
as long as they provide a ‘reasonable challenge’, will be cognitively involving and
motivating. Third, as in the case of Long, tasks serve as a suitable unit for specifying
learners’ needs and thus for designing specific purpose courses.
However, there have also been objections leveled at task-based courses. First, the
central claim that learners do not learn the specific grammatical structures that they
are taught through direct intervention is incorrect. In the previous section, we saw
that there is clear evidence to show that instruction consisting of a focus-on-forms
does result in learning, especially when this is measured in testlike performance but,
also, importantly, in spontaneous oral production. The noted failure of traditional
syllabuses may have had more to do with how the syllabuses were implemented (i.e.,
with their methodology) than with their design. It should be noted, however, that
the dismissal of this claim does not necessarily invalidate task-based instruction, as
this may still prove a more efficient way of promoting L2 acquisition than traditional
approaches. Second, the finding that immersion program fail to achieve high levels
of grammatical and sociolinguistic competence also cast doubt on the overall effec-
tiveness of a meaning-centered approach. Sheen (1994) observes that, if immersion
722 ELLIS

programs have failed in these respects despite the thousands of hours of instruction
they afford, one can only be skeptical of what might be achieved by the far fewer
hours available in a second or foreign language course based on tasks. Again, though,
this does not invalidate task-based instruction but merely points to a limitation, which
may be remediable by introducing a ‘focus-on-form.’ However, Sheen is right to point
to lack of clear empirical support for either the effectiveness of task-based instruction
or its relative superiority.
To sum up, task-based syllabuses have been promoted by SLA researchers and edu-
cationalists as an alternative to linguistic syllabuses on the grounds that (1) linguistic
syllabuses are not effective in promoting acquisition and (2) task-based syllabuses
conform to what is known about acquisitional processes. However, (1) has been chal-
lenged and in part at least would seem to be wrong while (2) remains a theoretical
claim as yet without strong empirical support. This is not to say, however, that task-
based syllabuses have no role to play in language teaching. Indeed, there are strong
theoretical grounds for them (see Skehan, 1998).

Task-Based Research
The goal of task-based research is to identify “psycholinguistically motivated task
characteristics” that “can be shown to affect the nature of language produced in
performing a task in ways which are relevant to SL processing and SL learning”
(Crookes, 1986). Research based on the Interaction Hypothesis (Long, 1996) aims to
find out which types of tasks are most likely to lead to the kind of meaning negotia-
tion hypothesized to promote language acquisition. Researchers have investigated a
variety of task variables and have been able to show that tasks that are two-way as
opposed to one-way (Pica & Doughty, 1985), that have split rather than shared input
(Newton, 1991), and where the outcome of a task is closed rather than open (Crookes &
Rulon, 1985) and divergent rather than convergent (Duff, 1986) result in higher levels
of meaning negotiation. Other research has focused on the nature of the learner’s
participation in a task, examining whether tasks performed in small groups or in
lockstep with a teacher led to greater meaning negotiation (Pica & Doughty, 1985).
More recently, researchers have turned their attention to tasks that require learners
to produce output. Drawing on Swain’s (1985) Output Hypothesis, Izumi (2002), for
example, conducted a study that found that learners engaged in a reconstruction task
requiring them to produce English relative clause constructions were more likely to
notice these constructions and learn them than learners who completed a comprehen-
sion task where the same constructions were graphically enhanced.
An alternative approach to investigating tasks has drawn on theories of language
competence and of speech production. Skehan (1998) has suggested that language
competence is comprised of lexis, including formulaic expressions such as ‘I don’t
know,’ and grammatical rules. Native speakers make use of these two different types
of knowledge by means of a dual processing system, drawing on both lexicalized
and grammatical processing but varying in which type they rely on in a given ac-
tivity according to the communicative pressure they experience and their need to be
precise. Skehan argues that when required to perform spontaneously, L2 learners are
likely to depend on lexicalized processing but when required to formulate messages
more precisely they will utilize their rule-based knowledge. He suggests that it may
be possible to identify the design features that lead learners to place a differential em-
phasis on fluency (i.e., performance free of undue pauses and false starts), complexity
(i.e., the use of a wide range of grammatical structures), and accuracy (i.e., the correct
use of grammatical structures). Variables so far investigated include the familiarity of
the information to be communicated, whether the task is dialogic or monologic, the
degree of structure of the information, the complexity of the outcome and the extent
to which information has to be transformed from one form to another (Skehan, 2001).
 39. INSTRUCTED LANGUAGE LEARNING 723

Dialogic tasks produce greater accuracy than monologic tasks. Tasks with a complex
outcome promote greater complexity. Tasks where the information to be conveyed is
clearly structured promote fluency.
Some researchers have based their research on Levelt’s model of speech production
(Levelt, 1989). This identifies three stages in speech production: (1) conceptualization,
when the purpose and semantic content of a message is determined, (2) formulation,
when the speaker maps grammatical and phonological features onto the preverbal
message, and (3) articulation, when the phonetic plan produced by (2) is converted
into actual speech. Wendel (1997) has used this model to distinguish two types of
planning—strategic or offline planning (i.e., the planning that takes place when learn-
ers are given time to plan a task prior to performing it) and online planning (i.e., the
planning that occurs while learners are actually performing the task). Thus, strate-
gic planning, according to Wendel, involves conceptualization; online planning, in
contrast, is directed at formulation and articulation and manifests itself through mon-
itoring. Bygate (1996) also utilizes Levelt’s model to account for what effect asking
learners to repeat a task has on task performance.
The contribution that strategic, pretask planning makes to task-based performance
has been examined in a number of studies. In an early study, R. Ellis (1987) found
that this kind of planning resulted in increased accuracy in the use of English regular
(but not irregular) past tense forms. Other studies (e.g., Crookes, 1989), however,
suggest that the effects of strategic planning are more evident in enhancing fluency
and complexity than accuracy. Ortega (1999) reviews a number of planning studies,
concluding that the evidence that planning contributes to greater accuracy is mixed.
Her own study of learners of L2 Spanish found a positive effect for noun-modifiers but
not for articles. One explanation for these mixed findings is that strategic planning only
leads to greater accuracy if learners have time to monitor their actual performance
of the task, as suggested by Wendel (1997). Yuan and Ellis (2003) investigated this
hypothesis in a study that compared the effects of strategic and online planning. They
found that strategic planning resulted in greater fluency and complexity while online
planning led to increased accuracy and complexity. It would seem, then, that there is
a trade-off between fluency and accuracy, with learners prioritizing one or the other,
depending on the kind of planning they engage in.
Not all task-based research has been motivated by theories based on a computa-
tional model of L2 learning (i.e., a model that views learning in terms of the mental
processing of input and output). A number of recent studies have drawn on Vygot-
skian accounts of language learning. These view learning as socially constructed.
When L2 learners have the opportunity to interact with other users of the language
(e.g., a teacher, a native speaker, or another learner) they are able to perform func-
tions in the language that they cannot perform by themselves. With time and practice
they internalize these functions, learning to perform them independently. In this way,
learning involves a progression from the inter- to the intramental as learners shift from
object and other regulation to self-regulation. Vygotskian theory also emphasizes how
learners shape the goals of any activity to suit their own purposes. Recently, this the-
oretical perspective has led to task-based studies that investigate ‘scaffolding’ and
‘collaborative dialogue’, the supportive interactions that arise when learners com-
municate with others (e.g., Swain, 2000) and also to studies that demonstrate how
the task-as-workplan is interpreted and reshaped by learners in actual performance
(Coughlan & Duff, 1994). There have also been attempts to show how learners and
native speaker interlocutors vary in the way they perform a single task depending on
the learners’ developmental stage (Aljaafreh & Lantolf, 1994; Nassaji & Swain, 2000).
Platt and Brooks (2002) discuss the notion of “task engagement” within a sociocultural
theoretical framework, arguing that this enhances learners’ motivation to accomplish
a task and results in ‘transformation’ when they switch from relatively undirected to
more focused activity and, thereby create a context in which learning can take place.
724 ELLIS

This review of task-based research addressed unfocused tasks (i.e., tasks designed
to elicit general communicative use of the L2). However, there have also been a num-
ber of studies that have investigated focused tasks (i.e., tasks designed to elicit com-
municative use of specific L2 features). Newton and Kennedy (1996), for example,
provide evidence to suggest that it is possible to predict the linguistic forms that will
be used when particular tasks are performed. They found that the discourse genre (i.e.,
description versus persuasion) elicited by tasks influenced the linguistic forms used.
Bygate (1999) has also demonstrated that the processing involved in performing a nar-
rative and an argumentation task led to learners making different linguistic choices.
Also, varying a task condition (i.e., shared versus split information) can influence
learners’ choice of linguistic forms.
By switching attention to form during the performance of a task, teachers can
incorporate form-focused instruction into meaning-centered activities methodologi-
cally, rather than through task design as in the ways previously described. This branch
of task-based research has been motivated by developments in SLA theory that stress
the importance for acquisition of the conscious ‘noticing’ of forms in the input for
(Schmidt, 2001). Nobuyoshi and Ellis (1993) and Ellis and Takashima (1999) demon-
strated that it is possible to push learners into using a particular grammatical form
(past tense) if they receive requests to clarify utterances containing an error in this
structure. Other studies have examined the effects of negative feedback in the form
of ‘recasts’ (i.e., reformulations of learners’ deviant utterances or parts of them) on L2
acquisition. Doughty and Varela (1998), for example, report a study that examined the
effect of recasting utterances whenever learners made an error in the use of English
past tense forms in the context of reporting science experiments. They found that
this treatment resulted in both improved accuracy in the use of the past tense and in
movement along the sequence of acquisition for this structure. However, as Nicholas,
Lightbown, and Spada (2001) conclude, the effectiveness of recasts in promoting ac-
quisition may depend on whether it is clear to the learners that the recast is a reaction
to the accuracy of the form, not the content, of their utterances. Current research is
directed at discovering how recasts aid acquisition. Leeman (2003), for example, con-
ducted a study that suggested that it is the enhanced salience of specific forms that
recasts afford rather than the negative evidence following errors that is important
for learning. Overall, research has shown that task procedures can be manipulated to
induce the use of specific features and also that focused feedback, such as recasts, can
bring about changes in learners’ interlanguage grammars.
In the case of the studies referred to earlier the focus-on-form was proactive (i.e., it
was predetermined to allow the researcher to investigate a specific type of interven-
tion). However, even when no such intervention has been planned, the participants
in a task may temporarily suspend attention to meaning in order to focus on form.
In this case the focus-on-form is entirely incidental. It can be achieved in a num-
ber of ways: when teachers respond to learner errors (Lyster & Ranta, 1997), when
they draw learners’ attention to the usefulness of specific forms in the task they are
performing (Samuda, 2001), or when learners themselves ask questions about form
as when they collaboratively try to solve some linguistic problem in order to com-
plete a task (Swain & Lapkin, 1998). It can arise both in the negotiation of meaning,
triggered by a communication problem, or in the negotiation of form, when partic-
ipants take time out from communicating to treat language as an object and func-
tion as teachers or learners rather than language users. A feature of this incidental
focus-on-form is that it is extensive rather than intensive in nature. That is, within
the context of a single communicative task, a number of different linguistic forms
(phonological, lexical, grammatical, or discoursal) are likely to be attended to but each
focus-on-form episode is only very brief. In this respect, incidental focus-on-form
differs from focus-on-forms instruction, where relatively few linguistic features are
treated but intensively. A key question is whether focus-on-form detracts from the
 39. INSTRUCTED LANGUAGE LEARNING 725

overall communicativeness of a task but studies to date (e.g., Ellis, Basturkmen, &
Loewen, 2001) suggest that this does not happen.
In summary, task-based research affords information about how the design of tasks
and their implementation can affect learner performance and L2 acquisition:

1. The negotiation of meaning is enhanced if the information provided by the task

is split and the outcome required is closed or convergent.
2. Task design can influence whether learners rely primarily on their lexicalized or
rule-based knowledge of the L2 with the result that either fluency or complexity
is prioritized.
3. Task design can also influence the specific linguistic forms that learners employ
when they perform a task.
4. Providing opportunities for strategic planning of a task performance promotes
fluency and complexity of language use. In contrast, providing time for online
planning (monitoring) leads to greater accuracy.
5. A focus-on-form, directed at specific linguistic features and induced proactively
into a task performance by means of the negotiation of meaning (e.g., requests
for clarification and recasts), promotes L2 acquisition.
6. Incidental focus-on-form also arises naturally in task-based interactions without
necessarily disturbing the communicative flow and addresses a broad range of
linguistic features.

This information can assist in the development of a task-based approach to language

teaching.

Research on Indirect Interventions and Language Pedagogy

There is substantial evidence from evaluations of immersion programs to suggest
that indirect interventions are effective in developing L2 proficiency. As yet, there is
less evidence to support task-based instruction, although there are strong theoretical
grounds for its advocacy. In particular, indirect intervention, with its emphasis on
learning through communication, is likely to result in linguistic knowledge that is
deployable (i.e., that learners can actually access when asked to engage in real-life
communication). However, there are caveats that give cause for hesitancy in recom-
mending this instructional approach. First, it may not result in high levels of linguistic
and sociolinguistic competence, as noted earlier, although this may be remediable by
means of proactive and incidental focus-on-form. Second, because of its relative new-
ness, there is no received set of principles on which to base the design of a course for
indirect intervention. Third, such an approach may be too radical for some teaching
contexts, especially if the teachers and students view classroom learning as necessarily
analytical. Fourth, it is not clear how an indirect interventional approach can cater for
self-directed language learning, as it depends very largely on social interaction. In the
case of task-based research, there is a clear need for shift from laboratorylike studies
to the careful evaluation of both its implementation and the learning outcomes in real
classrooms.

CONCLUSION

Instruction plays a major role in both foreign and second language learning. While
it may not be necessary to achieve competence in the L2 it undoubtedly helps. Nor
should instructed learning be seen as a poor alternative to naturalistic learning for
there is plenty of evidence to show that it is as, if not more, effective. The crucial ques-
tion is, therefore, not whether instruction works but rather what kind of instruction
726 ELLIS

works best. This chapter has been an exploration of this question. The research to date
does not provide definite answers. It is not possible to declare that direct intervention
is superior to indirect intervention or vice versa. Nor is it possible to declare that one
type of focus-on-forms instruction results in better learning than another. Nor is it
possible to specify how best to design a task-based course or how to implement it in
ways that will maximize learning. Despite these uncertainties, the research is not with-
out value. While it may not justify ‘prescriptions’ (and thus may disappoint policy
makers) it does offer a number of “provisional specifications” (Stenhouse, 1975) and,
as I have argued elsewhere (R. Ellis, 1997b) this is all we should expect of research.
Its true value lies, perhaps, in helping teachers to understand that “second language
classrooms should be characterized by a variety of activities, with an emphasis on
those which engage students in meaningful interaction, but with an awareness on the
part of the teacher that some attention to language form is also necessary” (Light-
bown, 2000, p. 433). This may sound self-evident to many teachers but, as Lightbown
points out, if this so, it is partly because research on instructed language learning has
helped to make it so.

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40

Discourse-Based Approaches:
A New Framework for Second
Language Teaching and Learning
Marianne Celce-Murcia
University of California, Los Angeles
Elite Olshtain
Tel Aviv University

PURPOSE/FOCUS

The main objective of this chapter is to propose that discourse-based approaches to

second language teaching and learning should be central to the process of enabling
learners to become competent and efficient users of a new language. While learning
another language, students need to develop discourse skills in that language; to func-
tion in new contexts and in new interpersonal relations; and to attend to linguistic,
cultural, and social factors that may be completely unfamiliar. Modern language ped-
agogy is constantly searching for new ways to facilitate this developmental process;
this chapter discusses a framework designed to serve this aim.
The chapter focuses primarily on the responsibilities that teachers, practitioners,
and curriculum developers need to take in order to work within a discourse frame-
work. Our position is based on the necessity for such a framework if the field is going
to fully integrate the recent trend toward returning to a ‘focus on form’ within com-
municative language teaching. This trend began with Long’s work (1983, 1991), was
further expanded in Doughty and Williams (1998), and continues to spur new research
in the field (Ellis, 2000; Ellis, Basturkmen, & Loewen, 2001). This chapter shows that
focus on form, which is primarily meaning focused, can best be achieved within a
discourse framework that is pragmatically driven.
Before we can discuss discourse-based approaches to language teaching, we need to
agree on a definition of discourse. What is discourse? It is difficult to define discourse
concisely. We propose the following working definition. Discourse is:
. . . an instance of spoken or written language that has describable internal relationships
of form and meaning that relate coherently to an external communicative function or

729
730 CELCE-MURCIA AND OLSHTAIN

purpose and a given audience/interlocutor. Furthermore, the external function or pur-

pose can only be determined if one takes into account the context and participants (i.e.,
all the relevant situational, social, and cultural factors) in which the piece of discourse
occurs. (Celce-Murcia & Olshtain, 2000, p. 4)

It is our position that discourse and context are critical notions for all aspects of
language pedagogy and all areas of research and development having to do with
language teaching and learning. We reflect this philosophy in our discussions of
discourse-based approaches to language pedagogy here and elsewhere (Celce-Murcia
& Olshtain, 2000; Olshtain & Celce-Murcia, 2001).
In this chapter we propose to do the following:

1. Show how discourse-based approaches have developed from two earlier strands
of research; namely, work indiscourse analysis and in communicative approaches
to language teaching and learning.
2. Show how a number of so-called controversies can be usefully re-envisioned
and resolved with reference to discourse-based approaches.
3. Argue that discourse-based approaches impact all aspects of language instruc-
tion (teaching materials, course design and content, teaching procedures, assess-
ment of learner achievement, etc.).

HOW DISCOURSE-BASED APPROACHES FIT WITHIN

CURRENT METHODOLOGY

Discourse-based approaches have developed from two prior strands of research: (1)
work in discourse analysis, and (2) work in communicative approaches to language
teaching and language learning. Over the past 30 years, discourse analysis has devel-
oped in part as a reaction to the sentence-level paradigm, long dominant in the influ-
ential school of theoretical linguistics developed by Chomsky (1957, 1965, 1972). Both
anthropological linguists such as Hymes (1967, 1972), who invented the term “com-
municative competence,” and socially oriented linguists like Halliday (1994)—often
in collaboration with Hasan (e.g., Halliday & Hasan, 1976, 1989)–have challenged
the narrowness of Chomsky’s model of language and the innate mechanisms that he
posits for language acquisition. Instead, they have argued that language has social
and cultural origins that help us understand its form, function, and acquisition.
Some discourse analysts have dealt exclusively with oral data (e.g., Schegloff, Ochs,
& Thompson, 1996) whereas others have dealt primarily with written texts (e.g.,
Swales, 1990; Hoey, 1991). In principle, discourse analysis can deal with all modes
of human communication (including spoken, written, gestural, and nonverbal); indi-
vidual researchers have had specific analytic preferences, giving rise to a number of ap-
proaches to discourse analysis such as genre analysis (e.g., Swales, 1990; Hyland, 2002),
conversation analysis (e.g., Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Atkinson & Heritage,
1984), rhetorical structure theory (e.g., Mann & Thompson, 1988), cohesion analy-
sis (e.g., Halliday & Hasan, 1976), and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995;
Pennycook, 1995; Luke, 2002). What all of these approaches have in common is that
they analyze entire coherent segments of language, not simply sentences taken out of
context and viewed in isolation (as is the case in Chomskyan linguistics). This means
that the focus of concern in discourse analysis has been features of language that one
examines over stretches of discourse, such as how topic continuity is maintained,
how reference to entities and to temporal frames is maintained, how ellipsis is to be
accounted for, how textual connections (grammatical and lexical, explicit and implicit)
should be described, how stance and identity are constructed through discourse, and
 40. DISCOURSE-BASED APPROACHES 731

so on. Grammar (i.e., sentence structure and morphology) is relevant to the extent that
it contributes to the understanding and description of such concerns (Celce-Murcia,
1991, 2002).
Proponents of communicative language teaching developed their proposals to
teach language as communication and for communication (e.g., Brumfit & Johnson,
1979; Widdowson, 1978) in reaction to the failure of “building block” methods of
language teaching such as grammar-translation and audiolingualism. Building block
methods hold that if you teach sounds and letters—that form words and morpho-
logical inflections, which in turn form sentences—learners can then use these bits
and pieces of language to communicate. The past (and current!) failures of such ap-
proaches, along with some of the early work in discourse analysis, initially led some
language teaching methodologists (e.g., Krashen, 1981) to argue that it would be
best to drop all explicit teaching of language structures (building blocks) in favor
of focusing on communication. Materials were then produced that were organized
around notions such as time, space, number, and so forth, and social functions such
as requests, apologies, complaints, and the like. (van Ek, 1976; Wilkins, 1976) rather
than grammatical structure. A geat deal of attention was given to developing com-
municative activities and tasks, exposing learners to authentic materials, teaching
performance-enhancing strategies to learners, and focusing instruction on the use of
the target language to communicate messages or to learn content of some sort in the
belief that the structures of the target language would be acquired as a by-product of
such instruction.
The results of early communicative methodology and classical immersion edu-
cation, both of which focused on content rather than form, demonstrated that such
approaches produce learners who have good receptive skills but whose production
is fluent yet inaccurate (Harley, 1989; Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991). In other words,
language learners participating in such programs do NOT acquire the structures of
the target language to the same extent that children do when learning their first lan-
guage and the resulting structural by-product that they do acquire is often highly
imperfect—especially at the morphological level (Lightbown & Spada, 1999).
Such failures indicate that language teachers need to understand the complex and
integrated nature of communicative competence, which consists minimally—Hymes’
model is much more complex—of linguistic competence, sociocultural competence,
discourse competence, and strategic competence (Canale, 1983). When viewed as an
integrated whole, these competencies are not independent and unordered. Rather
the core competence is discourse competence, with sociocultural competence (knowl-
edge of social factors, cultural norms, and other pragmatic information that influ-
ences choice and sequence of language forms) providing the requisite top-down back-
ground knowledge and with linguistic competence (the building blocks) providing
the bottom-up resources. Strategic competence (Canale & Swain, 1980; Celce-Murcia,
Dörnyei, & Thurrell, 1995) refers to how well language users can deploy the know-
ledge and resources at their disposal—along with communication strategies—in order
to communicate their intended meanings or interpret their interlocutor’s messages.
Discourse competence—the core competence—is an integrated ability that one needs
in order to make use of one’s sociocultural and linguistic competence to select or
interpret words, phrases, and sentence structures that produce coherent and cohe-
sive segments of language that appropriately communicate an intended meaning to
a specific audience.
Given that discourse is the central competency if one’s pedagogical objective is
communicative competence, pedagogical discourse analysis must become central in
all subdisciplines contributing to language pedagogy (i.e., methodology, language
teacher training, materials development, syllabus design, second language acquisition
research, classroom research, and language assessment).
732 CELCE-MURCIA AND OLSHTAIN

IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENTS IN LANGUAGE PEDAGOGY:

CURRENT CONTROVERSIES

In this section we discuss a number of so-called pedagogical controversies. However,

we do not juxtapose the positions that others have taken in the past in order to argue
for one option over the other; instead, in each case, we view the two options as
endpoints on continua in the discourse framework—both endpoints contributing to
a new integrated approach to language teaching, grounded in discourse.

Fluency and Accuracy

In the preceding section we pointed out that the students enrolled in classical immer-
sion education programs, which teach content (but not form) in the second language,
become fluent but inaccurate users of their target language over time. The opposite
result is also possible: Many learners in building-block approaches can perform fairly
well on standardized tests like the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language,
developed and administered by the Educational Testing Service, Princeton, New
Jersey) yet are unable to engage in a simple conversation in the target language with
anything approaching normal fluency (i.e., interacting according to target language
conventions and speaking comprehensibly at an average rate without long pauses or
undue hesitation). Of course, there are also many language learners who are neither
accurate nor fluent when using their second language—even after many years of in-
struction. To achieve the goal of training more second language learners who are both
fluent and reasonably accurate, it is imperative that professionals adopt an approach
in which they work at the discourse level but can, as needed, deal explicitly with any
area that is causing problems (pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, culture, rhetoric,
etc.). After the teacher deals with the problem(s) that impede clear communication,
the students can then return to the production and/or reception of the discourse that
the activity or task requires. (It may, of course, be useful for the teacher to prepare the
students linguistically and/or culturally prior to a challenging task and/or to deal
with selected problems at different stages while the students are doing the task.)

Comprehensible Input and Comprehensible Output

Krashen (1981) is a language teaching methodologist in the communicative peda-
gogy camp who has argued that the only requirement for language acquisition is
the learner’s exposure to (and intake of) a great deal of comprehensible input in the
target language. In other words, the more one listens to or reads materials in the tar-
get language that one can understand, the more one acquires of the target language.
However, Swain (1985) and Swain and Lapkin (1998), among others, have shown that
the truest indicator of language acquisition is the ability of the learner to produce
comprehensible output, that is, to speak and write messages in the target language
that are comprehensible to a specified recipient while the learner is engaging in a
communicative activity. This means that learners must be given many opportunities
to interact in their second language and to practice their productive as well as their re-
ceptive language skills in meaningful contexts at the level of discourse. The discourse
level is where language comprehension, production, and acquisition take place (they
do not take place at the level of the sound, word, or sentence taken in isolation). In re-
ality, both comprehension (i.e., interpretation of speaker/writer message and intent)
and production (i.e., constructing spoken or written messages that convey one’s in-
tended communication) are important facets of language teaching in discourse-based
approaches (Celce-Murcia, 1995a, 1995b).
 40. DISCOURSE-BASED APPROACHES 733

Implicit and Explicit Learning/Teaching

Another controversy in language pedagogy has been the debate over whether the lan-
guage building blocks (and, by extension, also cultural information, learning strate-
gies, and patterns of sequential organization in discourse) should be taught implicitly
or explicitly. Implicit pedagogy exposes learners to discourse that is naturally (or artifi-
cally) rich in the forms or features that the teacher wants the learner to acquire. Explicit
pedagogy makes the learners aware of the target forms or features via explanation,
rules, or special highlighting that the teacher provides in the context of appropriate
discourse. Research and practice suggest that, in general, younger learners and low
proficiency learners may benefit more from implicit instruction (Celce-Murcia, 1985)
whereas older and more advanced learners can benefit more from explicit instruction
(Lightbown & Spada, 1999; Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991). However, learners at any
age or level are different with respect to these pedagogical practices, which suggests
that by focusing on discourse the teacher can satisfy those learners preferring implicit
strategies, but also, by zooming in to deal with details within the context of the dis-
course being interpreted or produced, the teacher will satisfy those learners in need
of more explicit instruction.

Top-down and Bottom-up Processing

Discourse processing models that use the notions of top-down and bottom-up pro-
cessing have been used widely in describing the reading process (e.g., Rumelhart,
1977; Stanovich, 1980). However, we see these notions as being applicable to each
language skill if the skills are taught from a discourse perspective. Thus top-down
processing involves contextual factors such as sociocultural knowledge and task as-
sessment for producing or interpreting discourse, whereas bottom-up processing are
the productive or interpretative choices one makes regarding the words, phrases,
and sentence structures comprising the discourse of the task. At the discourse level,
effective performance of each language skill demands that the user monitor both top-
down and bottom-up knowledge: Is my message coherent and understandable to the
listener(s)/potential reader(s)?—top down. Is my pronunciation understandable and
not a source of confusion to the listener(s)?—bottom up. Can I understand the gist of
what this writer has written?—top down. Can I understand the words that my teacher
has underlined in the passage I am reading?—top down and bottom up!
The preceding example is instructive because it shows us that much of the time
discourse processing is simultaneously top-down and bottom-up (Grabe, 1991). The
student who asks such a question can best resolve it by using bottom-up strategies
such as word recognition, part of speech recognition, word decomposition for mean-
ing, and so on. He or she should also use top-down strategies such as contextual cues,
considering the general subject matter of the passage, and the like. A strategic inte-
gration of top-down and bottom-up processing will improve any skill; thus it is ironic
that reading skill instruction has often been dominated by methods that are either
exclusively bottom-up (i.e., phonics) or exclusively top-down (i.e., whole language).
Discourse-based approaches allow teachers to help learners process language using
both top-down and bottom-up methods judiciously.

Cognitive and Sociocultural Approaches to Language Pedagogy

Perhaps the teaching of the writing skill is where one can observe most clearly the
differences between a cognitive and a sociocultural approach to language pedagogy.
Researchers who favor a cognitive approach (Flower, 1972; Olson, 1977; Ong, 1982) es-
pouse techniques such as doing background reading, outlining, and careful rhetorical
734 CELCE-MURCIA AND OLSHTAIN

organization prior to drafting a piece of writing. Researchers who favor a sociocultural

approach (Myers, 1987; Nystrand, 1982) espouse techniques such as oral brainstorm-
ing, group discussions, negotiation of audience, and so on prior to drafting a piece
of writing, and they also encourage peer feedback and revision in response to such
input.
By gearing writing pedagogy to the discourse level, both of these perspectives
can be accommodated (Johns, 1997). It is very useful to read relevant materials on
a topic before one engages in writing on that topic. It is also useful to discuss one’s
ideas and to hear the ideas of others prior to writing. Writing that is done by a lone
individual tends to involve a great deal of cognition and reflection. Writing that is
done as a collaborative task by two or more writers involves more interaction and
social activity. Both types of writing benefit from acknowledging that producing an
effective piece of writing is a process that should involve preparation, multiple drafts,
input from peers and/or teachers, and so on. Ideally, the input that learners receive on
a piece of writing is both top-down (e.g., your title doesn’t make sense) and bottom-up
(e.g., the verb tense is wrong here) so that they can improve their written discourse at
all levels before the writing task is considered complete.

Authentic and Adapted Materials

The communicative approach to language teaching has long maintained that learning
materials should be authentic and natural; such materials have not been generated
for purposes of language teaching but for other communicative purposes. Authen-
tic materials can come from many different sources such as newspapers, magazines,
books, stories, maps, charts, graphs, plane/train/bus schedules, comic strips/books,
cartoons, ads, menus, recipes, radio/TV broadcasts, movies, and so on. Although there
are copyright issues involved in using some types of authentic materials, teachers—if
they fully acknowledge the source—can generally use such materials in their own
classroom for a specific purpose (i.e., not for profit or publication unless explicit writ-
ten permission is given). However, such adaptation takes time and thus teachers
pressed for time often resort to using textbooks that contain artificial language con-
structed by the author(s) for specific pedagogical purposes. Dialogues and stories,
two widely used discourse-level materials, can be either authentic or artificial.
We recommend that all language learning materials be as authentic as possible.
However, some authentic materials are simply too complex for lower proficiency
learners. In such cases, we appeal to Ur’s (1984) notion of “imitation authentic” ma-
terials. This means that the teacher should start with some authentic discourse (a
recorded dialogue or a recorded or written story) and then make adaptations that
will not change the overall meaning or organization of the message conveyed but
that will make the material more accessible to the students who will be using it to
learn and practice their second language. When learners are advanced, it is neither
necessary nor desirable for teachers to make any such changes. Advanced learners
can and should use unsimplified authentic materials as the basis for interpreting and
producing discourse in the target language.

IMPLEMENTATION OF DISCOURSE-BASED APPROACHES

AND SUPPORT FOR THE AUTHORS’ POSITION

Discourse-based approaches to language teaching allow for target language engage-

ment that focuses on meaning and real communication. Such real communication can,
of course, be carried out in speech or in writing with a variety of communicative goals.
Learners of different age groups and different levels of language proficiency should
 40. DISCOURSE-BASED APPROACHES 735

have, according to such an approach, many opportunities for natural exposure to the
target language during the course of study, as well as many opportunities to use the
language for meaningful purposes.
Our approach is based on a core language curriculum that takes into consider-
ation the linguistic, sociocultural, and pragmatic functions of language. As such,
it is compatible with two currently important influences in current language ped-
agogy: focus on form (Doughty & Williams, 1998) and pragmatics (Kasper & Blum-
Kulka, 1993). Thus, while placing adequate emphasis on language form and its rela-
tion to communicative purposes, our approach also enhances pragmatic understand-
ing of the relevant social and cultural contexts within which communication takes
place.
Language learning can occur in instructed or natural settings. Our approach is most
relevant to instructed settings where there is a planned curriculum (or where a cur-
riculum develops within a given instructional program) and where practitioners take
responsibility for the teaching process and the teaching environment. Furthermore,
students in such settings are expected to develop awareness of the role they need to
undertake if the process is to be successful. The instructional setting can be within a
school, at the workplace, or in a course offered in the afternoon or evening for people
who enroll based on their personal interests.
We will first seek support for our position in the focus-on-form literature. According
to Long (1991), engagement in meaning has to precede understanding of linguistic
form; it is only after meaning is understood that the function of any linguistic form
can be grasped. Since our approach is discourse-based and focused on given pieces of
discourse within relevant contexts, meaning precedes form by definition. Whether we
are dealing with a written text for a specific purpose or whether we are enacting a role-
play activity that prepares learners for a given type of natural interaction in the real
world, meanings are always discussed and focused on before the forms are explained
and/or practiced. A discourse-based approach leads to grammatical knowledge that
is well embedded in pragmatics and context.
In trying to understand how pragmatic features relate to grammatical knowledge,
we note that many scholars have viewed pragmatics as an autonomous area. In our
approach, however, there is a close link between pragmatics and grammar since the
focus is on discourse and communication. Following Bardovi-Harlig (1999), we exam-
ine the relation between pragmatics and grammar carefully and encourage teachers
and learners to become aware of this relation.
Thus, for example, an encounter with progressive and perfect aspect used within a
narrative told in the past tense can be facilitated using an authentic piece of discourse
such as the following:

“The Case of Koko”

1. In the 1980s researchers at Stanford University were trying
2. to teach American Sign Language to Koko, a female gorilla.
3. Koko was well cared for and was surrounded by interesting objects.
4. Her caretakers continually exposed her to signs
5. for the foods and toys in her environment. . .
6. One day she was hungry but couldn’t find any bananas.
7. She went to the researcher and made a good approximation
8. of the sign for ‘banana.’
9. Koko was rewarded with a banana and the research team knew
10. that she had made the connection
11. between a sign and the object it represented.
(Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman, 1999, p. 173)
736 CELCE-MURCIA AND OLSHTAIN

Here the main story line is presented in the simple past tense while background in-
formation is signaled by use of the progressive aspect (lines 1 and 2); the climax or
moral of the story is signaled by use of the perfect aspect (lines 10 and 11). Simply
reading and understanding the story allows learners to identify the main plot, the
background information, and the climax as important features of the narrative. Sub-
sequently, the learners can be led to realize that the tense-aspect forms used in the
story are related to these three narrative functions. Such teaching/learning, which is
embedded in discourse and context, is likely to help learners eventually become both
fluent and accurate users of the target language.
This example illustrates that our position combines exposure to authentic language
with focus on form and that it requires explicit learning and explicit pedagogy (see
also Celce-Murcia & Hilles, 1988; Hinkel & Fotos, 2002). Instruction provides short-
cuts to understanding and internalizing new knowledge that eventually leads to more
effective production. This is particularly true for older and more advanced learners,
as was mentioned earlier. However, if incorporated into a discourse-based approach,
instruction evolves naturally from the negotiation of meaning in discourse and can
easily be adjusted to the age of the learner and his or her level of knowledge. DeKeyser
(1995) found that explicit teaching of grammar rules was most effective when students
induced their own rules based on discourse and contextual information. We suggest,
therefore, that language instructors focus on form in contextualized discourse fol-
lowed by explicit instruction that encourages learners to discover the rules. It is our
belief, for example, that even in classically problematic cases such as that of speakers
of Japanese trying to understand and acquire the English article system (Butler, 2002),
consistent focus on discourse and context can facilitate the acquisition of such elusive
forms.
Age and level of knowledge may also be relevant to preferences related to emphasis
on pragmatics and grammar. As Kasper and Rose (2002, p. 190) point out, “. . . while the
acquisitional direction from pragmatics to grammar characterizes the early (especially
untutored) stages of pragmatic development, the reverse appears to be the case with
more advanced learners who ‘have grammar.’” Discourse-based approaches allow the
teacher to shift from pragmatics to grammar as learners advance in their acquisition
of the language.
Discourse-based approaches favor the continuing integration of top-down and
bottom-up processing. This can best be illustrated in lessons that teach students to
read for information. As Johns (1994) claims, when reading for information in a second
language, students need to access the information and thus tend to concentrate on
the message rather than the code. Yet, according to our position, when the message
is not clear to readers or when they need to confirm comprehension as they move
along through the text, bottom-up strategies are very important in activating learners’
knowledge of the code to resolve such difficulties.
The following is an example of a short passage taken from a reader for advanced
ESL learners (Olshtain, Feuerstein, & Schcolnik, 1988: 21):

On Origin and Species

Robert W. Langacker (1974)
1 It has sometimes been maintained that primitive peoples speak primitive languages.
2 In fact, however, there is no correlation between the degree of cultural advancement
3 and complexity of linguistic structure. The language of primitive people can be every
4 bit as complex and rich in expressive power as any European language. Anything that
5 can be said in one language can be said in any other, though perhaps more clumsily.
6 Claims that ‘primitive’ languages have very small vocabularies, that they have no grammar,
7 that most of their words are onomatopoetic, that they cannot express abstract ideas,
8 and so on are just plain false. The Eskimos have words for specific varieties of snow
9 but no generic, more abstract term (like our ‘snow’) that embraces all
 40. DISCOURSE-BASED APPROACHES 737

10 varieties of it. This does not mean that they are incapable of abstract thought
11 or that their language is impoverished; it simply means that snow is more
12 important to them than to us, or that their linguistic categorization in this area
13 of experience is more detailed than ours.

For this particular passage, the focus on the title that readers are typically told to
activate may not be very helpful for top-down processing. Instead, the teacher should
guide the students to read the first sentence (i.e., the topic sentence) in order to find
out that the passage is really about so-called primitive languages. Since the major aim
when reading such an expository text is to gain new information—in this case “What
do we know about so-called primitive languages?”—the students will read the text
and try to get the facts. Yet, sooner or later, they will need to relate the meaning of
bottom-up, language-specific features to the stance of the author, for example, the
use of the present perfect passive verb form and the meaning of the verb maintain (a
position or claim) along with the use of the adverb sometimes. It is the selection of
these linguistics features by the writer that alerts the reader to the fact that the writer
does not agree with the claim encoded in the ‘that’ clause in the opening statement.
Similarly, the use of the two conjunctive adverbs “In fact, however, . . . . ” to start the
second sentence signals an opposing position that the writer is about to present, which
refutes the position stated in the first sentence. The discussion of the manner in which
these linguistic features serve to open the passage and signal information flow will
help readers to develop metacognitive strategies using both top-down and bottom-up
processing and to become more effective readers.
For discourse-based approaches to reading, both text-pragmatics (Coulthard, 1994,
p. 104) and text-semantics are important at every level. Text-pragmatics describe the
interactional relationship between the writer and the reader within discourse, while
text-semantics focus on information structure within the text. Grammatical features
of reference and logical sequence are key elements in signaling text structure and need
to be acquired as parts of any discourse unit.
McCarthy and Carter (1994) suggest that the use of text-frames for teaching English
as a second or foreign language is compatible with a discourse-based approach since
text-frames are a tool not only for elucidating the macrostructure of a text but also for
teaching a variety of internal features of the text. In the previous reading passage, the
text could be presented in terms of text-frames indicating: (a) some claims/statements
are made by people (sentence 1); (b) there is evidence that refutes these claims (sen-
tence 2); (c) the facts are (lines 3–5); and therefore the claims (lines 6–8) are false; (d)
Eskimos present a good example (lines 8–10) of the facts presented in (c), and (e) there
is a good explanation (lines 10–13) that shows why (a) is not acceptable. At each such
frame in the information structure, the grammatical features should be related to the
writer’s position. Such an approach can further enhance the development of efficient
reading skills.
In this section of the chapter we have tried to show how discourse-based approaches
have bearing on the different areas of language learning/teaching and how they
are compatible with a focus-on-form position combined with a focus-on-pragmatics
stance. What needs to be added is that discourse-based approaches also underlie a
view of language curriculum design that places the social context of learning and
language use at the center: “A discourse-oriented curriculum (Celce-Murcia & Ol-
shtain, 2000, p. 185) places special emphasis on three areas: context, text types, and
communicative competence.”
The following presents a model developed with reference to the three main areas
mentioned: context, text types, and communicative goals. The model is appropriate
for multilingual societies or communities (examples are discussed in detail in Olshtain
& Nissim-Amitai, in press). In a multilingual context, curriculum considerations need
to respect heritage and ethnic languages on the one hand, while ensuring proficiency
738 CELCE-MURCIA AND OLSHTAIN

and high-level literacy in mainstream languages on the other. These considerations

are needed to ensure the learners’ social mobility via the mainstream language and to
enhance group and individual identity via maintenance of the home language. The
discourse-based approach is particularly relevant to such contexts.
There is no doubt that one’s language plays a central role in one’s identity and
feelings of belonging; the language also represents a culture and a host of discourse
worlds that are compatible with that culture. When a school aims to develop and
implement a multicultural curriculum, it is important to plan a system for the sharing
of discourse worlds among the various language groups. Such sharing can ensure
respect and appreciation for the different cultures in the community and promote
positive views regarding otherness.
Let us assume that we are talking about a small ethnic group in a larger com-
munity, who speak language X at home and within the family context but use lan-
guage Y, the mainstream language, for school activities and all other communicative
purposes with the community at large. They also use language Z (English or an-
other language of wider communication) for more international communication. A
discourse-based curriculum for this population would be sensitive to the communica-
tive needs the students have in each of the three languages. It would draw content from
discourse worlds typical to the three languages and would incorporate this content
using text types and learning contexts that reflect real situations outside the classroom.
A discourse-based investigation of the social, cultural, and linguistic functions of dif-
ferent text types in the three languages would be the basis for curriculum planning.
With respect to narratives, for instance, it would be important to establish those
features typical of how stories are told, what type of interpretations are expected of the
reader, what expectations the writer or speaker may have with regard to the impact
of the story, what background knowledge is assumed, and what is left for the reader
or listener to supply from his or her own experience. It is exposure to such textual
and pragmatic features that can truly enrich the world of discourse for all learners in
a multicultural/multilingual setting.
Since it is obvious that from a practical point of view one cannot aim at equal
language proficiency in all the languages used in the multilingual context, it is very
important to define a threshold level that the curriculum will aim at for each lan-
guage that is compatible with the communicative needs of the learners. How such a
threshold level is defined for each language will depend mainly on the patterns of
language use in society. Here it is obvious that a discourse-based approach to cur-
riculum design is vital to the decision-making process. The most important goal of a
multiculutral/multilingual curriculum is to allow the graduates of the program the
degree of social mobility and language choice that suits their personal aspirations.
In sum, context, text types, and communicative goals are the cornerstones not only
of curriculum development but of a discourse-based approach to language pedagogy.
Teachers, textbook writers, language testers, and other related practitioners need to
draw on discourse analysis and attend to these cornerstones when planning and
implementing language programs.

CONCLUSIONS/FUTURE DIRECTIONS

In view of the preceding discussion, we feel that there should be some new emphases
in language teaching and research:
New teaching priorities should include:

1. Adapting the curriculum (materials, content, procedures, assessment) to the

communicative needs of the learners, which involves making discourse analysis
an integral part of needs assessment.
 40. DISCOURSE-BASED APPROACHES 739

2. Designing programs and using discourse-based materials that emphasize the

skills and the language that the learners truly need in the target language.
3. Defining realistic and explicit expectations regarding the levels of ability and
fluency learners should achieve (as opposed to some abstract level of language
proficiency, e.g., a specific score on the TOEFL); this involves making discourse
analysis an integral part of language testing.

Some current approaches to language teaching/learning definitely qualify as dis-

course-based approaches, if properly implemented, such as English for specific pur-
poses (e.g., Johns & Price-Machado, 2001), literature-based approaches (e.g., McKay,
2001), content-based and immersion instruction (e.g., Snow, 2001), and experiential
and negotiated language learning (e.g., Eyring, 2001). Note that in this chapter we have
consistently referred to discourse-based approaches in the plural since many different
types of language courses are compatible with our discourse-based framework: There
is no one single discourse-based approach.
There have been a number of books arguing for the importance of discourse in
language teacher education (Hatch, 1992; McCarthy, 1991; McCarthy & Carter, 1994;
Nunan, 1993; Celce-Murcia & Olshtain, 2000). There have also been recent major efforts
to make discourse analysis an integral part of language assessment (see McNamara,
Hill, & May, 2002, and Young, 2002, for developments in applying discourse analysis
to oral assessment and Connor & Mbaye, 2002, for a discourse-based perspective on
writing assessment).
Research questions for which we need better answers include:

1. How best can teachers be trained (or retrained) to implement a discourse- based
approach? How much discourse analysis do they need? What kind? What hap-
pens to them in the process of change?
2. How can careful analysis of classroom language or pair/groupwork in progress
enhance our understanding of the teaching/learning process?
3. Are learners better able to transfer what they learn in the classroom to the real
world using discourse-based approaches? Do they take better responsibility for
their own learning?
4. Do discourse-based approaches lead to better language ability and/or increased
motivation to use the language?

We have begun to address some of these issues and to answer some of these questions
in this chapter. Likewise, many researchers have begun to make inroads in some
of these research areas (see McGroarty, 2002). However, a great deal of work still
needs to be done, and we encourage colleagues who are convinced of the value of
discourse-based approaches to second language teaching to contribute to the ever-
growing collection of teaching suggestions and research findings in this area.

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742
41

Computer-Assisted Language
Learning
Carol A. Chapelle
Iowa State University

In 1983 at the TESOL Convention in Toronto, Canada, a relatively small group of

technology enthusiasts met to discuss professional issues concerning the use of tech-
nology for language teaching and learning. Out of that meeting came a decision to
refer to this area as “computer-assisted language learning,” or CALL. In 1983 the issue
of technology in L2 teaching was marginal at best to the profession of L2 teaching as
a whole. In the years since the 1983 meeting, technology issues in L2 teaching have
spread from the margins, and in the minds of some, are central to current theory and
practice in L2 teaching. Even those who do not see technology as a central concern
would probably agree that applied linguists need to recognize the ways in which
technology affects their work.
As CALL has moved from the margins into the mainstream, the acronym that was
agreed on by a small number of people in 1983 has been modified, contested, and
discarded by some in what Rose calls “an ongoing power struggle among various
factions to privilege their meanings and interpretations above those of others” (Rose,
2000, p. 8). Whatever the political and intellectual shortcomings of the acronym in the
ever-changing world of information and communication technologies, this acronym is
used in institutions within the profession such as journals and professional organiza-
tions to denote the broad range of activities associated with technology and language
learning. More important than the specific acronym used to denote this activity is the
need to conceptualize and investigate technology-based pedagogy in a way that can
inform practice. In this chapter, I will outline the reasons that some applied linguists
argue that technology is central to the concerns of the discipline today and I will
discuss issues of CALL pedagogy and evaluation.

THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY

Applied linguists working in language teaching and research routinely draw on com-
puter technology for a variety of purposes to the point that technology becomes inte-
gral to applied linguists’ concerns such as communication and language learning. In
743
744 CHAPELLE

a paper that problematizes the seeping of technology into the mainstream language-
related activity, Bruce and Hogan (1998) portray a world in which the technology
is an invisible but integral aspect of language use, and therefore where knowledge
of technology is assumed of anyone who wishes to participate. Their point is that
language professionals need to recognize how technology is deployed strategically
by the competent language user if they are to teach the language learner about and
through technology. As Cummins (2000) put it, “we should acknowledge the funda-
mental changes that IT is bringing to our societies and seek ways to use its power for
transformative purposes” (Cummins, 2000, p. 539).
What are the fundamental changes that technology has brought and will bring
to society? There is no shortage of speculation on this question. See, for example,
Warschauer (2000) for speculation related to English language teaching. However,
those who attempt to conceptualize the world of technology take different perspec-
tives. The technologist sees rapid advances in technological developments that trans-
form all aspects of life, especially communication and education. In the future vision
of technologist Kurzweil (1999), more communication will take place between hu-
mans and computers than will take place between humans, in part due to advances
in technologies for language recognition. A social pragmatist moderates this perspec-
tive with anecdotes about how technology really works—or fails to work—in the real
world, and with analysis of how human communication is accomplished within orga-
nizations (Brown & Duguid, 2000). The critical analyst takes still another perspective,
viewing technology as a force that is neither neutral nor inevitable, and therefore
requires careful analysis and deliberate action. The plea of the critical analyst is for
educators to move beyond a shallow, technically oriented discussion of technology in
education and society to analysis of the values inherent in the use of technology for
communication and education (Bowers, 2000).
Implications for applied linguists can be found somewhere within the mix of
these diverse perspectives. The technologist argues persuasively that teachers and
researchers should be educated about technological possibilities that could improve
or change their work, and that the changes are sweeping and rapid. At the same time,
the social pragmatist perspective reminds us not to be so focused on the future that
we fail to see today’s reality: Real options for technology in a particular setting need to
be conceptualized in view of the experience of others and in view of teachers’ context
and experience. The critical perspective adds that teachers and researchers should be
critically aware of the connection between technology and culturally bound ideolo-
gies. What the three diverse perspectives share is a conviction that technology is a
force to be dealt with, particularly by people concerned with communication, busi-
ness, education, and cultural implications of seemingly neutral practices. The impact
of technology in applied linguistics can be seen concretely through examination of
some of the differences that it makes for language learners and language teachers.

Language Learners
Recent publications in applied linguistics (e.g., Rassool, 1999; Crystal, 2001) have
pointed out that the English language that learners use on the Internet is differ-
ent in some important ways from what they needed to be able to use in the past.
Crystal analyzed the registers that he calls “Netspeak,” concluding that “[t]he elec-
tronic medium . . . presents us with a channel which facilitates and constrains our
ability to communicate in ways that are fundamentally different from those found
in other semiotic situations” (Crystal, 2001, p. 5). The language that is required in
the technology-shaped registers of English use suggests that the English that learners
need is different from what it was before these new semiotic situations were created
through the introduction of e-mail, discussion lists, chats, and the like.
 41. COMPUTER-ASSISTED LANGUAGE LEARNING 745

Different registers for language use directly implies that the communicative lan-
guage ability for the 21st century is systematically changing. As Rassool concludes
from her analysis of the language in the world of technology, “[u]ltimately, commu-
nicative competence refers to the interactive process in which meanings are produced
dynamically between information technology and the world in which we live . . . ”
(Rassool, 1999, p. 238). Accordingly, Warschauer suggests that rather than skill in read-
ing and writing, language learners need to acquire competence in “reading/research”
and writing/authorship” (Warschauer, 2000, p. 521): “We cannot simply choose our
tools (i.e., to write longhand, use a typewriter, a word processor, or e-mail) in order
to be literate participants. Instead, the technology chooses us; it marks us as full,
marginal, or nonparticipating . . . ” (Bruce & Hogan, 1998, p. 271).
For many learners, the opportunities opened through communication on the Inter-
net have sparked new motivation for using the target language with peers, who are
readily accessible (Lam, 2000). As a consequence, these new registers created through
technology and the communicative language ability required for engaging in them
successfully are anything but obscure and remote to the lives of language learners. In-
stead they are the vehicle through which learners can express themselves and receive
genuine responses to their contributions.

Language Teachers
Language teachers need to concern themselves with the language needs of their learn-
ers, and in some cases, even to introduce learners to the range of potential activities
for language practice. At the same time, technology is changing the jobs of language
teachers through the changes it prompts in the language itself, the opportunities for
studying language, and the options available for teaching language.
The language. Technology is only one impetus for the enormous and rapid changes
in the English language that are occurring today. In a forward-looking set of readings
called Analyzing English in a Global Context (Burns & Coffin, 2001), the authors explore
the phenomenon of language change. The technology that greases the wheels of glob-
alization is noted by at least one author in that volume, who notes “. . . with increasing
use of electronic communication much of the social and cultural effect of the stability
of print has already been lost, along with central “gatekeeping” agents such as editors
and publishers who maintain consistent, standardized forms of language” (Graddol,
2001, p. 27). The case is more dramatically expressed and more thoroughly studied
for English than it is for other languages, but the point for all language teachers is
that the new forms of electronic communication are creating the need for new forms
at all linguistic levels, and therefore conventions are being quickly adopted, making
the subject we teach more of a moving target than it ever has been.
The study of language. The study of language resulting in authoritative grammars
was for many years accomplished through a combination of observation and reflective
analysis, relying on native speakers’ judgments. In English, Longman’s authoritative
descriptive grammar of English (Quirk et al., 1972) was based on such a methodology.
The recent Longman grammar (Biber, et al., 1999) is based on empirical analysis of
electronic corpora. Replacing intuition-based approaches with data-based approaches
puts the native and non-native speaker of English on more even ground when it comes
to researching English grammar. Moreover, the view of grammar that the corpus lin-
guist gets, Conrad (2000) predicts, will have other important implications for language
teaching.
Tasks for learners. Three important changes in language teaching are evident from
the introduction of technology. First, the range of tasks that teachers can develop
for their learners has expanded dramatically from the in-class and homework tasks
that comprise most language teaching syllabi to a range of tasks for learning through
746 CHAPELLE

computer-mediated communication (such as e-mail or chats) and those entailing in-

teraction between the learner and the computer (such as listening with hypermedia
support or concordancing). The new technology-based tasks stretch the former bound-
aries of registers in which written and spoken language typically occur, and expand the
potential participants in any task (Salaberry, 2000; Murray, 2000). Second, technology-
based language testing is changing the character of language tests in ways that are
important for the classroom (Roever, 2001). Whereas in the past some learners might
question the value of some CALL activities, many such activities are now seen as
helpful in preparing for high-stakes tests that are delivered online (Taylor et al., 1999).
This is only one of the many implications of computer-assisted testing for language
teaching. Third, a look at any of the journals on technology and language teaching
will demonstrate that language teachers use the technology not only for teaching but
also for investigating their learners’ use of the software (e.g., Allum, 2002).

The Profession
The changes in language use and language teaching have implications for how and
what future teachers are taught in programs for teacher education. Critics of the ways
in which technology is introduced in teacher education point out the need to go beyond
mechanical aspects of how to make Web pages, for example, to help students develop
a deep understanding of the many roles and meanings of technology in education
(e.g., Bowers, 2000). In language education the lessons would include at least critical
analysis of the characteristics of electronic communication and cultural implications
of computing. Reflecting on an investigation of computer-mediated communication
in an MA TESOL class, Kamhi-Stein notes the importance of the concrete experience
future teachers have while they are students:

[I]f ESL teachers are to use technology effectively for teaching in the future, they must
use it for learning while they are students. Limiting technology experiences to one course
or to one area of teacher preparation is insufficient for developing teachers who can use
technology creatively and flexibly. (Kamhi-Stein, 2000, p. 424)

Kamhi-Stein’s approach is clearly an important component in an overall education

that needs to provide students with opportunities to gain knowledge about how to
develop Web pages, to critically reflect on and analyze technology in the classroom
and in society particularly as it affects language learners, and to learn the lessons of
the profession about the development, use, and evaluation of technology for language
learning.

CALL PEDAGOGY

The expanding presence of technology in L2 use, L2 teaching, and L2 teacher educa-

tion has continually provided impetus for developing pedagogy that takes advantage
of technology. One logical place to begin would be to look toward the research on L2
classroom teaching and instructed SLA to seek principles that might apply to CALL.
However, doing so reveals significant gaps in what a CALL pedagogy would need
relative to the insights offered by classroom SLA research. The design and use of CALL
can be more like classroom materials than like classroom teaching, but the pedagogy
associated with teaching materials is somewhat less sophisticated than one would
like as a basis for CALL. Moreover, CALL activities can and probably should be dif-
ferent from books and other traditional materials, and therefore pedagogy should be
conceived differently too. A third area that might be considered in formulating CALL
 41. COMPUTER-ASSISTED LANGUAGE LEARNING 747

pedagogy is the research and practice that comes from past experience in CALL that
has attempted to identify evidence for potentially beneficial features of instruction.
A promising approach for seeking some middle ground comes from researchers
who develop principles for L2 teaching based on principles of L2 acquisition. Pica de-
scribes the basis for such a middle ground between materials developers and SLA re-
searchers as based on their interests in the cognitive and social processes of L2 learning:

From the cognitive perspective, among the most prominent [interests] are L2 compre-
hension, planning, and production; motivation; and attention to, and awareness of, L2
meaning and form. Social processes include various forms of communication and inter-
action, ranging from collaborative dialogue to instructional intervention, with mediation
through negotiation of meaning. (Pica, 1997, p. 56)

CALL pedagogy has been articulated on the basis of these social and cognitive con-
cerns about L2 learning (Chapelle, 1998; Doughty & Long, 2002). For example, within
Doughty and Long’s approach, one methodological principle specifies that learners
should be provided with rich input (rather than impoverished input that might result
from simplified texts). This principle might be put into practice in a variety of ways,
but in CALL the suggestion is that the use of corpora and concordancing could be
used to provide such input. Other principles provide guidance about how the teacher
would have the learner work with the corpora in task-based learning.
Aspects of CALL pedagogy are in the process of being developed through this
type of work, and through research attempting to identify the most effective ways
of operationalizing the many possibilities for input and interaction that CALL offers.
The basic assumption in CALL pedagogy is that the learners should be working
with texts and on tasks that require them to attend to the meaning of the language.
Some components of pedagogy that have been explored beyond the “meaning first”
principle deal with how learners can be prompted to attend to particular aspects in
the linguistic input, and how interactions can help learning.

Getting Learners to Notice

One hypothesis that has come from theory and research is that as learners work on
meaning-focused tasks, they need to notice the language to have any hope of learning it
(Long, 1996; Gass, 1997; Skehan, 1998). The strongest form of this hypothesis suggests
“. . . that subliminal language learning is impossible, and that [what might be learned]
is what learners consciously notice” (Schmidt, 1990, p. 149). This noticing hypothesis
has been investigated with mixed results in classroom instruction and in paper-based
learning materials (Doughty & Williams, 1998). In CALL, however, the opportunities
for prompting noticing are different. For example, in one CALL study a linguistic form
(the relative clause) was highlighted to help learners notice this form in a text that
learners were reading for meaning (Doughty, 1991). In addition, the program provided
interaction help with the relative clauses. Another found vocabulary gains for second
language learners when they had access to hyperlinked annotations, which provided
the opportunity not only to notice the vocabulary that they had trouble with, but also
to get help (Chun & Plass, 1996). In these studies, the learners were not only directed
to notice the form, but they were also given the opportunity to receive clarification or
explanation of the form, consistently and on demand.
Another CALL study compared the opportunity for noticing alone with the op-
portunity for noticing with help. DeRidder (2002) investigated the conditions under
which learners acquired vocabulary from four versions of a reading, each of which
varied the ways in which the learners were prompted to notice the vocabulary. One
748 CHAPELLE

text contained glossed words that were also highlighted on the screen. In a second
text, the words were glossed words but there was no highlighting. A third text con-
tained highlighted words without glosses, and the fourth contained no highlighting
or glosses. One would assume that the learners would notice the words that were
highlighted, but results indicated that highlighting alone was not related to acqui-
sition of vocabulary (DeRidder, 2002); in order to make a difference the highlighted
words also needed to be glossed.
Another way of prompting noticing and perhaps learning of vocabulary is through
repetition of a grammatical form or lexical phrase. Studies of CALL have suggested
that vocabulary repeated in the input is more likely to be acquired by the learner (e.g.,
Kon, 2002; Desmarais, Duquette, Renié, & Laurier, 1998), but these results were found
in post hoc analysis, and ideally future research could design materials specifically
intended to offer more evidence in addition to guidance concerning the number of
repetitions and would be ideal.

What Kind of Input Modification?

A second hypothesis that comes from research on classroom materials and classroom-
based tasks is that modification of the linguistic input will enhance comprehension
and therefore has the potential of affecting acquisition. In research based on paper
materials, modification has meant changing the original text either through simplifi-
cation, elaboration, or marginal glosses. The research has indicated a clear advantage
for elaborations (i.e., adding to the text) over simplification for higher level compre-
hension, that is, inference rather than comprehension of facts from the text (Yano,
Long, & Ross, 1993). This finding is useful as a starting point for CALL, but the issue
is different because a choice does not need to be made between the original text and
another version.

In a hypermedia environment, the learner can have access to the authentic text in addition
to whatever form of help is needed to clarify the meaning. Since the help is provided
dynamically in addition to the text rather than instead of it, it would seem appropriate for
CALL pedagogy to reinterpret results from classroom research to investigate principles
of input enhancement for CALL. (Chapelle, 2003. p. 52)

In CALL, therefore, the problem is not to decide whether to simplify or elaborate

the input, but rather to explore any means available to help the learner to comprehend
the input. In CALL, this means that a wide array of options exist including images, L1
translation, L2 dictionary definitions, and simplification. Findings across a number
of studies indicate that this type of modification of linguistic input in CALL helps
learners to acquire the target vocabulary and grammatical forms (e.g., Hegelheimer,
1998). However, the ways in which hypertext is used to modify the input is an issue
that requires more careful investigation. A paper-based study comparing methods of
annotation provided some useful findings in this regard. Watanabe (1997) compared
vocabulary annotation techniques by asking learners to give L1 definitions of words
that they were supposed to have learned while reading. He concluded that “[e]ven if
explanations are inserted for unfamiliar words [i.e., through elaborative annotations],
and the explanations are comprehensible, unless the students notice the connections
between the two, effective learning cannot be expected” (p. 303). This conclusion,
which is consistent with other studies of modification (e.g., Chaudron, 1983), may
indicate the need for local word and phrase-level annotations in many cases, and
exploration of ways of representing complex syntactic information in a way that is
clarifying to learners.
 41. COMPUTER-ASSISTED LANGUAGE LEARNING 749

Investigating the Effects of Modified Input

The fascinating array of options offered by hypermedia input modifications needs to
be investigated in research that identifies ideal pedagogical strategies, but to do so,
research methods are needed to document and analyze the choices that learners make.
The protypical research design is quasi-experimental, comparing the achievement of
learners who have been given materials with one type of modified input to that of
learners who have been given materials with another type of modification or no
modification. The problem with such research for hypermedia is that learners do
not necessarily take advantage of the hypermedia options made available to them.
Placing learners in a condition in which hypermedia is available for them to use to
obtain modified input does not mean that they will choose to do so. In CALL research,
therefore, some researchers attempt to document the learners’ interaction with the
materials. For example, in a study by Plass, Chun, Mayer, and Leutner (1998), each
time learners selected one of the hypermedia annotations available to them while
they were reading, the computer recorded the selection. The researchers were then
able to correlate annotation selection with performance on individual words for which
selections had been made. The results indicated that the more types of annotations
(i.e., both visual and verbal) learners looked up, the better they tended to do on the
words on the posttest.

Conceptualizing Interaction in CALL

Many of the findings in SLA and classroom research center around the idea that
interaction is valuable for language development. However, this work has focused
primarily on interaction among learners, teachers, and proficiency language users.
Suggestions to adapt insights from this research to learner-computer interaction (e.g.,
Chapelle, 1997) meet with concern by those who consider the latter to be so differ-
ent from the former to draw any links (Salaberry, 1999; Harrington & Levy, 2001).
Ellis’ (1999) discussion of interaction and the theorized reasons for its value is useful
in sorting out the underlying explanations from the form of observable interactions.
Ellis (1999) distinguishes the interaction that is “used to refer to the interpersonal ac-
tivity that arises during face-to-face communication” (p. 3) with that which “can also
refer to the intrapersonal activity involved in mental processing” (p. 3). Both types
of interaction can take place in CALL tasks as the computer is used for a medium
of communication or as a means of providing meaningful linguistic input. How-
ever, the computer can also act as the partner with which the learner interacts. Ta-
ble 41.1 summarizes the types of interaction and the three perspectives outlined by
Ellis.
With the potential interactions and their benefits laid out, it becomes possible to
draw on the construct(s) of interaction to theorize and investigate the value of vari-
ous types of CALL activities. Indeed, a number of studies have applied the insights
from the interaction hypothesis, sociocultural theory, and depth of processing theory
to the study of various CALL tasks. Based on theory about the value of modified
input, Hsu (1994) investigated the extent to which requests for input modification in
a listening task were related to improvement in learners’ listening comprehension of
specific phrases in the input. She found moderate correlations between requests and
improvement as measured on a dictation test. Belz (2001) drew on sociocultural theory
to investigate learners’ participation in language classes linked between the United
States and Germany. Guided by the practices of sociocultural researchers, Belz exam-
ined transcripts of the learners’ interactions, projects, interviews, and observations
to identify factors in the sociocultural setting that affected the important aspects of
the practice that the learners were expected to engage in. These examples of research
750 CHAPELLE

TABLE 41.1
Benefits of Three Types of Interaction from Three Perspectives Based on
Ellis, 1999 (from Chapelle, 2003)

Perspectives on the Value of Interaction

Basic types of interactions Interaction Sociocultural Depth of processing

hypothesis theory theory

Inter- between people Negotiation of Co-constructing Prompting attention

meaning meaning to language
between person Obtaining Obtaining help for Prompting attention
and computer∗ modified input using language to language

Intra- within the Attending to Stimulating internal Cognitive processing

person’s mind linguistic form mental voice of input
∗ Ellis (1999) did not discuss interaction between person and computer.

drawing on theoretical perspectives on the value of interaction suggest alternative

ways of tackling evaluation of CALL.

EVALUATION OF CALL

Most CALL developers and users 20 years ago thought of evaluation of CALL in
terms of checklists used to check off particular ideal characteristics of a CALL activ-
ity (Susser, 2001). Such checklists were typically focused on an interactive computer
program and some speculation about how it might be used with a particular class.
Whatever the merits of the checklist, today evaluation is seen from more diverse
perspectives. In an attempt to characterize a sample of research papers published in
journals on CALL and in edited books, Levy (2000) categorized the papers as rep-
resenting the following topics: computer-mediated communication (CMC), artifact,
hybrid, environment/comparative evaluation, teacher education, hypertext/reading,
and other (p. 177). He found that only about one third (28%) of the “new research”
had to do with measuring learning gains. Despite the variety of areas taken up in the
CALL journals and books, most applied linguists would probably agree that among
the critical areas of study for CALL should be empirical evaluation of the extent to
which students learn language from working on CALL. As CALL evaluators conceive
of their work as more complex than checking off categories, a number of issues arise,
several of which are outlined next.

Evaluation for Whom?

Whereas some might look to checklists as a means of evaluating CALL, others claim
to be interested in studies comparing CALL with “traditional” classroom learning.
The problems inherent in attempting to compare CALL to classroom learning have
been discussed extensively in the professional literature, and yet the idea of CALL-
class comparisons dies hard, perhaps because of the large number of constituents
potentially interested in the issue (see Chapelle, 2001, for discussion). Some have
argued that administrators, publishers, and the public need to have such proof that
technology-mediated learning is indeed time well spent for language learners. The fact
that the march toward technology-filled classrooms does not wait for such research
results may suggest that this argument is overstated. However, even some language
 41. COMPUTER-ASSISTED LANGUAGE LEARNING 751

TABLE 41.2
Three Approaches to Developing Useful Research Questions About CALL
(Based on Chapelle, 2003)

Audience Focus on. . . Results

Software developers and lab the software Indicate the most successful software
coordinators design strategies.

Teachers and students the learner Indicate successful strategies for

using software.

Teachers the task Indicate the best ways to structure

learning tasks.

teachers have suggested that such comparisons are useful in their lesson planning
and decision making.
The variety of opinions expressed on the issue of CALL evaluation points strongly
toward the need to consider the audience for evaluation. As summarized in Table 41.2,
software developers, lab directors, teachers, and students have some genuine use for
evaluation that focuses on the software, the learner, and the pedagogical tasks, respec-
tively. The purported need for comparisons of computer-assisted versus classroom
instruction by administrators is less defensible in view of the way in which decisions
about funding for computer labs are made—on the basis of space, funding, and local
politics rather than on research. Research intended to offer insights for those who
work closely with CALL has to be conducted using appropriate methods for discov-
ering relevant facts about CALL and its use. Rejecting the CALL versus classroom
paradigm requires theory, such as the theories concerning interaction outlined pre-
viously, that can suggest approaches for examining relevant aspects of CALL use.
The most interesting but challenging aspect of evaluating CALL on the basis of such
theories is that it requires analysis of data revealing the process of CALL use.

Interaction Theory and Learning Processes

The theoretical perspectives on the three types of interactions offer some guidance for
studying learning processes in CALL. The observable records of learners’ work on
CALL tasks are called “working style data—consistent, observable behavior displayed
by students as they worked on [computer-based] L2 tasks” (Jamieson & Chapelle,
1987, p. 529) or “CALL texts” (Chapelle, 1994). These terms, in addition to “tracking
data,” “computer logs,” and “process data,” all refer to the data that are documented
in order to study learners’ work on CALL. Such data might include sequences of
interaction such as the learner’s incorrect response to a question, feedback indicating
the response was wrong, and a second response (e.g., Chanier et al., 1992). It might
consist of a linguistic production to a peer in a chat room, a sign of laughter (e.g., “hee-
hee”), and a second attempt at the production (Negretti, 1999; Pellettieri, 2000). These
sequences can consist of language alone or, more commonly, through a combination of
language and other forms such as mouse clicks. Research has drawn on interactionist
theory to investigate whether the three hypothesized benefits were evident.
Negotiation of meaning. Based on interactionist theory suggesting the value of ne-
gotiation of meaning in task-oriented L2 conversation (Pica, 1994; Long & Robinson,
1998), researchers have investigated the quality of communication tasks by seeking ev-
idence for learners’ negotiation of meaning. Research on face-to-face classroom tasks
provides guidance for developing communication tasks such as the one Blake (2000)
752 CHAPELLE

investigated using 50 intermediate learners of Spanish. Data indicating negotiation

included sequences such as the following:

A: Cuales son en común? [What are in common?] (Trigger)

B : Como se dice comun en ingles? no comprehende [How do
you say “common” in English? no understand] (Indicator)
A: Común es cuando algo y una otra algo son el mismo;
entiendes mi explicacion? [“Common” is when something
and another thing are the same; do you understand my
explanation?] (Response)
B: Si, gracias . . . [Yes, thank you . . . ] (Reaction)

This analysis draws on the methods used for identifying sequences of negotiation of
meaning. The first turn shown acts as the trigger that initiates the sequence by intro-
ducing a word that the second participant does not know. The second move is an indi-
cator that draws attention to the problem, lack of knowledge of “común.” The response
explains the meaning, and the reaction acknowledges the explanation. Using these
methods developed by those studying the L2 conversation from the perspective of the
interactionist hypothesis, researchers have found that under some conditions the CMC
tasks can prompt the type of negotiation of meaning that is believed to be valuable.
Obtaining modified input. A number of studies have looked at the effects of offering
learners modified input, and can therefore be interpreted in view of the interactionist
hypothesis. For example, Borrás and Lafayette (1994) investigated the optional L1
(English) subtitles as a means of modifying the input. One group of French learners
used computer-assisted video materials with access to subtitles and a second group
used the same materials without subtitle options. The subtitle condition allowed stu-
dents the option of choosing to see English subtitles for the aurally presented French
as they requested. A speaking task following the video required learners to address
questions about the content of the video. The fact that the learners who had partici-
pated in the subtitle condition outperformed those who had not had access to subtitles
suggested that the subtitles had indeed acted as one would expect modified input to
do. Other studies have found similarly positive results when learners are able to obtain
modified input to help them provide access to meanings of the vocabulary through
hypermedia.
Attending to linguistic form. The use of hypermedia annotations might also be inter-
preted from the perspective of “intraperson” interaction, that is, within the learner’s
mind. The control-treatment research design that places learners in a modified input
condition or a plain text condition assumes that those who are given the provision
for modification will benefit from it. However, the hypothesis developed from the
perspective of intraperson interaction requires evidence that the learner has attended
to the linguistic form (Schmidt, 1990, 1992). Hegelheimer and Chapelle (2000) suggest
that such evidence comes from sequences such as the following:

The computer BRUSSELS, Belgium—They had to

displays: struggle a bit to open some recalcitrant
bottles of champagne, but finance
The student acts: <clicks on “recalcitrant”> (possibly indicating
noticing)
The computer recalcitrant—Definition: formal
displays: adjective; refusing to obey or be
controlled, even after being punished:
recalcitrant behavior
 41. COMPUTER-ASSISTED LANGUAGE LEARNING 753

Like any measure, the mouse clicks on vocabulary are not “proof” of noticing but
rather an indicator that might reasonably be inferred to indicated noticing under
some conditions. As mentioned earlier, studies investigating interaction are prob-
ably most defensible as studies of intrapersonal interaction. Plass, Chun, Mayer,
and Leutner (1998) put the issues as follows: “Because the student’s look-up be-
havior may change from word to word, the only way to test the hypothesis is to
use vocabulary items, not students, as the units of observation” (Plass et al., 1998,
p. 30).
These three examples of the study of interaction from an interactionist perspective,
of course, are not the only type relevant to CALL researchers. In view of the range of
issues of interest to software developers, learners, and teachers, a variety of methods
is needed. Learners might benefit from knowing more about learner strategies, the
study of which typically draws on introspective methods that ask learners to report
their thoughts and motivations as they work on CALL or afterwards. Teachers may
be interested in assessing quality of writing (rather than negotiation of meaning) in
CMC tasks as Swaffar (1998) did through examination of four rhetorical types:”1) de-
scriptive sentences, 2) sentences that express opinions, 3) sentences that have logical
features to substantiate opinion, and 4) sentences that establish a logical argument for
a point of view” (p. 155). These were used to assess what she called “strategic discourse
management,” which is intended to provide evidence for “level of thinking” (p. 155).
Other attempts to examine the language of CMC in terms of quality need to be ex-
plored, perhaps through the methods developed for the study of task-based learning
through assessment of fluency, accuracy, and complexity (Skehan, 1998). In examin-
ing online conversation, Lamy and Goodfellow (1999) look for evidence of “reflective
conversation” in which learners explicitly refer to the language and their learning, in
contrast to “social conversation” in which no evidence of attention to language and
learning appears. This and other approaches (e.g., Renié & Chanier, 1995) might be
considered to be consistent with the perspectives on interaction summarized in Table
41.1, but work remains to better understand the basis of the many research practices in
CALL.

CALL IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Some collections in applied linguistics do not contain a chapter on technology. If one is

included, it is typically placed at the end of the collection—at the margins. If the vision
of the technology enthusiasts is accurate, future collections in applied linguistics will
not need a separate chapter on technology because technology will be implicated in
all the work across chapters, that is, it will be invisible. Before this happens, if indeed it
does, it seems that it would be to the benefit of all to have a period in which technology
remains the focus of explicit investigation in applied linguistics. Levy’s (2000) analysis
of the issues investigated in the study of CALL pointed out the “distinct thread” in
the very diverse types on inquiries reported: “[f]or the CALL researcher, technology
always makes the difference; the technology is never transparent or inconsequential”
(Levy, 2000, p. 190). I have suggested in this chapter that this visibility of the technol-
ogy is critical at this point in time for three reasons. Technology plays a significant role
in virtually all matters of concern to applied linguists. CALL pedagogy needs to be
developed as distinct from but related to pedagogy for classroom teaching and learn-
ing through other materials. Evaluation of CALL needs to be developed in view of its
purpose and audience, drawing on and expanding existing theory and research on
learning.
754 CHAPELLE

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42

L2 Learning Strategies
Neil J. Anderson
Brigham Young University

STATEMENT OF FOCUS

Perceptive second/foreign language (L2) learners are those who are aware of and
use appropriate strategies for learning and communicating in a second language. The
purpose of strategy use is to improve performance in the learning and use of ones’
second language. Strategies are the conscious actions that learners take to improve
their language learning. Strategies may be observable, such as observing someone
take notes during an academic lecture to recall information better, or they may be
mental, such as thinking about what one already knows on a topic before reading a
passage in a textbook. Because strategies are conscious, there is active involvement of
the L2 learner in their selection and use. Strategies are not isolated actions, but rather
a process of orchestrating more than one action to accomplish an L2 task. It may be
helpful to view strategy use as an orchestra. Rarely does an instrument sound good
alone. However, when combined with other instruments, beautiful music results.
Although we can identify individual strategies, rarely will one strategy be used in
isolation. Strategies are related to each other and must be viewed as a process and not
as a single action.
Einstein offers a very interesting definition of insanity: doing the same thing over
and over again and expecting different results. Research consistently shows that less
successful language learners often use the same strategies over and over again and do
not make significant progress in their task. They do not recognize that the strategies
they are using are not helping them to accomplish their goal. These less successful
learners seem to be unaware of the strategies available to them to successfully accom-
plish a language task. Successful L2 learners have a wider repertoire of strategies and
draw on a variety of them to accomplish their task of learning a language.
The purpose of this chapter is to examine the research on L2 learning strategies
within the context of current language teaching methodologies, to consider important
developments in L2 strategy research, to identify current directions, and to anticipate
the future of L2 strategy research. A single chapter of this nature cannot possibly go
into the depth that a researcher or teacher needs on the role of language learning strate-
gies. Researchers and teachers are encouraged to do additional reading on their own by
consulting the references cited in this chapter. Perhaps the most extensive bibliography

757
758 ANDERSON

on language learning strategies can be found electronically at http://linguistics.

byu.edu/faculty/andersonn/learningstrategies/LearningStrategies.html. Consulting
works on this list may better prepare researchers and teachers as we all work together
to better understand the role of strategies in L2 learning.

L2 LEARNING STRATEGIES WITHIN THE CONTEXT

OF METHODOLOGIES

Since the mid-1970s, close attention has been given to the role of strategies in L2
learning (Anderson, 1991; Cohen, 1990, 1998; Hosenfeld, 1979; Naiman, Fröhlich, &
Todesco, 1975; O’Malley & Chamot, 1990; Oxford, 1990, 1993, 2002; Rubin, 1975; Stern,
1975; Wenden, 1991, 2002; Wong-Fillmore, 1979). The early research identified the pri-
mary strategies that good learners use while engaged in language learning tasks. Five
primary strategies were consistently addressed in these early studies: (1) memoriza-
tion strategies, (2) clarification strategies, (3) communication strategies, (4) monitoring
strategies, and (5) prior knowledge strategies. All this pointed to a new generaliza-
tion that could be made about L2 learning, when learners actively use strategies to
accomplish their language learning goals.
A language teaching methodology typically assumes that if the language teacher
follows the steps outlined, the effort will result in effective learning by students in the
class. Methodologies often assume that everyone learns the same way. Oxford (1993)
and Nunan (1991) each point out that no single method can meet the needs of all learn-
ers. The fact that individual learners use a variety of strategies and approach learning
a language differently is not taken into careful consideration within the context of
most of the methods for language teaching.
Within the context of methodologies, strategies play a central role in two ap-
proaches: Styles and Strategies-Based Instruction (SSBI) and the Cognitive Academic
Language Learning Approach (CALLA). SSBI is an approach to language teaching
that places learning style and language learning strategy instruction as a central
goal in this learner-centered approach. Learning styles are the general approach one
takes to learning; the ways that we prefer to organize and retain information. Teach-
ing learners to be aware of their learning style is known as Style-Based Instruction.
For example, you may learn best by listening (auditory), looking at printed material
(visual), or by moving around (kinesthetic). Strategies are the specific things that one
does to learn. Strategies are typically linked to a learning style. For example, an au-
ditory learner may apply a strategy of reading aloud to hear a text. A visual learner
may draw a graphic organizer to help visualize the organization of a reading passage.
A kinesthetic learner may walk around while studying new vocabulary written on
flash cards. Research data suggest that there is a link between the language learning
strategies and learning styles (Rossi-Le, 1995).
An SSBI approach to language teaching has two primary goals: styles and strategy
instruction, and style and strategy integration. Style and Strategy instruction involves
the explicit instruction of learning styles and strategies so that learners know about
their preferred style of learning and how, when, and why to use the strategy. Style and
strategy integration involves embedding learning style and strategies into all class-
room activities so that learners have contextualized practice. The practice provides
reinforcement of the concepts learned during explicit instruction.
Cohen, Weaver, and Li (1997) report on one key research project. The specific focus
of their research was to examine the impact of Strategies-Based Instruction (SBI) on
speaking for university-level, foreign-language learners. Fifty-five intermediate level
learners of French and Norwegian participated in the study. Thirty-two students re-
ceived explicit SBI while the remaining 23 served as a control group receiving no
 42. L2 LEARNING STRATEGIES 759

explicit strategy instruction. A pretest/posttest design was used to determine whether

SBI influenced gains in students’ oral proficiency over a 10-week term. One unique
feature of this research is that the subjects were asked to report their strategy use
on three specific speaking tasks. These tasks included: (1) self-description, (2) story
retelling, and (3) city description. After completing all three speaking tasks, the sub-
jects responded to a strategies checklist prepared for each task. The checklist was
designed to capture subjects’ strategy usage during three stages: (1) preparation for
accomplishing the task, (2) self-monitoring during execution of the task, and (3) self-
reflection following the task. In addition, subjects completed the Strategy Inventory
for Language Learning. A subsample of 21 subjects provided retrospective think-aloud
protocols to justify their frequency of strategies reports. ANCOVA results showed that
both groups made gains in their oral language proficiency. This should not be sur-
prising since we would hope that regular language instruction results in proficiency
gains. The ANCOVA results indicate that the experimental group outperformed the
control group on the third task, city description. Cohen, Weaver, and Li report that SBI
“seems to have contributed to the students’ ability” (p. 14) to produce the necessary
language to perform the tasks. Overall this research suggests that SBI can have an
impact on language learners in the classroom.
Additional understandings of SSBI are needed to more fully comprehend the im-
pact of styles- and strategies-based instruction. Very little research has been conducted
to examine the full extent to which learners acquire strategies within a SBI approach.
Also, researchers must ask whether engaging learners in an SBI approach results in
higher levels of language proficiency among the learners? Can we explicitly teach
learners to draw on their learning style strengths and then apply the appropriate
strategies for accomplishing language learning tasks? Can we teach learners to move
beyond their learning style preferences so that they can then apply strategies for
learning that are not linked to their preferred learning style?
O’Malley and Chamot (1990) proposed the Cognitive Academic Language Learn-
ing Approach (CALLA). As this approach has evolved since its inception, it has com-
bined four primary elements for successful language teaching: (1) academic content
for language learning, (2) learning strategies, (3) standards-based education, and (4)
portfolio assessment. One assumption of this approach is that L2 acquisition is accel-
erated by an explicit focus on strategies.
Chamot and O’Malley (1994) emphasize that the CALLA framework integrates re-
search from several previous studies and puts it into practice. Their extensive research
has resulted in the metacognitive model of strategic learning and the framework for
learning strategies instruction.
In spite of the three and one-half decades of research, recent research by Dörnyei
and Skehan (2003) points out that “learner differences, such as aptitude, style, and
strategies, as a sub-area of second language acquisition, and applied linguistics more
generally, have not been integrated into other areas of investigation, and have not
excited much theoretical or practical interest in recent years” (p. 589). Clearly, more
research is needed on the influence of individual differences and language learning.

IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENTS IN L2 STRATEGY RESEARCH

Five important developments have contributed to the success of L2 learning strategy

research: (1) the identification, classification, and measurement of language learning
strategies, (2) the distinction between language use and language learning strategies,
(3) the relationship between strategies and L2 proficiency, (4) the transferability of
strategies from first language (L1) tasks to L2 tasks, and (5) the explicit instruction of
language learning strategies.
760 ANDERSON

The Identification, Classification, and Measurement

of Language Learning Strategies
Research by Hsiao and Oxford (2002) clearly supports the notion that L2 strategies can
be classified in a “systematic manner” (p. 377). Language learning strategies have been
classified into seven major categories: cognitive strategies (e.g., identifying, retention,
and storage of learning material as well as retrieval, rehearsal, and comprehension),
metacognitive strategies (e.g., preparing and planning, identifying, monitoring, or-
chestrating, and evaluating strategy use), mnemonic or memory-related strategies
(e.g., memorization strategies), compensatory strategies (e.g., circumlocution strate-
gies such as using a word you do know to describe the meaning of a word or phrase
you do not know), affective strategies (e.g., strategies for reducing anxiety), social
strategies (e.g., strategies for interacting with others), and self-motivating strategies
(e.g., self-encouragement, relaxation, and meditation, eliminating negative influences,
creating positive influences). There is some overlap between affective strategies and
self-motivating strategies. Oxford (1990, 2001) refers to the first six of these categories,
while other researchers (Chamot & O’Malley, 1994; Chamot et al., 1999; Cohen, 1996a;
Weaver & Cohen, 1997) use a fewer number. Work by Dörnyei (2001) focuses on
self-motivating strategies.
A recent research article provides empirical data into how best to classify lan-
guage learning strategies. Hsiao and Oxford (2002) compared classification theo-
ries of language learning strategies. Their research involved 517 college English as a
Foreign Language (EFL) learners from Taiwan. Participants took the Strategy Inventory
for Language Learning (SILL) that had been translated into Chinese. Fifteen strategy
classifications were developed and tested based on classification systems proposed
by Oxford (1990), Rubin (1981), and O’Malley & Chamot (1990). The research findings
support the classification of L2 learning strategies into six distinct categories: cogni-
tive strategies, metacognitive strategies, memory strategies, compensatory strategies,
affective strategies, and social strategies. These six categories correspond to Oxford’s
six dimensions of strategy classification.
Among the tools available for identifying, classifying, and measuring L2 strategies,
the most frequently cited and used include standardized inventories, think-aloud
protocols, and reflective journals. Researchers are urged to triangulate the research
design so that more than one of these tools is used.
Standardized inventories. The most widely used inventory for L2 strategy re-
search is Oxford’s (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL). Oxford and
Burry-Stock (1995) report on the successful use of this inventory in gathering data on
language learning strategies. One great advantage of the SILL is that reliability and
validity data are available. Oxford (1996) reports on the psychometric qualities of the
SILL. Reported reliabilities for the ESL/EFL SILL range from .86 to .91 when learners
respond to the questionnaire in their second language (English). Translated versions
of the SILL have been used in many research projects. Reliability coefficients increase
when learners respond in their L1 to .91 to .94. Whether administered in the subjects’
L1 or L2, the SILL has high reliability.
Validity for the SILL is likewise high. When strategy use is compared with language
performance, evidence strongly favors the SILL. Oxford reports a variety of studies
that link strategy use and performance in general language proficiency, oral language
proficiency, grades in language courses, proficiency self-ratings, and professional lan-
guage career status.
Oxford is currently developing a task-based version of the SILL that would be
administered in conjunction with specific L2 tasks. This could be a very important
contribution to the L2 strategy research.
One additional inventory that shows great promise is a more recent instrument
developed by Mokhtari and reported in Mokhtari and Sheorey (2002) and Sheorey
 42. L2 LEARNING STRATEGIES 761

and Mokhtari (2001). The Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) focuses on metacogni-
tive strategy use within the context of reading. The SORS was based on a separate
metacognitive reading strategy survey developed for native speakers on English, the
Metacognitive-Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI). The SORS mea-
sures three categories of reading strategies: global reading strategies (e.g., having
a purpose for reading, using context to guess unfamiliar vocabulary, confirming or
rejecting your predictions), problem-solving strategies (e.g., adjusting reading rate,
focusing when concentration is lost), and support strategies (e.g., taking notes while
reading, highlighting important ideas in the text). Mokhtari and Sheorey report relia-
bility for the MARSI but not for the SORS. Because it has just recently been completed,
more studies need to be conducted using this instrument to determine whether the
SORS is as stable of an instrument as the MARSI from which it was based.
Additional inventories for identifying L2 learner strategies can be found on the
Internet. Language Strategy Use Survey, by Andrew D. Cohen and Julie C. Chi: <http://
carla.acad.umn.edu/profiles/CohenPapers/Lg Strat Srvy.html> and the Young Lear-
ners’ Language Strategy Use Survey by A. D. Cohen and R. L. Oxford at <http:// carla.
acad.umn.edu/profiles/CohenPapers/Young Lg Strat Srvy.html>.
Think-aloud protocols. Think-aloud protocols or verbal report data have been used
in many L2 strategy research projects to identify strategies used by language learners
(Anderson, 1991; Anderson & Vandergrift, 1996; Cohen, 1996b; Cohen & Olshtain,
1993; Gass & Mackey, 2000). Protocols allow the researcher insights into the language
learning process that would not be available without their use. One of the greatest
strengths of think-aloud protocols is that researchers are able to gather data on the
process of strategy use. We can capture the sequence of strategies that language users
implement to complete language tasks.
Cohen and Scott (1996) suggest three categories of verbal reports: self-report, self-
observation, and self-revelation. Self-report is a statement of typical behavior. Re-
sponses to questionnaires are a form of self-report. Self-observation is used simulta-
neously to completing a language task or within a very short time after completing the
task. Self-revelation data refer to unanalyzed thoughts. Think-aloud protocols typi-
cally fall into this category. One key to the successful use of think-aloud protocols is
to gather the data as close to the event as possible. Thus, the strategies identified will
be those actually used.
Reflective journals. For several years, the use of journals (or diaries) has been
advocated as a tool for student reflection (Oxford et al., 1996). Riley and Harsch
(1999) outline a research project to compare Japanese learners of English strategy use
in ESL and EFL environments. One of the primary tools they used to gather data
was a strategy journal. The journal served as a tool to explore learner awareness,
development, and use of language learning strategies as well as what effect guided
reflection has on the development of language learning strategies.
One common feature of the work of those involved in learner reflective journals
is the encouragement for teachers to give learners prompts to select from in making
their entry. If you are specifically focusing on language learning strategies you want
the learners to make journal entries that focus on their strategy use and not other
aspects of the language learning process.

The Distinction Between Language Use and Language

Learning Strategies
Cohen (1996a) makes the distinction between language use and language learning
strategies. This distinction can be useful for L2 researchers and teachers. Cohen indi-
cates “language use strategies focus primarily on employing the language that learners
have in their current interlanguage” (p. 2). Under this umbrella term, the following
strategies apply: retrieval strategies (e.g., strategies used to recall learned material;
762 ANDERSON

similar to Oxford’s memory strategies), rehearsal strategies (e.g., strategies used to

practice vocabulary or grammar structures), cover strategies (also known as compen-
sation strategies, e.g., strategies used to get around missing knowledge), and com-
munication strategies (e.g., strategies used to express a message). Cohen continues by
indicating “language learning strategies have an explicit goal of assisting learners in
improving their knowledge in a target language” (pp. 1–2). Language learning strate-
gies include strategies in four common categories: cognitive, metacognitive, social,
and affective as illustrated earlier.
Although I have listed this as an important development in L2 strategy research,
essentially no research has been conducted with L2 learners to determine if this cat-
egorization of strategies is valid. Hsiao and Oxford (2002) point out that “in daily
reality the strategies for L2 learning and L2 use overlap considerably” (pp. 378–379).
The way that Cohen (1996a) classifies strategies within these two categories (language
use strategies: retrieval strategies, rehearsal strategies, cover strategies, and commu-
nication strategies; language learning strategies: cognitive, metacognitive, social, and
affective) suggests that employing cognitive and metacognitive strategies only occurs
during the learning phase and not the use phase of language. This seems to be short-
sighted. As learners move from learning to use they free up cognitive capacity from
thinking about the language to knowing how to use it. They are now in a position to
implement more cognitive and metacognitive strategies.

The Relationship Between Strategies and L2 Proficiency

The research conducted to date has been consistent in linking levels of L2 proficiency
to strategy use. Proficient L2 learners have been found to have a wider repertoire
of strategies and draw on them to accomplish L2 tasks. At the same time, research
supports the concept that less proficient L2 learners draw on a smaller number of
strategies and do so in a less effective manner (Anderson, 1991; Dreyer & Oxford,
1996; Ehrman & Oxford, 1990, 1995; Green & Oxford, 1995). Proficiency can explain
from .30 to .78 of the variance in strategy use. There is a strong relationship between
strategy use and L2 proficiency.
One thing that researchers and teachers must keep in mind is that there are no good
or bad strategies; there is good or bad application of strategies. Anderson’s research
(1991) shows that effective and less effective learners reported using the same kinds
of strategies. The difference is in how the strategies are executed and orchestrated.
Therefore, we cannot suggest that successful L2 learners use good strategies and
less effective learners use poor or bad strategies. With a value judgment placed on
strategies it would appear that all teachers have to do is teach poor learners the “good
strategies” that successful learners use. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. The ways
that effective learners use strategies and combine them makes the distinction between
them and less effective learners. Cohen (1998) supports this concept. He states, “with
some exceptions, strategies themselves are not inherently good or bad, but have the
potential to be used effectively” (p. 8).

Transferability of Strategies from L1 Tasks to L2 Tasks

Wolfersberger (2001) conducted exploratory research to examine the transfer of com-
posing processes and to determine whether L2 proficiency had any effect on the
transfer of the L1 composing processes to L2 composing. Three high intermediate-
and three high beginning-level Japanese learners of ESL participated in the research.
All were considered experienced writers in Japanese based on responses to a writ-
ing survey prepared by Wolfersberger. The data collection involved three stages:
(1) a background questionnaire, (2) two think-aloud composing sessions, and (3)
 42. L2 LEARNING STRATEGIES 763

post-composing session interviews. The results show that the three high beginning-
level writers used different writing strategies when composing in their L1 and L2. All
three subjects reported thinking in Japanese while writing their essays in English. Five
primary differences appeared during their writing tasks: (1) general translation for
words and ideas into English, (2) back-translating their English text in order to help
interpret its meaning, (3) finding the vocabulary to express the ideas produced in the
L1, (4) dealing with challenges in lack of English grammatical knowledge, and (5) cor-
recting spelling errors in English. These five are primarily language concerns that did
not appear while the subjects were writing in Japanese. The three high intermediate
writers used similar strategies while composing in both English and Japanese. They
reported being at ease in both languages while engaging in the writing tasks. There
was transfer of strategies while engaged in writing in both languages. Wolfersberger
reports that these results support a threshold hypothesis for L2 writing as has been
reported for L2 reading (Clarke, 1980).
Wolfersberger’s research helps inform L2 researchers and teachers about the role of
transfer of strategies from L1 to L2 learning tasks. We can move forward by carefully
considering how L2 acquisition can be accelerated through helping learners draw
more on their L1 skills.

Explicit Instruction of Language Learning Strategies

Nunan (1996, 1997) provides a good rationale for integrating explicit instruction of
language learning strategies into the classroom curriculum: “[L]anguage classrooms
should have a dual focus, not only teaching language content but also on developing
learning processes as well” (1996, p. 41). The primary purpose of instruction is to raise
learners’ awareness of strategies and then allow each to select appropriate strategies
to accomplish their learning goals.
Research consistently shows that the most effective strategy instruction occurs
when it is integrated into regular classroom instruction (Cohen, 1998; Oxford & Leaver,
1996). Some language programs prepare special strategy lessons that are presented.
Brown (2002) provides a very practical guide, firmly based on the L2 strategy
research, on how to approach the teaching of language learning strategies in the
classroom. Teachers and learners are guided through the language learning strategy
process in an effective and organized fashion. One benefit to the research would be
for teachers to apply the concepts outlined in the book and measure the effect of the
instruction on language learning.
Rees-Miller (1993, 1994) calls into question the concept of strategy instruction. She
suggests that because of the mixed results that have been obtained from various
research studies that teachers should be more cautious in accepting the concept of
learner-strategy training. Factors that she suggests that teachers must take into account
include learners’ cultural backgrounds, age, educational background, life experience,
affective factors, and the learners’ and teachers’ beliefs about language learning. Cer-
tainly all of these factors are important for teachers to consider. As Chamot and Rubin
(1994) point out in response to Rees-Miller’s article, all of these variables influence
individual strategy use. They remind us, as pointed out in the definition of strategies
earlier in this chapter, that a strategy is not used in isolation, but rather in an orches-
trated manner with other strategies as part of a process. This should not suggest that
strategy instruction is not effective, but rather give teachers increased insight into
the various factors they should take into consideration when strategy instruction is
undertaken.
Also, Eslinger’s research (2000) suggests that there may be a natural tendency to
grow in strategy use without explicit instruction. She suggests that implicit strategy
learning should be given closer attention.
764 ANDERSON

CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN L2 STRATEGY RESEARCH

Strategy Research Within the Language Skills

Researchers and teachers have traditionally approached the language skills through
listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Larsen-Freeman (2001) suggests that “gram-
maring” is a fifth skill area that deserves our attention. Significant research has been
conducted on the use of specific strategies in each of these language skill areas.

Listening Strategies. Vandergrift is perhaps the researcher most actively engaged

in strategy research within the context of L2 listening (Vandergrift 1997, 1999, 2002). In
his 2002 published research, he reports on a metacognitive strategy awareness project
undertaken with 420 children in 17 different Grade 4-6 classes in Canada. The L2 learn-
ers are learning French. What makes this study noteworthy is that it is the first study
published that focuses on listening strategy use of children. All classes responded to
at least one of three tasks and a guided reflection activity. Data were collected from
classes rather than from individuals because of the age of the participants. Teachers
recorded all student responses. The three tasks engaged the learners in (1) listening
for what to feed animals, (2) listening to descriptions of five families and matching
the descriptions with pictures, and (3) listening to answering machine messages and
matching activities on the checklist with the name of the person who suggested it.
After each of these tasks, teachers engaged the class in reflective exercises to deter-
mine how the listeners approached the tasks and what they learned in French. Results
indicate that students have a high level of awareness of their strategies for listening
to materials in French. They were able to successfully identify the strategies that they
had used while engaged in the listening tasks. In particular, learners’ use of metacog-
nitive strategies of planning, monitoring, and evaluation during the listening was
clear. Vandergrift emphasizes the importance of teaching language content as well as
learning processes. This was one of the additional benefits of the research with these
young learners.
In addition to this key research study, additional research on the role of strategies
and listening has been conducted. The research of O’Malley and Chamot (1990), Goh
(1997), Cheng (2002), and Chien and Kao (2002) all add to our understanding of the
important role that strategies play during the language task of listening.

Speaking Strategies. Cohen and Olshtain (1993) have applied retrospective think-
aloud protocols to get L2 learners to report the ways in which they “assess, plan, and
execute” their spoken utterances. The researchers videotaped 15 L2 learners partici-
pating in role-play situations with a native speaker of English. Six speech act situations
were provided for each learner (two apologies, two complaints, and two requests).
After each set of two speech acts, the video was repeated for the learners, who then
responded in their L1 to a set of questions about what they were thinking during the
role-plays. One of the strengths of this research is the use of the retrospective proto-
cols. The videotape provided the source of the recall stimulus. The learners were not
asked to remember great amounts of material before providing the protocol. The tasks
were structured so that after each speech act pair the strategies for the two speech acts
could be reported. Cohen and Olshtain generalize from the data to classify learn-
ers from this study into one of three types of learners: metacognizers, avoiders, and
pragmatists. The results indicate that in using strategies to perform speech acts, the
subjects utilized four primary strategies: (1) planning to use specific vocabulary and
grammatical structures, (2) thinking in two languages, (3) using a variety of different
strategies in searching for language forms, and (4) not paying much attention to gram-
mar or to pronunciation. This research supports the claims that learners can be aware of
their strategies and report them to researchers and teachers. This awareness facilitates
 42. L2 LEARNING STRATEGIES 765

language learning. Additional research related to learner’s strategies during speaking

tasks can be found in the research of Dörnyei (1995).

Reading Strategies. Sheorey and Mokhtari (2001) and Mokhtari and Sheorey
(2002) are conducting significant research on the metacognitive reading strategies
of L2 learners. They have developed a new instrument named the Survey of Read-
ing Strategies (SORS) designed to measure the metacognitive reading strategies of L2
readers engaged in reading academic materials. One of the first studies published that
used the SORS reports on the strategies of 152 native English-speaking students and
152 ESL students. The focus of the study was to examine the differences in reading
strategy usage between native speakers and non-native speakers of English. They
asked three primary research questions: (1) Are there any differences between ESL
and U.S. students in their perceived strategy use while reading academic materials?
(2) Are there any differences between male and female ESL and U.S. students, respec-
tively, in their perceived strategy use while reading academic materials? (3) Is there a
relationship between reported strategy use and self-rated reading ability?
Results show that the ESL students reported a higher use of strategies than the
U.S. students. The ESL students reported using a greater number of support reading
strategies, which should not be surprising. We would expect learners of English to
need more support strategies. When the data were examined overall no significant dif-
ferences were reported between the male and female readers in this study. However,
there was one significant difference in the use of the strategy of underlining informa-
tion in the text for ESL learners. The female ESL students reported using the strategy
more frequently than the male ESL students. Finally, students who had a higher self-
reported reading rating reported using a higher frequency of reading strategies than
those readers who gave themselves a lower rating. Sheorey and Mokhtari (2001) re-
port that “skilled readers . . . are more able to reflect on and monitor their cognitive
processes while reading. They are aware not only of which strategies to use, but they
also tend to be better at regulating the use of such strategies while reading” (p. 445).
This research contributes a great deal to our understanding of the reading strategies
of L2 readers.
Anderson (1991) highlights that “strategic reading is not only a matter of knowing
what strategy to use, but also the reader must know how to use a strategy successfully
and orchestrate its use with other strategies. It is not sufficient to know about strategies;
a reader must also be able to apply them strategically” (pp. 468–469). Additional
research on reading strategies can be found in the works of Block (1986, 1992), Carrell,
Pharis, and Liberto (1989), Janzen (1996), Knight, Padron, and Waxman (1985), and
Song (1998).

Writing Strategies. Two recent research projects in Taiwan highlight the contin-
ued interest in learning about strategies used by L2 writers (He, 2002; You & Joe,
2002). He’s research involved 38 Taiwanese college-level writers. These writers were
divided into two groups: mastery-orientation (intrinsic motivation to improve writ-
ing) or performance-orientation (extrinsic motivation to be better than other writers)
classes. The purpose of the division was to determine if the learner’s goal orien-
tations would influence the learner’s strategy use. Results indicated that the writ-
ers in both groups reported using strategies classified into five categories: planning,
monitoring/evaluation, revising, retrieving, and compensating strategies. Writers in
the mastery-orientation group had a higher frequency of reported strategies in the
monitoring/evaluation, revising, and compensating categories. The mastery group
also produced better essays than the performance-orientation group. Finally, revising
strategies and mastery orientation served as two significant predictors of successful
writing. What makes this study of interest is that there is an integration of strategy
use with writers’ goal orientations.
766 ANDERSON

You and Joe (2002) designed a research study to examine incoherence in EFL learn-
ers’ writing. They examined the strategies that writers used in solving problems of
incoherence in their work. Nine college-level writers were engaged in this research
project. After writing a composition, the writers were each interviewed and asked to
describe their writing strategies in sections of the essay that were incoherent. Three
reasons were identified for the incoherence in these writers’ essays. First, the subjects
failed to apply the writing strategies that they were aware of for handling difficulties
in writing. Second, the writers had a limited number of strategies that they imple-
mented during their writing. Finally, given the limited amount of time for the writing
task, writers did not feel they had sufficient time to monitor their strategies and pro-
duce the required composition. These nine writers lacked metacognitive strategies,
in particular the strategies of planning (e.g., preparing for a writing task), monitoring
(e.g., being aware of strategy use during writing), and evaluating (determining if the
strategies being used are helping to accomplish the writing goal), in order to improve
their performance.
We continue to learn about L2 strategies, particularly when the research is focused
on a specific language skill. These two studies represent the growing research in
writing. Other articles on L2 strategy use and writing include Anderson (2003), Bosher
(1998), Leki (1995), and Paulus (1999).

“Grammaring” Strategies. Consistent with what we have discussed related to L2

learning strategies, the role of strategies in the teaching of L2 grammar has focused
more on the teacher’s pedagogical strategies than on learner’s strategies for learning
the grammar of a language. Larsen-Freeman (2001, 2003) emphasizes that we go be-
yond teaching “grammar” to teaching learners the skill of “grammaring”: “Grammar
teaching is not so much knowledge transmission as it is skill development. In fact, it is
better to think of teaching ‘grammaring,’ rather than ‘grammar’” (p. 255). Sharwood
Smith (1993) suggests that “enhanced input” allows learners to focus on elements of
grammatical structures that are targeted by the teacher. Krashen (1985) and Ellis (1994)
have advocated making input comprehensible for learners. Ellis (2002) suggests that
input to become intake “noticing” is the necessary condition. Focusing learner’s
attention on specific aspects of grammar is the pedagogical strategy to get learners to
learn grammar.
What is greatly lacking in the research are studies that specifically target the identi-
fication of the learning strategies that L2 learners use to learn grammar and to under-
stand the elements of grammar. Clearly more research is needed on “grammaring”
strategies of L2 learners.

The Role of Metacognition and L2 Strategy Research

McDonough (1999) asks a provocative question of whether there is a hierarchy of
strategies for language learning. His review of a part of the literature suggests that
this is an area of possible future research that should be considered. Of the various
categories of strategies identified through strategy research, does any one category
play a more significant role than the others? I hypothesize that the metacognitive
strategies play a more significant role because once a learner understands how to
regulate his or her own learning through the use of strategies, language acquisition
should proceed at a faster rate.
Vandergrift (2002) emphasizes the essential role of metacognitive strategies:
“Metacognitive strategies are crucial because they oversee, regulate, or direct the
language learning task, and involve thinking about the learning process” (p. 559).
O’Malley and Chamot (1990) strengthen the importance of the role of metacogni-
tive strategies when they state that “students without metacognitive approaches are
 42. L2 LEARNING STRATEGIES 767

essentially learners without direction or opportunity to plan their learning, moni-

tor their progress, or review their accomplishments and future learning directions”
(p. 8).
Metacognition can be defined simply as thinking about thinking (Anderson, 2002).
It is the ability to make your thinking visible. It is the ability to reflect on what you know
and do and what you do not know and do not do. Metacognition results in critical but
healthy reflection and evaluation of your thinking that may result in making specific
changes in how you learn. Metacognition is not simply thinking back on an event,
describing what happened, and how you felt about it.
Understanding and controlling cognitive processes may be one of the most essential
skills that classroom teachers can develop in themselves and the students with whom
they work. Rather than focusing students’ attention only on issues related to learning
content, effective teachers can structure a learning atmosphere where thinking about
what happens in the learning process will lead to stronger learning skills. Developing
metacognitive awareness may also lead to the development of stronger cognitive skills
as well.
Work by Skehan (1989), Vann and Abraham (1990), and Wenden (1998) points out
that explicit teaching of language learning strategies does not ensure a successful
learning experience. Learners need to be metacognitively aware of what they are
doing. Learners need to connect their strategies for learning with their purpose for
learning.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN L2 STRATEGY RESEARCH

I believe that three areas deserve increased attention in L2 strategy research in the
coming years: (1) the relationship between language learning strategies and learning
styles, (2) strategy use in second language learning contexts versus foreign language
learning contexts, and (3) the role of computers in L2 strategy research.

The Relationship Between Language Learning

Strategies and Learning Styles
We cannot look at language learning strategies in isolation. Strategies are linked to
the individual learner’s learning style.
Cohen (2000) suggests that in an ideal world teachers would be aware of learners’
styles and the wide variety of strategies that are used for these styles. Teachers would
accommodate learners to help them progress as quickly as possible in their task of
learning the language. This ideal world is not likely to exist any time in the near future.
Teachers must therefore teach learners how to self-assess their learning styles and
strategy usage and to then help them monitor these issues themselves. Researchers
can play a significant role in exploring the explicit links between learners’ use of
strategies and their preferred learning styles.

Strategy Use in Second Language Learning Contexts Versus Foreign

Language Learning Contexts
Riley and Harsch (1999) explored the use of language learning strategies through
strategy journals. One major finding from their research was that learners in second
language settings as compared to those in foreign language settings report using dif-
ferent strategies. Riley and Harsch report that the second language learners in their
study reported using more metacognitive strategies than the foreign language learn-
ers. The foreign language learners reported using more cognitive strategies than the
768 ANDERSON

second language learners. Riley and Harsch conclude that the environment influences
the learners’ need to use certain kinds of strategies.
Research can play a significant role in exploring the use of L2 strategies in different
learning environments. In addition to research on the similarities and differences
between strategy use in ESL and EFL environments, researchers can consider what
role the use of strategies play in academic versus social language use contexts. To
better understand strategy use, we must explore how strategy use changes when
conditions for language use change.

The Role of Computers in L2 Strategy Research

Computer-assisted strategy assessment is a rich source of potential data still not ac-
tively utilized by L2 researchers and teachers. Hyte (2002) and Kohler (2002) have
conducted very interesting research projects examining the use of the computer in
metacognitive strategy training. Hyte studied the influence of metacognitive strat-
egy training for language learning within the context of computer-assisted language
learning (CALL). Two hundred thirty-nine second language learners of Spanish partic-
ipated in her study. An experimental group (n = 120) received metacognitive training
integrated within their CALL training. The control group (n = 119) did not receive
the metacognitive strategy training. Hyte found that there was a significant difference
between the two groups in terms of their listening strategies. Learners in the experi-
mental group scored higher than those in the control group. One interesting finding
was that learners in the control group reported a higher use of metacognitive strate-
gies than learners in the experimental group. Hyte concludes that the metacognitive
training increased the awareness of the learners in the experimental group such that
they more accurately reported their strategy use.
Kohler’s research (2002) was designed to investigate the effects of metacognitive
strategy training on lower-achieving second language learners. Seventy learners of
Spanish as a foreign language represented the lower-achieving 30% of a randomly
selected larger group. The 70 subjects were divided into two groups. One group re-
ceived metacognitive strategy training in class on through 20 CALL lessons. The
second group served as a control group receiving no strategy training.
Results indicate that the subjects who received the metacognitive language learn-
ing strategy training significantly increased their listening comprehension, vocabu-
lary, and phrases mastered. No significant differences were found in grammar usage
and performance in specific language tasks between the two groups. Subjects who re-
ceived the strategy training indicated higher perceived value of the training and use
of metacognitive language learning strategies than those subjects from the control
group.
One area of research that deserves additional focus is how learners use strategies
while engaged in CALL tasks. For example, we need to investigate the strategies that
learners use while reading online as opposed to the traditional hard copy reading
strategies. Are there any differences in the use of language learning strategies when
learners approach language learning through CALL environments versus traditional
classroom settings? These are issues that need directed attention by researchers in the
near future.

CONCLUSION

Will Rogers is credited with the saying that common sense ain’t necessarily common
practice. Perhaps what I have addressed in this chapter appears to be common sense
to some readers. I believe that in many respects it is, but the reality is that what
 42. L2 LEARNING STRATEGIES 769

is common sense related to L2 learning strategies research is not common practice

among researchers and language teachers.
There is still much research that needs to be completed for us to better understand
the role of strategies and language learning. I hope that we can see a renewed research
focus on the use of strategies in these areas.

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VI

Second Language Testing

and Assessment

Guest Editors:
Tim McNamara
Annie Brown
Lis Grove
Kathryn Hill
Noriko Iwashita
University of Melbourne

773
774
Introduction

Tim McNamara
University of Melbourne

The Social Turn in Language Assessment

Language assessment is an institutional practice, whether it takes the form of large-
scale proficiency tests or curriculum-related assessment. Until recently most published
research in language testing has focused on proficiency tests, particularly two interna-
tional tests of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), used to facilitate the admissions
processes of universities in English-speaking countries: the American Test of English
as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and the British/Australian International English Lan-
guage Testing System (IELTS). The emphasis in this research is on guaranteeing the
quality of the inferences about test-takers implied in test scores: This process is known
as test score validation, and it draws on concepts and techniques from psychomet-
ric theory, whose terminology and procedures (particularly in the area of statistical
analysis of test data) can appear formidably complex for the nonspecialist. Although
the language proficiency tested in such tests is the target of second language learning
programs, proficiency assessment (albeit in minor key) has not always been well in-
tegrated into the language learning process, as teachers have found its terminology
and its requirements, developed in other institutional contexts and to serve other in-
stitutional needs, both technical and onerous. Even where (as is increasingly the case)
curriculum reform involves attention to assessment, and has led to the development
of assessment methods more sympathetic to the needs of teachers and learners, lan-
guage assessment is still carried out to serve primarily institutional purposes, and the
role of the teacher is to gather data for administrative purposes of accountability or
the fulfillment of policy. It can thus still be seen by language teachers as the practice
of others. The institutional character of language testing has been disguised from re-
searchers in language testing by the discourse of the principal contributing disciplines
to language testing, linguistics, psychology, and measurement, with their overtly
asocial character. Tests have focused on the measurement of individual knowledge
and individual skill, and theories of proficiency have been social in a very limited
sense, even when they address issues of communicative competence.
In the last decade and more, however, a growing critical focus on the character
of applied linguistics as a whole has found its echo in language testing, which has
experienced what we might call a “social turn.” This turn is associated with both
theoretical and policy-related developments. In terms of theory, these include a new
concern for values and social consequences in validity theory; epistemological debates
about the socially situated nature of knowledge; and a specific questioning of the
individualistic focus in current conceptualizations of language proficiency. In terms
775
776 MCNAMARA

of policy, they include a renewed role for assessment in managerialist educational and
training systems; and the advent of what is known as critical language testing.
First, theories of validity in educational assessment have increasingly stressed the
social context and meaning of assessments, and have required that interpretations
of the ability of students be seen in the context of the social values implied in such
assessments, and in the light of the social practices engendered by them. These is-
sues have been most comprehensively addressed in the work of Messick (1989), and
their influence on the field, originally somewhat muted in the influential original pre-
sentation of Messick’s ideas in the work of Bachman (1990), have begun to be felt
strongly. Second, the ferment about the epistemology of research in the social sci-
ences (cf. Lynch, 1996) (also reflected in Messick’s discussion of validity), has led to
changes in the methodology of validation research so that it is no longer based solely
on the traditional procedures of psychometrics but now includes various forms of
discourse analysis and other qualitative research methods, particularly introspection.
Third, work in discourse analysis on the co-construction of performance, particularly
in spoken language, has challenged the individualistic focus of received conceptual-
izations of language proficiency, which saw language performance as a projection of
individual competence, rather than seeing it as distributed and collaborative. Fourth,
the managerialist emphasis on accountability in curriculum reform has led to the
creation of powerful overarching scales and frameworks for guiding the language
assessment practices of teachers, and these have led to an increasing focus on the
differences between teacher assessments and formal tests developed within the psy-
chometric tradition. Finally, the critical perspective on applied linguistics associated
most clearly with the work of Pennycook (2001) has found its response in the devel-
opment by Shohamy of the field of critical language testing (Shohamy, 2001), which
attempts to bring to the fore the political and social agendas involved in language
assessment practice.
r The social context of language assessment is addressed in detail in chapter 43,
“Social and Political Context of Language Assessment by Antony Kunnan.” Kunnan
specifies four dimensions of the context in which language testing takes place: “the
political and economic, the educational, social and cultural, the technological and
infrastructure, and the legal and ethical,” and relates these to Messick’s widened con-
ceptualization of validity. Kunnan presents detailed examples of issues confronting
language testing related to each of these dimensions: for example, the (sometimes
covert) role of tests in the service of dubious social policies; issues of fairness and test
bias in standardized tests containing a language-based testing component; the differ-
ential impact on test-takers of new technologies used for the delivery of tests; the legal
rights of test-takers, including those with disabilities; and the response of the language
testing profession to a new sense of their social and professional responsibilities in
the form of the development of a code of ethics.
r In chapter 44, “Validity and Validation in Language Testing,” the discussion
by Alan Davies and Cathie Elder is by turns speculative and empirical (cf. Davies,
1992). Davies, long one of the most independent and iconoclastic thinkers in Applied
Linguistics, discusses the nature and requirements of test validity, and sets Messick’s
thinking on validity within his own critically evaluative framework. Davies’ work on
validity in language testing long predates the influence of Messick in the field, and the
paper thus presents an encounter between an older and a more currently influential
tradition. He argues that the process of validation of test scores is a potentially endless
search for the Holy Grail of validity; Elder demonstrates in detail what this involves
in her account of the validation of a test of English for Academic Purposes, setting out
the scope, results, and limits of a complex program of validation research.
 PART VI: TESTING AND ASSESSMENT 777
r A somewhat different focus on the ‘social’ is present in chapter 45, “A Look
Back at and Forward to What Language Testers Measure by Micheline Chalhoub-
Deville and Craig Deville, who discuss in detail the third of the earlier points, the
co-constructed character of performance in language tests, and the intellectual and
practical challenges this poses for current theories of proficiency. Their discussion of
the construct of language proficiency is located in the context of a survey of how
currently available textbooks on language testing treat issues in measurement. They
argue that the most distinctive feature of language testing, when compared with other
areas of educational measurement, with which it shares much, is the conceptualization
of its measurement target, language proficiency.
r In chapter 46, “Research Methods in Language Testing,” Tom Lumley and
Annie Brown also address measurement issues within the context of current the-
ories of validity in their discussion of research methods in language testing. Messick’s
validation framework includes the need for empirical investigation to support claims
about the interpretability of test scores. They draw attention to the widening range of
research methods used in carrying out such investigations. They begin with a survey of
quantitative methods including traditional psychometric methods such as correlation
and analysis of variance, moving on to deal with techniques of increasing statisti-
cal sophistication derived from theories including Item Response Modelling, Rasch
measurement, Structural Equation Modelling and Generalizability Theory. They then
discuss a range of qualitative approaches. These include loosely ethnographic meth-
ods including interviews and observation; discourse-based methods, particularly the
use of Conversational Analysis, for examining the interaction in various types of oral
assessments; and introspection, the analysis of concurrent or stimulated recall proto-
cols in order to examine rater cognition and test-taker strategies. Discourse analysis
emerges as an important lever for change in language testing research, this time in
the area of research methodology, complementing its role as a trigger point for the
epistemological issues and questions of construct raised in the previous chapter.
r The contribution of discourse studies to language assessment is also prominent
in chapter 47, “Testing Languages for Specific Purposes,” by Dan Douglas. He defines
a number of persistent issues in research on specific purpose tests. Two of them tie in
closely to issues raised in the previous papers. The first is the nature of specific pur-
pose language proficiency, and the tendency of the structuralist heritage in applied
linguistics to isolate ‘language’ from ‘context,’ in this case the context of real-world spe-
cialist knowledge that forms one dimension of specific purpose language. Although
it is at some level possible to conceptualize language knowledge and subject-matter
knowledge as separable, it is not clear that this is either coherent theoretically or prac-
tically relevant in many of the specific purpose contexts Douglas discusses. Certainly,
current theories of discourse would make such a separation problematic. Second,
Douglas appeals to work in discourse analysis, particularly the work of Sally Jacoby
(Jacoby, 1998), to justify his call for reference to “indigenous” criteria in the reporting
of achievement on specific purpose tests. In her dissertation work, Jacoby studied
a team of experienced and novice physicists rehearsing conference papers prior to
presentation, and analyzed the naturally occurring or “indigenous” criteria being ap-
pealed to implicitly or explicitly in feedback to team members about the strengths and
weaknesses of their individual presentations. These criteria made no special place for
language, even though several graduate student members of the team were non-native
speakers with, in many cases, rather limited proficiency in English. The feedback did
not differentiate between native and non-native speakers, except in marginal ways.
This surprising fact, that the criteria actually being oriented to in performance did
not single out aspects of language proficiency, has obviously important implications
for the earlier issue of the conceptualization of specific language proficiency, as well
778 MCNAMARA

as suggesting that research on such naturally occurring “assessment” activities in the

target setting may be relevant to establishing valid criteria for language assessments.
r The need for a shift of research attention to the underrepresented area of classroom
assessment is the principal argument in chapter 48, “Classroom Teacher Assessment
of Second Language Development: Construct as Practice by Constant Leung. Leung
contrasts teacher assessment with standardized testing. Following Lynch (2001), he
defines teacher assessment as “the noticing and gathering of information about stu-
dent language use in ordinary (noncontrived) classroom activities, and the use of that
information to make decisions about language teaching without necessarily quantify-
ing it or using it for reporting purposes.” This locally focused definition of assessment
represents a radical challenge to the tradition of institutional language testing: it is
not about measurement; it does not serve administrative functions; it does not adhere
to psychometric canons. Its aim is to improve pedagogy. Leung attempts to define its
status and nature, and to articulate a research and development agenda. He locates
the primary focus for this in the development in teachers of “professional knowledge,
responsive pedagogy, and reflexive practice.” The question remains as to how to get
the necessary institutional muscle behind such a development, given that institutional
goals are not normally formulated in such terms, certainly not in traditional theorizing
of assessment, even in the most progressive theories of validity. There is a possibly
unbridgeable gap here, which underlines one dimension of the many difficulties in-
volved in implementing more socially aware language assessment.

REFERENCES

Bachman, L. (1990). Fundamental considerations in language testing. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Davies, A. (1992). Speculation and empiricism in applied linguistics. Melbourne Papers in Language Testing
1(2): 1–18.
Jacoby, S. W. (1998). Science as performance: Socializing scientific discourse through conference talk re-
hearsals. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.
Lynch, B. K. (1996). Language program evaluation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Lynch, B. K. (2001). Rethinking assessment from a critical perspective. Language Testing, 18(4): 333–349.
Messick, S. A. (1989). Validity. In Linn, R. L. (Ed.), Educational measurement (3rd ed.). (pp. 13–103). New
York: Macmillan.
Pennycook, A. (2001). Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
Shohamy, E. (2001). The power of tests: A critical perspective on the uses of language tests. Harlow, Essex:
Longman.
43

Language Assessment From a

Wider Context
Antony John Kunnan
California State University, Los Angeles

INTRODUCTION

Most individuals who have been required to take language tests know that tests are
part of the sociopolitical setup of a community. Yet, language assessment is character-
ized as a field that is primarily concerned with the psychometric qualities of tests and
one in which test developers/researchers ignore the socioeconomic-political issues
that are critically part of tests and testing practice1 . It is not that these perspectives
have not been known earlier. In fact, about two decades ago, Cronbach (1984) pointed
out that “testing abilities has always been intended as an impartial way to perform
a political function—that of determining who gets what” (p. 5). Bachman (1990) also
succinctly stated that “tests are not developed and used in a value-free psychomet-
ric test tube; they are virtually always intended to serve the needs of an educational
system or of society at large” (p. 279). In addition, Hanson (1993) characterized the
intentions and social benefits of testing:

Most tests are intended to contribute to social ends that are generally reckoned as benefi-
cial, such as equal opportunity, honesty, law-abiding behavior, acquisition of knowledge
and skills, identification and development of individual interests and talents, knowledge,
and skills for the mutual benefit of the individual and society. (p. 6)

Examining the intentions and social benefits of language testing in the 20th century,
Spolsky’s (1995) pioneering and eye-opening treatise entitled Measured Words was
critical of the whole enterprise:

Since the days of World War I, psychometric principles and practices have come to domi-
nate the testing of foreign language proficiency, and a movement that initially blossomed
in the United States has spread throughout the world. As long as testing was confined
to helping students learn or to determining the qualifications of individuals seeking
employment, there was a strong ethical case to be made for it, as the end justifies the
means. But, from its beginnings, testing has been exploited also as a method of control
and power—as a way to select, to motivate, to punish. The so-called objective test, by
779
780 KUNNAN

virtue of its claim of scientific backing for its impartiality, and especially when it operates
under the aegis and with the efficiency of big business, is even more brutally effective in
exercising this authority. (p. 1)

He also called for a different approach to understanding the motivations and impact
of tests.

It is only by taking full account of the institutional or political context that one can appre-
ciate how the psychometric controversies have distracted attention from more serious
social (or antisocial) motivations and impact. (p. 1)

Having set up the framework, Spolsky (1995) convincingly showed the influence of
personal, institutional, political, and economic policies on the development of lan-
guage testing in the United States (particularly in the development of the Test of
English as a Foreign Language at Educational Testing Service, Princeton) and in the
United Kingdom (at the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate),
often overriding appropriate educational and ethical practice.
Using a similar framework, Shohamy (2001) found compelling evidence in three
case studies (a reading test, an Arabic test, and an English test) that the “power of
tests and their detrimental forces” can alter the intentions of those who introduce
tests. McNamara (1998) also noted that tests are used as a disciplinary tool by political
institutions for example, as an arm of policy reform and control in fields as broad as
education, vocational training, immigration, and citizenship2 .
This chapter follows these researchers in spirit. I examine tests and testing practice
from a wide context in order to more fully determine whether and how these tests are
beneficial or detrimental to society. The wide “context”, constructed from reflection
and research in the last two decades, includes the political and economic, the edu-
cational, social and cultural, the technological and infrastructure, and the legal and
ethical.

TEST VALIDITY AND TEST FAIRNESS:

OPENING UP THE “CONTEXT”

In the late 1980s, Messick (1989) revolutionized test validity discussions by arguing for
a unified view of validity. Specifically, he asserted that validity should be considered
as a unified concept (in contrast to the three traditional validity types: content validity,
predictive and concurrent criterion-related validity, and construct validity developed
and applied in earlier decades) with a superordinate role for construct validity. He
postulated that test validity refers to the “appropriateness, meaningfulness, and use-
fulness of the specific inferences made from test scores” (p.8) and that the unified va-
lidity framework could be constructed “by distinguishing two interconnected facets of
the unified validity concept. One facet is the source of justification of the testing, being
based on appraisal of either evidence or consequence. The other facet is the function
or the outcome of the testing, being either interpretation or use” (Messick, 1989, p. 20)
In this view of validity, Messick also explicitly advanced a critical role for value
implications and social consequences, particularly evaluation of intended and unin-
tended social consequences of test interpretation and use, as part of test validity. This
was the first time that values implications and social consequences were brought from
the back room (where test developers had conveniently ignored them) and included as
part of test validity. This view has now been instantiated in the 1999 Standards (AERA,
APA, NCME, 1999). The examination of the social value of tests as well as their unantic-
ipated consequences or side effects, especially if such effects were traceable to sources
of invalidity of test score interpretation, received support from this view. Many re-
searchers welcomed this significant development as a possible sign of a new beginning
 43. LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT FROM A WIDER CONTEXT 781

in a hitherto psychometrically driven field and such discussions are widespread today
(see paper in Cumming & Berwick, 1996; Kunnan, 1998; and Chapelle, 1999). Mes-
sick’s view of test validity also triggered the reworking of the role of test reliability
and has led many researchers to argue that test reliability evidence should be used as
evidence that contributes to test validity (Chapelle, 1999; Kunnan, 2000).
Similarly, after Messick’s view was widely circulated, the importance of fairness has
also been understood better. The 1999 Standards acknowledged the critical importance
of fairness as a goal in testing by devoting a whole chapter to fairness for the first time.
Its vision is as follows:

A full consideration of fairness would explore the many functions of testing in relation to
its many goals, including the broad goal of achieving equality of opportunity in our society.
It would consider the technical properties of tests, the ways test results are reported,
and the factors that are validly or erroneously thought to account for patterns of test
performance for groups and individuals. A comprehensive analysis would also examine
the regulations, statutes, and case law that govern test use and the remedies for harmful
practices. (p. 73; emphasis added)

Further more, the Standards specifically defined three categories of fairness: fairness
as lack of bias, fairness as equitable treatment in the testing process, and fairness as
equality in outcomes of testing.
Willingham and Cole (1997) offered another perspective, but their focus was no-
ticeably different: Their focus was on comparable validity, the validity of score inter-
pretations for all individuals and groups. Their three criteria for fair tests were com-
parable opportunity for test-takers to demonstrate relevant proficiency, comparable
testing tasks and scores, and comparable treatment of test-takers in test interpretations
and use. Incorporating these two definitions and Messick’s interest in values and so-
cial consequences through his unified validity framework, Kunnan (2004) proposed
a fairness framework that positions fairness as the ultimate goal in testing 3 . The main
qualities of the framework are construct validity, absence of bias, access, administra-
tion, and social consequences. These concepts inform the “Wider Context” concept.

THE WIDER CONTEXT

The wider context of tests and testing practice refers mainly to the collection of tra-
ditions, histories, customs, professional practices, and academic, social, and political
institutions of a community. This collection can then be identified loosely as the polit-
ical and economic, the educational, social and cultural, the technological and infras-
tructure, and the legal and ethical contexts of a community in which a test operates
(Figure 43.1). Other contexts that may also play a role in a community but which are
not explicitly shown in Fig. 43.1 include race and ethnicity, gender, class, caste, reli-
gion, sexual orientation, entertainment, and so on. As shown in the figure, the main
contexts surround, overlap, and enmesh each other and it is into this milieu that a test
is thrust when it is commissioned. It is then developed, administered, scored, reported,
and researched and decisions are made based on test scores for this community 4 . This
conceptualization also implies that we need to use this wider context in debating and
evaluating tests and testing practice but does not exclude any of the technical aspects
of language testing practice, such as validity, reliability, standard-setting, and the like
from being used in such evaluations5 .

The Political and Economic Context

The political and economic context of language assessment has not been—until very
recently—overtly acknowledged, and relative silence on this front has contributed
782 KUNNAN

Educational,
Political & Social &
Economic Cultural

TESTS

Legal & Technology

Ethical &
Infrastructure

FIG.43.1. The wider context of tests and testing practice.

to the notion that language testing is an apolitical discipline (see Spolsky, 1995;
McNamara, 1998; Shohamy, 2001, for notable exceptions). An examination of school-
level testing and testing for immigration and citizenship will be discussed along these
lines.

The Politicization of School-Level Testing

In the United States, there has recently been a huge growth in publications and
public discussions on school-level standardized testing, so much so that electoral
campaigns and platforms have become a key stage for such debates6 . Elected officials
(such as the president, state governors, mayors, and school superintendents) often
take the first opportunity to underscore their desire to impose standardized testing
on schools in their jurisdiction in the guise of public accountability.
Large-scale standardized testing is now the main component that drives the concept
of public school accountability. This is largely because until recently most school did
not require tests for grade-level promotion or high school graduation. Instead, schools
depended on teacher grades for courses and students were promoted to the next grade
automatically. College-bound students took additional courses and standardized tests
such as the SAT for admission to colleges and universities. The official accountability
argument goes as follows: If parents knew how well their children were doing, then
educators, policymakers, and the public would know how well their schools were
doing. Financial incentives would then be offered to schools that have met or exceeded
their goals or punitive action would be taken against schools that do poorly.
President Bush’s education agenda added negatively to this state of affairs when
he signed the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, which requires all states to
introduce testing in science, mathematics, and (English language) reading for Grades
3 through 8. It is based on four basic principles: stronger accountability for results,
increased flexibility and local control, expanded options for parents, and an emphasis
on teaching methods that have been proven to work. In terms of increased account-
ability, the Act requires states to implement statewide accountability systems covering
all public schools and students on state standards in reading and mathematics, an-
nual testing for all students in Grades 3–8, and annual statewide progress objectives
ensuring that all groups of students reach proficiency within 12 years. Results of such
 43. LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT FROM A WIDER CONTEXT 783

tests are required to be broken out by poverty, race, ethnicity, disability, and limited
English proficiency to ensure that no group is left behind. School districts and schools
that fail to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) toward statewide proficiency goals
will, over time, be subject to improvement, corrective action, and restructuring mea-
sures. Schools that meet or exceed AYP objectives or close achievement gaps will be
eligible for State Academic Achievement Awards. This overtly stated goal masks the
Bush administration’s related concept of awarding parents tuition fees (known as the
School Voucher Program) if they choose to remove their children from failing public
schools and place them in private schools7 .
Whereas there is general support for the accountability argument from educators
and parent groups, (which is driven by dissatisfaction with instructional and grad-
ing practices and social promotion through grade levels), the mechanism of using
standardized testing to achieve this end has been challenged by education groups,
including civil rights organizations, as well as individuals. For example, according to
Heubert and Hauser (1999), “for more than 20 years the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People has called the use of testing as a sole criterion for the
nonpromotion of students and the use of competency testing for high school grad-
uation ‘another way of blaming the student victim’” (p. 45). The Mexican American
Legal Defense and Educational Fund has filed a lawsuit in Texas against the use of
the Texas Testing of Academic Skills, which claims that, in the words of Heubert and
Hauser (1999), “the test denies diplomas to students without sufficient proof that the
test does not correspond to what is actually taught in schools in many minority com-
munities” (p. 46). Similarly, the National Association of Bilingual Education argues,
according to Heubert and Hauser (1999) “students should be assessed with appropri-
ate, performance-based tests, and English language learners should not be assessed
with tests that are inappropriate at their level of language competency” (p. 46). At
the individual level, Linn, Baker, and Betebenner (2002) present arguments that the
states’ content standards, the rigor of their tests, and the stringency of their perfor-
mance standards vary greatly, thus posing substantial challenges to schools, school
districts, and states.
Overall, there is a disjuncture between elected officials and opinion polls, on the one
hand, and major educational groups and academic researchers regarding school-level
testing on the other hand. However, school-level tests continue to be used as policy in-
struments by elected officials7 . Whatever direction this policy takes in the near future,
test use will continue to be a highly politicized issue, as ultimately whether and how
tests are used is largely decided by elected officials in school boards, governments, and
legislatures, and finally in courts; in most cases without much regard to opinions from
educators and academic researchers. As Cronbach (1980) put it, “the public intends to
judge specific test uses for itself, directly or through courts and legislatures” (p. 100).

Testing for Immigration and Citizenship: Political

and Economic Gatekeeping
Political and economic interests have been at the center of gatekeeping in the high-
stakes arena of immigration and citizenship. In most countries, language abilities
(in the official language of the country) have been required of potential immigrants.
Often, the overt goal of assessing language proficiency and the associated intention
of providing free language instruction is not the real reason for the testing policy. The
real objective may be “racial exclusion,” as in the case of the dictation test in Australia
and in the case of intelligence tests in the United States in the early 20th century.
In the case of Australia, language tests were used as part of the immigration re-
quirement as early as 1901 as part of the “White Australia” policy. The first test was
a dictation test in a European language (or any “prescribed language”) to a potential
784 KUNNAN

immigrant in such a way that the immigrant (if not from the British Isles) could be
excluded. As a result of rigorous application of this policy from 1902 to 1946, only
125,000 members of “the alien races” (Asians and “colored”) were admitted to the
country. In 1956, the dictation test given in any European language was changed to an
English dictation test. In the 1990s, first the ACCESS and then the STEP tests were in-
troduced to assess English language proficiency of professionals prior to registration
or immigration of those seeking permanent residence. However, standard setting was
influenced by immigration policy that was intended to be benign but sometimes inde-
fensible in practice. According to Hawthorne (1997), the standard set on the ACCESS
test restricted immigration in terms of English language ability but the standard on
the STEP test was set in such a way as to enable Chinese students already in Australia
(after the events of Tiananmen Square) to continue their stay: “The case of the STEP test
offers a dramatic illustration of the increasing use of language testing by Australian au-
thorities to achieve political purposes . . . The federal government was able to impose
control over a politically volatile situation; the Australian legal system was cleared of
an unmanageably large backlog of refugee applications; and young PRC, Pakistani,
Sri Lankan, and other asylum seekers were transformed into a relatively educated and
acculturated skilled migrant intake—commencing their legal permanent residence in
Australia supported by a functional basis of English” (pp. 257–258).
Rather similarly, the use of intelligence tests for immigration in the 1920s had a
“racial exclusion” objective in The United States. The earliest language testing was
the English Competence examination prepared by the College Entrance Examination
Board in 1930. According to Spolsky (1995), this test was intended to deal with a
loophole in the Immigration Act of 1924: “Carl Brigham gave evidence in Congress
on the deleterious effects of permitting non-Nordic immigrants to ‘contaminate the
American gene pool”’ (p. 55). Spolsky (1995) cites Brigham’s racist intentions: “We
must frankly admit the undesirable results which would ensue from a cross be-
tween the Nordic in this country with the Alpine Slav, with the degenerated hybrid
Mediterranean, or with the Negro, or from the promiscuous intermingling of all four
types . . . Immigration should not only be restrictive but highly selective” (p. 37). In
addition, according to Spolsky (1995), the nexus between the government and test-
ing agencies was clear: “It is important to note that the purpose of this test . . . was in
fact political and restrictive, namely to enforce an immigration act intended to close
the gates to ‘undesirables.’ A well-established testing agency wrote it at government
request” (p. 59).
More recently, the political and economic interests of New Zealand government
were evident in the way it introduced the IELTS in 1995. As Read (2001) notes, “the
test which would determine whether applicants in the target categories had a mini-
mum level of English proficiency, defined as Level 5 in the General module. Principal
applicants were required to pass the test in all four skills before arriving in New
Zealand. Other members of the family (or ‘nonprincipal applicants’) aged 16 and
over were also expected to achieve the same level. However, they could be admitted
to the country without doing so, upon payment of a fee of NZ$20,000 each. The fee
was refundable as follows: a full refund would be given if IELTS Level 5 was achieved
within three months of arrival; the sum of NZ$14,000 would be refunded if the re-
quired level was reached from three to twelve months after arrival. After that, the full
NZ$20,000 was to be retained by the government” (p. 192). Read (2001) goes on to
state that the government realized that this high fee was having a negative effect on
potential business investor applicants, [and] as an intermediate measure the level of
attainment for refund was lowered to Level 4. Later in 1998, the NZ$20,000 fee was
abolished and was replaced with a fee ranging from NZ$1,700 to NZ$6,650, which
was to entitle the applicants to ESL tuition for a 3-year period.
Many countries also have language tests for citizenship. In the United States,
in order to become a citizen, one of the requirements is that the applicant “must
 43. LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT FROM A WIDER CONTEXT 785

understand English and be able to read, write, and speak ordinary English unless the
applicant is 50 years or older and have lived in the country for 20 years” (Immigration
and Naturalization Service [INS])9 . Although this requirement is stated clearly, what
is unclear is how it is operationalized, as there does not seem to be a standard testing
protocol or procedure. The INS examiners who conduct the final interview also con-
duct the civics test and the English test, along with other duties such as examining
documents. Unlike the civics part, which is made up of a body of knowledge that
is described in the citizenship study materials, the English test is not described in
terms of a proficiency level or can-do statements and is therefore left to the interpre-
tation of the examiner, allowing obvious variations in the test. Anecdotal information
collected from citizenship applicants indicates the test may consist of any of the fol-
lowing: The applicant may be asked to write a sentence in English (such as “Today is
a beautiful day”), read the civics questions aloud and answer the questions in English
(“Who was the first president of the United States?”), or answer questions on every-
day matters in English (“Where do you live?”)10 . Such variation in any test would be
cause for concern; in this high-stakes test, it is a vexing problem that needs immediate
attention.
In the 1990s, new language tests have become part of the requirements for ap-
plication for citizenship in many countries such as Estonia, Germany, Latvia, and
Lithuania. According to Shohamy (2001), the test of Latvian required of all residents
including Russians, many of whom have lived their entire lives in Russian-speaking
communities in Latvia, is an example of a test used to discriminate against minority
ethnic groups: “ . . . in 1996, a report showed a drastic decline in the number of Rus-
sians residing in Latvia . . . While the language test may not be the only reason for the
decline, it clearly contributed significantly to ethnic cleansing” (p. 89).
From these examples, it is imperative for language testers to examine the social
consequences of such policies, particularly in terms of what would happen to the
applicants who do not pass the test and therefore cannot become citizens. Would
they have to continue to live in such countries as second-class citizens because of
their inability to achieve an acceptable level of language ability or return to their
“homelands”? More fundamental questions could be asked of immigration tests: What
is the purpose of such a test? Is the purpose to encourage applicants to learn the local
language or identify their deficiencies so that they can take the language classes they
need? Or, is the purpose to expressly deny rights and powers to residents who have
not mastered the local language to an acceptable level and by extension have not
assimilated to the local community and country? Similar questions have been raised
in the context of testing immigrants in Canada (Cumming, 1997).

The Educational, Social, and Cultural Context

Standardized language tests are common in the educational, social, and cultural con-
texts. They are used for a variety of educational and career-related purposes that in-
clude competency, admission, and employment. Key concerns that have been raised
about these tests are primarily regarding their educational and social consequence:
test bias and washback.

Standardized Tests and Washback

Standardized tests have become most popular in U.S. education in. Scores on the
SAT that assesses verbal and quantitative ability and/or SAT-II (subject areas) or the
ACT are required for admission to U.S. colleges11 . Similarly, students who are non-
native speakers of English and who wish to apply for admission to U.S. and Canadian
colleges and universities are required to demonstrate their English language ability
by taking and providing scores on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL)
786 KUNNAN

or the International English Language Testing System (IELTS). At the graduate level,
applicants are generally required to demonstrate their preparedness for study by pro-
viding scores on graduate-level aptitude tests (that assess English language reading
and writing ability in addition to quantitative skills) such as the Graduate Record
Examination or on professional tests such as the Graduate Management Test.
In keeping with the accountability concept, the state of California introduced the
California High School Exit Examination (CAHSEE) in English from 2003–2004. Ac-
cording to the State Education Code, the purpose of the CAHSEE is to ensure that
students who graduate from high school can demonstrate grade-level competency
in the state content standards for reading, writing, and mathematics. The exam has
two parts, English-language arts and mathematics, and students of the class of 2006
must pass both portions of the test to receive their high school diploma. Although the
independent evaluation of the test reports that the test development, administration,
scoring, and reporting is flawless, the report documents through one table that teach-
ers spent 45 hours on test preparation and in one short paragraph that a small DIF
study was conducted for Hispanic test-takers.12
In 1998, anticipating the national accountability concept, California introduced
standardized tests that assesses students from Grades 2 to 11 in a variety of subjects
including English reading and writing, mathematics, and science. The impact of this
test has generally been negative particularly in terms of washback: Teacher anecdotes
have indicated that they have to “teach to the test” for about two months prior to
the test and that the curriculum has in general become “test-driven” with less time
devoted to activities that are not part of the test. Furthermore, there have been com-
plaints that the test is not aligned to the stated curriculum, a clear problem of content
representativeness/coverage. This is a result of many factors, including the situation
that different school districts have slightly different curricula and different school dis-
tricts have slightly different timelines for completion of topics, units, and concepts.
It is clear, therefore, that more systematic washback studies need to be conducted al-
though the limitations and dangerous consequences of such standardized tests have
been regularly raised13 . The value of these high-stakes educational tests to California
society depends on construct validity, and the absence of bias and positive washback
of the tests on instruction.

Achieving Fairness Through Test Bias Studies

Fair access to education and employment has required test bias investigations on
standardized tests. Although such investigations are not always mandatory, they are
advisable in multicultural, multilingual test-taking populations where a test may be
considered biased when it produces systematic differential performance among test-
takers from the same ability group but from different subgroups of interest (such as age,
academic major, gender, race and ethnicity, nationality, native language, religion, and
test-takers with disability). Such systematic differential performance may be due to
the presence of construct-irrelevant test characteristics in a test (or in test items) or rel-
evant secondary item characteristics. Irrelevant item characteristics may be found in
different components of a test: language variety, directions, content, response process,
administration, and scoring, reporting, interpretation toward a particular subgroup.
Thus, differences in test performance for a designated subgroup of interest (DSI) might
result in differences in meaning of test scores such that the validity of the test scores
would be seriously in doubt. In summary, test bias could occur when two groups
of test-takers with equal ability show a differential probability of a correct response.
Furthermore, as test bias investigations are based on comparable test-takers matched
with respect to the primary construct the test is measuring, a large difference in per-
formance may mean the test is measuring additional constructs differently across the
 43. LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT FROM A WIDER CONTEXT 787

groups. The additional construct(s) could be either intended secondary constructs or

nuisance constructs that have crept into the test.
According to the 1999 Standards, there are two sources of bias: content-related
and response-related. Content-related bias is related to the following aspects of
testing:

1. Content representativeness: In an achievement test, it is possible there may be

less than desirable alignment between the curriculum and the test items leading to
content underrepresentativeness or construct irrelevance. A slightly different type of
content bias may also be identified in cases where the topic or subject matter or events,
places, and situations that are construct-irrelevant are different or unfamiliar to a DSI
(such as test-takers from different academic major, gender or cultural or educational
background subgroups).
2. Language variety: The language of the test can be a source of bias, particularly if
a DSI uses a language variety different from the language variety of a test (such as a
DSI uses British or Australian English instead of American English that is used in the
test to measure English language ability).
3. Offensive content and language: This type of bias refers to content or language
used in a test that is controversial or inflammatory to a DSI, demeaning or offensive
to members of a DSI, depicting members of a DSI as having stereotypical occupations
(i.e., Chinese launderer, White professionals, Black porters, Hispanic laborers, female
secretaries or nurses) or in stereotypical situations (i.e., boys as successful in math, girls
needing help with math) or material that does not provide adequate representation
of all DSI. This type of bias also includes terms and expressions that are offensive or
inappropriate, such as “he” to include male as well as female members, “man” as in
policeman instead of police officer, “fireman” instead of firefighters, and “disabled
workers” instead of workers with disability.

Response-related source of bias is related to the following aspects of testing:

1. Response-format: This type of bias refers to the format used in a test such as the
item format as well as the response format (essay writing, short-answer, multiple-
choice, true-false, etc.). It also includes test directions, scoring rubrics, or test-taking
procedure that may be ambiguous or confusing to a particular DSI.
2. Differential performance: This type of bias refers to differences in performance on
a test between two subgroups (for example, age, gender, race/ethnicity, geographic,
or other DSI)13 .
3. Standard setting: When a test is used for standard setting (that is, selection and
prediction), evidence is gathered to check whether the relationship between the test
score and the criterion score (used for standard setting) is biased for a DSI.

Many standardized language tests have been the subject of test bias studies. Most
of the attention has been on the following areas: language variety, language content,
response format, differential performance, and standard setting (see Kunnan, 2000,
for a list of studies). Such investigations have helped test developers and researchers
understand the role of social and cultural factors in the performance of different test-
taker groups although the limited role of such studies in terms of fairness has also
been pointed out (Camilli & Shepard, 1997; Kunnan, 2000).

The Technology and Infrastructure Context

The importance of this context has become clearer in the last decade than ever before
due to the rapid use of high technology in testing such as computers and the Internet.
788 KUNNAN

A key concern with the use of technology often articulated is whether test-takers have
access to and knowledge of the technology necessary for success on a test.

Technology and Access

In low-technology-use areas, where machine scoring has replaced human scoring,
it is likely that this is coupled with the promotion of multiple-choice test items and the
use of machine-scorable cards that enable machine scoring (such as most U.S. based
tests). While recording responses to test items on a machine-scorable card might be
easy for test-takers who are used to this format, test-takers who are not used to it
might find it rather confusing and unnecessarily tricky from two points of view: the
use of multiple choices for each test item and the recording of responses. Thus, it
is critical that test developers are aware of how familiar test-taking groups (in their
targeted population) are with multiple-choice test items and whether they are able to
record their responses.
Similarly, in the case of tape-mediated tests (such as the Test of Spoken English or
the Simulated Oral Proficiency Tests), talking into an audio tape recorder in response
to an unseen voice that asks for responses is another problematic test format. Test-
takers who are unfamiliar with this format will have difficulty dealing with it (espe-
cially starting and completing responses within the time allocated for each response).
Furthermore, from a social and cultural point of view, it may seem inappropriate to
particular test-taking groups to talk into a tape recorder, especially in tests that claim
to assess communicative language ability.
In high-technology-use areas, computers may be used in all aspects of test develop-
ment, administration, scoring, and reporting. In test administrations using computers
(such as the computer-based TOEFL), a test-taker would receive test items on the
computer screen that have been either based on item difficulty and person ability es-
timates (if the test section is a computer-adaptive test) or based on a set order of items
(as in a computer-based test or a paper-and-pencil test). Either way, the test-taker
would need to have the requisite computer keyboarding and mouse movement skills
(clicking, scrolling, highlighting, etc.) in order to read the test items and to record the
answers. This calls into question the issue of test access if the test is required of test-
takers in places where such computer skills and computer-based tests are relatively
new or nonexistent.
For example, the administrators of the computer-based TOEFL (which replaced the
paper-and-pencil TOEFL) had to deal with this issue as the test is offered worldwide,
including places in which high-technology use is new or nonexistent. As the test ad-
ministrators were aware of the test access issue, a computer-familiarity study of poten-
tial TOEFL test-takers was conducted prior to launching the test (Taylor et al., 1998).
This study enabled the test administrators to be confident that most test-takers who
might take the computer-based TOEFL have sufficient familiarity with keyboarding
and mouse skills and that those who do not could benefit from a free tutorial that test-
takers could take prior to taking the test. This solution is acceptable for test-takers who
come forward to take the tutorial and the test, but it would not be sufficient if the very
thought of having to take a computer-familiarity tutorial and computer-based test
inhibited a sizable number of test-takers in a particular area from taking the test. This
example shows how the use of high technology has to be understood and managed
in areas where such technology may not be commonplace among test-takers.
Other related issues also need to be considered. Cost is a concern when paper-and-
pencil versions of tests are replaced with computer-based tests; geographical access
is another, as a computer-based test may only be available in test centers located in
cities15 . Furthermore, comparability of test versions (computer-based and paper-and-
pencil) is also a matter of concern. Thus, if these are major concerns, then technology
with computer-based testing may raise more questions than answers.
 43. LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT FROM A WIDER CONTEXT 789

The Legal and Ethical Context

Test-takers and test score users need a remedial procedure whenever a test is shown
to be in violation of established practice or a regulation. For example, if there are
problems with any aspect of a test (indefensible construct validity, absence of bias, lack
of access, administration, scoring, score-reporting, etc.) or if any existing regulations
have been violated that has a direct impact on test-takers, remedial measures should be
available to test-takers or any affected persons or agencies. Furthermore, if decisions
made on test scores that are in doubt can be reversed as in nonhigh stakes tests, then
any of the following remedial measures might satisfy affected test-takers: re-scoring,
re-totaling, or re-taking of the test for free or a small fee. In cases when decisions are
not easily reversible or test-takers are affected adversely, legal action may be the only
recourse.

Legal Framework in the U.S.

In the United States, legal frameworks based on the Constitution, federal civil rights
statutes, and judicial decisions apply to standardized tests (including language tests)
in educational, licensure, employment, and professional arenas. Test score interpreta-
tions and decisions based on scores can be challenged on three grounds by test-takers
or interested parties. They are the discrimination challenge based on the basis of test-
takers’ race, color, national origin, or gender; the due process challenge based on inade-
quate notice of test requirements or a challenge of the test’s curricular validity; and the
disability challenge based on legislation passed to protect Americans with disabilities.
The discrimination challenge: In terms of the discrimination challenge, three types
of claims can be made to a court: (1) A test is intentionally discriminating against
test-takers (who are a particular class of people) on the basis of race, color, na-
tional origin, or gender. This challenge is based on the equal protection clause in the
14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that forbids public employers from engag-
ing in acts of discrimination. (2) A test preserves the effects of prior discrimination.
(3) A disparate impact claim. This claim can be made when different test-taker groups
receive different scores (such as female and male or from different race/ethnic groups).
State and public school agencies that receive federal funding are prohibited from dis-
criminating against students based on federal statutes16 .
The due process challenge: High-stakes tests that are not found to be discriminating
against protected classes may still be illegal under the due process provision of the 5th
and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. The claims under this provision may be
either that the test-takers did not receive sufficient advance notice or adequate notice
of the test or that the test-takers did not receive instruction on the test knowledge and
skills (also known as curricular validity). In terms of the adequate notice provision,
test score users or similar agencies are expected to provide adequate notice. This has
been interpreted by courts to mean anywhere between 1 to 4 years of advance notice
before a test becomes effective, so that the test-takers have adequate opportunity to
learn the relevant knowledge or skills. In terms of curricular validity, there have been
disagreements as to how educational agencies can demonstrate what students have
been taught. Some argue that the formal written school or district curriculum can be
used to match the knowledge and skills measured in the test. Others argue that it is not
the formal written curriculum that should be used to check curricular validity but the
instructional curriculum of the classroom. Test researchers have also made the same
argument: They prefer to examine whether test-takers have had the “opportunity to
learn” the knowledge and skills in the classroom rather then merely matching test
knowledge and skills with a formal written curriculum.
Accommodations for test-takers with disabilities: Test accommodations for test-takers
with disabilities were given a major push in the form of three pieces of legislation
790 KUNNAN

as part of a political and social agenda: Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973,
the Americans with Disability Act (ADA) of 1990, and the Individuals with Disabil-
ities Educational Act (IDEA) of 1991 and 1997. Of these, the ADA of 1990 prohibits
not only discrimination against individuals with disabilities but also relates to the
opportunities for individuals to obtain employment and education17 .
Following these legislative actions, the 1999 Standards and the Code of Fair Testing
Practices in Education (Joint Committee on Testing Practices, 1988) recommend that test
accommodations should be made available for test-takers with disabilities. In the 1999
Standards, the chapter titled “Testing Individuals with Disabilities” identifies individ-
uals with disabilities “as persons possessing a physical, mental, or developmental
impairment that substantially limits one or more of their life functions” (p. 101). And,
it urges “test developers and users to become familiar with (U.S.) federal, state, and
local laws, and court and administrative rulings that regulate the testing and assess-
ment of individuals with disabilities” (p.101). U.S. federal regulations and testing
guidelines, therefore, mandate that tests should not discriminate against test-takers
with disabilities but must be valid measures, measuring the ability to be tested and
not the disability. While this mandate for testing and test accommodations is evident,
IDEA regulations and Section 504 contain an important proviso: “ . . . except where
those skills are the factors that the test purports to measure” (Burns, 1998, p. 9). This
is important because in some cases the disability itself might be the focus of the test.
However, neither the regulations nor the testing guidelines provide or suggest the
exact test accommodations to be offered to test-takers with specific disabilities. This
leaves many critical issues to be sorted out by test developers, administrators, and
users, and finally, by courts.
In the past, test-takers with disabilities were identified only as persons with visual,
hearing, or physical impairments. Test-takers with visual impairments were provided
a Braille version of a test, test-takers with hearing impairments received a written
version of test directions, and test-takers with physical impairments were offered
the services of a scribe. In recent years, however, learning disabilities have gained
more attention, and appropriate test accommodations (such as extended time and
format change) have been designed for this group of test-takers. In fact, in 1994–
1995, out of about 5 million test-takers with disabilities, a little more than 50% are
learning disabled. What is critical to recognize is that as people with disabilities are
heterogeneous, test accommodations need to fit the needs of the individuals if the
test accommodation has to be valid as well as meaningful. The most popular type of
accommodation is time accommodation: test scheduling, time management, extended
time, and reduced time. A chief concern of this test accommodation is whether the
validity of the test-score interpretations is altered when the extended time given is
varied for test-takers with and without disabilities.
ADA-related challenges: Prior to the passage of the ADA of 1990 and the IDEA
of 1991 and 1997, legal cases filed by test-takers with disabilities or disability rights
groups were based on the two challenges discussed earlier. Post-ADA legal cases have
generally been related to learning disabilities (rather than physical disabilities) and
this is probably due to the fact that the majority of test-takers with disabilities are now
from this group. But in the various rulings, courts have not provided clear directions on
many critical matters like test accommodations (such as extended time). Pitoniak and
Royer (2001) state, “The results of these cases do not present a consistent picture, owing
to courts’ struggling with both how to determine whether a learning disability exists
and what that disability means in terms of the affected individual’s rights” (p. 63).
In summary, as legal challenges in testing are relatively new, court opinions do not
offer clear directions as to how to proceed with many matters, including how to avoid
discriminatory testing practice, how to identify individuals with disabilities, or what
test accommodations are appropriate for different physical and learning disabilities18 .
 43. LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT FROM A WIDER CONTEXT 791

Ethics and Professional Standards: The Way Forward

With legal standards and regulations constantly under attack and reinterpretation
by courts, it is obvious that legal recourse for unsound professional practice may not
always help and is often too late from the test-takers’ point of view. Thus, sound pro-
fessional practice needs to be promoted and one way of doing this would be to focus on
ethical practice for testing professionals. However, according to Spolsky (1995), from
the 1910s to the 1960s, social, economic, political, and personal concerns among key
language-testing professionals in the United States and the United Kingdom domi-
nated boardroom meetings and decisions. But in the last two decades, ethical concerns
have emerged in the research literature. Spolsky (1981) argued that tests should be la-
beled like drugs, “Use with care.” Stevenson (1981) urged language testers to adhere to
test development standards that are internationally accepted for all educational and
psychological measures. Canale (1988) suggested a naturalistic-ethical approach to
language testing, emphasizing that language testers should be responsible for ethical
use of the information they collect. Stansfield (1993) argued that professional stan-
dards and a code of practice are ways to bring about ethical behavior among testers.
Alderson et al. (1995) reviewed principles and standards but concluded “language
testing still lacks any agreed standards by which language tests can be evaluated,
compared, or selected” (p. 259). Corson (1997), broadly addressing applied linguists,
made a case for the development of a framework of ethical principles by considering
three principles: the principal of equal treatment, the principle of respect for persons,
and the principle of benefit maximization.
In the last few years, momentum has gathered through publications such as the
special issue of Language Testing guest-edited by Alan Davies (1997) and conferences
such as the Language Assessment Ethics Conference (see Kunnan, 2002). Narrowing
the discussion to applied ethics, Hamp-Lyons’ (1997) asked what the principle was
against which the ethicality of a test was to be judged. To offer guidance in this matter,
the International Language Testing Association (ILTA) recently published a report of
the Task Force on Testing Standards (1995) and the ILTA’s Code of Ethics (2000) that
lays out broad guidelines of how professionals should conduct themselves.
As a way of forward, then, the key question for assessment ethics should be: How
should ethical test development and test use be promoted? The answer is that there are
indirect and perhaps difficult ways. One way is to develop appropriate group ethics
through the development of professional standards (for researchers, practitioners,
and students) as recently provided by ILTA’s Code of Ethics. This Code could be used
in developing, researching, maintaining, and evaluating tests as well as in training
graduate students although it may not be universally applicable and adjustments may
need to be in certain communities.19

CONCLUSION

This chapter discusses language tests and testing practices by situating them within
four main wider contexts. The four contexts discussed here do not preclude the rel-
evance of other contexts that may be useful in other discussions. This chapter also
explicitly puts forward the notion that tests are best understood when a wider inter-
disciplinary perspective is used in debating and evaluating tests and testing practice.
As Spolsky (1995) asserts, “In the study of fields like language testing and teaching,
scholars need to be ready to draw not just on the obvious theoretical disciplines that
underpin applied linguistics, such as the various language sciences and education,
but also on fields like economics, political science, and sociology that furnish methods
of investigating the context in which language and education exist” (p. 3).
792 KUNNAN

I would like to conclude with McNamara’s (2000) beautiful theater analogy that
perfectly captures my own interest in the wider context and the spirit of this chapter: At
a moment of dramatic intensity in the theater, the glare of a single spotlight can isolate
an individual actor from his or her surroundings. The spotlight focuses the spectators’
attention on the psychological state of the character being portrayed. Temporarily at
least, the surroundings, including other actors present, are rendered invisible for the
audience. Until fairly recently, thinking about language assessment was like this. It
focused exclusively on the skills and abilities of the individual being assessed . . . But
what does this spotlight of this individualizing perspective exclude? What lies behind,
around? Imagine the spotlight going off to be replaced by normal stage lighting: The
other actors on the stage are revealed. Now imagine the performance continuing,
but the house lights coming up, so that the audience is revealed. Imagine finally the
side curtains behind pulled back and the stage removed to expose all the personnel
working behind the scenes. The individual performer is now exposed as forming part
of a larger collective activity . . . (p. 67).

NOTES

1. As I am making no distinction in this chapter between tests and assessments, I am using tests inter-
changeably with assessments and testing interchangeably with assessment.
2. General critiques of U.S. educational testing include Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, (1981) Crouse and
Trusheim’s The Case against the SAT (1988), and more recently Lemann’s The Big Test (1999).
3. In this view, ‘a fair test’ is not necessarily one in which a test-taker is awarded a better score.
4. In Fig. 43.1, the four main contexts are presented in neatly overlapping circles. In reality, it is likely
that one or two contexts may overlap fully or only be tangentially involved. Much depends on the
how and why a test is commissioned, developed, administered, scored, reported, researched, and
used by the community in which the test operates. Moreover, the main contexts need not always be
configured in the manner shown. In particular communities, depending on the local situation, the main
contexts of interests could be social and political or economic and technological, or legal and political,
etc.
5. Davidson and Lynch, (2002) in their book Testcraft use the concept of mandate, which they define as a
constellation of forces that shape the design of a test: theory, curriculum, politics, money, answerability
(to higher powers), etc.
6. Most of the examples in this chapter are from the United States this is where the author works but this
does not mean that the “Wider Context” perspective promoted in the chapter is restricted to the United
States. This framework could be used for evaluation of tests and testing practices of any community.
7. Most commentators read private schools to mean faith-based (meaning, religious and Christian) schools
which is very much in line with the Republican President Bush’s agenda.
8. It must be noted that California teachers are not directly involved in any of the standardized tests used
in the state. The CAHSEE, the CELDT, or the California Achievement Test 6 are all produced by testing
companies thus increasing the divide between teaching and testing and teachers and tests.
9. The INS has been reorganized and renamed the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS).
See the website for details: http://www.immigration.gov/graphics/index.htm retrieved on 5/27/2003.
10. This website provides a list of about 200 unconnected English sentences for the written English test,
much like a set of sentences in an old-fashioned dictation test; test-takers are cautioned that other sen-
tences may be on the test: http://www.ins.usdoj.gov/graphics/services/natz/natzsamp.htm retrieved
on 1/23/2003.
11. At the time of writing, the College Board, which owns the SAT, is planning to revise the test. The new
test will have Critical Reading (an increase in the reading part and the elimination of the word analogies
section), an Essay Writing section (a new addition), and the Mathematics section.
12. See website for HUMRRO’s (2002) independent evaluation of the CAHSEE: http://www.cde.ca.gov/
statetests/cahsee/eval/2002/2002humrro.html retrieved on 1/25/2003.
13. The FairTest: The National Center for Fair and Open Testing at the following website has many argu-
ments on these lines: www.fairtest.org.
14. A caveat regarding this type of bias is that outcome differences do not automatically mean that the test
is biased but the burden is on the test developer to demonstrate that biased test items are not causing
the differential performance.
15. It was reported in U.S. press that the Computer-based TOEFL, which had been launched in sub-
Saharan Africa in 2000, soon had to be replaced with the paper-and-pencil version due to problems of
geographical access after many university and college professors in departments of African studies in
the United States (known as Africanists) complained to ETS about this.
 43. LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT FROM A WIDER CONTEXT 793

16. This is a uniquely American legal provision due to legal (for example, slavery) and illegal discrimination
of several groups of people (Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian
Americans) practiced for centuries in the country.
17. Similar laws are on the books in the United Kingdom the European an Union, and India.
18. See Bersoff (1981) and Fulcher & Bamford (1988) for legal challenges that are possible in the United
States and United Kingdom. Also, see Kunnan (2000) for a list of court cases related to testing in the
United States and Lippi-Green (1997) for court cases related to employment-related language use and
discrimination in the United States.
19. See Singer (1991) for discussion on universal prescriptivism and relativism.

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44

Validity and Validation in

Language Testing
Alan Davies
University of Edinburgh
Catherine Elder
Monash University, Australia

INTRODUCTION

The concept of validity, which concerns the truth-value of a test and its scores, is
both powerful and precarious: powerful because it dominates all aspects of language
testing; and precarious because it responds uneasily to four challenges. These are first,
the challenge of the appeal to logic and to syllogistic reasoning; second, the challenge
of the claims of reliability; third, the challenge of the local and the universal; and
fourth, the challenge of the unitary and the divisible. In this chapter we will first
discuss the concept of validity, making use of these three causes of concern; we will
then take up the issue of validation and examine with exemplification how far different
approaches to validation meet the requirements of validity. It is through validation
that validity is established, which means that validity is only as good as its validation
procedures.

VALIDITY

The Appeal to Logic

Our concern in this chapter is with validity and validation in language testing. How-
ever, it may help clarify the argument if we begin with a note on how the term is used
in philosophical logic. Validity is an old song for philosophers. They define validity
in the following ways:

A deductive argument is valid whenever its conclusion necessarily follows from the
premises; if the premises of the argument are true, then its conclusion cannot be false; the
conclusion too must be true. (Angeles, 1981, p. 310)

795
796 DAVIES AND ELDER

Traditional logic studies the validity of syllogistic arguments while modern logic iden-
tifies as valid those arguments which accord with truth-preserving roles. Any argument
is valid if and only if the set consisting of its premises and the negation of its conclusion
is inconsistent. (Marcus, 1995, p. 894)

In other words, an argument is valid if its premises and its conclusion are consistent
with one another; or to put it negatively, an argument is valid if its premises and the
negation of its conclusion are inconsistent with one another.
When choosing a language test for a particular setting (such as medicine), this
mode of argument can be exemplified thus:

r This is a test of medical Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP).

r We are in an appropriate medical setting in which to use the test.
r Therefore the test is likely to be valid in this setting.

The negation of its conclusion would be that this test is not valid for its purpose, which
would be inconsistent with the previous premises.
For us, what matters in these definitions of validity via logic is the nature of validity
construed as an argument. Validity is self-contained: Its definition is reflexive (“valid-
ity is validity”) just like those other great abstractions: beauty, truth, justice. No doubt
that is why when Keats attempted to explain beauty, the best he could achieve was:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

The analogy to justice is particularly instructive since justice (like validity) is

unattainable directly and must be reached for via law: It is as though lawyers rec-
ognize that while they aim at justice, they have to be content to achieve a remedy
that is available in law. There is indeed a view that states that true justice is simply
unattainable because there are too many factors that would need to be taken into
consideration. And so, just as justice has to be approached via the law, so in the same
way, validity can only be accessed via validation.

The Claim of Reliability

If the truth-value of a test is said to be its validity, the reliability of a test indicates
its consistency. The relationship of reliability and validity is not unlike that between
Form and Meaning in language studies. Meaning, we say, is what matters and yet,
without Form, Meaning disappears. In the same way, Validity is what gives a test its
life, its uniqueness as a measure, but to do that, to exist as an entity, it needs reliability.
It is for this reason that Lado wrote, “Reliability . . . is general rather than specific. If
the scores on a test are steady, that is, reliable, they are reliable regardless of what we
test” (Lado, 1961, p. 31). Reliability, we say, is necessary but not sufficient: sufficiency
depends on validity. Looked at this way, reliability appears as a separate, parallel (if
junior) quality of a test, supporting validity but somehow independent of it. Hence
Lado’s comment about the generality of reliability: It provides the framework, the
structure on which validity depends and builds.
Another currently fashionable way of explaining the relationship is to see reliabil-
ity as part of validity. Being reliable (or consistent) may not be exciting, but in a test,
as in life, it can offer a modicum of security, and therefore of meaning—even when its
validity status is unclear. But a modicum only, for although it offers generality, that
generality is repetitive and recursive, whereas validity offers newness and change.
Reliability is said to represent agreement between similar measures of the same test
 44. VALIDITY AND VALIDATION IN LANGUAGE TESTING 797

such that, for whatever reason, scores derived from different test sessions or differ-
ent ratings will be similar, whereas validity resides in agreement between different
measures of the same trait (and, to be convincing, in lack of agreement with measures
of another trait).
It makes sense to recognize this similarity dimension of reliability as contribut-
ing to the overall validity portfolio, which is how validity is now typically viewed
(Bachman, 1990; Chapelle, 1999; Winter, 2000). Being similar is a start, as it were, it
shows that replication is possible: but it tells us little about the construct that the test
models. For that we must look at difference, at the new, at the explorations validity
allows us to make. For statisticians, there is a fixed relationship between reliability
and validity such that the maximum validity of a test is actually the square root of
its reliability (Bellack & Hersen, 1984, p. 48). Thus, the higher a test’s reliability, the
greater the possibility for validity. This relationship is not, however, reciprocal: If one
could “demonstrate that a measure has good validity, its reliability can be assumed
and becomes a secondary issue” (Bellack & Hersen, p. 48). Indeed, current discus-
sions of interpretivist approaches to test validity (Lynch, 2003) claim precisely this,
that reliability is not as necessary as has been traditionally assumed.

The Local and the Universal

Much of the argument in language testing over the last period mirrors the argument
in the wider social science and humanities area, that between the enlightenment (or
universal) view that humanity (and experience) can be understood in similar ways
and the relativist (or local) view that contexts are not just apparently but fundamen-
tally different. This is the argument from postmodernism, which has insisted over the
last 40 years or so that it is unacceptable to assume that one size fits all. With regard to
test validity, these approaches manifest themselves as the positivist and the interpre-
tivist, as Lynch (2003) explains. Lynch maintains, “Different research paradigms such
as positivism and interpretivism require different validity frameworks” (Lynch, 2003,
p. 153). Positivist validity typically uses correlational information between the test and
an agreed criterion. The question asked within this paradigm is “Are we measuring the
relevant trait or construct?” (Lynch, 2003, p. 151). Interpretivist validity, on the other
hand, asks the opposite question: What is it that we are testing? Unlike positivist va-
lidity frameworks, interpretivist frameworks do not insist on reliability: “Ultimately,
establishing validity from an interpretivist perspective involves achieving consensus
across multiple audiences and sources of evidence” (Lynch, 2003, p. 154).
How far tests are appropriate only in a specific (or local) context and how far
they can be used more widely (or universally) continues to be debated. Brown and
Goodman (2001) point up the issue: “Validity claims always occur in and are tied to
specific contexts. Nevertheless, Habermas thinks that they transcend the contingencies
of their local genesis to make universal claims. To make a claim to validity is, for
Habermas, always to presuppose universality, that is to suppose that any rational
person would be motivated to agree” (p. 206).
Transcending their specific contexts must mean that in some sense validity does
reside in the test instruments. After all, on what principled grounds does one choose
this test (Test A) rather than that test (Test B) to develop and employ? How do we
know which one is more likely to provide the kinds of information we seek regarding
score inferences? It must surely be the case that Test A and Test B are distinguishable
on some principled basis before one or the other is put into use for decision making,
learning, or whatever purpose the test claims to serve. And that principled basis must
have something to do with validity. In other words, over time, tests in use (such as
TOEFL or IELTS) accrue information about the scores that candidates have achieved
on them and the inferences that have been drawn. This information allows us to say
798 DAVIES AND ELDER

that one test has provided more helpful inferences than the other and it is not just
a trick of semantics, therefore, to say that one test is more valid than the other for a
particular purpose.
If of course we are constructing a new test then we have no such information to go
on and must rely on the inferences gained from the first test scores to make a judgment
about the test. And, indeed, it is now commonly accepted that validity is everywhere
a property of the conclusions, interpretations, or inferences that we draw from tests
and not a property of the tests themselves, that is, no test is tout court “valid.” Such
a view is not just current orthodoxy. Lado opined that “validity is not general but
specific” (1961, p. 31). And in the same vein, and in the same decade as Lado (1961),
Tyler (1963) argued for local validity: “A good rule when using tests to select people
is: get information about their specific validity, what they accomplish in a particular
situation” (p. 93).
This is a view echoed by Anastasi (1988): “The validity of a test cannot be reported
in general terms. No test can be said to have ‘high’ or ‘low’ validity in the abstract. Its
validity must be established with reference to the particular use for which the test is
being considered” (p. 139).

The Unitary and the Divisible

Validity, then, concerns the extent to which a test provides us with true information
about persons, always with regard to the situation of its use. It is now regarded as a
unitary concept. In order to allow the test constructor to make a statement about the
test’s validity, some accessible methodology of investigation is necessary. Otherwise,
validity remains a matter of belief, a kind of magic. And so, in spite of the unitary
view now taken of validity, it has to be operationalized through the usual suspects
of content and construct validity, concurrent and predictive validity, although, as we
have seen, the current fashion is to talk not about plural validities but about multiple
sources of evidence for validity. As Messick points out, “excessive reliance on only
one kind of validity evidence (as, in the past, on only one kind of so-called validity)
is unlikely to be seriously endorsed for long” (1988, p. 35). To the usual suspects we
need to add reliability; some will want to include face validity. However, the joker is
the validity added by Messick (1989) as a result of the wider cultural climate of social
and ethical turns. He wrote of the role of test consequence: for some this has come to
be called consequential validity. Here, for the first time judgment is made not just by
design and intention and existing networks, but by future possibilities and unexpected
consequences (collected, of course, post hoc). There are serious objections to this. It is
analogous to saying here is an alarm clock; it keeps very good time; however, because
it could be used to trigger a bomb (an unexpected consequence) it behooves us to
monitor those who purchase the alarm clock and the uses they make of it. Surely a
distinction needs to be drawn between, for example, weapons such as bombs, which
are designed with the sole purpose of inflicting harm and, say, motor cars, which in
some circumstances may be used by suicide bombers to carry out terrorist attacks. To
what extent are the manufacturers of the motor cars responsible for what, after all,
are unintended consequences of the machines they have produced?
Test specificity, the accumulation of evidence, these, we have seen, are not new
demands. What Messick adds, and it is an important addition, is to make the link
between testing arguments and the wider social and ethical turns. McNamara (2000)
considers this development as representing “a renewed theory of test validation.”
This takes account of the impact of the test itself and the changes produced by its
implementation.
Two main changes have taken place with regard to how validity can be opera-
tionalized. The first is that the scope of evidence gathered and taken into account has
 44. VALIDITY AND VALIDATION IN LANGUAGE TESTING 799

widened. The second is that there is a broad antipositivist groundswell of scepticism

about the meaning and value of traditional correlational evidence (e.g., O’Loughlin,
2001). As we will see, such evidence is still collected and taken seriously—but it is
now only part of the validity story, and for exactly the same reason that reliability,
which relies entirely on correlational evidence, is now itself put into question (Swain,
1990; Moss, 1994; Gipps, 1994) or at least downplayed in classroom contexts, where
the focus is on enhancing learning, rather than on buttressing high stakes decisions.
Classical validity studies looked in different and unrelated directions. Content va-
lidity was the appeal to specialist knowledge of the field under test (‘English grammar,’
‘Japanese for tour-guides,’ ‘French for chefs’). Both predictive validity and concurrent
validity used correlations to examine how close the test was to existing (and accept-
able) criteria, predictive to a variable to be accessed in the future, concurrent to a
variable already available. And construct validity, that “most central type of validity”
(Lynch, 2003, p. 151), concerns, as Bachman explains, “the extent to which perfor-
mance on tests is consistent with prediction that we make on the basis of a theory
of abilities or constructs” (Bachman, 1990, p. 255). There is also that nonprofessional
validity, face validity, the appeal to the layperson who is not equipped to examine the
test (and the inferences of its scores) in terms of its professional content and meaning.
Face validity is routinely dismissed as unimportant but lay views do matter, even
though they will differ, because the lay are just as much stakeholders as are the pro-
fessionals. Indeed, in some instances, a test’s limited appeal may result in reduced
engagement with the test-taking event on the part of test-takers, thereby limiting the
accuracy of test scores as measures of ability (Elder & Lynch, 1998). And there is the
further point: As some of the stakeholders (for example, government departments)
commission tests to implement policies they have adopted, if the test does not ‘speak’
to them in a language they understand, it will not go ahead.
Each approach in the classical tradition had failings, especially on its own. Predic-
tive and concurrent validity were bedeviled by the lack of certainty as to whether the
external criterion was itself a valid one and how to interpret significant but low corre-
lations. Content validity was not dependent on statistics and it did give everyone the
comfortable feeling that they were on home ground, but not for long. Since content
validity operated at the level of surface similarities between field and test, it was dif-
ficult to demonstrate a convincing correspondence between test tasks and real-world
tasks (Davies, 1984) and to encompass sufficient detail in a test to be able to claim
representativeness (Alderson, 1988). An alternative approach to content validity was
to theorize it. Messick points out that “except for simple domains . . . the notion of a
domain or behavioural class is a construct” (1988, p. 39) and Fulcher argues that using
content validity as a major criterion in test design and evaluation has been mistaken
(1999, p. 221).
Messick’s particular achievement has been to characterize validity as a simple and
coherent question: “This question has various aspects related to evidence about, ra-
tionales for, interpretations of, and uses of a particular test in a specific social context”
(Cumming, 1996, p. 4). However, Messick insists on a unified approach to validity
in which “appropriateness, meaningfulness, and usefulness of score-based inferences
are inseparable and . . . the unifying force is empirically grounded construct interpre-
tation” (1988, p. 35). To that extent Messick was primarily concerned with validity as
a theoretical concept rather than with validation in its practical operation.
Messick’s conceptual clarity can be analyzed less charitably. Since validity can only
be achieved through validation, using logic, judgment, and empirical evidence, it may
be suggested that what Messick does is to offload all the problems of validity onto
validation, leaving validity as an abstract and essentially empty concept. Indeed, he
adds to the problems of validity by extending its scope into the social and the ethical.
Kunnan (2000) goes further in proposing that validity should be regarded as only one
800 DAVIES AND ELDER

component of ethicality, along with access and justice. Indeed, Bachman reminds us
that “historically, the notion of construct validity grew out of efforts in the early 1950s
by the American Psychological Association to prepare a code of professional ethics,
part of which would address the adequacy of psychological tests” (Bachman, 1990,
p. 255).
However, professional test constructors must always steer a middle course between
the potential hypocrisy of claiming to be ethical and the acceptance of responsibility for
the impossible demands of unexpected consequences (Davies, 1997). What professions
exist to do is to combine field expertise with a proper moral and social concern to act
responsibly in normal settings. As it happens, we do not think Messick was so reckless
as to open the floodgates of consequential validity in this way, concerned, as he was,
to “improve validity by test design” (Messick, 1996, p. 247) but it does appear possible
that his theorizing has been extended and misapplied by the proponents of critical
language testing (Shohamy, 2001; Pennycook, 2001).
To an extent, what Messick has done is to issue a warning, a kind of government
health warning for test consumers. Like land mines, he is saying, tests have continuing
lives. Take care! Be on your guard! (Lynch, 2003, p. 164; and see Spolsky, 1995). This
is how Cumming explains Messick’s message in Table 44.1, making use of Messick’s
own “Progressive Matrix of construct validation (1989).”
He writes “Ultimately, Messick proposes that the social consequences of test use
must be appraised, combining the considerations raised in all three previous cells of
his matrix, to assess the long-term effects that actually occur from implementation of
a test, for example, the washback of tests on educational practices or more broadly
the realizations of specific values related to the construct of interest on whole societal
systems” (Cumming, 1996, p. 7).
Making construct validity the validity of choice may create problems. Just as con-
struct validity was an attempt to imbue correlational and content validity with wider
responsibilities, so in more recent times, classical construct validity has itself been
found inadequate because, however perfect or ‘beautiful’ the construct may be in it-
self, its effects may be unacceptable. (A good example from a different field would
be the system or construct of prison reform proposed by the Utilitarian philosopher
Jeremy Bentham. He invented the Panopticon, a Model or Silent Prison, designed in
such a way that prisoners were forbidden to speak and isolated from one another
but under constant observation by the warders. As a means of detaining prisoners at
minimum cost, the design was admirable; it was also inhuman. (It is said of the Model
or Silent Prison at Port Arthur in Tasmania that the idea was that the prisoners would
be given plenty of opportunity to consider their deeds and their fate. Many went mad
from the enforced silence and solitude).
Hence the push to consider effects, to widen the pool of evidence, hence the conse-
quential basis of validity what has come to be called “consequential validity.” What

TABLE 44.1
Cumming’s Interpretation of Messick’s Progressive Matrix
of Construct Validation

Test Interpretation Test Use

Evidential Basis 1. Construct validity 2. Construct validity

+ Relevance/utility
Consequential Basis 3. Construct validity 4. Construct validity
+ Value implications + Relevance/utility
+ Value implications
+ Social consequences
 44. VALIDITY AND VALIDATION IN LANGUAGE TESTING 801

this does that is different is to round up all available sources of evidence under the
auspices of construct validity, adding the relevance/utility, value implications, and
social consequences to the established content, concurrent, predictive, and construct
approaches. To that extent consequential validity is inductive, opening itself up to tests
as social facts and as institutionalized interventions. Lynch asks the hard question:

How far does the responsibility for the consequences of tests extend? If negative conse-
quences are the result of otherwise valid test measurement (construct relevant test-score
variance), is the test still valid? Is this the test developer’s responsibility? Questions like
these make the relationship between validity and ethics (as well as the social and political
nature of both) all the more apparent. And the fact that Messick’s framework raises these
questions demonstrates its usefulness as a bridge between positivist validity typologies
and interpretivist approaches to assessment validity. . . . (Lynch, 2003, p. 153)

The Old and the New

As we have seen, what we have called the precariousness of the validity concept is
evidence of its abstract nature. That being so, validity can be defined, established,
and measured only operationally. That is why discussion of validity quickly turns
into a consideration of validation. And so, contrary to the competing voices claiming
different approaches to and definitions of validity, what the dispute is really about is
validation. In other words, there is general agreement about validity: What is in dis-
pute is how to establish it, how to do validation. This explains why, very early in her
account of validity, Chapelle (1999) can slide between validity and validation, blur-
ring the distinction: “The definition of validity affects all language test users because
accepted practices of test validation are critical to decisions about what constitutes a
good language test for a particular situation” (p. 254).
Even the celebrated distinction between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ validity questions
(Tyler, 1963) does not represent a real difference of view of the meaning of validity
since what is (again) in contention is how to establish validity, in other words, how to
do validation.
The ‘old’ validity question was: To what extent does this test measure what it pur-
ports to measure? whereas the ‘new’ validity question asked: Just what is it that this
test does measure? The ‘old’ approach is at bottom a deductive approach: There is an
agreed criterion and what the test at issue aims to do is to represent or simulate that
criterion. Interestingly, for such a direct test–criterion relationship the concept of va-
lidity is multi(factorial) in the sense that there are different (and unrelated) avenues to
its establishment, thus content, concurrent, predictive, construct. All avenues provide
evidence, evidence that does not necessarily cohere as one judgment. Like the ‘old’
question the ‘new’ validity question is interested in what the test stands for, what it
means, what inferences may be drawn from the scores derived from it. The ‘old’ ver-
sion thinks it knows; the ‘new’ does not. For this reason the ‘new’ offers an inductive
approach. As we have seen, it looks for a range of types of information, all of which are
criterial since there may be different criteria, on the one hand seeking predictive infor-
mation and on the other, providing feedback on learners’ behavior. Furthermore, the
approach, paradoxically, is unitary, in the sense that all sources of evidence (including
reliability) belong together, contributing to the overall evaluation of the test’s validity.
What this suggests is that although validity is a unitary concept, what happens in vali-
dation is the search for a range of information contributing to the validity judgment of
the test. Since that may lead to contradictory evidence, decision makers have a choice,
either to redesign or revise the test so as to remove the contradictions or to accept
them and make explicit just how the test relates to each of the chosen criteria. For ex-
ample, contradiction is likely between impact on the educational system and selection
efficiency for promotion to higher levels of education or to coveted appointments.
802 DAVIES AND ELDER

VALIDATION

The Scope of Validation

We now turn to the process of test validation, and to the question of whether validation
efforts, on which the burden of proof for validity rests, can ever be deemed sufficient.
One thing that is certain is that the permissible evidence and the forms it comes in are
growing. A survey of validation studies in language testing (Hamp-Lyons & Lynch,
1998) documents a paradigm shift away from more positivistic forms of inquiry in-
volving statistical analysis of test scores toward more naturalistic approaches focusing
on the nature of the test encounter and the qualities of the performance elicited from
it. Kunnan’s (1998) collection of papers presented at one of the many Language Test-
ing Research Colloquia on the theme of validity also bears witness to this broadening
scope of validity inquiry and includes several papers on such issues as test-taker feed-
back and test-taking processes, which were not previously seen as central. Among the
newer and increasingly popular methodologies used for test validation is introspec-
tion, which is the subject of an entire volume by Green (1998) and is used to reveal
what informs test-taker choices and rater decisions. Discourse analysis has also found
favor as a means of illuminating the quality of speech elicited in oral proficiency in-
terviews (see McNamara, Hill, & May, 2002, for an overview). Studies in Language
Testing monographs in language testing put out by UCLES Cambridge (Milanovic,
1995) offer some rich accounts of the newer approaches to validation, some of which
combine both quantitative and qualitative techniques. Notable among these is that of
O’Loughlin (2001), which brings together evidence from different research traditions
to explore the equivalence of live- and tape-based forms of access:, a vocational test
of English used as a means of stemming the flow of skilled immigrants to Australia
during a period of economic recession in the early 1990s. The approaches taken in-
clude a more traditional quantitative analysis of score patterns to determine whether
scores derived from a live- and taped-based test can be mapped on a common scale,
along with quantitative and qualitative analyses of test discourse and a narrative
account of test-taking processes from multiple stakeholder perspectives. The conclu-
sion is that the two testing modalities are measuring different constructs and cannot
be used interchangeably. However, even such a thorough analysis is insufficient ac-
cording to Shohamy (2001) who, drawing support from Messick’s concern with the
values underlying test constructs and Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic power, argues
that validation efforts should go even further to deconstruct the broader meaning
of tests as institutional practice. Hawthorne (1997) is similarly dissatisfied with test
internal investigations asserting that in high-stakes tests such as the one investigated
by O’Loughlin: “Where the measurement of language proficiency is clearly a pretext
for achieving some broad political procedures, construct validation processes which
are concerned with what the test purports to measure may be an insufficient means
of ensuring the test’s ethicality” (p. 58).
This raises the important question of how much evidence is enough to claim that a
test is valid for its purpose, or indeed whether language testers can ever rest easy on
this score. Although Messick’s framework is often invoked, most published articles
single out a particular aspect of a test’s validity, leaving open the question of whether
validity limitations in one area might be compensated for by strong evidence for
validity with respect to another aspect of the test’s meaning or use. A notable exception
is Fulcher’s (1997) study of an English language placement test, which documents a
number of different approaches to examining the reliability and validity of an English
as a Second Language (ESL) placement test and concludes that the instrument fulfills
its purpose “as well as can be expected within the context” (p. 137). Fulcher’s study
brings home strongly the point that validity is a local and relative affair. Another
 44. VALIDITY AND VALIDATION IN LANGUAGE TESTING 803

attempt at a multifaceted approach is that offered by Guerrero (2000), who organizes

his critical review of the Four Skills Exam (FSE) used in New Mexico to measure
the Spanish language proficiency of bilingual educators around the various cells in
Messick’s framework. He finds the test wanting in almost every area and reports
that the test has since been replaced by another one, following “overdue legislative
action” (p. 418). It would be helpful to know whether all of the FSE’s shortcomings
were taken into account in this legal decision, or, whether, say, the lack of evidence for
the test’s reliability was seen as primary. One also wonders about the validity of the
new and improved test, La Prueba, given Guerrero’s suggestion that, ultimately, the
validity of teacher certification tests requires evidence that the teachers who pass them
are providing “meaningful instruction to the growing number of English language
learners in our schools” (p. 419). Such evidence may be elusive and in any case must
be gathered AFTER a test has become operational, which means that validity must be
taken on trust at the outset of any new testing initiative.
In an attempt to impose some order on what might seem an unwieldy and eclectic
enterprise, Read and Chapelle (2001) propose a framework that links validity and
validation to three aspects of a test’s purpose, namely the intended score inferences
(Messick’s construct validity and value implications), score uses (Messick’s relevance
and utility), and their intended impacts (Messick’s social consequences). They work
through the various dimensions of this framework with reference to eight different vo-
cabulary measures, proposing that validation studies are needed to support construct
definitions (with different kinds of evidence required according to whether these def-
initions are ‘trait’, ‘behaviorist’ or ‘interactionist’ in their orientation), the methods
of reporting scores (either multiple or global) and the audience for test presentation
(whether students, administrators, the general public, or the scholarly community).
The framework does not however accord priority to any aspect of validity. Moreover,
consequential validity, as they describe it, remains both daunting and inchoate, re-
quiring investigation of what each of the specified audiences makes of the information
it receives and whether these interpretations result in better diagnosis, better decision
making, or sounder theorizing.

The Validation Argument

Although it seems that the sources, kinds, and amounts of validation evidence nec-
essarily vary according to test purpose and context and to the view of language that
underpins the test design, there is general agreement that validation is a kind of
argument comparable to a legal defense. According to McNamara (2000) there are
two stages involved, each requiring consideration of evidence. First, there is the test
score, which is code for a claim about the candidate’s ability based on inference (com-
parable in his formulation with the charge laid against the suspect on the basis of
available clues). Then comes the subsequent investigation of the reasonableness of
this claim (comparable to the legal trial, where the evidence for the charge is sub-
jected to scrutiny). The importance of the second stage hinges on the consequences
of the first stage, which may sometimes be dire (resulting in possible failure or exclu-
sion in the case of tests, and a fine, imprisonment, or worse in the case of the police
charge). The higher the stakes, the greater the need for a formal defense. The legal
defense takes the form of a reasoned argument supported by a trail of evidence and so
too does the test validation process. The argument and evidence chain is built around
a series of hypotheses concerning a) what the test tasks or items are measuring and
how appropriate they are for this purpose, b) the inferences drawn from test scores,
c) the uses to which these scores will be put, and d) the consequences that are expected
to ensue from the test’s implementation.
804 DAVIES AND ELDER

A Validation Case Study

To illustrate the nature of the validation process and the reasoning that underpins it
we now offer a brief work-in-progress account of validation activities surrounding a
particular assessment procedure. This case study serves to illustrate the complexities
of the process, but also the ambiguity of outcomes that, it is argued, makes Messick’s
notion of validity as a unitary construct somewhat difficult to operationalize.
The test we have chosen is a Diagnostic English Language Needs Assessment
(DELNA) used in the University of Auckland, New Zealand, for the purpose of a)
identifying first-year undergraduates in an English medium university who may be
at risk in their academic study owing to limited English, b) determining the areas
in which such students are likely to experience problems, and then c) guiding them
toward appropriate means of language support in order to enhance their chances of
success (Elder & Von Randow, 2002). The test is administered to students, whether
native or non-native speakers of English, who cannot show formal evidence of English
language proficiency in the form of either a specified score on the IELTS test (or
recognized equivalent) or a designated level of performance in English or some other
writing-intensive subject offered as part of the end-of-school certificate used as a basis
for admitting students to the university. DELNA is a two-tiered procedure: The first
tier, made up of an academic vocabulary and text-editing component, which takes less
than 20 minutes to complete, is designed as a filter for the purpose of exempting more
literate students from further diagnosis. High scoring students are simply informed
that their performance is satisfactory and that language skills are unlikely to hamper
their academic progress. The second tier is for those who perform below a specified
threshold on Tier One. This second tier includes a listening, reading, and writing
component drawn from an English as an Additional Language (EAP) test developed
for an ESL population at the University of Melbourne1 and takes just under 3 hours to
complete. Its purpose is to assess students’ academic reading, listening, and writing
skills in greater depth, so that their strengths and weaknesses can be highlighted.
Performance is reported on a 6-point scale, with a descriptive profile generated for
each skill area and a recommendation for the student about possible avenues for
English support where these are deemed necessary.
Although the second tier diagnostic component has already been validated for
use with international students at another institution, the conditions surrounding the
introduction and implementation of the entire DELNA battery raise some important
local validity issues, which are currently being explored. In keeping with current
conceptualizations of validity as a process of logical argumentation, each foray into
validity is formulated as a hypothesis.

Case Study Hypotheses

In what follows, we examine our case study in terms of a series of questions (linked
to one or more cells in Messick’s matrix) accompanied by one or more hypotheses,
each contributing to our validation argument. The questions and accompanying hy-
potheses are set out below:

How effective is Tier One as a screening device? (Relevance/utility)

H.1 Students performing above a specified threshold will perform satisfactorily on

all of the second tier diagnostic components.
How suitable is the existing diagnostic test for the broader population to which it
is now being administered? (Construct validity)
 44. VALIDITY AND VALIDATION IN LANGUAGE TESTING 805

H.2 All test components will function uniformly for the different populations of
test-takers.
Is the new writing task eliciting relevant academic literacy skills? (Construct
validity/relevance/utility)

H.3 Essays rated high will contain a higher incidence of linguistic and discoursal
features, which have been found to be characteristic of academic prose in various
disciplinary areas.
Are score interpretations and cutoffs on the writing task consonant with academic
values? (Value implications, Relevance/utility)

H.4 Academics from different disciplines will accept the writing tasks as
representative of the language demands placed on students in their discipline.
H.5 The standards they use to judge the adequacy of samples of academic writing
will conform with those applied by the language experts who have been trained to
rate the scripts.
Are the existing test-reporting mechanisms meaningful to users? (Relevance
Utility)

H.6 Students, language instructors, and faculty administrators will be able to

interpret and make use of the test results for relevant test purposes.
How well do the various test components predict subsequent academic perfor-
mance? (Relevance/utility, Construct validity)

H.7 Academic language proficiency (as measured by DELNA) will be significantly

related to performance in the academic domain (as measured by GPA)
Are the outcomes of the DELNA initiative consonant with its intended purposes?
(Social consequences)

H.8 The student population will benefit from the information that the test provides.

Testing the Hypotheses

The first hypothesis pertains to the accuracy of the cutoffs on the first tier used
to exempt the more able students from the subsequent diagnostic component. The
hypothesis to be tested here is as follows:

H.1 Students performing above the specified threshold will perform satisfactorily on
all of the second tier diagnostic components.
This process involves getting students to take all DELNA components and using
logistic regression techniques to determine an optimum threshold on Tier One above
which there is the minimum number of false positives (i.e., students who perform
well on Tier One but unsatisfactorily on Tier Two) and false negatives (students who
perform poorly on Tier One and well on Tier Two). The false positives are more of a
806 DAVIES AND ELDER

concern than the false negatives since the latter are identified as false in the second
round of testing. This is an ongoing process with the threshold adjusted as additional
data come to hand. Given that the correlations between Tier One and Tier Two com-
ponents are less than perfect (ranging from 0.78 to 0.81 on successive administrations)
there is inevitably some error associated with these predictions and there is a trade-off
between raising the bar to a point where false positives are eliminated altogether and
the cost savings that come from lowering the threshold and thereby exempting larger
numbers of students from the more resource-intensive diagnostic assessment, which
includes a double-marked writing component.
Validation efforts have also been directed to exploring the suitability of DELNA for
the very diverse population of candidates, which includes recent immigrants from a
range of different countries, indigenous students who may or may not be native
speakers of English, and the majority European population, most of whom were
born and educated in New Zealand. (Recall that the diagnostic components of the
procedure were developed for an ESL population at another institution.) The purpose
of the investigation was to detect sources of possible bias or unfairness in the test
relating to factors independent of the construct. Such issues are now regarded as
integral to test fairness (e.g., AERA, APA, NCME, 1999). The hypothesis underlying
this investigation is as follows:

H.2 All test components will function uniformly for the different populations of
test-takers.

Note that uniform functioning has nothing to do with differences in mean ability
scores for the different groups, but rather with systematic differences that emerge after
any inter-group differences in ability have been taken into account. A technical bias
analysis of group-by-item interactions yielded evidence of differential item function-
ing on all test components except vocabulary, but how these apparent biases should
be dealt with is unclear, because some of the biased items (e.g., grammatical accu-
racy) were reckoned to be indicative of real differences in ability between the groups
rather than of construct-irrelevant variance (Elder, McNamara, & Congdon, 2003). A
technical bias analysis (as noted by Elder, 1997; Kunnan, 1997; Gipps, 1994, among
others) is an insufficient basis for drawing conclusions about test validity and fair-
ness. While some changes to the test have been made as a result of this bias analysis,
it is also clear that any potential unfairnesses linked to assessing this diverse popu-
lation of test-takers on a common measure need to be weighed against the cost and
administrative problems of introducing separate measures for native and non-native
students. These different groups of test-takers can only be identified via self-report
against an arbitrary criterion and students may in any case resist being assigned to
one or other category.
Further validation studies are being undertaken with respect to a new writing
task, which it is hoped can replace the one developed for University of Melbourne
students. The new task is more efficient, taking only 30 minutes rather than almost an
hour to complete and might be seen as more validly representing the target domain
of academic writing in that the response is closely linked to a specified quasiacademic
input rather than involving open-ended argument based on personal opinion (Moore
& Morton, 1999). There was also less evidence of bias on this task when scored holis-
tically than on the longer analytically scored writing component. (Of course, as noted
by Hamp-Lyons, 1991, holistic scoring is less useful for diagnostic purposes, so again
there is a trade-off between validity and absence of bias and the relevance and utility
of the task for its intended purpose.)
An additional validation study that is currently being undertaken involves a close
analysis of test-taker scripts generated from this task and explores the following hy-
pothesis:
 44. VALIDITY AND VALIDATION IN LANGUAGE TESTING 807

H.3 Essays rated high will contain a higher incidence of linguistic and discoursal
features that have been found to be characteristic of academic prose in various
disciplinary areas.
The analysis (Thomborson, 2003) focuses particularly on nominalization and in-
volves both quantitative and qualitative comparisons. It confirms that ‘good’ (i.e.,
high scoring) writers are more likely to use these nominalizations and use them to
better effect than the poor writers. However, this kind of linguistic analysis is unlikely
to convince the nonlinguistic members of the academy who may have different views
about what academic writing entails. Further hypotheses are being investigated in
order to explore the validity of the test as a predictor of the ability to handle the
language demands of academia.

H.4 Academics from different disciplines will accept the writing tasks as
representative of the language demands placed on students in their discipline.
H.5 The standards they use to judge the adequacy of samples of academic writing
will correspond to those applied by the language experts who have been trained to
rate the scripts.
These hypotheses are being investigated in a study involving academics from three
broad disciplinary areas who are invited both to rate a set of scripts spanning a range
of proficiency levels and to introspect about the criteria they have applied and to
offer their views as to the adequacy of the writing task for its intended purpose.
This approach (see also Cushing Weigle, Boldt, & Valsecchi, 2003) is somewhat dif-
ferent from the standard-setting procedures normally undertaken that involve pool-
ing of judgments with the aim of forcing consensus on the issue of cut-offs. The
differences of opinion that have emerged when lecturers from different disciplines
are left to their own devices (Smith, 2003) raise serious questions as to whether a
single writing task can capture the highly variable language demands of academia
and, indeed, whether there is such a thing as a uniform standard of satisfactory lan-
guage performance that can be separated from other content-based requirements and
the multitude of individual interpretations as to what a satisfactory academic essay
entails.
Nevertheless, although the perspective of the subject-specialists provides a useful
reality check, giving too much credence to academics from nonlanguage disciplines
may be unfair and unhelpful in that their training arguably equips them better to
assess mastery of content than to make judgments about language as a vehicle for
demonstrating this mastery. As for the single writing task, given that there are limita-
tions on available resources, one would need to embark on a further validation study
to weigh up the reliability and washback effects of using a single task assessed by
two raters against the use of two different academic writing tasks assessed by a single
rater, which is all that current resources will allow.
The more traditional forms of evidence based on the tests’ predictive power are
alluring in that they offer a seemingly more manageable means of evaluating a test’s
utility for its intended purpose. The hypothesis underlying predictive validation stud-
ies is as follows:

H.6 Language proficiency will be significantly related to performance in the

academic domain.
This hypothesis was sustained in this particular context of use. For those assessed
in 2002, the correlation between the combined Listening, Reading, and Writing score
and end-of-semester grades was around 0.32, indicating that language proficiency
808 DAVIES AND ELDER

accounted for just under 10% of the variance in academic performance. There was
some variation in the strength of these correlations according to skill, with reading
more strongly related to GPA than listening and writing. There was also, as one
might predict, considerable variation in the strength of the English/GPA relationship
according to faculty, with language proficiency appearing to play a more important
role in, for example, Arts, with a correlation of around 0.4, than in Science where it
fell to just under 0.2. Interestingly, the shorter writing task, in spite of the problems
revealed by the research mentioned earlier, proved to be a better predictor of GPA
across all faculties than the longer argument essay. These correlations, while moderate
at best, were in all cases statistically significant. They attest to the utility of DELNA
as a predictor of subsequent performance although there are obviously (and rightly
so!) many factors other than language that come into play. There also appears to be
a threshold of proficiency at or below that students are highly likely to fail in one
or other of their first-year subjects. While this needs to be confirmed by tracking
students in successive years of the program, it offers a useful basis for determining
which students might perhaps be required rather than simply advised to undertake
further English language instruction.
Another aspect of test use that is worthy of investigation pertains to the mean-
ingfulness of score reporting mechanisms for the various participants in the DELNA
initiative. There has been considerable work undertaken to refine the rating scales
for use by assessors, but the meaningfulness of the profiles for test-takers and other
end users has yet to be established. The assumption underlying the current reporting
mechanisms is that

H.7 Students, language instructors, and faculty administrators will be able to

interpret and use test results in appropriate ways.
A survey of users indicated that some were less interested in a profile than in
a score or a grade accompanied by a brief recommendation regarding the kind of
intervention required. Thus it has been decided to use different reporting mechanisms
for different users, with students and ESL teachers receiving a descriptive report on the
strengths and weaknesses and faculty coordinators receiving an overall bandscore and
recommendations for action that will assist them in planning and resource provision
for their students. Of course, the decision as to how to combine the various test
components in arriving at an overall score rests on a value judgment that must itself be
validated. There is also a danger that such a score could be used as a basis for barring
students from taking certain subjects (turning what is meant to be a diagnostic tool into
a de facto selection device). This is an unintended consequence that would constitute
a threat to the test’s validity.
A further important dimension of validity needs to be considered given that the
ultimate purpose of DELNA is to enhance the quality of the educational experience
and, ultimately, improve academic outcomes. The hypothesis to be investigated in
this regard relates to the impact of the testing program on the stakeholders, including
the students who take the test. It can be formulated thus:

H.8 Students will benefit from the information the test provides.
Just what kind of evidence needs to be gathered in support of such a hypothesis will
depend on how one defines the notion of benefit. Uptake of language support options
by students diagnosed to be at risk? More sophisticated, transferable, English skills
for at-risk students taking advantage of available support? Or higher marks and/or
lower failure rates in particular academic subjects? Uptake of support may depend
on a range of factors, such as motivation, or the amount of time that students have at
 44. VALIDITY AND VALIDATION IN LANGUAGE TESTING 809

their disposal to spend on extra English, which have little to do with the information
that the test provides. Investigating language gains achieved by low-scoring DELNA
students after an intensive period of language support is a complex undertaking,
and it is difficult to know how long one should wait before deciding whether or not
a particular support option is having the desired effect. A recent evaluation study
(Lynberg, 2003) has focused on the effectiveness of a language support course that
is integrally linked to subject-specific demands in a business course. Data gathered
after only one semester of study revealed a noticeable improvement in the quality of
written work among the DELNA students who attended the relevant tutorials. The
content-based instruction was also perceived by participants as extremely valuable
in helping them interpret and respond to the demands of the particular subject area.
Whether these language proficiency improvements have resulted in greater engage-
ment with study or better academic performance than would otherwise have been
achieved however remains open to question. A series of case studies documenting the
experience of first-year immigrant students undertaken by Bright (2003) has shown
that such students adopt highly variable strategies in pursuing their academic goals,
and that language proficiency, although perceived by the students to be important,
may be less influential than attitudinal and sociocultural factors, which are far more
difficult to pinpoint.
Validating DELNA in terms of its effectiveness in identifying students’ needs and its
impact on study strategies and study outcomes is a daunting undertaking because of
the difficulty of disentangling test impact from the many other institutional and social
influences that are played out in students’ lives and that influence their choices and
actions in complex ways (Wall, 2000). In any case, if we return to the legal analogy, it
could be argued that to include the consequences of a given procedure within the scope
of a validation exercise is to confuse the verdict with the sentence. The sentence, and
also the extent of rehabilitation or recidivism, may vary in response to factors that are
not directly related to the charge, such as the person’s prior history of criminal activity,
but the verdict of guilty or not guilty (or, in our case, literate or otherwise) and the
burden of proof for that verdict remains the same.

The Limits of Validation

The earlier account of validation efforts in relation to a particular language test raises
a number of issues regarding the validation process. First, it is clear that validation
entails more than a set of technical procedures undertaken while developing a test.
(In fact, we have given scant attention to these procedures in our account because we
are focusing on using a previously validated test in a new environment.) Whereas the
traditional attention to internal consistency and criterion-linked correlational analyses
remain fundamental, they may be insufficient grounds for defending inferences drawn
from test scores because they do not deal sufficiently with the test’s use in a particular
context for particular populations and specific purposes, with the values of the various
stakeholders (including test-takers and end users) and with the relationship between
the test’s intended purpose and its ultimate impact or consequences. A range of other
sources of evidence are therefore sought and the earlier example has provided some
indication of the kind of studies that might be conducted in the interests of gathering
such evidence for a particular context of use. The fact that such studies are ongoing
supports the notion that validity is not tucked up in the test itself but rather resides
in the meanings that are ascribed to the test scores. These meanings are dynamic
rather than static, changing along with shifting attitudes and practices in the relevant
context of test use. Since none of the studies described is sufficient in its own right,
it makes sense to gather all the aspects of validity under a single unified validity
umbrella as Messick has done. However, while Messick’s conceptualization of validity
810 DAVIES AND ELDER

has arguably provided a stronger theoretical base for validity inquiry, we still lack a
means of combining the various elements of Messick’s framework in a principled and
meaningful way, as Chapelle (1999) and Kunnan (chap. 43, this volume) also point out.
Furthermore, discussions as to what validity is or what it needs to encompass
leave unanswered the question of what constitutes adequate evidence of validity in
situations where there are limited time and resources available. Is a test invalidated by
a weak link in the chain of evidence as Haertel (1999) among others, has suggested? Or
are some sources of evidence to be considered primary? Do actions or interpretations
based on misunderstandings of a test’s purpose invalidate other outcomes that fit
with the test’s purpose? The processes described earlier certainly tell us more about
the test and the inferences that can or cannot be drawn from test scores, but the
decision as to whether the test is good enough, or what kind of improvements are
necessary or desirable or indeed whether we need the test at all, remain open to
debate. The broadened scope of validity inquiry comes at a price. It offers richer and
more multifaceted accounts of test properties and score meanings but at the same
time transforms validity into a kaleidoscope of images that configure differently for
each viewer. Gone is the perhaps fictional certainty that the validity coefficient once
offered, leaving us with no truth other than that which is constructed in the minds of
test stakeholders including those charged with validating the test.
One test consequence that is seldom explored in discussions of test validation is the
self-serving role of a language test, such as the one described previously, in furnish-
ing research and publication opportunities for applied linguistic scholars. Although
research conferences and publications have an important peer review function and
may serve to enhance the quality and rigor of the validation process, one could also
argue that the current tendency to complexify the task of validation has served the
research community well, while in some sense ignoring the very real need of test ad-
ministrators to justify the decisions they need to make about selection, certification,
and/or resource allocation.

The Way Forward

Returning to the legal analogy we conclude by reflecting on the fact, also noted by
McNamara (2000), that whereas the arbiters in a legal trial are the jurors and ultimately
the judge who considers the legitimacy of charges laid by other parties, the instigator
of test validation is more often than not the test developer. The test developer may
well have a vested interest in the outcome and his or her reluctance to seek evidence
against intended test interpretations means that validation studies often have a con-
firmatory bias (Cronbach, 1988). If the notion of test validity and the processes of test
validation discussed in this chapter are to be regarded as credible, rather than dis-
missed as the arcane practices of a self-serving élite, they need to be simplified or at
least rendered more transparent to test users. In addition, more attention needs to be
paid in test validation efforts to documenting the test design, delivery, and reporting
decisions that have arisen from validation studies, so that the utility of this process
is more obvious to the outsider. For example, was the decision to do away with the
subject-specific modules of the IELTS test a result of the findings of research (e.g., by
Clapham, 1996) or was it a decision based largely on cost considerations? And what
is the relationship between ETS-sponsored research on TOEFL-related issues and the
design of the Next Generation TOEFL? How will the findings of current research on
the impact of both the IELTS and the TOEFL program be acted on? Will it result in
changes to test design or simply in caveats that delimit the responsibilities of testing
agencies in relation to test-related teaching practices and score-related decisions made
by institutions? Do expanded notions of test validity mean that responsibilities for test
validation are also more widely distributed as Chalhoub-Deville and Turner (2000)
 44. VALIDITY AND VALIDATION IN LANGUAGE TESTING 811

suggest? How can stakeholders be alerted to these responsibilities and what sanctions
can or should be applied to those who fail to discharge them? If discussions about
new dimensions of validity and new ways of validation are to do more than warm the
air, the language testing community needs to come clean about not just the processes
involved in the business of test validation but also to build up what Hamp-Lyons
(2000) refers to as “case law,” documenting the conclusions they come to about how
much validation is enough in different testing situations and how different sources of
evidence are weighed in overall judgments about the adequacy of assessment tools,
the appropriacy of their uses, and the legitimacy and fairness of their impacts.

VALIDITY AND VALIDATION

In this chapter we have considered the relationship between the concept of validity
and the practice of validation. We have highlighted the contribution of Samuel Mes-
sick to our understanding, both in his presentation of validity as a unitary concept and
in the blueprint he presents for the pursuit of validation from multiple perspectives.
Validity is the abstract test construct; validation, through the assembling of multiple
sources of information including empirical evidence, judgments, and logical appreci-
ation, operationalizes validity. So much is straightforward: validation operationalizes
validity. However, this does not resolve the dilemma at the heart of validity; how to
combine into a coherent whole the different insights offered by validation: in other
words how to give the multiple sources of information that validation provides, the
unity that validity needs.

NOTES

1. The test is known as Diagnostic English Language Assessment (Language Testing Centre, 1991).

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45

A Look Back at and Forward to

What Language Testers Measure
Micheline Chalhoub-Deville
Craig Deville
The University of Iowa

INTRODUCTION

Our charge for this chapter is to write about measurement issues in second language
(L2) testing. To do this we begin by presenting a definition of measurement that guides
much of our thinking and discussion. We apply the definition to an examination of
topics found in language testing textbooks published since 1961. We focus primarily
on how language testers have depicted the construct of second language ability and
performance over the years, and we trace the past development and point to a plau-
sible future of the field’s view of what we measure and how. Finally, we conclude by
advocating increased attention to validity arguments that focus on how test scores are
actually used.
A major part of the chapter focuses on how the L2 construct definition has evolved
over time. The review starts with Lado’s (1961) L2 representation and moves through
the various models to the present day and includes emerging calls for considering
interactional competence in language testing. In discussing interactional competence,
we seek primarily to problematize the issues raised by this model. Given the sur-
vey character of the chapter, it is not feasible to deliberate in detail on these issues,
but interested readers can consult Chalhoub-Deville (2003). Finally, it is important to
mention that in the present review we do not seek to promote any one model, but to
explicate the orientation and the contribution of each model to the measurement of
language testing.

DEFINITION OF MEASUREMENT

Measurement, assessment, evaluation, and testing are terms that are sometimes used
interchangeably in everyday language, and at other times are utilized by authors to
denote distinct ideas, intents, and practices (e.g., compare Bachman, 1990, and Lynch,
815
816 CHALHOUB-DEVILLE AND DEVILLE

2001). We adopt a definition of measurement in the present chapter that situates it

as part of testing, which in turn can serve broader assessment and/or evaluation
purposes. In addition, our definition reflects a more conventional perspective and not
alternative paradigms as described by Lynch (2001), McNamara (2001), and Shohamy
(2001).
A critical first step then is to clarify what we mean by measurement. Thorndike
and Hagen (1977) state that:

Measurement in any field always involves three common steps: (1) identifying and defin-
ing the quality or attribute that is to be measured, (2) determining a set of operations by
which the attribute may be made manifest and perceivable, and (3) establishing a set
of procedures or definitions for translating observations into quantitative statements of
degree or amount. (p. 9)

This definition will serve as an organizer for much of the chapter, in which we review
how language testers have dealt with measurement topics in published textbooks over
the years. This definition is also mirrored in Bachman’s (1990) discussion of measure-
ment. Bachman defines measurement as “the process of quantifying the characteris-
tics of persons according to explicit procedures and rules” (p. 18). The two definitions
overlap considerably. They both state that the process of measurement involves a de-
scription of the construct attributes or characteristics to be measured, and it entails
the delineation of the operations or procedures to be followed to elicit the requisite
test-taker behavior indicative of the construct. Furthermore, both definitions of mea-
surement include the application of methods for quantifying the attribute exhibited
by test-takers, that is, methods for obtaining meaningful test scores. As mentioned,
our focus in this chapter will be on the first two aspects of the measurement process.
This focus reflects what we observed in the language testing textbooks that we exam-
ined. Additionally, the topic of quantification methods is addressed in Chapter 46 of
this volume.
Understanding and working through this three-step process is incumbent on any
language test developer or analyst. As in any field, experts can and do disagree with
respect to both the practice and theory involved in each step. For example, some
might initiate the development of a new test by clearly defining and specifying what
is to be measured and for what purpose, and then, deciding which items, tasks, and
concomitant scoring procedures best reflect the construct definition and specification.
Others might begin with a global model of language proficiency that, in essence,
combines construct, task, and scoring definition in one package (see the following
discussion of hierarchical scales). There are no hard and fast rules for these steps, but
testers must explicitly or implicitly go through this process whenever they construct
assessments and interpret scores from them.

LANGUAGE TESTING TEXTBOOKS REVIEWED

In an attempt to understand how language testers have covered the three aspects
of measurement, we reviewed language testing textbooks that have been published
since Lado’s 1961 seminal volume, which was a time when the field of language
testing was first emerging (Carroll, 1986). Our intent in this chapter is not to provide
an exhaustive listing of the language testing textbooks or to indicate the extent certain
texts are used in graduate courses (e.g., Bailey & Brown, 1996), but instead to identify
a representative sample of books and use them to explicate how the field has viewed
measurement issues over the years.
The review focuses on language testing textbooks because such volumes are in-
tended to address basic considerations involved in measurement. Edited volumes
 45. WHAT LANGUAGE TESTERS MEASURE 817

(e.g., Kunnan, 1998; Hurley & Tinajero, 2001) are not included as they typically com-
prise articles/chapters that concern themselves more with elaborating a certain aspect
of measurement and do not necessarily afford a representative treatment of measure-
ment issues. In addition, textbooks with a more specialized focus (e.g., Underhill,
1987; Read, 2000; Buck, 2001; Davidson & Lynch, 2002) are not considered. While
such textbooks might address the measurement aspects described earlier, including
them would have rendered the review task unwieldy.
Language testing textbooks were reviewed and a determination was made as to
whether the textbooks addressed specific measurement content or issues (see Ta-
ble 45.1). The content/issue categories used in the review emerged from the defini-
tion of measurement, as described earlier, and after a careful study of the table of
contents in numerous language testing and several general measurement textbooks
(e.g., Nitko, 2001). Although one can argue that categorizing these textbooks accord-
ing to their own table of contents is circular, one must keep in mind that the cate-
gories are dynamic in the sense that they are derived from textbooks published over a
40-year span. As such, the categories are not confined to a particular era. The review of
the volumes was performed independently by the two authors and where differences
surfaced, decisions were made after discussion.
Specifically, the Definition of the Construct or Attributes entails the following cate-
gories:
r History—An account of trends, movements, periods in the field (e.g., Madsen,
1983).
r Purpose/Type—The variety of situations, contexts, decisions, and uses of test
scores, for example, diagnostic, achievement, proficiency, placement, screening,
norm- and criterion-referenced, direct- and indirect testing (e.g., Hughes, 1989).
r Skills, Components, and Models—A description of language models, classroom syl-
labi, skills/modalities, components (e.g., vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation)
that denote attributes to be measured (e.g., Lado, 1961).

As for Operations to Elicit Behavior, these include:

r Development/Administration—Considerations for effective test preparation and
administration (e.g., Valette, 1967).
r Methods/Forms—Characteristics and impact of various testing methods such as
cloze, multiple-choice, interviews, and so on, employed to elicit examinee behav-
ior (e.g., Heaton, 1975).
r Resources—Taking into account available resources when developing, adminis-
tering, scoring, and interpreting language tests; practicality concerns (e.g., Harris,
1969).
r Projects—Documentation of research and development work on a given language
testing project that serves to explicate specific issues (e.g., Davies, 1990).

Finally, Rules/Procedures for Quantification comprise:

r Validity—Explication of validation procedures (e.g., Bachman, 1990).
r Reliability—Approaches to document the consistency and dependability of the
test scores and/or ratings obtained (e.g., McNamara, 1996).
r Fairness/Advocacy—Practices that support using assessment to better serve in-
structional and learning needs (e.g., Fradd & McGee, 1994).
r Scores—How scores are aggregated and reported using procedures such as
z-scores, t-scores, percentiles, cutoff points, descriptive profiles (e.g., Brown,
1996).
818
TABLE 45.1
Textbooks Reviewed and Their Categorizations
Identify/Define Construct Operations to Elicit Behavior Rules and/or Procedures for Quantification
History Purpose Model Project Development Methods Resources Validity Reliability Fairness Scores Rating Analysis
Lado (1961) X X X X X X X X X X X
Valette (1967) X X X X X X X X
Harris (1969) X X X X X X X X X
Clark (1972) X X X X X X X
Heaton (1975) X X X X X X X X X X
Valette (1977) X X X X X X X X
Carroll, B. J. (1980) X X X X X X X X X X
Finocchiaro & Sako (1983) X X X X X X X X X X X
Omaggio (1983) X X X X X
Madsen (1983) X X X X X X X X X
Carroll, B. J., & Hall (1985) X X X X X X X X X X
Shohamy (1985) X X X X X X X X X X X
Brindley (1986) X X X X X X X X X X X
Henning (1987) X X X X X X X X
Brindley (1989) X X X X X X X X X
Hughes (1989) X X X X X X X X X X
Bachman (1990) X X X X X X X X X X X X
Davies (1990) X X X X X X X
Weir (1990) X X X X X X X X X X
Weir (1993) X X X X X X X X X
Cohen (1994) X X X X X X X X X X
Fradd & McGee (1994) X X X X X X X X X X X
Alderson, Clapham, X X X X X X X X X X X
& Wall (1995)
Bachman & Palmer (1996) X X X X X X X X X X X X X
Brown (1996) X X X X X X X X X X X X X
Genesee & Upshur (1996) X X X X X X X X X X X
McNamara (1996) X X X X X X X X X X X X X
McNamara (2000) X X X X X X X X X X X X
Brown & Hudson (2002) X X X X X X X X X X X X X
Hughes (2003) X X X X X X X X X X X
 45. WHAT LANGUAGE TESTERS MEASURE 819
r Rater/Ratings—A discussion of rater training and/or development and adminis-
tration of rating scales (e.g., Alderson, Clapham, and Wall, 1995).
r Analysis— Test and item analysis; classical test and/or item response theory (e.g.,
Henning, 1987).

These categories overlap and distinctions among them, as mentioned earlier, can
be tenuous. For example, some might argue that the test purpose, the definition of the
skills or model, and the test method overlap—a diagnostic speaking test for begin-
ning learners that emphasizes pronunciation of specific phonemes might constrain
the choice of test method. Furthermore, some may question the appropriateness of
assigning particular features, for example, Validity, to Rules and Procedures for Quan-
tification instead of to Definition of the Construct. We readily acknowledge the slipper-
iness of the categorizations but maintain their usefulness as a heuristic for examining
measurement issues in the L2 testing textbooks.
As to be expected, textbooks varied in the amount of space allocated to measure-
ment topics covered. For example, while in some volumes (e.g., Bachman, 1990), the
topic of validity accounts for 50 pages; in other books, such as Madsen (1983), that topic
is covered in a few paragraphs. Some topics, such as fairness/advocacy, have gained
attention only more recently. In addition, it is understandable that earlier textbooks
did not review historical developments or present illustrative projects in language
testing as the field was in its infancy then. Except for the topics/categories just men-
tioned, virtually all of the textbooks covered the other categories to varying degrees
of comprehensiveness.
Obviously it is not possible to talk about all the textbooks listed in Table 45.1 (several
are discussed in some detail below with respect to how they define L2 ability and
performance), but we do wish to single out several because of the uniqueness of the
information they present. Alderson, Clapham, and Wall (1995), in their book Language
Test Construction and Evaluation, end each chapter with illustrative information as to
how the principles of test development they present are actually practiced by various
examination boards in the United Kingdom. Although readers might think that such
examples do not apply in local contexts of more modest resources, they will find the
information to be extremely useful (and sometimes surprising!). Much of what larger
testing organizations do can indeed be undertaken on a smaller scale in local contexts.
In addition, the authors include three chapters that deserve special mention. The
first is on the training of examiners and administrators. Whereas many of the textbook
authors listed in Table 45.1 discuss rater reliability, the Alderson, Clapham, and Wall
volume provides a much more comprehensive discussion of the issues surrounding
the training of the various participants responsible for evaluating test-takers. They
also include specific tips to raters when assessing different skills. A chapter cover-
ing posttest score reports—and one from Brown and Hudson (2002)—represent, as
far as we know, the only discussions of this topic in our field. The authors point
out that validating test score interpretations also means assisting multiple audiences
and/or constituents to understand those scores by providing them with meaningful,
appropriately tailored reports. Finally, the Alderson, Clapham, and Wall chapter on
standards in language testing is also unique to the textbooks reviewed, presenting
a valuable review of various codes of practice of which test developers should be
aware.
Brown’s Testing in Language Programs (1996) offers an excellent introduction to basic
quantitative measurement and statistical concepts and procedures, and would be a
good first book for students pursuing this area of study. He presents much of the
material in the context of language testing and programs, thus contextualizing the
concepts and making them more accessible. In addition, each chapter contains useful
review questions and application exercises with answers in an appendix.
820 CHALHOUB-DEVILLE AND DEVILLE

Generally, Brown’s discussion of these sometimes complex issues is straightfor-

ward and on target. We especially liked his review of standard setting, an important
topic that is often neglected in texts. Some chapter material is somewhat dated (e.g., the
discussion of validity) and would need to be supplemented with additional readings.
The Genesee and Upshur (1996) text, Classroom-based Evaluation in Second Language
Education, distinguished itself because of its intended audience. The text is written
with an eye directed toward classroom language teachers’ needs regarding assess-
ment. The authors discuss testing in the larger framework of instructional evaluation.
In addition, the book stands out because of its coverage of nontraditional forms of
assessment such as portfolios and conferencing, and how these fit into an evaluation
scheme.

A COMPARISON WITH GENERAL MEASUREMENT TEXTBOOKS

A survey of several widely used general measurement textbooks (e.g., Thorndike,

1997; Linn and Gronlund, 2000; Nitko, 2001) reveals an overlap—but considerable
difference in emphasis—of the topics addressed in these texts and their counterparts
in the field of language testing. A notable difference between these two groups of
textbooks is the focus on the construct. Understandably, virtually all the language
testing textbooks devote considerable space to discussing, defining, and operational-
izing the language construct. The general measurement books, on the other hand,
tend to focus more on issues of scoring and quantifying. The discrepancy in focus
is to be expected as the audience of the general measurement textbooks is relatively
heterogeneous with regard to their fields of study. Consequently, the intent of the
authors of these textbooks is to provide readers with a set of “generic” skills and tools
that can be employed in developing and analyzing tests across content domains. In
language testing textbooks, however, it is essentially a mandate to explicate the nature
of the L2 construct and the corresponding operationalization, whereas the coverage
of tools used to quantify and analyze test scores receives less attention.
In the remainder of this chapter we focus our discussion on the various L2 mod-
els that have been prominent in the language testing textbooks and literature over
the years and briefly touch on the issues of operationalization and quantification ap-
proaches as they pertain to the models. We acknowledge that our use here of the term
‘model’ to refer to the various approaches to defining and evaluating the language
construct—language skills, ability, proficiency, performance, and so forth—is some-
what indiscriminate. We deliberately did this to avoid the impression of a pecking
order of theory, comprehensiveness, or popularity.

LANGUAGE CONSTRUCT AND OPERATIONALIZATION

Ability-Based Construct Definition

Researchers have defined L2 ability in different ways at different times. During the
so-called precommunicative era (McNamara, 1996), Lado (1961) represents the ability
or knowledge that underlies test-takers’ performance within a structuralist approach.
Language knowledge is essentially examined in terms of skills (reading, writing,
listening, and speaking, with an emphasis on the receptive skills) and elements (e.g.,
grammatical structure, lexicon, pronunciation, cultural meaning). Lado’s perspective
of what should be measured focuses on competence (Chomsky, 1965), and not on
performance or ability to use the language (Hymes, 1972).
Carroll (1961) differentiates between what he calls discrete-point and integrative
testing, emphasizing the importance of the latter. In his reflections on language testing
 45. WHAT LANGUAGE TESTERS MEASURE 821

in the 1960s, Carroll (1986) advocates that “language tests should measure those as-
pects of language performance that call upon skills in putting together utterances or
written statements in more or less real-life situations, or in understanding or reading
connected speech or text” (pp. 123–124). His call for performance-based testing un-
derscores two features or attributes: (1) a more integrative method of measurement,
and (2) the real-life or authentic aspect of testing.
Oller (1979), among others, takes up the baton and extends the idea of integrative
testing—not by contrasting it to discrete-point testing, as Carroll did—but by specifi-
cally tying the integrative notion (and methods) to a theory of psychological language
processing and use. He refers to this idea as pragmatic expectancy grammar. Accord-
ing to Oller, pragmatic expectancy grammar “causes the learner to process sequences
of elements in a language that conform to the normal contextual constraints of that
language” (p. 38). This theory of language processing led Oller to advocate such inte-
grated testing methods as dictation and cloze. And although such integrative testing
methods can be problematic to score (see Deville & Chalhoub-Deville, 1993), they do
represent an important effort to link construct theory with test method.
One can characterize Oller’s view of language processing and use as integrative
but essentially cognitive in nature. His language theory and testing methodology
largely ignore the social and interpersonal aspects of language use in real-life, interac-
tive contexts. This point is elaborated by Cummins (1983). Nonetheless, Oller’s work
distinguishes itself in that it represents an early attempt in language testing to richly
and systematically explicate the psychological and linguistic processes that under-
lie language use by linking construct theory and test operationalization, albeit in a
somewhat restricted context.
Canale and Swain (1980) emphasize not only linguistic but also pragmatic knowl-
edge as critical components of the L2 construct. The authors introduce sociolinguistic
competence as a prominent feature in their model of communicative competence in
language teaching and testing, along with grammatical and strategic competence.
Later, Canale (1983) adds discourse competence to the model. In their distinction be-
tween competence and performance, Canale and Swain choose to emphasize issues
pertaining to the knowledge of language in terms of components and do not deliberate
on how these components come together to result in performance.
Although Canale and Swain present a more comprehensive view of language abil-
ity, they, like Lado (1961), essentially follow Chomsky’s (1965) representation of ab-
stract knowledge, and not Hymes’ (1972) broader view, that is, ability to use that
knowledge in specific contexts. As Ellis, (1994) points out, however, “although Canale
and Swain prefer to exclude ‘ability to use’ from their definition of ‘competence,’ they
argue in favor of including sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic knowledge within
its compass” (p. 158). In other words, while it may be possible to view grammati-
cal competence simply in terms of knowledge (see Rea-Dickins, 1991, for a contrary
viewpoint), it is more difficult to conceptualize the other competences, especially so-
ciolinguistic and discourse competence, as divorced from a particular performance
context. Nevertheless, the Canale and Swain model essentially features cognitive,
psycholinguistic elements.
Bachman (1990) and Bachman and Palmer (1996) take into account earlier work
in communicative language ability and use, particularly that by Canale and Swain,
in formulating their communicative language ability (CLA) model. The CLA model
meets Carroll’s (1986) call for both integrative and real-life measurement by attempt-
ing to model not only language knowledge but language use as well. The model posits
an interaction among language knowledge, topical knowledge, affective schemata,
and individual characteristics together with the test task. According to the model,
this interaction is mediated through strategic competence. Bachman and Palmer (1996)
indicate that strategic competence represents “higher order executive processes that
822 CHALHOUB-DEVILLE AND DEVILLE

provide a cognitive management function in language use, as well as in other activi-

ties” (p. 70).
Bachman (1990) and Bachman and Palmer’s (1996) inclusion of strategic compe-
tence represents the field’s best attempt to forge a relationship between language
knowledge and language use. (For an excellent discussion of strategic competence,
see Douglas, 2000). As Alderson (2000) points out, however, “[t]his aspect of language
ability is arguably the least developed in their [Bachman and Palmer’s] framework”
(p. 166). For example, Bachman (1990) states that his representation of strategic com-
petence is cognitive in nature and is based on Faerch and Kasper’s (1983) model of
communicative strategies. Yet Bachman and Palmer (1996) present strategic compe-
tence as metacognitive strategies “derived largely from Sternberg’s description of the
metacomponents in his model of intelligence” (p. 82). Although the representation of
strategic competence in terms of goal setting, planning, and assessment strategies is
essentially the same in both books, the lack of clarity in the theoretical underpinnings
of this construct and its questionable usefulness in terms of both test development
and the measurement of language ability are troublesome.
What is important to our discussion is the consistent view that this element of
the CLA model is cognitive—rather than interactional—in its orientation. Moreover,
the representation of affect in CLA, which is a significant addition to Bachman and
Palmer’s (1996) model, is essentially cognitive in nature. According to Bachman and
Palmer, affect schema is viewed not as integral to interactional communication but
as background knowledge/experience that can be a double-edged sword, capable of
hindering or helping a learner’s performance.
In conclusion, Bachman and Palmer’s treatment of strategic competence and affect
is in terms of cognitive demands on the individual. Whereas they do address the social
nature of language in their discussion of task demands, much of their model deals with
the stored knowledge within an individual test-taker. Bachman and Palmer would,
therefore, agree with Sharwood Smith (1994) that “[performance] has, of course, so-
ciolinguistic relevance, but social factors are not the immediate concerns . . . ” (p. 111).
The CLA model is essentially a psycholinguistic representation of performance.
While a psycholinguistic/cognitive approach to modeling, evaluating, and under-
standing performance is clearly legitimate, another that emphasizes interactional and
sociolinguistic elements is also worthy of consideration. We discuss such an approach
later, but first we turn our attention to hierarchical definitions of language proficiency.

Hierarchical Construct Definition

The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) scale, American Council on the Teaching of Foreign
Languages (ACTFL) Guidelines, International Second Language Proficiency Ratings
(ISLPR), and Common European Framework all illustrate a hierarchical approach to
representing the L2 construct (see North, 2000, for an extensive discussion of these
and other scales). By delineating functions, contexts, and degrees of accuracy across
different ability levels, these frameworks are most ambitious in their attempts to
define the language construct. These hierarchical models share many features (e.g.,
their behavior/task orientation) but also differ in important ways (e.g., intended users,
research base). The present discussion will focus on one of the models, the ACTFL
Guidelines.
The widespread impact of the Guidelines on instructional material and oral pro-
ficiency testing is commonly acknowledged (Omaggio, 1983, 1986). Also well doc-
umented are the criticisms of these Guidelines (Chalhoub-Deville, 1997). A preva-
lent criticism is the lack of theoretical base and empirical evidence to support the
hierarchical representation of the construct. Additionally, the Guidelines have been
depicted as a hodgepodge of task descriptions and levels of performances and abili-
ties that attempt to offer information to multiple audiences—teachers, students, test
 45. WHAT LANGUAGE TESTERS MEASURE 823

developers, interviewers, and score users—but which leave many wanting additional
information and guidance. A criticism relevant to the present discussion is the lack of
modeling that links test-takers’ performances to either abilities or a real-life language
use paradigm.
On the surface the ACTFL Guidelines seem to emphasize authenticity and real-
life performance tasks expected to be encountered by learners in the target language
culture. However, the tasks and situations included in the Guidelines are generic and
were selected by a committee without any systematic investigation into actual student
needs and eventual use. Such a needs analysis would be problematical indeed since
students vary considerably in their needs and goals of language use. Yet, until such
studies are undertaken, scores based on ACTFL-like tasks remain hard to interpret
and generalize.
Language use on these tasks is not the sole focus of proficiency proponents. Given
that the primary users of the proficiency Guidelines are schools and universities,
where discrete abilities lend themselves more readily to instruction and assessment,
such ability components achieve virtually the same importance as language use (see
Omaggio, 1983, 1986). ACTFL tasks are viewed as tapping and/or eliciting specific
ability and skill components that vary across different proficiency levels (Higgs &
Clifford, 1982). Language components such as vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation,
fluency, and sociolinguistic knowledge play an important role in the Guidelines’ de-
scriptions of what learners at different levels can do.
One would expect that this emphasis on performance and implicitly on the abil-
ities underlying performance calls for systematically modeling these abilities (e.g.,
Chalhoub-Deville, 1995a, 1995b). Such is not the case, however. The proficiency move-
ment’s contribution via the ACTFL Guidelines is its promotion of an integrated and
contextualized approach to language teaching, learning, and assessment—not a model
of the language construct. Also, inattention to explicating capacity for language use
linking ability and performance is not, however, a problem specific to the ACTFL
Guidelines, but, as indicated earlier, is endemic to most representations of the com-
municative language construct. Finally, much like the other models discussed thus
far, the Guidelines advocate a cognitive representation of the test-taker’s proficiency.
For example, while speaking performances evaluated using the ACTFL Guidelines
are typically obtained via a trained interviewer, collaborative interaction is not mod-
eled in the Guidelines. Performance is attributed solely to the test-taker. This position
has been questioned by several researchers (e.g., Brown, 1998, 2003) and is vigorously
opposed by proponents of an interactionalist model (see Johnson, 2001, discussed
next).

Performance-Based Construct Definition

As we have seen, many language testers, as a reaction to the structuralist approach to
language ability, differentiated between discrete-point and integrative tests (or indi-
rect versus direct; or testing language usage versus use; etc.). Although this distinc-
tion was meaningful and helpful at the time, researchers more recently have begun to
examine different approaches to measurement within the framework of performance-
based assessment. McNamara (1996) provides the most extensive discussion of issues
related specifically to language performance assessment. In his book, he distinguishes
between two types of performance assessment practice:

1. an application of the techniques of performance assessment developed in non

language contexts, which we will call the work sample approach; and
2. a tradition that sees performance in a second language as a complex cognitive
achievement, involving integration of a number of psycholinguistic processes.
(p. 6, italics in original)
824 CHALHOUB-DEVILLE AND DEVILLE

Along these lines, McNamara also points out the difference in a weak versus a
strong approach to the assignment and evaluation of scores derived from language
performance assessments. The weak approach is commonly associated with the cog-
nitive type of performance assessment and focuses on inferences about the test-taker’s
language abilities. This approach is employed with virtually all of the models of lan-
guage ability discussed thus far. Conversely, the strong approach is associated with
the work sample type of assessment and takes its cue from personnel psychology. This
approach finds some application in the areas of language for specific and/or academic
purposes. The strong approach’s primary criterion for the evaluation of the test-taker
is how well he or she has accomplished a given task. Consideration of the test-taker’s
language ability is relevant only inasmuch as it contributes to overall performance on
the task.
Scores from the cognitive or psycholinguistic practice of performance assessment
are linked—to varying degrees—to an explicit or implicit theory of language ability,
and the test developer’s, evaluator’s, and researcher’s efforts are guided accordingly
by this theory. With respect to performance on work sample types of tasks, interest
in scores as indicators of just language abilities is mitigated. Modeling performance
within the strong approach requires a more comprehensive representation of ability,
one that includes linguistic as well as nonlinguistic factors. In addition, these factors
interact in complex ways with attributes of the context to affect performance. Within
the strong approach, the degree of successful task fulfillment might be determined
in part by language ability, and in part by other cognitive, affective, as well as social
factors. Nevertheless, both the weak and strong approaches make inferences about
the internal—primarily cognitive—constructs an individual brings to the task.
As rich as the strong perspective of language ability and performance is, under-
standing and modeling the many factors remains elusive. Attempts to do so, such as
Munby’s (1978) framework—with its extensive lists of skills, subskills, and enabling
skills—have been criticized (e.g., Skehan, 1984). The next model we discuss, although
also based on language performance, emphatically and purposefully stresses the so-
cial nature of language, and provides the field with a very different perspective of the
L2 construct.

Interaction- and Discourse-Based Construct Definition

Interaction- and discourse-based competence is a relatively recent approach to defin-
ing language knowledge and performance. Kramsch (1986, 1998), whose work has
been influential in this area, introduces the term ‘interactional competence’ to denote
the social nature of language interaction and the notion of communication as the
co-construction of participants:

Whether it is face-to-face interaction between two or several speakers or the interac-

tion between the reader and the written text, successful interaction presupposes not
only a shared knowledge of the world, the reference to a common external context of
communication, but also the construction of a shared internal context or “sphere of inter-
subjectivity” that is built through the collaborative effort of the interactional partners.
(1986, p. 367)

Although this definition describes interaction as part of oral and written commu-
nication, in reality this approach relies almost solely on analyses of speech data often
collected in natural settings. As such, the interaction- and discourse-based approach
to competence is concerned primarily with speech communication. On a positive note,
this focus offers us a somewhat tapered view of language, allowing us to concentrate
our attention on one modality, analyze how speech is realized in natural settings, and
 45. WHAT LANGUAGE TESTERS MEASURE 825

use this information to bolster our understanding and assessment of interaction. On

the other hand, this same tapered view limits our capability to some degree to look
at language across the four skills. To be sure, however, because the interaction- and
discourse-based view of language demands that we examine the many vagaries of
the social context and consider how communication is co-constructed among partic-
ipants, it is just as complex and challenging—and promising—as any other model.
Young (2000) builds on Kramsch’s work stating that interactional competence deals
with recurring, that is stable episodes of interaction in context among participants.
He refers to these episodes as discursive practices. Young identifies six interactional
resources that participants make use of in a given context to co-construct their com-
munication. These resources include (1) sequences of speech acts or rhetorical scripts;
(2) register (in terms of lexical and syntactic structures as well as the semantic relations
typical in a given practice); (3) turn taking patterns; (4) topic management (e.g., topic
nomination and topic shift); (5) participation configuration; and, (6) designation of
boundaries among and transition across discursive practices. In discussing these re-
sources, Young emphasizes that the way the resources are utilized is not set in advance
but is dependent on the particulars of the dynamic social context.
Recently, Young (2000), Swain (2001), and Johnson (2001) have urged language
testers to incorporate this interactional perspective into the measurement process.
Johnson’s book offers the most comprehensive discussion of a discourse analytic ap-
proach to understanding and evaluating language performance. Her research refutes
claims that the interview technique, specifically the Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI),
elicits conversational features (e.g., topic management, turn-taking, question type,
etc.) that correspond to those occurring in nontesting conversations. In essence, John-
son sees OPI-like discourse in the same vein as Kramsch (1986) sees classroom dis-
course. Both types of discourse tend to be asymmetric, negotiation-reduced, teacher-
or tester-controlled. Moreover, the OPI’s discourse can be likened to what Kramsch
(1998) calls “topic-centered” communication, which is characteristic of essay writ-
ing where the main focus is on the transmission of a message. This “topic-centered”
exchange in the OPI is to be contrasted with “people-centered” communication, in
which discourse is constructed not only to transmit information, but also to mutually
engage the participants and to negotiate meaning. In conclusion, these authors point
out that the OPI and other conventional tests, “which have to break down language
into functions, structures, and accuracy levels, have their purpose, but they do not
show learners how to achieve the synthesis necessary to adapt to new conversational
partners, new cultural contexts, new situations” (Kramsch, 1986, p. 370).
Proficiency, communicative competence, communicative language ability, and in-
teractional competence models may, at first glance, seem to represent nuanced differ-
ences of the same construct. These models tend to focus on abilities the learner brings
to the testing situation and consider contextual factors as well. Such surface similari-
ties, however, mask fundamental differences in how language use is conceptualized.
Because interactional competence researchers view language, social contexts, and the
co-construction of meaning as inextricable, they maintain that interactional compe-
tence is an alternative model to the previously discussed language ability models.
Young (2000), for example, addresses the issue of how communicative competence
differs from interactional competence. He writes that whereas “communicative com-
petence has been interpreted in much of the testing literature as a trait or bundle of
traits that can be assessed in an individual, interactional competence is co-constructed
by all participants in a discursive practice and is specific to that practice” (p. 9). The
idea that performance can be attributed to an individual test-taker’s array of internal,
cognitive competences or abilities is rejected in favor of a model that views the in-
teraction between the dynamic language exchange of participants and external social
context as the primary determinant of performance. Interested readers are encouraged
826 CHALHOUB-DEVILLE AND DEVILLE

to consult Johnson’s (2001) model, which she refers to as Practical Oral Language Abil-
ity, for a discussion of how such a model can find application with language testers.
Whereas language testing models discussed in the previous sections might be char-
acterized as reflecting theories of cognitive language abilities, and are intended to
be comprehensive and general, the interactional competence approach is primarily
a social model of performance or practice, which is local and context dependent.
According to the latter model, there are no static abilities inherent in and applied
by all learners that conveniently sit still while we measure them. Instead, following
Vygotsky (see McNamara, 1997, or Swain, 2001, for a brief introduction to Vygotsky’s
ideas, or Johnson, 2001, for a more comprehensive discussion of Vygotsky and oth-
ers), knowledge and learning are engendered by the social transactions in which we
engage and are therefore “local: They apply to a given discursive practice and either
do not apply or apply in a different configuration to different practices” (Young, 2000,
p. 10, italics in original).
With respect to the three aspects of measurement defined earlier, the interactional
competence model can have implications for our depiction of the construct (as al-
ready discussed), the operationalization of that construct, that is, test development,
and the scoring and interpretation of test performances. In terms of test development,
if we are to take seriously the claim made by interactionalists or co-constructionists
that language performance is local and that we cannot assume constructs of indi-
vidual competence, then we need an accurate picture of how language is generated
between or among participants in the setting of interest. Such a picture would facilitate
the development of simulated tasks and evaluation of performance. As McNamara
(1997) writes, in essence what we need is a “close analysis of naturally occurring
discourse and social interaction [to] reveal the standards that apply in reality in par-
ticular settings” (p. 457). This calls for conducting language ethnomethodological
studies and/or extensive needs analyses in order to describe and establish those stan-
dards (e.g., Douglas & Myers, 2000). Analysts would have to study many plausible
interactions from the target language use context, a task requiring special skills that
many language testers possess only to a limited degree. Collaborative efforts with
researchers in other areas of applied linguistics and with content experts (e.g., Jacoby
& McNamara, 1999) would be needed.
Evaluating test-takers’ performances according to this model offers a conundrum.
Generally speaking, we administer tests to, assign scores to, and make decisions about
individuals for purposes such as selection, placement, assignment of grades/marks,
and the like. If we view language as co-constructed, how can we disentangle an
individual’s contribution to a communicative exchange in order to provide a score
or assess a candidate’s merit for a potential position? Some have suggested that all
participants in the interaction be scored, but it is unclear how doing this will help
us arrive at a ’better’ score for the participants. If we wish to pursue this approach
in language testing, we will need to reconcile the demand for individual scores and
group performances. Perhaps we will need to rethink how we assign—and ultimately
interpret—test scores. Furthermore, with respect to scoring, proponents of the inter-
actional competence model would reject the use of hierarchical or fixed/generic pro-
ficiency scales across contexts. The proponents maintain that such scales presuppose
an ordering of abilities and/or skill thought to be internal to test-takers and to be
responsible for the generation of language. The interactional competence supporters
would prefer scales that take into account the dynamics of the interaction process.
Again, this model would oblige us to rethink how we characterize, construct, use,
and interpret language rating scales.
Because the interactional competence model is relatively new and has yet to be
applied or investigated widely, the jury remains out with regard to the usefulness
and appropriateness of this approach for language testers. Both Young (2000) and
 45. WHAT LANGUAGE TESTERS MEASURE 827

Johnson (2001) see interactional competence as a model of language practice, not of

language abilities. In addition, Vygotsky’s ideas are primarily meant to explain and
model learning, so although such a model may seem sensible when investigating
L2 learning and acquisition, it may prove intractable for the purpose of assessment.
Despite these potential limitations, we resolutely maintain that this approach deserves
further consideration and application.

Summary of L2 Construct Representation

This section summarizes the evolving representation of the L2 construct. Our review
documents that the majority of the L2 models have adopted a cognitive orientation to
representing the construct. Also to be noted is the ever-expanding representation of
the construct as newer models incorporate the knowledge and thinking garnered from
past researchers and scholars. The review concludes by focusing on interactional com-
petence. A question raised by this last representation of the L2 construct is whether
ideas advanced by interactional competence proponents can be reconciled with and
incorporated into established L2 models. Interactional competence researchers advo-
cate a reconceptualization of existing theories of language ability and performance
because cognitive and interactional models represent fundamentally different orien-
tations to defining and investigating the construct. This issue, as well as others raised
earlier, present the field with a challenging alternative to how we think about the L2
construct—one that shouldn’t be dismissed without earnest reflection and discourse.

ABILITY TO USE TEST SCORES

The focus in the present chapter has been on representations of the L2 construct that
have gained recognition in the language testing field. As pointed out, the manner
in which testers define the L2 construct often leads to the way they operationalize
that construct. We have chosen in this chapter to concentrate on how language testers
conceptualize their constructs as that is what sets them apart from other measurement
experts. In this final section we turn our attention to issues concerning the use and
interpretation of L2 test scores.
The long history of interest in performance-based assessment has amplified L2 re-
searchers’ attention to not only linguistic, but also to nonlinguistic cognitive, affective,
and social factors that have an effect on test scores. Consequently, modeling of lan-
guage use has become increasingly complex. Although such modeling is critical for
meaningful interpretation and appropriate generalization of scores, until we achieve
greater understanding of such variables as metacognition, affect, and co-construction,
their place in the measurement of performance remains tenuous. Our position is not
to discount the need for the inclusion of such factors in a comprehensive model of
ability and performance, but to question the soundness of incorporating them into
test specifications when their measurement is so elusive. We have already pointed
out the dilemmas associated with the co-construction approach. In terms of the other
factors, numerous researchers have already pointed out how difficult the research and
assessment of metacognition (e.g., Ellis, 1994; Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) and affect
(Carroll, 1991; Porter, 1991) can be. We therefore argue that it is reasonable to take a
somewhat conservative, but responsible, position. As Alderson and North (1991) note:

This [conservatism] implies not only that language testing researchers and test developers
need humility, and an understanding that resistance to change is not necessarily obstruc-
tionism, but also that we need in language testing perhaps to explore more carefully the
nature of innovation, in order to better understand how to optimize our instruments and
procedures and their impact on their environment. (p. ix)
828 CHALHOUB-DEVILLE AND DEVILLE

A conservative position, however, should not be employed as a smokescreen for not

engaging in systematic investigations that help improve our understanding of the
role these slippery factors play in L2 ability and performance. This understanding
can then direct how we might incorporate such factors into language tests in order to
better understand what our test scores mean.
The meaningfulness and appropriateness of test scores are, of course, issues of va-
lidity (Messick, 1989). With respect to validation, we must begin by asking ourselves
what we wish test scores to tell us about test-takers. Are we, for example, primar-
ily interested in what test scores tell us about performance relative to our construct
definition, or more so in a candidate’s merit for a job or position? This dichotomy
is illustrated in the infamous reproach McNamara received from a medical educator
while conducting research that led to the development of the Occupational English
Test: “Oh, so you’re only interested in language, not communication” (McNamara,
1997, p. 452). As stated earlier, this tension in evaluating language performance led
McNamara to distinguish between a weak approach to validation, whereby the focus
is simply on a candidate’s language ability, and a strong approach, whereby a more
comprehensive model of task fulfillment is investigated. One might argue, however,
that the goal of both approaches is to formulate (or confirm/falsify) an abilities-based
theory or model of language ability and performance—the difference being essentially
the degree of comprehensiveness.
Another way of conceiving validation would be to prioritize what we wish to say
about test-takers (Shepard, 1993). Validation efforts will likely result in confusing and
contradictory information unless we prioritize the uses and interpretations of our test
scores. How we intend to use test scores should guide us in how we interpret them.
Is our first concern to examine decisions we make and actions we take with respect to
examinees? Or is our primary concern the relation of test scores to a theory of language
or to a set of similar tasks? We argue that it is the use of test scores that should take
precedence in validity arguments. As Kane (2001, p. 334) states: “The distinction here
is not among different kinds of validity or even different types of validity evidence,
but among different types of interpretations.” Anytime test scores are used to make
important decisions about examinees, the catchall bin of construct validity should
prioritize evidence concerned with the particular use of/decision from test scores.
We believe there is an imbalance in validity arguments that favors test score in-
terpretation and inference—with respect to content/tasks and/or global, theoretical
models of ability—instead of test use, that is, examining local, practical decisions
made and actions taken based on scores. For example, Douglas (2000, pp. 257–258)
presents a very apt and appropriate metaphor for construct validation, referring to
the process as creating a “validity mosaic.” He lists ten avenues for investigation
of the construct, nine of which are essentially theory-driven and one that is related to
the specific use of the test scores. (In fairness to Douglas, he cautions his readers that
no such list is exhaustive, and that any validity mosaic is malleable.) No question, it is
easier and safer to construct validity arguments about a theory than about decisions
and actions.
Attention is warranted as well to practice-driven validation with an emphasis on
supporting our uses/decisions and their consequences. We are by no means suggest-
ing that language testing become atheoretical or that test development be task-driven
(e.g., see Chalhoub-Deville, 2001). Structured, discerning investigations into the rela-
tionship of test-taker performance to a model of ability and/or to a domain of tasks is
desirable, but not at the expense of an uncompromising examination of our decisions
about test-takers. We language testers, our constituents, and even our theories/models
may all be better served if we devote increased attention to the more pragmatic—and
sometimes more mundane—consideration of better understanding our assessment
tools, our use of test scores, and the consequences.
 45. WHAT LANGUAGE TESTERS MEASURE 829

Finally, we would like to draw attention to score reporting. A critical—but often

neglected—aspect of measurement, test score interpretation, and especially test use,
is how we document score information and relay this to intended users. Brown and
Hudson (2002) realize the importance of reporting, saying:

One of the most important lessons we have learned . . . is that feedback is crucial; this
involves more than just feedback to the students, but also to teachers, administrators,
parents, etc. In addition, we have to come to realize that feedback should not just be
top-down, but a two-way communication. (pp. 278–279)

Multiple audiences, who have varying needs and perspectives and who interpret and
use test score information with their particular needs in mind, give rise to the necessity
of communicating test score information in inventive but appropriate ways.
The value and usefulness of our scores are directly related to how we disseminate
test score information to users (see Wainer, Hambleton, & Meara, 1999). When we fail
to communicate test results effectively, we diminish the validity of our test scores. It is
crucial to understand how test users negotiate meaning from scores reported by test
developers/institutions. Systematic investigations into how scores are reported and
used can be utilized to enhance practice- and purpose-oriented validity evidence.

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832
46

Research Methods
in Language Testing
Tom Lumley
Annie Brown
University of Melbourne

INTRODUCTION

A common stereotype of the language testing researcher is that he or she is essentially

a statistician who employs a daunting array of procedures, often obscure to outsiders,
to attack or defend the quality of language tests, with scant regard for more humanistic
issues or a full range of validity concerns. Certainly a great amount of language test-
ing research is quantitatively based, employing an increasingly sophisticated range
of statistical procedures, as perusal of the journal Language Testing, for example, easily
confirms. Spolsky (1995) and Lemann (1999) discuss the triumph of reliability in all ar-
eas of educational measurement including language testing in the United States, over
much of the last century, while McNamara (2001, p. 334) has recently claimed that
“language testing is arguably the most positivist in orientation of all areas of applied
linguistics.” Assessment involves measurement, which requires the use of numerical
data (in the form of scores or ratings), and language testing research is concerned cen-
trally with the defensibility of these numbers, which implies a positivistic paradigm.
Nevertheless, in the last decade or so there has been a broadening of scope in the
kind of issues investigated in language assessment research, with a concomitant ex-
pansion in the research methods used to investigate them. There has been a move
from positivistic research focusing on properties of tests and scores toward a broader
and more critical examination of a wide range of validity issues embracing construct
definition as well as language testing practice and policy. This has required the use
of an increasing variety of (broadly) qualitative approaches to problems that arise in
language assessment contexts, involving, for example, more consultation with stake-
holders and more sophisticated approaches to analyzing both the product and the
process of language testing. Such developments have to a considerable extent resulted
from expanded models of validity (e.g., Linn, Baker, & Dunbar, 1991; Messick, 1989,
1994, 1996; Moss, 1994) in educational assessment more generally, which have brought
with them greater attention to the consequences of language assessment. There has

833
834 LUMLEY AND BROWN

been increasing questioning and problematization of notions and consequences of

language testing and assessment (see, for example, Hill & Parry, 1994; Lynch, 2001;
McNamara, 2001; Shohamy, 2001a, 2001b). Instrumental in relating Messick’s concep-
tualization of validity to language testing has been Bachman’s work (Bachman, 1990;
Bachman & Palmer, 1996). The broadening of concerns in language testing research
is exemplified by the inclusion in the recent Encyclopedia of Language and Education of
a chapter on qualitative approaches to test validation (Banerjee & Luoma, 1997), by
Shohamy’s (2001a) critical perspective on language testing, and by Kunnan’s chapter
(chap. 46, this volume) “Language Assessment from a Wider Context.” Conceptual
issues in language assessment, including those relating to development of frame-
works or theories, test design, discussion of policy, and understanding of processes,
necessarily rely on argument and the complexity of multiple points of view, and raise
problems that challenge a positivistic paradigm and which no degree of quantitative
sophistication can resolve.
The essential point here is that language testing and assessment research now neces-
sarily relies on a variety of research methods, quantitative and qualitative, that increas-
ingly complement each other. It is impossible to ignore the role of quantitative data and
appropriately sophisticated statistics in test validation; however, aspects of validity in-
cluding the process, impact, and consequences of assessment deserve equal attention
and require investigation using appropriately different and varied research methods.

Statement of Purpose
In this chapter we aim to introduce the reader to some of the most commonly used
methodological approaches to research in language testing in recent years, including
methods long established as well as new approaches and current directions. Although
we recognize that any classification of methodologies into types is simplistic at best, we
distinguish here research concerned primarily with scores (labeled here, for the sake of
convenience, “quantitative methods”) from research that we consider to be concerned
mainly with issues other than scores (“qualitative methods”)1 . The remainder of this
chapter will therefore be organized under these two headings.

QUANTITATIVE METHODS

Language testing implies measurement, which is necessarily quantitative. Much re-

search in language testing examines test scores and ratings to investigate the internal
qualities of tests (addressing issues of both reliability and validity) and the validity
of the inferences made using those scores.
Language testing practice long relied on classical test theory, borrowed from the
field of psychological testing (Anastasi, 1976; Bachman, 1990) to investigate the quali-
ties of tests, with reliability a principal concern. One issue was the internal consistency
of tests: the extent to which the test items correlate with each other and hence collec-
tively define a single measurable trait or dimension. A narrow interest in the reliability
of tests is rarely the major focus of research studies these days, although it is still nec-
essary to estimate the reliability of test scores or ratings in order to support other
claims, whether these claims relate to the quality of a new test or item type, or to tests
used for research in areas of applied linguistics other than language testing itself. The
reliability of the scoring procedures, for example, was an issue in Alderson, Percsich,
and Szabo’s (2000) study of a proposed test item type in which test-takers are required
to reorganize a sequence of sentences or paragraphs so as to construct a coherent text.
Reliability also remains an issue in research studies dealing with more established
tests, as in J. D. Brown’s (1999) study of sources of error in the Test of English as a
 46. RESEARCH METHODS IN LANGUAGE TESTING 835

Foreign Language (TOEFL), which focused specifically on the reliability of the whole
TOEFL test and that of its subtests.
Until recently, the predominant view of validity was of separable kinds, includ-
ing content, construct, and criterion-related validity (Anastasi, 1976; Bachman, 1990).
Whereas content validity was (and is) seen as a matter of judgment and argument,
score data formed the basis for investigations of the nature of the construct and of
criterion-related validity. Broadly speaking, the statistical approaches used in these
studies involve measures of correlation, or convergence of data, on the one hand, and
of difference, or divergence, on the other.
In recent decades, the range of statistical procedures available for the examination
of the internal measurement properties of tests, contributing to better understanding
of both reliability and validity, has expanded beyond classical procedures to include
item-response theory (Baker, 1997; Henning, 1984, 1987), the related Rasch measure-
ment (Bond & Fox, 2001; McNamara, 1996; Wright & Masters, 1982; Wright & Stone,
1979), Generalizability Theory (G-Theory) (Brennan, 1983; Shavelson & Webb, 1991)
and structural equation modeling (SEM) (Bae & Bachman, 1998; Kunnan, 1998). The
chapter will look first at classical statistics before discussing other procedures.

Correlation
Correlations between different measures have always been a major point of concern in
quantitatively based language testing research. The number of studies in which cor-
relational analyses (such as Pearson product-moment, Spearman rank correlations
and regression analyses, all part of classical test theory2 ) are used is enormous. Cor-
relations, which examine similarity among measures, can provide information about
practical issues such as the equivalence of different tests or test forms, the ability of a
test to predict performance on another measure, or the behavior of raters, as well as
more theoretical issues such as the dimensionality of a test’s construct.
At a simple level, scores by test-takers on different forms of a single test (intratest
correlation) may be compared, in order to determine whether each form provides
similar information about the test-taker. This can help to establish whether all test-
takers face equivalent challenges in test difficulty, regardless of which test form they
have taken, and hence the extent to which results from different test forms are directly
comparable. A typical use of correlation occurs in Beglar and Hunt (1999): High cor-
relation coefficients were used to support the authors’ claim that two new versions
of parts of the Vocabulary Levels Test (Nation, 1983, 1990) could be considered as
parallel, or equivalent.
Intertest comparisons involve studies of concurrent or predictive validity (both
forms of criterion-related validity). Correlations are used to compare scores on a test
under investigation with some other criterion, such as a score on a different test (con-
current validity), or perceptions of success on a later course of study or in employment
(predictive validity). Such studies offer the simplest indication of how closely perfor-
mance on one (often new) measure compares to a different, criterion measure, often an
existing instrument already accepted as a measure for a similar purpose. This issue is
relevant when theoretical advances lead to the development of new kinds of language
tests. For example, Henning, Schedl, and Suomi (1995) compared scores from the old
version of the Test of Spoken English (TSE) with scores on a new prototype. Their
finding of a fairly high correlation between scores on the two versions suggested that
both versions assess a similar construct, although without addressing the question of
what the construct is.
Scores on two subtests may also be compared, in order to determine whether, say,
an objectively scored or short test (probably cheaper and easier to administer, with
potentially higher reliability) is a good predictor of scores on a subjectively scored
836 LUMLEY AND BROWN

test (probably more expensive and less reliable). During the development stages of an
EAP test, correlation statistics were also used (Clapham & Alderson, 1996) to show
that the proposed grammar component of the test overlapped considerably with the
reading component, and yielded little if any additional information. In this case, the
desire to avoid unfavorable washback led to a decision not to include the grammar
component in the new test; in another situation, where the stakes are lower, efficiency
(i.e., cost considerations) would dictate removal of the reading test. Correlational
studies have also been used to defend the use of a simulated (tape-mediated) test of
oral proficiency (SOPI), by showing a high correlation between scores on the SOPI
and those on a face-to-face oral proficiency interview (OPI) (e.g., Stansfield & Kenyon,
1992). A potential problem in studies based solely on correlations, as various writers
(e.g., Bachman, 1990) have pointed out, is that simple correlations between scores on
two different instruments are not sufficient evidence that either is a valid measure
of the construct or ability the test aims to assess, nor do they allow statements to be
made about which is more valid.
Where a test aims to predict future performance, as in a selection test for university
entrance, as part of the validation process, test results may be correlated with sub-
sequent university grades. Clapham (1996) reported correlations between students’
scores on the Academic Reading module of an entrance test and ratings by university
tutors of students’ general English ability at the end of their first year at university,
as evidence of the predictive validity of the reading test score. In another kind of
predictive study, Powers, Schedl, and Wilson (1999) used different types of regression
analyses (also based on correlation) to examine the relationship between test-takers’
scores on the revised Test of Spoken English (TSE) and ratings indicating listeners’
ability to understand what the test-takers were trying to communicate.
A different branch of investigation, also based on correlations, and arising from
the increasing use of subjective assessment in language testing, compares the ratings
provided by different types of raters. Correlational studies allow the investigation of
how background factors may affect the level of agreement (and hence the potential
impact on test-takers) among raters of different kinds. These factors include (in aca-
demic contexts) raters’ language teaching experience, such as ESL versus English as
L1 (e.g., J. D. Brown, 1991; O’Loughlin, 1992), and (in occupation-specific language
tests) their professional background, such as tour guides versus language teachers
(A. Brown, 1995) or health professionals versus ESL specialists (Lumley, 1998). The
results of these studies can offer an indication of how closely scores from one group of
raters substitute for scores from raters of a different background, giving information
relevant to the validity as well as the reliability of the assessment results.
In addition to practical issues such as those discussed earlier (dealing with choice
of test or test form and choice of rater), correlations also offer information on the more
theoretical issue of test dimensionality, an important aspect of construct validation.
If a language test claims to assess something described as “second language profi-
ciency,” this assumes that we can conceive of “second language proficiency” in broad
terms as a single (or holistic) dimension, along which all learners can be placed. Such
an assumption is necessary if measurement is to take place, although it is clear that
“because of the nature of human learning, all educational tests are likely, to some
degree, to be multidimensional” (Blais & Laurier, 1995, p. 74), involving different
components (or dimensions) of knowledge and ability (e.g., grammatical knowledge,
pronunciation, range of technical vocabulary, clarity of writing) that may develop at
different rates in individuals. Correlational studies, more complex than those referred
to earlier, can give information on the degree of unidimensionality or multidimen-
sionality observed in the tests under investigation. Such studies assist researchers to
make and evaluate claims about the measurement properties of the tests and the ways
in which test results are to be interpreted.
 46. RESEARCH METHODS IN LANGUAGE TESTING 837

Established statistical procedures used in construct validation research include

multitrait multimethod analysis (Bachman, 1990; Buck, 1990; Campbell & Fiske, 1959)
and factor analysis (Bachman et al., 1994). Both confirmatory and exploratory factor
analysis have been used in language testing research in attempts to define factors
that account for consistency and variation in language test scores. High correlations
among scores (convergence) suggest a single (or overall) dimension of measurement,
whereas variation (or divergence) among scores on different subtests (or assessment
criteria) supports claims that different components of language ability (such as gram-
mar, vocabulary, organization) can be separately assessed. For example, Boldt and
Oltman (1993) examined the statistical relationship among Test of Spoken English
(TSE) scores with the measurement constructs (pronunciation, grammar, fluency, and
overall comprehensibility) that the scores aimed to reflect. In a study designed to
evaluate the usefulness of reporting separate scores for different aspects of test per-
formance, Fulcher (1997) used factor analysis to examine the degree of convergence
and divergence among scores given for different test components (writing, structure,
and reading) in an English language placement test.
Correlation is also the basis for a recently developed, rather complex set of statis-
tical procedures, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), described by Kunnan (1998,
p. 298) as “a coming together of several models: multiple regression, path analysis and
factor analysis.” SEM is particularly useful in trying to explain factors that influence
test results, including those considered both relevant and irrelevant to the constructs
that tests aim to assess, with the general goal of improving our understanding of what
it is that language tests actually measure. Recent studies employing SEM have inves-
tigated the relationship between test-takers’ use of strategies and second language
test performance (Purpura, 1997, 1998, 1999) and the relationship between test-taker
background and test performance (Kunnan, 1995).

Difference
In contrast to correlation, which is primarily concerned with similarity among mea-
sures, the other general group of approaches to analyzing test data involves investi-
gating difference. A wide variety of statistical approaches investigating difference in
test data are used to address issues relating to construct validity. One area of interest
concerns differences in performance by different groups of test-takers, or differences
in performance by the same group on different tests or test forms. Many are based on
analysis of the magnitude and significance of variance observed in scores from two or
more groups (analysis of variance (ANOVA), and related statistics). Such studies raise
questions of whether, or to what degree, these differences are relevant to the construct
the test aims to assess, whether modifications to test design are likely to lead to im-
proved (i.e., more valid) language tests, or whether a particular test is relevant or fair
for specified groups of test-takers. They therefore have importance in consideration
of issues such as the ethics and consequences of test use.
One branch of study focuses on trying to explain differences in scores observed for
different test tasks. Thus, Sasaki (2000) examined the influence of schemata activated
by culturally familiar words on students’ cloze test-taking processes. She identified
two groups of test-takers with no difference in age, length of instruction in English
or English reading ability, and then used t-tests to compare performance by the two
groups when each was administered a different version of a cloze test. She found that
inclusion in the test of words more likely to trigger familiar schemata led to improved
test performance. In the context of speaking assessment, Iwashita, McNamara, and
Elder (2001) used MANOVA and ANOVA to examine whether variation in test perfor-
mance (as measured by ratings) could be related to differences in task characteristics.
For example, they considered the effect on measures of accuracy and fluency when
838 LUMLEY AND BROWN

test-takers were confronted with tasks predicted to be more or less demanding. This
work is interesting for the range of researcher expectations that were not fulfilled,
its general lack of support for previous research findings aiming to identify compo-
nents of task difficulty, and its confirmation of the hugely problematic nature of at-
tempts to reliably predict influences on task difficulty (cf. also Hamp-Lyons & Mathias,
1994).
A second focus is on differences in observed performance by test-takers of different
kinds. For example, Clapham (1996) used ANOVA to investigate whether subject-
specific reading passages offered equal advantage to test-takers of different subject
backgrounds. She identified little advantage in the inclusion of subject-specific reading
modules, and the test was revised accordingly. ANOVA was also used by Hamilton
et al. (1993) to examine differences in performance levels of different groups of native
and non-native speakers of English on an EAP reading and writing test used by
universities as a selection test for non-native speakers. They found that native speakers
of different backgrounds performed neither homogeneously, nor especially highly,
on the test, and concluded that there was inherent bias in the system toward native
speakers, who were not required to take the test.
Examination of differences in group performance can also shed light on bias in
tests. Item bias, or Differential Item Functioning (DIF), can be said to exist when the
test scores of one group of test-takers is higher than those of another group, for reasons
unrelated to the construct being assessed (Elder, 1998; Holland & Wainer, 1993), thus
threatening the validity of claims made on the basis of test performance. DIF analysis is
employed to investigate bias in test items against particular groups of test-takers, such
as those from different language or educational backgrounds. For example, Ryan and
Bachman (1992) used the Mantel-Haenszel procedure (derived from a simple test of
difference, the chi-square test) to compare responses by test-takers of Indo-European
and non-Indo-European language background on two tests, finding that many of the
items showed DIF in favor of one group of test-takers or the other, raising questions
about the construct measured by each test. Further insights into the complexity of
bias were provided by Elder (1996), who used the Mann Whitney procedure and
the Mantel-Haenszel procedure to investigate performance by school-age students of
Italian, Greek, and Chinese to establish whether students with a home background in
one of these languages outperformed those with no such background. Her finding that
the tests varied in the extent to which they advantaged one group or the other raised
questions about what the test construct should be in such tests and also highlighted
the difficulty of providing fair assessments for students of different backgrounds.

Item Response Theory and Rasch Measurement

Over the past two decades the range of statistical procedures used in language assess-
ment validation research has expanded dramatically. Arguably the most important
development has been the increasingly widespread acceptance of item response the-
ory (IRT) (Hambleton, Swaminathan, & Rogers, 1991; Henning, 1984, 1987; Henning,
Hudson, & Turner, 1985; Woods & Baker, 1985) and the related Rasch measurement
in place of, or in addition to, classical theory, not only for test analysis but also for
research expanding our understanding of how tests function. Baker’s (1987) doctoral
dissertation was the first application of IRT to language test data, and the forerunner
of many more studies using IRT to examine aspects of test functioning. IRT models
are especially useful for equating the difficulty of different test forms, in item banking
(Pollitt, 1984) and in the construction of computer-adaptive tests (CAT) (e.g., Brown
& Iwashita, 1996; Chalhoub-Deville, 1999), where large numbers of test items are re-
quired, each of whose measurement properties (such as difficulty) should be known
in detail, in order to construct efficient and reliable tests of required difficulty levels.
 46. RESEARCH METHODS IN LANGUAGE TESTING 839

Rasch measurement (Bond & Fox, 2001; Linacre, 1989; Wright & Masters, 1982;
Wright & Stone, 1979), also referred to as a one-parameter item response model, al-
though deriving from different mathematical principles, is named after the Danish
mathematician Georg Rasch, and has assumed enormous importance in educational
assessment, including, more recently, language assessment (McNamara, 1996). Most
simply, IRT and Rasch analysis uses data from candidate responses to test items to
posit a single dimension of measurement, typically language ability (or a component,
such as vocabulary knowledge). The analysis then provides a variety of measures
(expressed in probabilistic terms) that indicate how well the data fit this single di-
mension. These forms of analysis can identify items that elicit test-taker responses
that are unexpected, divergent or “misfitting,” on the basis of ‘fit’ statistics providing
information analogous to (classical) point-biserial statistics (Henning, 1987; Henning,
Hudson, & Turner, 1985). On a theoretical level, these ‘fit’ statistics can provide evi-
dence for the unidimensionality of a test (as in studies of specific-purpose listening
tests by de Jong and Glas (1987) and McNamara (1991). More practically, results of
such studies can be used to identify unsuitable test items.
Multi-faceted Rasch measurement (Linacre, 1989), a refinement of Rasch analy-
sis, examines the relationship among relevant elements (or facets) of a language test.
Multi-faceted Rasch measurement is of increasing value in studying performance-
based assessment, which involves, in addition to the candidate and the test items,
features of the performance, the rating scale, and the rater (McNamara, 1996, p. 9).
Typical facets that may be examined include item (or task) difficulty, candidate back-
ground, and rater harshness as well as candidate ability. Studies employing Rasch
analysis (e.g., McNamara, 1996; McNamara & Adams, 1994; McNamara & Lumley,
1997; Pollitt & Hutchinson, 1987; Weigle, 1998) have drawn attention to the importance
of understanding the role raters play in language assessment. Studies have focused
not only on reliability of raters, but have provided ways of examining levels of con-
sistency and harshness of individual raters on different occasions and over varying
periods of time (Congdon & McQueen, 2000; Lumley, 2000; Lumley & McNamara,
1995) as well as differences between groups of raters from different backgrounds
(A. Brown, 1995; Hill, 1997; Zhang, 1998). Perhaps the most significant achievement
of Rasch analysis has been conclusive documentation of the many ways in which
rater behavior can vary, as well as to identify some of the kinds of measures (such as
training and multiple rating) that can be taken to assist in managing this variation. For
example, A. Brown (1995) used Rasch measurement to show how raters with teaching
and tour guiding backgrounds applied different components of rating scales in a test
of spoken Japanese for tour guides. She found that raters from different backgrounds
used the individual scales differently, although there was no effect on overall scores.
Such findings can assist in the selection of raters. In another context, Weigle (1994)
used Rasch measurement to investigate the effectiveness of training for raters of ESL
writing in a university context by comparing ratings made by a group of raters before
and after training, providing convincing evidence for the need for rater training, while
also showing that there are limits to its effectiveness.
In addition to examining rater and item behavior, Rasch measurement allows bias
analyses to be carried out, investigating other aspects of the testing situation. For exam-
ple, McNamara and Lumley (1997) used the bias statistics produced by the computer
program FACETS (Linacre & Wright, 1992–1996) to investigate the impact on ratings
given on a speaking test when raters perceived audiotaped recordings of speaking
test interactions to be less than perfectly audible, or when interlocutors appeared to
be less than fully competent, highlighting the role of rating conditions in test validity.
In a study focusing on how items should be combined to create a fair test, Takala and
Kaftandjieva (2000) used a Rasch model to analyze DIF for males and females in an L2
vocabulary test. They looked not only at the test as a whole, but at individual items and
840 LUMLEY AND BROWN

clusters of items, suggesting the need for item banks to incorporate this information,
and to use it to improve the way items are selected for individual test-takers.

Generalizability Theory
One final statistical methodology to be mentioned in this section that has gained par-
ticular prominence in recent years is Generalizability Theory (G-Theory) (Shavelson
& Webb, 1991), which is based on analysis of variance. As its name suggests, it pro-
vides information about how reliably we can generalize information obtained from
a single testing event. G-Theory allows the estimation of the sources of variance in
test scores, and hence a way of ascertaining whether, for example, test-taker ability
or variability in rater standards is more important in accounting for differences in
test scores. J. D. Brown and colleagues have conducted numerous studies employing
G-Theory over many years: J. D. Brown (1984) investigated the effect of variations in
the numbers of items and passages on the dependability (analogous to reliability) of
a reading test for engineers, giving information on the optimal number required for
reliable assessment; Brown and Bailey (1984) examined the effect of different numbers
of raters and of scoring categories on the dependability of writing scores, again pro-
viding information that can assist in developing efficient and reliable measurement;
Brown and Ross (1996) used a series of G-studies in their investigation of the relia-
bility of subtests of the TOEFL and their contribution to the dependability of scores
on the overall TOEFL battery; and J. D. Brown (1999) examined the relative effects
of items, subtests, and language backgrounds on the level of error in the TOEFL.
Bachman, Lynch, and Mason (1995) have also investigated the utility of G-Theory in
investigating variability in tasks and rater judgments, making the important sugges-
tion that greater dependability is achieved by increasing the number of tasks taken
by test-takers than the number of raters.
It will be clear from this survey, necessarily far from exhaustive, that the uses
of quantitative analyses vary considerably, ranging from issues such as informing
choices between test methods to pointing out serious potential inequities in test use.
Both the focus of investigation and the ways in which findings are used depends
necessarily on the interests of the researchers. A broader focus and a more complex
picture will emerge in the second section of the chapter.

QUALITATIVE APPROACHES

Introduction
Although language testing research typically involves the analysis of score data, re-
cent years have seen an increase in the use of qualitative research methodologies to
examine issues of interest in test validation and language testing research in general.
McNamara, Hill, and May (2002) attribute this increase in the range of research meth-
ods to a cross-fertilization of research in language testing and other areas of applied
linguistics, and to the challenge to the positivist epistemology of applied linguistics
generally. Others (e.g., Banerjee & Luoma, 1997; Bachman, 2000) attribute it to the
widening conceptualization of validity in the assessment literature in general, and
language testing in particular. As in other areas of educational measurement, validity
is no longer viewed as a set of measurable phenomena (based in the traditional cate-
gories of construct, content, predictive and concurrent validities) but as an integrated
and holistic judgment that is based on the collection of evidence from a number of dif-
ferent areas (Messick, 1988, 1989). In this revised conceptualization, the main concern
is the validity of the inferences made about test-takers on the basis of their scores,
that is, the meaning of scores. The enterprise is made more complex through the
 46. RESEARCH METHODS IN LANGUAGE TESTING 841

increased recognition of a need to employ alternative methods of assessment, includ-

ing portfolios (Hamp-Lyons & Condon, 2000), teacher-designed tasks, observation,
and self-assessment (Brown & Hudson, 1998). What validity investigations require,
as Banerjee and Luoma (1997) point out, is a thorough understanding of tests, both
product and process. It is in this area where qualitative approaches are of particular
value.
One type of research methodology that has become increasingly prevalent in lan-
guage testing research in recent years is discourse analysis. In their state-of-the-art
article on “discourse and assessment,” McNamara, Hill, and May (2002) attribute this
trend to the central role afforded assessments of oral proficiency within the current
communicative approach to language teaching and testing. Although early research
focused almost exclusively on the American OPI, discourse analytic research is now
undertaken in relation to a wide range of oral test formats. It has been used to ad-
dress such questions as how proficiency can be characterized and to what extent test
performance is an adequate reflection of authentic, nontest performance. The role of
discourse analysis in language testing research will be discussed in more detail in the
next section.
Another qualitative research methodology that has seen a recent growth in use
in language testing research is introspection in the form of verbal report analysis
(also called protocol analysis). Verbal report analysis, drawn from the field of cogni-
tive psychology, responds to a concern with understanding the strategies involved
in test-taking and rating and represents a move away from earlier approaches to the
examination of test constructs that relied primarily on expert judgment. Prior to its
use in language testing research, verbal report analysis had appeared in the SLA liter-
ature in relation to cognitive strategies in second language learning (Faerch & Kasper,
1987). It had also been used to examine rating behavior in the context of L1 essay
writing (Huot, 1988, 1993). In the context of language testing, verbal report studies of
test-taker cognition have examined the ways in which test-takers process language
input (for example, when reading texts in a foreign language or when listening to
spoken language in a listening test) and how they respond to test items. More re-
cently, following on from studies of first language composition marking, research has
focused on how raters react to texts, both spoken and written, produced under test
conditions. The use of verbal report methodology will be discussed in more detail
later.
A third and rapidly expanding area of research in language testing can also be
attributed to more recent conceptualizations of validity that expand the notion to
include an analysis of the context in which tests are used and the role they play
in society (Shohamy, 1997, 2001a). In this view, also championed by Messick, tests
are not isolated events that have no impact outside the test room but are social
and political tools whose impact must be evaluated as part of the validation of the
test. This increasing concern with the impact or social consequences of test use—
consequential and systemic validity—is attested by recent volumes of the journal
Language Testing, one devoted to the topic of ethics in language testing (1997, Vol.
14, 3), and the other to washback, the impact of tests on instruction (1996, Vol. 13,
3). Research concerned with the consequences of test use tends to draw heavily on
ethnographic research methods such as observation, interviews, and questionnaires,
with stakeholders in the test under examination as the main source of data. Im-
pact studies, as they are termed, are typically case studies of single-test implementa-
tions.
In the remainder of this section, because of their current popularity as research
methods, we will examine in more detail these three types of methodology described
earlier: discourse analysis, introspection, and ethnographic methods. In the discussion
of each,we willfocus onthe questions that they have addressed, and the methodologies
842 LUMLEY AND BROWN

used. Readers are referred to the studies described and to other sources for more de-
tailed discussions of the methodologies, including questions of methodological va-
lidity.

Discourse Analysis
Over the last two decades the analysis of test discourse has become an increasingly
important research methodology, particularly in relation to tests of second language
speaking proficiency. As McNamara, Hill, and May (2002) comment in their overview
of “discourse and assessment,” “If structural linguistics was the source of the views
on language of the formative period of postwar language testing, best represented in
the work of Lado (1961), then discourse analysis has taken its place for the assessment
of oral language.”
Discourse analysis was first used in language testing research to critique the archety-
pal oral test, the ACTFL OPI (Clark & Gifford, 1988). In a now classic paper, van Lier
(1989) criticized the OPI for its lack of authenticity as a ‘conversational’ event, com-
menting in particular on the lack of empirical analyses of test discourse. In the decade
following the publication of van Lier’s article, discourse analyses of oral interview
data began to appear with increasing frequency, culminating most recently with a
collection of articles (Young & He, 1998) involving a range of oral interview tests
in a range of languages and addressing the question of validity from a number of
perspectives. A general consensus has emerged from these and other analyses that,
although oral interview interaction shares some features with nontest conversation,
it is essentially a distinct and institutional form of interaction, and that because of
its nonsymmetrical nature, it is limited in the extent to which it can provide an indi-
cation of nontest conversational performance (Johnson, 2001; Johnson & Tyler, 1998;
Lazaraton, 1991, 1992; Perrett, 1990; Ross & Berwick, 1992; Young & Milanovic, 1992).
Although this is perhaps not an unexpected finding, it is nevertheless important
as it raises the question of what can and what should be assessed in a performance
assessment of oral proficiency. In particular, the question arises of the extent to which
it is either appropriate or possible to assess interactional skills such as conversational
management and turn-taking skills in assessments of second language proficiency.
Discourse analysis is, of course, not a single method reflecting a single approach to
the data. The question of how to analyze and characterize the discourse is dependent
on the research question itself, and will be informed by relevant theories. Perrett’s
(1990) examination of oral interview discourse, for example, analyzed oral interviews
using a Systemic Functional Linguistics framework to show how social constraints
imposed there (defined in terms of the systemic functional categories of field, tenor,
and mode) resulted in a lack of authenticity. Young and Milanovic (1992) addressed
the same question from the perspective of Dominance Theory. Their analysis revealed
that, in comparison with noninterview conversation, oral interview discourse was
highly asymmetrical with respect to dominance, contingency, and goal orientation.
Interviews were found to be characterized by greater reactiveness on the part of the
candidates and greater goal orientation on the part of the interviewers. Ross (1992)
used Speech Accommodation Theory (see Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1991), a
social psychological approach to language, to examine the ways in which interviewers
accommodated their speech to their interlocutor (i.e., the candidate), and Lazaraton
(1991, 1992, 1997) showed the usefulness of Conversation Analysis in comparing the
structure of oral interviews with that of conversation. More recent studies, such as
those by Johnson and Tyler (1998) and Johnson (2001) have been informed and guided
by sociocultural theory.
Although the characteristics of oral interview discourse vis-à-vis nontest interaction
remain a major focus of concern, discourse analysis has also been used to address a
 46. RESEARCH METHODS IN LANGUAGE TESTING 843

range of other questions, such as the way in which interviewer or candidate variables
affect performance, or variation in performance due to the manipulation of aspects of
the test such as the task type, the conditions under which the performance is elicited,
or the mode of testing.
Turning first to the candidate, one question of obvious interest is how different
levels of performance (i.e., proficiency) can be characterized. In his analysis of OPI
performance, Young (1995) compared the discourse produced by candidates at inter-
mediate and advanced levels in terms of features such as changing topic, talking at
length, reactiveness, and gaining the floor (performance features that he considers
to be relevant to measures of communicative proficiency). The only difference that
emerged between the levels was that intermediate learners tended to answer ques-
tions briefly, taking them at face value, whereas advanced students were more likely
to take the floor and elaborate. Young concludes, on the basis of this finding, that
the interview format masks the display of relevant skills. Perhaps more important
for the validity of the inferences that are drawn about candidate’s ability to per-
form in nontest situations, he also points out that such differences may be due not
to proficiency per se but to cultural understandings of appropriate interview behav-
ior, a finding that has been echoed in other studies such as A. Brown (2003) and He
(1998). A study by Yoshida-Morise (1998) revealed that interviewees at different levels
of proficiency used different types of communication strategies. While Young’s and
Yoshida-Morise’s analyses focused on interactional aspects of interview test perfor-
mance, a recent study (Brown et al., 2003) involved detailed linguistic analysis of the
monologic performance of candidates on a range of computer-administered speaking
tasks proposed for new TOEFL in order to compare the quality of candidate output in
independent and integrated speaking tasks and across different levels of proficiency.
Although the studies described above are concerned with characterizing different
levels of proficiency, others have been concerned with the effect on candidate perfor-
mance of background variables such as gender (O’Loughlin, 2002; Young & Milanovic,
1992), native language (Ross, 1998; Young & Halleck, 1998), personality (Berry, 1997)
or familiarity with the interlocutor (Katona, 1998; O’Sullivan, 2002). Such studies are
concerned with possible test bias. Ross (1998), for example, found that students from a
Japanese background were more likely to produce simple, “factual” responses, which
was likely to result in them being identified as having lower proficiency and being
awarded lower ratings.
The greater understanding of the co-constructed nature of oral interview discourse
and the increasing importance of interactional aspects of performance in assessments
of oral proficiency, have stimulated a research interest in the impact of interviewer
behavior on test-taker performance, and the implications that arise for test fairness.
Lazaraton (1996a, 1996b) and Brown and Lumley (1997), for example, identified a
number of accommodative behaviors in the speech of examiners and speculated on the
effect they might have on the candidate’s subsequent behavior. A. Brown (2003, 2004)
showed how the same candidate is perceived as stronger or weaker in interviews with
two different interviewers as a result of the interviewers’ different interactional styles.
Ross (1996) related differences in interviewer style to their ethnicity and language
background, although O’Loughlin (2002) did not find the differences in style (in terms
of indicators of support and rapport) that he predicted between male and female
interviewers.
Discourse analysis is particularly useful in examining the functioning of innova-
tive test methods. It has been used in examinations of performance on paired orals
(O’Sullivan, 2002; Swain, 2001) or group orals (Berry, 1995; Fulcher, 1996), which inci-
dentally saw an increase in popularity in part because of the findings that interview
discourse is asymmetrical and inhibitive of candidate initiative-taking. Other research
into task effects that involves discourse analysis includes O’Loughlin’s (1995) detailed
844 LUMLEY AND BROWN

comparison of two alternative test modes, face-to-face and taped-based. In his analysis
he focused on the lexical density of the texts produced in the two formats. Although
steps were put in place to ensure comparability across the two formats and the two
tests were operationally treated as equivalent, a thorough analysis of the test discourse
revealed that they were qualitatively very different. Wigglesworth (1997) examined
the effect that different amounts of planning time had on test performance. Iwashita,
McNamara, and Elder (2001) used Skehan’s task characteristic framework to examine
the quality of test performances according to the cognitive complexity of the tasks
(see Skehan, 1998).
One of the drawbacks to discourse analysis as an approach to test validation is
the complexity of the transcription procedure and analysis: Discourse analysis can
be extremely time-consuming. O’Sullivan, Weir, and Saville (2002) propose an alter-
native approach to the content validation of oral interviews using checklists that,
they claim, can answer “the basic question” concerning validity (i.e., whether the
expected/intended functions are actually present) but also task-type functioning,
performance across levels, comparison of paired/examiner formats, and differences
among interviewers. However, as they point out, a “degree of training and practice”
is necessary to ensure a reliable and consistent outcome (O’Sullivan, Weir, & Saville,
2002, p. 46).

Introspection
Although introspective techniques for data collection were scorned during the many
years when behaviorist theories dominated research in the social sciences, since the
early 1980s they have gradually come back into favor (Ericsson & Simon, 1980, 1993;
Faerch & Kasper, 1987). Within the field of applied linguistics, they were used ini-
tially to examine language learning and language use strategies (see Oxford, 1990, for
example). This led to their use of language testing research to examine the strategies
employed by participants in language tests, by test-takers and raters. Recent books
such as Green (1998) attest to the usefulness of verbal report studies in language
testing research.
Introspection has been used to examine the strategies employed by test-takers to
derive answers to test items. Cohen (1998) provides a useful overview of research into
test-taking strategies. Early studies were concerned with particular types of item, such
as cloze (Cohen, 1984; Homburg & Spaan, 1981). More recently, they have focused on
skills testing; for example, studies by Buck (1990, 1991) and Gruba (1999) examined lis-
tening and viewing (video-mediated listening), and Cohen (1994) performance on in-
tegrated reading-writing tasks involving summarizing. Dollerup, Glahn, and Hansen
(1994) used introspection to examine the strategies employed by test-takers in an EAP
context when completing multiple-choice reading questions, whereas Wu (1998) fo-
cused on multiple-choice listening comprehension questions. Dollerup, Glahn, and
Hansen argue that the data provided in the verbal reports not only allowed them to
identify the types of strategy used by test-takers when responding to the test questions
(an important aspect of item quality), but also gave insights into the ways in which
students’ foreign language reading proficiency could be improved. Anderson et al.
(1991) combined think-aloud data with test item analysis and statistical item data,
arguing that such triangulation gives insights not only into test-taking strategies but
also their relationships with item characteristics and performance.
Over the last decade, following on from studies of first language composition rat-
ing, there has been a growing interest in examining the cognitive process employed
by raters of second language production. Whereas most studies to date have been
concerned with the assessment of writing (e.g., Cumming 1990; Cumming, Kantor, &
Powers, 2001; Lumley, 2000, 2002; Vaughan, 1991; Weigle, 1994; Zhang, 1998), there
 46. RESEARCH METHODS IN LANGUAGE TESTING 845

has more recently been an interest in using the methodology to examine assessments
of speaking (e.g., Meiron, 1998; A. Brown, 2000; Brown et al., 2003). These studies
have investigated such questions as how raters go about assigning a holistic rating
to a performance, what aspects of the performance they privilege, whether experi-
enced or novice raters rate differently, the status of self-generated criteria, and how
raters deal with problematic performances. In general, they have revealed that raters
are influenced not only by the quality of the performance in relation to the features
described in the scales, but also by what they themselves bring to the rating process
through their background and training. They have shown that while training does
have some effect in constraining raters’ reactions to test performances, it cannot iron
out all differences.
Whereas most verbal report studies have involved operational tests, and as such
examined the use of test-specific rating criteria, Brown et al. (2003) argue that asking
expert informants (i.e., experienced teachers) to assess performances without refer-
ence to specific criteria has the potential to inform the empirical development of rating
scales, thus ensuring that the content of the scales is really relevant to task performance
and experts’ judgments of proficiency.
Just as discourse analysis involves a variety of approaches and methods, so pro-
tocol analysis also involves a range of different elicitation techniques. Data may be
elicited in real time during the activity under consideration (such as rating), or ret-
rospectively, such as immediately after a test task. Because of the online nature of
speaking assessment, a retrospective verbal report methodology has been found to
be more useful than a concurrent one.
For their use in language testing research, verbal report studies initially relied al-
most exclusively (as well as sometimes uncritically) for credibility on the work of
Ericsson and Simon (1980, 1987, 1993). More recent studies have taken a more crit-
ical view of what can be learned from consulting participants about aspects of the
language assessment process (Cumming 1990; Cumming, Kantor, & Powers, 2001;
Lumley, 2000, 2002). An extensive discussion of the limitations and advantages of
using think-aloud data elicited during the process of rating a set of writing scripts
is given in Lumley (2000). It is clear that introspection can provide only a very par-
tial picture of any cognitive processes, that major parts of such processes may sim-
ply be inaccessible to description, and that the act of providing introspective data
may disturb or alter the cognitive process under consideration. Nevertheless, em-
ployed with proper care, this methodology offers the potential for insights into pro-
cesses employed by raters and test-takers that would not be available by any other
means.

Ethnographic Methods
Ethnographic methods, which essentially involve a description of events within par-
ticular contexts, and are generally described as including observations, interviews,
and questionnaires, are by no means a recent introduction to language testing re-
search. The growth in popularity of tests of languages for specific purposes in the
1980s and 1990s led to a need for information about target language use that was
used to inform task design and content. The process of collecting this information is
termed a needs analysis. Weir (1983, 1988), McNamara (1990, 1996), and Douglas (2000)
provide comprehensive overviews of the role of the needs analysis in specific-purpose
test design where, in order to match the test design to the purpose for which the test is
intended, methods such as direct observation of people in the target context, as well
as questionnaires and interviews may be used. Ethnographic methods such as these
are also employed in language program evaluations (Lynch, 1996; Weir & Roberts,
1994), in addition to tests, particularly in formative evaluations where the aim is to
846 LUMLEY AND BROWN

gather information that will lead to improvements in the program rather than simply
measuring effectiveness in terms of test scores.
Where ethnographic methods do reflect a new and important strand in language
testing research, as mentioned earlier, is in the examination of the social consequences,
or impact, of test use. Shohamy (2001a, 2001b) lists as some of the questions that should
be (and are increasingly being) asked in such studies:
r How are tests used by decision makers?
r How are scores being interpreted?
r Are language tests used according to their intended purposes?
r What are the consequences of tests?
r Are tests used fairly?
r What is the impact of tests on learning and teaching?

In tests designed to assess achievement in relation to a specific curriculum, changes

in the assessment procedures can have a profound impact on the teaching of that
subject. Studies that have examined the impact of newly introduced achievement as-
sessments include one by Shohamy (1993) that made use of a range of ethnographic
methods (observation of classrooms before and after the test’s introduction, interviews
with teachers, and a series of student questionnaires, as well as review of teaching
materials) to examine the ways in which the introduction of a new test of Arabic af-
fected the practices of teachers and students. A study by Wall and Alderson (1993) was
concerned with the impact of a new O-Level examination in Sri Lanka. Cheng (1997)
documented the changes that occurred in both teaching practice and in materials
following the announcement of revisions to the Hong Kong Certificate of Education
Examination, and in China, Li (1990) examined the impact on school teaching of the
introduction of a new English test used to select students for university entrance and
taken by approximately 3 million candidates every year.
The studies described above were concerned with the impact of tests used to assess
achievement against a specified curriculum. Test impact is also a concern in relation
to proficiency tests, particularly as they may narrow the teaching of language in
preparatory courses to (in the extreme version) a focus on strategies for answering
questions. In a study of the impact of TOEFL on the teaching of English, Alderson
and Hamp-Lyons (1996) found that this concern was justified in some cases (where
teachers taught very narrowly to the test) but not in others. As a consequence, they
argue that washback of any particular type is not a consequence of the test per se but
of the individuals (both teachers and learners) who are required to engage with it.
Research undertaken in relation to the International English Language Testing System
(IELTS) test as part of the IELTS validation program (see for example, Tulloh, 1999,
2003; Woods, 1998) is an example of how a series of single-institution studies can
together contribute to a ‘big’ picture of the social consequences of tests used on a
worldwide basis.
We turn next to a discussion of some of the most commonly used ethnographic
methodologies in language testing research, namely self-report data such as ques-
tionnaires, surveys and interviews, and observation.

Questionnaires and Surveys

Questionnaires and surveys have long played a role in language testing research
as a means of gathering (typically quantitative) background information on test can-
didates (or raters) in order to examine the relationship of particular variables to test
outcomes. Even though they are commonly analyzed quantitatively, they tend be
viewed as one type of ethnographic data. A large-scale study of school language
 46. RESEARCH METHODS IN LANGUAGE TESTING 847

learning (Brown, Hill, & Iwashita, 2000) gathered data on the amount and quality
of home exposure and amounts, periods of instruction and type of instruction in or-
der to compare school foreign language learning outcomes in four languages. Elder
(1996) also gathered information on the amount and quality of home exposure among
“background” speakers of the language being taught in order to examine the role of
this prior exposure on test performance. Berry (1997) drew on survey data in order
to classify learners as extroverted and introverted in order to examine the influence
of personality on oral test performance. Numerous other studies combine the use of
questionnaire data with test score analysis in order to examine the impact of specific
variables on performance on the test.
Depending on the degree of freedom permitted for responses, questionnaires may
also contribute qualitative data. As noted earlier, questionnaires play a major role in
the gathering of data when undertaking a needs analysis to support the development
of tests for specific purposes. There are a number of reports of the use of expert
informants in the development of tests for professional and academic purposes (e.g.,
A. Brown, 1994; Elder, 1993; Lumley & Brown, 1996, 1998; McNamara, 1990).
Questionnaires and surveys have also been used to evaluate tests once they have
been introduced. Studies by Wall, Clapham, and Alderson (1994) and Bradshaw (1990)
both used questionnaires to evaluate newly introduced placement tests. A. Brown
(1993) showed how test-takers themselves can provide useful feedback in posttest
questionnaires, providing a different perspective from that of teachers. As one aspect
of the validation of a new Japanese proficiency test, trial subjects were asked to re-
spond to a series of questions about the test. Brown illustrates how this information
was integrated with information on item functioning and incorporated into the test
revision process. Lewkowicz (2000) asked university students about their perceptions
of the authenticity in and the relative usefulness of two tests, the TOEFL and a locally
developed EAP test. The study raised questions about the assumed importance of au-
thenticity to test-takers. Lumley and Stoneman (2000) used questionnaires to examine
students’ attitudes not toward a test but toward test preparation materials. Interest-
ingly, students’ views on the usefulness of the materials were markedly different from
those of the teachers.
Finally, questionnaire data has also been used to examine questions such as what ex-
amination boards do and how they see themselves and their tests (Alderson, Clapham,
& Wall, 1995). Questionnaires were used to elicit information about exam syllabuses,
exam construction, procedures for validation, administration, marking procedures,
results, and examination revision and quality control. Although the data were largely
quantifiable and analyzed accordingly, open-ended questions allowed respondents
to give a clear picture of the exam boards’ practices.

Interviews
Interviews have much in common with open-ended questionnaires, and are com-
monly used where qualitative descriptions of learning and assessment contexts are
required. They can take many forms and, depending on the aims of the research, may
be more or less structured, allowing more or less freedom to follow up individual re-
sponses or topics. Lynch (1996) in his book on language program evaluation provides
a useful introduction to different types of interview.
Interviews are frequently used in classroom contexts, for example, as one compo-
nent of ethnographic surveys of teacher assessment practices, which remain under-
theorized (Teasdale & Leung, 2000) despite the many purposes they serve (Brindley,
1998). Chronicles of their use, mainly descriptive, have become more common with
the increasing attention paid to the variety of modes of language assessment in the
classroom (especially the primary school classroom) in recent years, as a recent volume
848 LUMLEY AND BROWN

of Language Testing (2000, Vol. 17,2) devoted to “Assessing young language learners”
attests. The study by Rea-Dickins and Gardner (2000) in that volume used a “struc-
tured [interview] protocol . . . to probe in depth the key issues of English language
assessment at Key Stage One of the National Curriculum” (p. 219). Interviews also
formed a prime source of data, along with classroom observation, in a large-scale
study of the classroom assessment procedures used by early primary school teach-
ers of ESL learners across Australia (Breen et al., 1997). The study, conducted over
a number of months, was concerned with the relationship between everyday teach-
ing, the various assessment methods and practices employed by teachers, and the
array of scales available to report on both first and second language development.
In another study aiming to elaborate the constructs used by teachers in their assess-
ments of primary school children’s language development, Leung and Teasdale (1997)
used semistructured interviews to relate teachers’ reactions to video footage of pri-
mary school students’ performances with the reporting scales of the British National
Curriculum.
Interviews are also commonly used to elicit views of raters and candidates about
both test-taking and rating, as an alternative or supplement to verbal reports. For
example, in his investigation of the process of assessing second language writing,
Lumley (2000, 2002) supplemented verbal protocol data provided by raters with in-
terviews in which they were asked to identify possible difficulties in uses of the rating
scales or difficulties they had encountered in rating and to comment on the use of
think-aloud protocols. These interviews were able to provide additional insights into
the rating process, but also into the status of the think-aloud data forming the main
component of the study. Other researchers including Weigle (1994) and Zhang (1998)
have also used interviews with raters to supplement investigations using essentially
cognitive methodologies such as verbal reports.

Observation
Observation may be an end in itself or may be used in conjunction with (to provide
a context for) follow-up interviews, as in the studies described above. Observation
has been used to examine how teachers carry out classroom assessment (Breen et al.,
1997; Leung & Teasdale, 1997; Rea-Dickins, 2001; Rea-Dickins & Gardner, 2000), as
well as to describe the processes or observable behaviors involved in test-taking or
assessing. Classroom observations can take many forms; Lynch (1996) provides a use-
ful description. Whereas there are several published frameworks such as the Com-
municative Orientation of Language Teaching, or COLT (Spada & Fröhlich, 1995),
these have typically been developed for use for particular purposes. Generally, a
framework will either need to be adapted from an existing framework or developed
specifically for each research study in order to capture most effectively appropri-
ate observations. Gattullo (2000), for example, in a study of formative assessment in
primary school ELT classrooms in Italy, adapted a framework of assessment events
and processes developed by Torrance and Pryor (1998) for analysis of the data. The
washback study carried out by Wall and Alderson (1993) was one of the first test
validation studies to employ classroom observation, while TOEFL test preparation
course classrooms formed the focus of observations in Alderson and Hamp-Lyons’
(1996) washback study. Observation is commonly also used in the design stages of
specific purpose assessments; it formed one of the first stages in a project to develop
a language and teaching skill self-assessment instrument for teachers of English in
Korean primary schools (Jin, McNamara, & Brown, 2002), where existing frameworks
were adapted to capture Korean and English language use by both teachers and
students.
 46. RESEARCH METHODS IN LANGUAGE TESTING 849

CONCLUSION

This chapter shows that research in language testing, although still essentially quan-
titative in many respects, involving as it often does the analysis of test scores, in-
creasingly involves qualitative methodologies that it draws from a range of related
disciplines. These include, in addition to educational measurement, cognitive and
social psychology, education, and social sciences in general. Research is increasingly
looking outside the test itself to its impact (consequences, including washback) in the
context where it is used.
The survey presented here provides a representative view of commonly used ap-
proaches to research in language testing and questions that they are employed to
address. It is by no means exhaustive, however, and readers are referred to journals
devoted to language testing research, such as Assessing Writing, Language Assessment
Quarterly (from 2004), Language Testing, Language Testing Update, and Melbourne Papers
in Language Testing, the bibliography of the International Language Testing Associa-
tion (ILTA) (Banerjee et al., 1999), to research reports and other publications produced
by testing agencies, and to proceedings of conferences, especially the annual Lan-
guage Testing Research Colloquium. They are also directed more broadly to research
and publications in Applied Linguistics in general.

NOTES

1. The reader is referred to Davies et al. (1999) for brief definitions of a broad range of terms used in
language testing.
2. See Hatch and Lazaraton (1991) for explanations of these and other classical statistics.

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47

Testing Languages for

Specific Purposes
Dan Douglas
Iowa State University

INTRODUCTION

After a review of the “state of the art” in specific purpose language testing in my
book on assessing languages for specific purposes (Douglas, 2000), I concluded with
a discussion of four “interesting but troublesome” issues that arose from the review:
the nature of the input in specific purpose tests, engaging communicative language
ability and specific purpose language ability, devising assessment criteria relevant to
target language use situations, and the use of general versus specific purpose lan-
guage tests. In discussing the first issue, I argued for the use of extended input from
genuine sources and the use of trained interlocutors in role-plays, and expressed a
concern about the ultimate lack of pragmatic reality in simulations (what might be
called the “there is no airplane” syndrome, referring to a well-known test for air traffic
controllers). Under the heading of engagement, I suggested that even in tasks rich in
target language use (TLU) situational features, it was possible that very little negotia-
tion of meaning or creation of discourse was required by the test-taker, thus limiting
the degree to which interactional authenticity was engaged. Thirdly, I argued for the
inclusion of TLU-relevant assessment criteria in at least the interpretation of test per-
formance if not in the actual rating of performances themselves, and for the inclusion
of specific purpose background knowledge in the construct of specific purpose lan-
guage ability. And finally, I reviewed what I perceived as a tendency in the field to
move toward the more general end of the specificity continuum and emphasized the
reasons for specific purpose testing: That language performances vary with context
and specific purpose language is precise. I concluded the book with a view of a rich
future for specific purpose language testing as we grapple with our attempts to under-
stand and measure “the complex abilities language users require to function in specific
purpose contexts where precision, clarity, range, and flexibility of language use are
increasingly called for as requirements for participation in academic, vocational, and
professional life” (p. 282).
In this chapter, I want to move beyond where I left off in 2000 and consider where
we are now in specific purpose language assessment, touching on these same issues,
857
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though perhaps not always directly. I will refer frequently to three publications im-
portant to specific purpose testing: a special issue of System (28(3), 2000) on language
testing, a special issue of Language Testing (18(2), 2001) based on papers from a confer-
ence on Language for Special Purpose (LSP) testing held at Hong Kong Polytechnic
University early in 2000, and a festschrift honoring Alan Davies on his retirement
(Elder et al., 2001). These three collections raise a number of current issues in LSP test-
ing as well as describing recent work in research and development. I will begin with a
brief discussion of the very notion of specific purpose language testing, arguing that
it is getting harder and harder to distinguish specific purpose tests from more general
language tests, particularly since the publication of Bachman and Palmer (1996) and
Douglas (2000)—specific purpose language testing is seen as a special case of commu-
nicative testing. This leads to a problem of “blurred boundaries” (Elder, 2001, p. 149):
between specific purpose and general tests, between domains of language use, and
between components of language ability. Beginning the chapter proper, I will first
review a crucial theoretical discussion that has been going on for some time regarding
the nature of specific purpose language and the need, desirability, and indeed, the
possibility of specific purpose tests. Next, I will review current research initiatives in-
cluding needs analysis and TLU analysis, various effects of input on test performance,
and raters and rating criteria. I will then review current test revision and development
efforts that illustrate both the vitality and the variety of specific purpose assessment.
I will conclude with a personal view of the issues that we must deal with in moving
the field of specific purpose testing forward.

Specific Purpose Tests Defined

Is there such a thing as specific purpose language testing? I have argued (Douglas,
2000) that specific purpose language testing is a special case of communicative lan-
guage testing in that they share a number of critical features, including the notions of
language performance, specific contexts of use, and communicative capacity (Weir,
1990). In fact, it would be difficult to find a language proficiency test anywhere in the
world today whose developers do not claim that it represents to some degree or other
aspects of performance and context of use, and measures capacity for communicative
language use. Indeed, we might ask ourselves whether the traditional distinction be-
tween “general purpose” and “specific purpose” tests is still valid, and if so, what a
general purpose test is. In a subsequent publication, I have also argued (Douglas, 2001)
that very often general purpose test content and methods are derived from theories
of language acquisition and use or from theoretical understandings of measurement,
whereas specific purpose tests are more often than not based on an analysis of the TLU
situation and employ both content and methods derived from the analysis. However,
it is not clear that these analyses are truly exclusive to specific purpose testing any
more. Since Bachman and Palmer (1996) presented a model for test development that
requires attention to, among other things, validity, authenticity, and interactiveness,
as well as a thorough analysis of the target language use situation, the distinction
between specific purpose tests and more general purpose language tests is blurred
even further: even by the time Assessing Languages for Specific Purposes was published,
it was becoming hard to find any sort of test that was not based on an analysis of
a TLU situation. I proposed a continuum of specificity with quite general purpose
tests, such as Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), at one end and quite
narrowly defined tests, such as the test of Proficiency in English for Air Traffic Con-
trol, at the other, but practitioners will be hard pressed to actually agree on where on
such a continuum any given test might be placed. Finally, I argued that true specific
purpose tests must share a focus on an interaction between language knowledge and
 47. TESTING LANGUAGES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES 859

specific purpose background knowledge and that background knowledge, far from
being a factor leading to “construct irrelevant variance” (Messick, 1989, p. 35), or er-
ror, may be an essential aspect of the construct of specific purpose language ability.
This, I think, remains an essential defining characteristic of specific purpose tests—the
specificity of our tests lies in the nature of the construct that we wish to make infer-
ences about on observing test-takers’ performances on the test tasks—it is how we
define the construct specific purpose language ability that defines specific purpose
language testing. As Fulcher (2000) puts it, “Some aspects of context may need to be
defined as construct rather than error if they are found to be part of the meaning of
test scores” (p. 491). This is the essence of specific purpose language testing—a will-
ingness, indeed necessity, to include nonlinguistic elements in defining the construct
to be measured. This includes an area of great potential interest in specific purpose
testing: the use of assessment criteria derived at least in part from an analysis of the
target language use situation. I have proposed (Douglas, 2000, 2001) that we should
base not only test content and format on an analysis of the target situation, but also the
criteria by which we judge specific purpose test performances, employing the notion
of indigenous assessment criteria put forward by Jacoby and McNamara (1999).
There are two related issues here: whether or not we include specific purpose back-
ground knowledge in the construct of language ability, and whether we are measuring
language use in specific contexts or success in achieving specific communicative pur-
poses. With regard to the first issue, Davies (2001) states categorically that “LSP testing
cannot be about testing for subject specific knowledge. It must be about testing the
ability to manipulate language functions appropriately in a wide variety of ways”
(p. 143). He is surely correct in that we Applied Linguists are not in the business of
assessing, for example, how much of engineering or language teaching methodol-
ogy people know. Nevertheless, in measuring language knowledge in professional,
vocational, or academic contexts, we may indeed decide to include specific purpose
background knowledge in the construct to be measured on the grounds that it is
very difficult to separate language knowledge from the content that it conveys. As
Bachman and Palmer (1996) have argued, when we are testing experienced engineers
or teachers, we may assume background knowledge as a given, but when we are
testing novices, a possible lack of background knowledge can be a source of error in
our measurement of language for specific purposes. In such a case we may need a test
of background knowledge to sort out the two traits.
The second issue, whether we are assessing test-takers’ ability to use language in
specific contexts or whether we are assessing ability to perform specific tasks in target
language use situations, is described by McNamara (1996) as “weak” and “strong” per-
formance hypotheses and continues to give us headaches today. In 1996, McNamara
recommended the weak performance hypothesis on the grounds that what we lan-
guage testers are best at is making inferences about language ability. However, sub-
sequent research (e.g., Lumley, 1998; Jacoby & McNamara, 1999) has cast doubt on
our ability to separate language ability from performance. McNamara himself has
acknowledged this in an e-mail exchange:

I’m not sure we should be restricting ourselves to the ‘weak’ end of the continuum I pro-
posed, but it also means that the criteria for assessment become critically important . . . We
should be using our best understanding of the nature of face-to-face communication as
the basis for deciding on these criteria. In this we should be looking to colleagues out-
side our own field to help us understand—and what they tell us, for example about the
shared burden of communicative success, is problematic for procedures designed to re-
port on ‘individual language ability.’ I’m not sure where we go, but I do know we have a
problem.
LTEST-L, April 10, 2001
860 DOUGLAS

In a related discussion (Douglas, 2000), I proposed that until we understand better

the relationship between language knowledge and background knowledge, we are
better off in specific purpose testing not to try to separate the two but to interpret test
performance in terms of a composite construct of specific purpose language ability
that includes both specific purpose language knowledge and field specific content
knowledge. Thus, an important research challenge of the coming decades is to try to
understand better the relationship between these two aspects of specific purpose lan-
guage ability. Clapham (1996) has shown us the difficulties we face in this enterprise:
It is very difficult even to define what makes a text field specific, and in addition, texts
appear to vary in their degree of specificity within themselves, with some sections
being more specific than others. This is a present and future challenge for researchers
in specific purpose language testing.
In this section, I have discussed a number of issues that center around the def-
inition of a specific purpose test. As Elder (2001) has pointed out, the uncertainty
about the boundaries between target language domains, between test and nontest
situations, and between components of language ability intended to be measured, all
stem from a systemic uncertainty about the nature of specific purpose language itself,
and consequently about the nature of specific purpose language testing. Indeed, this
indeterminacy is reflected in the similarly blurred boundaries between specific pur-
pose and general purpose teaching practices that were “unexpectedly uniform from
context to context” (Cumming, 2001, p. 223) among teachers Cumming interviewed
with respect to the assessment of writing in academic programs. All this leads me
to wonder whether we are not asking the wrong questions when we consider the
distinction between specific purpose and general purpose tests, or whether “English
for academic purposes” is part of ESP or not, for example. In Douglas (2000), I pro-
posed a continuum of specificity based on “the amount of background knowledge
required for carrying out test tasks, and the narrowness of interpretations which may
be made on the basis of test performance” (p. 14), and Cumming (2001) also discusses
the specific/general purpose distinction in terms of a continuum (p. 213). This indeed
blurs boundaries between and within specific and general purpose tests. But such,
perhaps, is the nature of the language testing enterprise and indeed of language itself.
I will argue next that a case can be made for defining a construct of specific purpose
language, but, although I do not propose to argue it here, I do wonder whether any
case can be made for the existence of general purpose language.

Specific Purpose Language?

For years in specific purpose language testing, we have referred, somewhat unthink-
ingly perhaps, to testing “English for air traffic control,” “scientific German,” or “tech-
nical Japanese,” as if these were definable dialects. Davies (2001) reminds us that
there is an important distinction between a dialect and a register: Dialects are ac-
quired as native languages whereas registers may be acquired for specific purposes
at any time in life and, when the purpose is no longer of relevance to us, the reg-
ister can be dropped. After reviewing Clapham’s and others’ research on the effect
of background knowledge, Fulcher (1999) concludes that we cannot justify testing
“academic English” but only that we are testing “English in an academic context”
(p. 234). Davies (2001) echoes this sentiment, arguing that we cannot make a theo-
retical case for the existence of language for specific purposes, that there are prac-
tical problems with implementing such tests, and that in any case specific purpose
language tests seem not to predict future performance much better than more gen-
eral tests. He maintains that there are sound pragmatic reasons for employing tests
that appear to the test-takers and score users to reflect the communicative tasks they
are interested in performing in English, and that as such, specific purpose language
 47. TESTING LANGUAGES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES 861

tests have a “beneficial effect on learners and teachers” (p. 144). This view brings us
logically, it seems to me, to a “face validity view” of specific purpose language test-
ing in which general English is dressed in a specific purpose context. This, I think,
would be wrong, not because the notion of face validity is inherently wrong but
because it rests on an argument that there is no theoretical basis for specific purpose
language.
For the most part, those who argue that there is not such a thing as specific purpose
language base their arguments on empirical studies suggesting that specific purpose
knowledge plays a very small role in the measurement of language ability in spe-
cific purpose language tests (cf. Alderson & Urquhart, 1985; Hale, 1988; McNamara,
1990; Jensen & Hansen, 1995; Papajohn, 1999). The difficulty with these studies is not
that they were poorly carried out but that the contextual and linguistic characteristics
investigated in each vary so much as to make a generalization about the effect of spe-
cific purpose language difficult to maintain. Davies (2001) nevertheless argues that
the existence of language for specific purposes has never been demonstrated and that
therefore specific purpose language testing is atheoretical. His distinction between
dialect and register I am not so sure about. I see language acquisition as a special
case of a general capacity for language use and both dialects and registers acquired
and discarded as part of social behavior—this is related to the discourse domains
hypothesis that Selinker and Douglas have been attempting to make a case for some
years now (Selinker & Douglas, 1985; Douglas & Selinker, 1985). Our argument is that
languages are learned in contexts, and as Chapelle (1998) has argued, the interaction
between trait and context changes the nature of both. If we agree with this notion, then
it seems to me that logically there must be such a thing as specific purpose language
and I wonder whether the distinction between dialect and register, as it relates to spe-
cific purpose language, is really important. Tarone (2001) argues that what matters is
variation with respect to context, which she calls “variable capacity” (Tarone, 1998)
rather than “competence.” This sounds very much like what Widdowson has called
“capacity,” and Halliday (1994) calls “meaning potential,” as I discuss later. Tarone
notes that both native and non-native speakers of languages have to acquire new
registers as they participate in new discourse communities, and this is in line with
my own view of language acquisition as a special case of general language use. If we
cannot define specific purpose language as a measurable property, as Fulcher (1999)
calls us to do, there will continue to be a problem with specific purpose language
testing.
I find it somewhat paradoxical that Davies (2001) argues that specific purpose
language testing, indeed specific purpose language itself, is an atheoretical concept
but that it can be justified on pragmatic grounds—what Fulcher (1999) has called
the “face validity argument” (p. 234)—for I would argue the reverse: that specific
purpose language testing is justified on theoretical grounds, taking an interactionalist
view of construct definition, but that it is often not actually carried out for pragmatic
reasons—it is too expensive or impractical to produce the variety of field specific tests
that theory would justify. As Fulcher (2000) suggests, an important task for specific
purpose language researchers in coming decades will be to “identify the level of
generalizability that is permitted in making inferences from scores across variable
features of tasks” (p. 491). Fulcher goes on to ask how far down the variationist road
language testing will go in the future, allowing that “in practice it is likely that the
position adopted on the cline [of specificity] of any specific test will be related to test
purpose and the needs of score users” (p. 491). Hamp-Lyons and Lumley (2001) agree
with this view: “Tests have multiple audiences, but the one that is most likely to drive
design decisions is the score user” (p. 130). This would appear to be another defining
feature of specific purpose language tests—the degree to which test results can be
interpreted with respect to the specific needs of groups of score users.
862 DOUGLAS

LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE AND SPECIFIC PURPOSE LANGUAGE

In addition to the current arguments about the nature, indeed existence of specific
purpose language, a number of researchers in specific purpose language testing have
recently proposed the centrality of linguistic competence (Clapham, 2000a, 2000b;
Davies, 2001; Fulcher, 1999; Widdowson, 2001) and have recommended that some-
how tests of linguistic knowledge be included in the assessment of specific purpose
communicative ability. In particular, Widdowson argues strongly that we should not
even try to measure communicative language ability since, on the one hand, it is a
dynamic, complex process that appears incapable of being pinned down long enough
to be measured, and on the other our means of measurement, which depend on static,
apparently unrelated components, are in principle incapable of measuring commu-
nication. He suggests that we instead attempt to test only the most salient features
of communication on which the others depend or are derived from. Thus, he pro-
poses that linguistic knowledge be restored to a central place in the inventory of
components to test, not as in, for example, the Chomskian paradigm, where linguis-
tic competence is seen as a somewhat self-contained formal property of sentences
in isolation, but as an integral part of a more general ability to communicate, inte-
grating the other components in relation to a context of use. Widdowson incorpo-
rates Halliday’s (1994) notion of meaning potential, contextually realized meanings
that are inherent in the lexicogrammatical code that we call linguistic knowledge,
and argues that only when we assess “the extent to which learners have internal-
ized the communicative potential in language” (p. 19) will we be on the right track.
This notion of meaning potential is related, it seems to me, to that of “capacity” that
Weir proposed earlier as a defining feature of communicative language testing, and
which Widdowson himself argued for before that. Widdowson discusses communica-
tive potential in a way relevant to specific purpose language testing by rejecting the
Hymes-Canale/Swain-Bachman/Palmer frameworks as going both too far and not far
enough. Too far in the sense that in the thirty years since Hymes first proposed a com-
ponential view of language knowledge, the frameworks for describing communica-
tive language ability have become more and more complex, adding more and more
components; not far enough in that they have never specified the dynamic relation-
ships among the components as they are used in communication. It seems to me that
the challenge to specific purpose language researchers in the coming decades will be to
explore the consequences of the proposal of the centrality of linguistic competence
for the construct of specific purpose language ability and the impact it may have for
specific purpose test development. It has been suggested, for example, that the Rule
Space Model offers a means for analyzing test content and linking it to performance
data (Buck & Tatsuoka, 1998) that might usefully be further explored in this regard.

Research
I’d like to turn now to a brief review of current research in testing language for
specific purposes. The projects I refer to are only representative of a great deal of
work being done around the world and not a definitive catalog, but the review is
intended to give an idea of the nature of research being conducted. I should point out,
too, that although some of the projects described here are not based on highly specific
purpose tests, the investigations themselves do bear on issues of interest to specific
purpose language testers. There are four categories of research that I will review here,
some of which have been discussed earlier: the nature of the test input, analysis of
the target language use situation, the nature of the assessment criteria, and backwash
(also known as washback or impact).
 47. TESTING LANGUAGES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES 863

The Nature of the Input

A listening comprehension test developed as part of the Hong Kong English Lan-
guage Benchmark Test is the vehicle for a study of differences between audio and video
input (Coniam, 2000). The stimulus consists of authentic discussion on educational
themes such as a panel discussion or professional seminar in a range of contexts,
including task content that reflects the culture of the target audience and differences
between spoken and written discourse. Coniam concluded that audio input was pre-
ferred: whereas test-takers perceived no advantages for either format and performed
similarly on both, a majority preferred audio to video—some found the visuals dis-
tracting. In another test development effort, video has been the chosen medium for
input: Feak and Salehzadeh (2001) are developing a listening test for international
teaching assistants. After reviewing the research literature, which was inconclusive
regarding advantages of using video over audio input, Feak and Salehzadeh turned
the question “Why use video?” around to “Why continue to use audio?” They are
attempting to employ video carefully to complement the auditory signal rather than
distracting from it. The issues raised with regard to visual and audio input have im-
plications for our views of the authenticity provided by video, and there has been
considerable research recently on the advantages and disadvantages of video input
in specific purpose language tests, with inconclusive results overall. No doubt the
preference for video or audio input depends, as do most aspects of language testing,
on the purpose and uses of the tests as well as the construct being measured.
Pino-Silva, of the Language Department, Universidad Simón Bolı́var in Venezuela,
is working on a series of small-scale studies dealing with computerized reading com-
prehension tests. He is looking particularly at the perception of ESP students of the
advantages of computerized reading comprehension tests, including the relationship
between reading online and test performance, as well as test/retest performance on
computer versus paper-and-pencil tests. The differences between reading online and
from printed texts is especially important as more and more specific purpose language
tests are being put on computers and the Web, and more research is certainly needed
to help us interpret test performance in light of the nature of the input medium.

The Analysis of the Target Language Use Situation

Purpura is conducting research that will have relevance to testing with regard to the
specific language needs of students doing their master’s in the School of International
Policy and Administration (SIPA) at Columbia University, where there is a foreign lan-
guage requirement related to the region they expect to work in. The intent of Purpura
and his colleagues is to examine to what degree this requirement is appropriate, given
the students’ perceived needs and wants. They are also examining to what degree the
foreign language programs at Columbia are providing foreign language instruction
appropriate to the future career goals of SIPA students. The project is in the qualitative
data-gathering stage: Staff have interviewed current students, alumni, administrators,
language teachers, and SIPA teachers and will be interviewing end users (employers).
Based on the interviews, they are devising structured questionnaires for their survey.
O’Sullivan, at the University of Reading has been conducting research studies re-
lated to the Test of English for Educational Purposes (TEEP). In 1999, a project funded
by the University of Reading, and implemented by Weir and O’Sullivan, replicated
the original needs analysis conducted by Weir (1983), and found that the original re-
sults were still relevant. This is not really surprising as the context of language use
has changed little in the intervening years, although the growing use of computer-
mediated communication technology must surely have an effect on academic lan-
guage use. Another aspect of this effort was research that focused on task-related
864 DOUGLAS

factors such as the question of the effect on written performance of the provision, or
lack of provision of scaffolding (O’Sullivan, Slaght, & Pallant, 2001). This research is
associated with revisions to TEEP described next.

Analysis of Assessment Criteria

Elder, at the University of Auckland, is working on the development of a post-
admission diagnostic test of EAP for NS and NNS undergraduates. Research related
to this project focuses on two issues: a) the difficulty of setting benchmarks given
differences between the views of faculty members from different disciplines and ESL
experts regarding what constitutes adequate performance, and b) whether the same
set of assessment criteria can provide valid information about NS and NNS test-
takers on post-admission diagnostic EAP bias and threshold setting. Once again, this
is related to the issue of assessment criteria in specific purpose language testing.
Eggly, Musial, and Smulowitz (1999) studied the relationship between medical
residents’ performance on two tests, both at the less-specific end of the specificity
continuum—the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) and the
Speaking Proficiency in English Assessment Kit (SPEAK)—and patient satisfaction,
faculty and colleague evaluations, and in-training exam scores. They found signifi-
cant relationships between the tests and the performance measures, such that faculty,
colleagues, and patients perceived their language skills to be deficient, although the
residents had very high proficiency scores as a group (the TOEIC mean was 904 out
of 990 whereas the SPEAK mean was 272 out of 300). This finding is similar to that
of McNamara (1996) with regard to the more highly specific Occupational English
Test (OET)—whatever the test was measuring, it wasn’t what the score users were in-
terested in—and highlights the need for incorporating information about assessment
criteria in the target situation in our test specifications.

Backwash
Green is conducting backwash research into the role of the IELTS Writing test in
EAP provision at the University of Surrey-Roehampton, comparing courses directed
at IELTS preparation with “pre-sessional” preparation courses provided by univer-
sities that draw more directly on academic writing needs analyses and so may have
a ‘broader’ scope. He is investigating differences between course types and relat-
ing these to outcomes, including test score gains and perceptions of learning. Does
teaching-to-the-test lead to greater or faster score gains? And at what cost to EAP
training?

Test Revision Projects

Three test revision projects reflect current trends in specific purpose language testing—
the tendency noted by Douglas (2000) toward less specificity may be stabilizing. A
European consortium of business management schools, Community of European
Management Schools (CMS), offers a pan-European master’s degree in economics
and business administration in which students must demonstrate proficiency in two
European languages. Quite some time ago, the consortium developed a set of specific
purpose tests to assess candidates’ proficiency in their chosen languages. Currently,
the main European language test forms are developed annually, whereas the lesser
taught languages are developed on an as-needed basis (two versions) and re-used
for several testing sessions, and recently, the team charged with assessment has been
working to link the tests to the Council of Europe Framework for Teaching and Testing.
The TEEP revision project referred to in the earlier section on research has led to a
completely new tape-mediated test of speaking, currently undergoing a final trial, and
 47. TESTING LANGUAGES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES 865

which was due to be added to the existing battery in autumn of 2001 (O’Sullivan, 2001).
The main TEEP paper, which consisted of reading, listening, and writing tasks, has also
been the subject of a major revision. O’Sullivan and Slaght (2001) have reviewed and
updated the specifications of the test and have recently introduced the first of a series
of updated versions. This revision has seen the introduction of more contemporary
topics, while a rigorous trialing process has greatly enhanced the test’s reliability.
In addition to reviewing the procedures for writing and evaluating TEEP items, the
Revision Project also integrated the results of a series of specifically designed research
studies that focused on task-related factors such as the question of the effect on written
performance of the provision, or lack of provision of scaffolding (O’Sullivan, Slaght,
& Pallant, 2001). The major addition to the TEEP is the inclusion of a grammar paper.
This paper has been the subject of a joint project between TERU and the Centre for
Research in Testing, Evaluation and Curriculum in ELT (CRTEC), the University of
Surrey-Roehampton (Weir et al., 2001).
In a project that has been ongoing since 1997 (Jamieson et al., 1997), Educational
Testing Service is undertaking a major revision of the TOEFL. The main motivations
for the revision project include developments in the field of language testing away
from discrete-point, multiple-choice tasks, toward more integrative, communicative
tasks, and concerns among test users that students were being admitted to university
programs with high scores on the current TOEFL who had insufficient written and
spoken communication skills. The project was based on an extensive research and
design phase, during which TOEFL staff and outside consultants from the fields of
applied linguistics, language assessment, and higher education, considered trends in
international student admissions and intensive English program enrollments, exam-
ined developments in technologies for test delivery, scoring, and reporting, reviewed
the literature on communicative competence and communicative language testing,
and commissioned papers elaborating communicative constructs in academic read-
ing, writing, listening, and speaking. Prototype tests have been developed and plans
are for the New TOEFL to be introduced initially in a low-stakes version to be mar-
keted to English language programs. A particular feature of the new test is a focus on
extended production tasks, integrated with reading and listening input. For example,
test-takers will read an excerpt from an academic text and then write an essay based
on one or more of the points in the text, or listen to a lecture on an academic topic and
provide a spoken summary.

Recent/Current Test Development Projects

For me, perhaps the most exciting part of preparing this paper has been learning about
the vibrant activity in specific purpose language test development—there is a lot going
on all over the world. I sent out a message on the TESP-L, EST-L, and LTEST-L online
discussion lists, asking for information about ongoing test revision and development
projects. I received more than 30 replies and have categorized the information under
the broad headings of tests for academic and vocational purposes. The list of tests
below is thus not exhaustive or even randomly representative of all the activity going
on in specific purpose language testing, but it is nevertheless a fascinating glimpse of
some exciting developments in our field. [Note: Unless otherwise noted, all references
are personal e-mail communications.]

Academic Tests
There are a number of tests of academic English for science and technology: English
for chemical engineering at Abu Dhabi Men’s College; reading, vocabulary, and tech-
nical report writing in EST at Kwangju Institute of Science and Technology in Korea;
writing, listening, and editing assessment in biochemistry at Yonsei University, also
866 DOUGLAS

in Korea; article reading tests in biology and chemistry at the University of Guam;
and alternative assessments for students in dentistry and various other sciences at the
University of Hong Kong. A number of tests of academic business English are being
developed at Kyiv University; a large-scale project in France will introduce a national
foreign language exam for students of all subjects (other than literature and language)
in French universities, under the auspices of the Centre Régional Interuniversitaire
de Formation En Langues (CRIFEL); a test of English for policy studies is under de-
velopment at Kwansei Gakuin in Japan; and a computer-based test of oral proficiency
for international teaching assistants (ITAs) is under development at Purdue Univer-
sity in the United States. In another large-scale project, English placement tests have
been developed in the fields of agriculture, forestry, applied chemistry and microbi-
ology, marketing, chemistry, mathematics, biology, drama, medicine, pharmacy, and
veterinary medicine at the University of Helsinki.

Vocational Tests
Two commercial ventures include entry and exit achievement tests to accompany
online business English courses published by Pearson Education and an online busi-
ness language test, the Business Language Testing Service (BULATS), offered in a
number of European languages, and developed by the University of Cambridge Local
Examination Syndicate (UCLES) and the Association of Language Testers in Europe
(ALTE). A research and development team at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, in
association with the Hong Kong Society of Accountants, is working on an online test of
English for professional accountants, currently known as the Context-led English Lan-
guage Assessment System (CLELAS). Vocational language testing in the medical pro-
fessions includes the Communication Skills assessment that is part of the Clinical Skills
Assessment of foreign-trained physicians by the Educational Council for Foreign Med-
ical Graduates (ECFMG), and an Australian test of English communication skills for
overseas-trained nurses who wish to practice in Australia, sponsored by the Queens-
land Nursing Council and developed and administered by staff at the Centre for Ap-
plied Linguistics and Languages at Griffith University. Other vocational language tests
include an online English test for trainee aircraft maintenance workers in Saudi Ara-
bia; an online English test for engineers in Japan, under the auspices of the Institute for
Professional English Communication; a European initiative under a NATO Standard
Agreement to test the military English ability of officers and civilian personnel for ser-
vice at NATO Headquarters in Brussels or participation in peace-keeping operations
with military personnel from other countries; and a Taiwanese version of the Listen-
ing Summary Translation Examination (LSTE) for law enforcement personnel (Wu &
Stansfield, 2001). Stansfield and colleagues are also developing a court interpreters
written examination to screen candidates for the more expensive oral examination.

CONCLUSION

So, what is the state of the art of languages for specific purposes testing? Like other
areas of Applied Linguistics (Larsen-Freeman, 2000), specific purpose language test-
ing is still an emerging discipline whose practitioners are grappling with definitions,
boundaries, and methods. I have argued that specific purpose language testing is de-
fined by the nature of the construct to be measured, which includes both specific pur-
pose language and background knowledge. While, as Davies (2001) points out, we are
not in the business of measuring specific purpose content knowledge, it is also true that
we know very little about the interrelationship between language knowledge and the
content it is used to convey. Thus, it will be necessary to take background knowledge
 47. TESTING LANGUAGES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES 867

into account in the interpretation of specific purpose language test performance even
if it is not explicitly measured by our tests. It may also be, as Fulcher (2000) has sug-
gested, that other aspects of the context, such as purpose, tone, or genre, for example,
may need to be included in the construct definition to the extent that they are seen to
be part of the meaning of scores on specific purpose language tests. In this regard, we
need, as McNamara (2001) reminds us, to pay more attention to the criteria we employ
to judge performances on specific purpose language tests, listening to practitioners
in the professional and academic fields within which we are producing tests for what
they have to tell us about the criteria they use in judging performances in their fields.
Some of these may be directly useful in constructing rating scales, whereas others may
be of more use in the interpretation of test performances. Finally, we need to come to
grips with our understanding of specific purpose language itself, particularly in light
of the challenge put forward by Davies (2001), Fulcher (1999), and Clapham (2000a),
among others, that specific purpose testing is linguistically atheoretical but that it is
justified on pragmatic, face validity grounds. I have argued that we need to find a way
to describe specific purpose language in a way that allows for its measurement in our
tests, perhaps in a paradigm similar to what Tarone (1998) has called variable capacity or
what Widdowson (2001), invoking Halliday (1994), refers to as meaning potential—“the
extent to which learners have internalized the communicative potential in language”
(p. 94)—and which he suggests is best measured as contextualized linguistic compe-
tence. This issue will continue to be a point of investigation for language for specific
purposes practitioners for some time to come.
In addition to these fundamental, definitional issues, specific purpose language
testing continues to require empirical studies of what makes spoken and written texts
field specific (cf. Clapham, 1996), of the degree of generalizability of test performance
(Fulcher, 1999), of the effect of test delivery technologies on test performance, and of
the impact of specific purpose language testing on specific purpose language teaching
and materials.
Finally, given the rich and vibrant test revision and development work going on
all around the world, the hopeful vision at the end of Douglas (2000) of a rich future
for specific purpose language testing would appear to be justified.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank the numerous colleagues who sent me information about ongoing research
and development projects in specific purpose language testing.

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48

Classroom Teacher Assessment

of Second Language
Development: Construct
as Practice
Constant Leung
King’s College, University of London

INTRODUCTION

Classroom-based teacher assessment of second language development has been the

subject of a great deal of interesting and at times polemical discussion in recent years.
One area of interest is concerned with the claims of distinctive usefulness and ped-
agogic value made by proponents of classroom-based teacher assessment as an al-
ternative approach to the more conventional forms of standardized language testing.
There has also been a lot of interest in the quality and soundness of classroom-based
teacher assessment in terms of validity and reliability and other issues traditionally
associated with standardized testing. In addition, the arguments for critical language
assessment has added a number of new issues such as ethical values, political respon-
sibility, and democratic principles to the discussion. The main purpose of this chapter
is to present an overview of some of the constitutive issues concerning pedagogi-
cally oriented classroom-based teacher assessment, and some suggestions for further
articulation and formulation of the research and development agenda.
The discussion will argue for a view of teacher assessment that is intrinsically tied to
a built-in requirement for expanding professional knowledge, responsive pedagogy,
and reflexive practice. It will be proposed that teacher practice should be seen as a
key site for research and development. The privileging of teacher practice represents
an epistemological turn as well as a starting point for reflexive examination. This
chapter will draw on works from the fields of second language testing/assessment and
educational assessment more generally. Researchers and writers have used the terms
‘assessment,’ ‘evaluation,’ and ‘testing’ in a number of different and/or overlapping
senses; every effort will be made to minimize terminological ambiguity.

869
870 LEUNG

FINDING A WAY THROUGH CONCEPTUAL DIFFERENCES

AND COMMON CONCERNS

The term classroom-based teacher assessment, from now on teacher assessment, has
been associated with a range of different but often overlapping conceptualizations
and practices in different contexts. The following are some examples:
r Alternative assessment—Huerta-Macı́as, for instance, argues that “[a]lternative
assessment . . . provides alternatives to traditional testing” and these alternatives in-
clude “checklists of student behaviors . . . journals, reading logs . . . work samples and
teacher observations and anecdotal records” (1995, p. 9); the centrality of teacher action
and teacher involvement in alternative assessment can be clearly seen when she states
that alternative assessment procedures are “non-intrusive to the classroom because
they do not require a separate block of time to implement . . . ” and “. . . the . . . day-to-
day activities that a student is engaged in (e.g., writing, role play, group discussion)
are the basis for alternative assessment” (1995, p. 9).
r Authentic assessment—Garcı́a and Pearson (1994, pp. 357–358) state that the
goal of authentic assessment is “to gather evidence about how students are approach-
ing, processing, and completing “real-life” tasks in a particular domain. Authentic
classroom assessment can include . . . anecdotal records . . . teacher-student conferenc-
ing . . . and portfolios of student work. . . . ” They add that “. . . authentic classroom
assessment requires teachers to observe the participants (students), respond to their
performance, and plan instruction accordingly” (1994, p. 359).
r Classroom assessment—TESOL (1998, p. 3) states that “classroom assessment are
those that are interwoven into instruction, often created and delivered by ESL/bilingual
teachers”; it also suggests elsewhere in the same title that “classroom assessments
mirror the language(s) and content of instructional practices” and “classroom assess-
ments enable students to demonstrate their learning in multiple ways from multiple
perspectives, thus serving as learning experiences themselves” (1998, p. 7).
r Educational assessment—Gipps (1994, p. 123) states that “teacher assessment is
essentially an informal activity: the teacher may pose questions, observe activities,
evaluate pupils’ work in a planned and systematic or ad hoc way. . . . ”
r Formative assessment—Black and Wiliam (1998b, p. 2) suggest that assessment
includes “all those activities undertaken by the teachers, and by their students in as-
sessing themselves, which provide information to be used as feedback to modify the
teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged. Such assessment becomes
“formative assessment” when evidence is actually used to adapt the teaching work to meet the
needs’ of students” (original italics).
r Informal assessment—Rea-Dickins (2001, p. 434) suggests that “much routine
classroom teaching activity allows teachers to make decisions about their
learners—e.g., how much a learner knows, and how much progress a learner is mak-
ing—and may be influential in determining what is taught next and how that material
is taught, thereby constituting an important core in classroom assessment practice.”
r Statutory assessment—In England, teacher assessment is “an essential part of
the national curriculum assessment and reporting arrangement” at the end of ele-
mentary school and teachers are advised that “tests provide a standard “snapshot” of
attainment . . . while teacher assessment, carried out as part of teaching and learning in
the classroom, covers the full range and scope of the programs of study, and takes ac-
count of evidence of achievement in a range of contexts, including that gained through
discussion and observation” (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority [QCA], 2001).

The terminological and discoursal differences can be seen to represent different

theoretical and practical orientations. For instance, the seemingly formative-cum-
summative, instrumental, and record-keeping conceptualization presented by official
 48. CLASSROOM TEACHER ASSESSMENT 871

curriculum and assessment authorities such as QCA (2001) is clearly quite different
from the strongly pedagogic orientation suggested by Rea-Dickens, and Black and
Wiliam. However, there appears to a common core meaning underlying the termino-
logical differences—that is, nonstandardized local assessment carried out by teachers
in the classroom.
Additionally there seems to be a shared understanding that teachers need
classroom-based information about individual students, even where formal test scores
are available. Genesee and Upshur (1996, p. 5) illustrate the argument in this way:

Imagine that Pedro scored 19 on a class test. By itself, Pedro’s score is meaningless. We
cannot tell from this score alone whether Pedro has done well. Moreover, if he has done
poorly, we cannot discern the reason from his score alone. Therefore, we cannot decide
whether to proceed with our teaching as planned or to take another course of action more
appropriate for Pedro.

Furthermore, arguments for teacher assessment recognize that standardized testing

does not necessarily provide valid information accurately and reliably about stu-
dents’ ability or performance in a specific domain, particularly at the level of the
individual. Gipps (1994, p. 6) raises the issue of the limiting effect of the tendency
to conceptualize construct (in the psychometric tradition) as comprising one single
underlying attribute or skill when many, if not most, language abilities or skills are
multidimensional. For instance, if a standardized reading test operationalizes reading
as “comprehension of simple sentences,” then the other aspects of a student’s ability
to read in context in a wider sense are left out. Pedagogically the possible consequence
of curriculum narrowing of limited construct dimensionality, through washback, is
not difficult to see. In education systems with ethnic and linguistic diversity, Garcı́a
and Pearson (1994) point out that in test construction the norming process tends to
(a) underrepresent linguistic minority groups and (b) eliminate test items that have
low correlation with the total test score, thus getting rid of those items on which mi-
nority students may perform well (cf. Bachman, 2000). Wiliam (2001b, p. 18) shows
the potential unreliability of standardized test scores at the individual level: for a test
with scaled scores with 100 as the average score and a standard deviation of scores of
15, “with a reliability of 0.75 . . . someone who scores 115 . . . might really have a true
score of just 100 . . . or as high as 130 . . . we must be aware that the results of even the
best test can be wildly inaccurate for individual students. . . . ”
So educationally and pedagogically there is a good case for teacher assessment to
play at least a complementary role, to borrow a phrase from Linn, Baker, and Dunbar
(1991, p. 16), to standardized testing. The important task now is to consider what
constitutes epistemologically appropriate questions for teacher assessment. For the
purpose of this discussion teacher assessment is understood as, building on Lynch
(2001, p. 358), the noticing and gathering of information about student language use
in ordinary (noncontrived) classroom activities, and the use of that information to
make decisions about language teaching without necessarily quantifying it or using
it for reporting purposes. It is hoped that this deliberately low-key perspective on
teacher assessment will help focus attention on the core issues centered around the
relationship between assessment and pedagogy.

ASSUMPTIONS, CLAIMS, AND CRITICAL RESPONSES

The usefulness of teacher assessment is generally accepted but there are questions
as to the status and the nature of the information it produces. The strong claims of
validity and reliability advanced by proponents of teacher assessment such as Gipps
and Huerta-Macı́as are contested. Huerta-Macı́as (1995, p. 9), for instance, argues
that these concerns, traditionally associated with psychometric approaches, should
872 LEUNG

be recast as aspects of trustworthiness: “An instrument is deemed to be trustworthy if

it has credibility (i.e., truth value) and auditability (i.e., consistency).” On this account
credibility appears to be associated with real-life classroom tasks and activities such
as “writing, self-editing, reading, participation in collaborative work . . . ’ (Huerta-
Macı́as, 1995, p. 9); the syllogism is as follows: Real-life tasks are credible, credibility
is validity, therefore real-life tasks are valid. Consistency or reliability is regarded as
a consequence of being valid:

. . . if a procedure is valid, then it is reliable in that it will consistently produce the same
results if audited or replicated. The probability is very high, for example, that a student’s
written retelling of a story will share the same or at least highly similar characteristics in
his writing from one week to the next. Two instructors or even the same instructor who
is trained in the use of a holistic evaluation scale will more than likely find two pieces,
written one week apart by a student, will exhibit like characteristics. (Huerta-Macı́as,
1995, p. 9)

Gipps (1994, pp. 123–124) presents her views on validity and reliability as follows:

The information which the teacher thus obtains may be partial or fragmentary . . . But
repeated assessment of this sort, over a period of time, and in a range of contexts will
allow the teacher to build up a solid and broadly based understanding of the pupil’s
attainment. Because of these characteristics teacher assessment may be seen as having a
high validity in relation to content and construct . . . If the assessment has sampled broadly
across the domain and in depth within it then the assessment is likely to be generalizable
(within that domain). . . .
Where traditional reliability measures are not appropriate we need to drop reliability
and . . . use . . . comparability, which is based on consistency. The level of comparability
demanded for any assessment will be related to its use: for example, if performance
assessment is used for accountability purposes then great care will need to be taken to
ensure comparability; for teacher assessment for formative purposes comparability is
of lesser concern. Consistency leading to comparability is achieved by assessment tasks
being presented in the same way . . . assessment criteria being interpreted in the same
way . . . (Gipps, 1994, p. 171).

Brown and Hudson (1998, p. 655), in a discussion on the usefulness of different kinds
of second language tests and teacher assessment, agree that attributes such as credi-
bility and auditability contribute to the notion of trustworthiness in teacher assessment;
but they insist that trustworthiness so defined is not enough. In their view teachers
conducting classroom assessment “must make every effort to structure the ways they
design, pilot, analyze, and revise the procedures so the reliability and validity of the
procedures can be studied, demonstrated and improved” (Brown & Hudson, 1998,
p. 656).
In a similar vein, Cohen (1994) suggests that when teachers evaluate their own
assessment instruments they should look at different aspects of their reliability and
validity. For instance, with reference to reliability, Cohen (1994, p. 36) suggests that
“the reliability of a test concerns its precision as a measuring instrument” and that
“three different types of factors contribute to the reliability of language assessment in-
struments: test factors, situation factors, and individual factors.” Attention is drawn to
formal means of investigating test factors such as the internal consistency of test items.
It seems quite clear that this view of validity and reliability locates teacher assessment
within the broader concept of performance testing. (For a discussion on validation
criteria of performance assessment see Linn, Baker, & Dunbar, 1991.) However, given
that teacher assessment is regarded in this discussion as complementary to and not
an extension of standardized testing, it would seem more pertinent to ask on what
 48. CLASSROOM TEACHER ASSESSMENT 873

basis can teacher assessment claim validity and reliability and whether this question
is indeed germane.
One way of making sense of this kind of questioning is to understand a particular
difference in the epistemological concerns of psychometric measurement and teacher
assessment—psychometrics treats the attribute to be sampled as a property of the
individual, which is quantifiable at any one time, whereas teacher assessment has
to take account of the interactive nature of student performance in the classroom,
which is dynamic and co-produced with the teacher and others. (The issues raised by
A. Brown (1995) and McNamara (1997) on the interactive nature of performance tests
are relevant here.)
The views expressed by Rea-Dickens, Black, and Wiliam1 and others2 cited earlier
would suggest that what they have in mind is a form of teacher assessment that
is integrated into the ordinary teaching and learning activities. Gipps (1994, p. 13)
suggests that teacher assessment (in her terms, “trickle up testing”):

. . . is essentially nonstandardized and involves a wide range of activity but its purpose
is to gather information for use in decision making in the classroom . . . and the teacher is
assessor, user, and interpreter of results, i.e., s/he has an interactive role. The results are
used by teachers to identify students’ needs . . . [and] by students for feedback on their
learning . . .

More observationally, Rea-Dickins (2001, p. 437) suggests that teacher assessment

may be “plotted at different points along a more ‘formal’ to ‘informal’ continuum.”
The more formal assessments would include preplanned stand-alone assessment ac-
tivities carried out for reporting or summative purposes, but the teacher would nev-
ertheless provide scaffolding for the students during the assessment activities. The
informal assessments would take place as part of teaching and learning with “strategic
teacher intervention—by questioning, seeking clarification . . . pushing some learners’
forward in their understanding and language learning” (Rea-Dickins, 2001, pp. 437–
438).
The alternative conceptualization of validity and reliability suggested by Huerta-
Macı́as and others has in fact been recognized within the psychometric perspective.
For instance, Haertel (1992, p. 986), in a discussion on what he calls “instructional uses
of student performance measurement,” suggests that, teacher assessment tasks “may
be highly motivating for students and may be more closely tied to curriculum and in-
struction than are typical objective tests” and, given the focus on teaching and learning
at the local classroom level, “reliability and efficiency in scoring are relatively unim-
portant. . . . ” From a psychometric point of view it is not difficult to follow Haertel’s
line of reasoning. There are at least three reasons. First, each teacher assessment task is
unique because it is virtually impossible to reproduce any particular assessment task
in the same way or under the same conditions since the task and the conditions are not
controlled in the first place. Second, teacher assessment tasks are rarely used without
variation (see previous point) beyond a particular class or group of students (therefore
“objective” comparability of scores or outcomes is not an issue). Third, “important
decisions are unlikely to hinge on the precise ranking of the [students]” (Haertel, 1992)
because the focus is on teaching and learning. Furthermore, it is recognized that in
day-to-day classroom work teachers generally have multiple sources of information
about their students, and misinterpretation of teacher assessment outcome can be
easily corrected.
This relaxation of reliability for “instructional uses of student performance mea-
surement” may be seen as concessions offered on account of the low-stakes and
“home-made” nature of teacher assessment from a psychometric perspective of
high-stakes testing. In a sense, this is a form of tacit acknowledgment that teacher
874 LEUNG

assessment is not the same thing as psychometric testing, therefore there is no point
in insisting on applying the same basis of validation. Lynch (2001, p. 361), in a dis-
cussion on a critical perspective on language assessment, suggests that “the use of
qualitative methods would not be simply a methodological choice, but an epistemo-
logical and ontological one, entailing a view of language as something that is created
and exists in the act of our using, inquiring, and interpreting, not as an independent,
objective entity waiting to be discovered and measured.” Along similar lines, Wiliam
(2001a, p. 172) argues that “. . . much of the investigation that has been done into au-
thentic assessment of performance has been based on a ‘deficit’ model, by establishing
how far, say, the assessment of portfolios of students’ work, falls short of the standards
of reliability of standardized multiple-choice tests. An alternative approach is, instead
of building theoretical models and then trying to apply them to assessment practices,
we try to theorize what is actually being done.”

TEACHER ASSESSMENT: TEACHER MEDIATION

If teacher assessment is part of the teaching and learning process, then it follows
that its quality and value crucially depend on what (kinds of) pedagogically oriented
information is being sought and what basis of judgment is being invoked by the
teacher in that process. These questions are related to the idea of construct. Bachman
and Palmer (1996, p. 89) suggest that in test development it is important to define the
test construct because the activity of defining it “makes explicit the precise nature of
the ability we want to measure, by defining it abstractly.” For example, reading can be
defined as the ability to read with comprehension unconnected sentences or to read
and understand sentence and whole text level meaning. In teacher assessment the
issue of construct is considerably more complicated. The teacher, qua assessor, acts
as a mediated representation of construct when working with and interpreting their
own assessment criteria or published assessment scale descriptors. In most, if not
all, institutional settings teachers exercise considerable amount of asymmetric power
over students in regulative and pedagogic decision making in terms of both day-to-
day classroom construction of the curriculum and longer term trajectories of student
progress. This power inequality makes it all the more important to explore teachers’
mediation of construct and assessment criteria both theoretically and empirically.
In one sense the notion of mediation is concerned with the basis of teacher judg-
ment. A conventional way of looking at this is to ask whether teachers operate ac-
cording to clearly defined criteria of what students know or can do, that is, criterion-
referenced assessment. The key argument for criterion-referenced assessment is that
there should be clarity about the relationship between what is being assessed and what
the assessment means. At first glance it may seem that teacher assessment should be
criterion-referenced because this may help clarify what the teacher should attend to.
However, it is generally the case that the criteria in a criterion-referenced assessment
scheme are set out in advance of the assessment activities. The teacher’s job, qua as-
sessor, is to look for the requisite evidence. It can be argued that the kind of teacher
assessment being discussed here may not fit easily into this conceptual framework. If
teacher assessment is part of the ordinary teaching-learning process, the teacher has to
respond to all kinds of contingent student responses. For instance, in a story-writing
task, based on previous acting out and role play, some students show signs that they
are finding it difficult to use reported speech and this may lead to an impromptu
teaching session on grammar. In this situation, any teacher intention to assess as-
pects of story writing would be displaced. It is not clear how possible it is for the
teacher, any teacher, to operate the full range of prespecified criteria that would cover
all possible aspects of student learning, modes of participation, and learning strate-
 48. CLASSROOM TEACHER ASSESSMENT 875

gies, to name but a few possible issues that can emerge in the teaching and learning
process that might impact on teacher assessment; the fluid, socially dynamic, and
sometimes unpredictable nature of classroom activities would preclude this possibil-
ity. A teacher cannot in good faith impose an assessment agenda on classroom events
when teaching and learning are the declared purpose. In any case, when they are not
acting as official invigilators or examiners, teachers often intervene in assessment ac-
tivities to assist learning. This is not to say that teachers should not work with clearly
defined criteria. The point is that one cannot assume that noncontrived classroom
events would always provide the necessary opportunities to sample the language
use (or any other kind of “evidence”) required for the intended criterion-referenced
assessment.
Wiliam (2001a, pp. 172–173) suggests that an alternative to criterion-referenced
assessment, is construct-referenced assessment, which is glossed as follows:

The innovative feature of such assessment is that no attempt is made to prescribe learning
outcomes. In that it is defined at all, it is defined simply as the consensus of the teachers
making assessments. The assessment is not objective, in the sense that there are no ob-
jective criteria for a student to satisfy . . . the assessment system relies on the existence of
a construct (of what it means to be competent in a particular domain) being shared by a
community of practitioners. . . .

The high-stakes Ph.D. examination, according to Wiliam, is an example of this kind

of assessment. The University of London regulations, for instance, stipulate that to
pass the examination a Ph.D. thesis must make a contribution to original knowledge
by discovering new facts or by the use of critical power. This would appear to be a
criterion at first sight. However, in fact not all new facts are rated equally at Ph.D.
level. In a thesis concerned with the nature of teacher-student interaction, counting
up the total number of words uttered by all participants in a particular lesson may
show a new fact, but by itself it is unlikely to count for much. Indeed notions such
as ‘original’ and ‘critical,’ even ‘contribution,’ are subject to interpretation. When two
examiners agree to pass a thesis they do so “not because they derive similar meanings
from the regulation, but because they already have in their minds a notion of the
required standard” (Wiliam, 2001a).
This concept of construct-referencing is useful because it provides an epistemolog-
ically helpful basis for further critical exploration of the complexities in pedagogically
oriented teacher assessment. The most important issue raised by this concept is what
constitutes professional or communal consensus alluded to by Wiliam. Teachers’ pro-
fessional knowledge and the way they use this knowledge in assessment practices are
now being brought into focus. Seen in this light, there are at least two aspects of teacher
assessment that require further exploration: institutional or community practice and
individual teacher qua assessor practice. These are actually overlapping phenomena
in real life. At this stage, however, it would seem helpful to look at them separately
to show how they may impact on teacher assessment.
We will look at institutional or community practice first. The notions of institution
and community are understood loosely here; an institution is a school or a department
within a school and a community is a group of teachers who share some common
understanding and approaches to assessment within a school, a subject area, or even
a particular phase of education.3

INSTITUTIONAL AND COMMUNITY PRACTICE

Clarke and Gipps (2000, p. 38) observe that a number of public educational systems,
such as Australia and England, have introduced national curriculum frameworks
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and assessment schemes that require teachers to both teach and assess according to
published content and benchmarks, and yet “little is known about the actual processes
of assessment.” One of the focuses of attention of their work was on how elementary
and secondary teachers in England carried out their ongoing teacher assessment,
which enabled them to make an overall judgment on the level of attainment at the
end of a school year or at the end of a Key Stage.4 They report that “mathematics and
science departments in secondary schools adopt rather formal approaches to ongoing
assessment (e.g., end of module tests, regular classroom tests), whereas English de-
partments and [elementary] teachers tend to use more informal, formative methods
(e.g., pupil self-assessment, regular notetaking, use of pupil portfolios)” (Clarke &
Gipps, p. 44). This kind of findings points to the fact that teachers in specific disci-
plines or subject departments and different phases of schooling may adopt different
practices and use different kinds of information and procedures.
Brindley (1998, 2001) investigates a number of issues concerning the assessment
of the Certificates in Spoken and Written English, a nationally accredited competency-
based curriculum and assessment framework designed for adult migrants in
Australia. This framework provides teachers with four levels of “‘can-do’ statements
of the outcomes of learning . . . in oral interaction, reading and writing (e.g., can par-
ticipate in a casual conversation . . . )” (Brindley, 1998, p. 60). The assessment tasks are
produced and administered by teachers. As part of his study Brindley looked at six
particular writing tasks intended to assess two particular competencies at Certificate
III level and found “major differences in rater severity . . . a person’s chances of being
awarded [either one of the competencies] would be reduced by approximately 45
percent if his or her script were judged by the most severe rater instead of the most
lenient” (Brindley, 1998, p. 63). This kind of findings suggests that even with a group
of teachers who are working within the same curriculum and assessment framework
there can be greater differences in terms of their judgments, possibly reflecting a range
of different interpretations of criteria.
The National Curriculum in England operates a set of common scales for (the sub-
ject) English for all students, irrespective of their language background except for the
first (lowest) level.5 Indeed, until the recent introduction of the additional modified
Level 1 to accommodate second language beginners (Qualifications and Curriculum
Authority [QCA], 2000), all students were meant to be assessed according to the com-
mon national scales. The curriculum framework and the assessment arrangement
generally did not (and still does not to a large extent, see Endnote 3) encourage teach-
ers to draw a clear distinction between English as a mother tongue and English as an
Additional/Second Language (EAL/ESL). In an exploratory study of teacher models
of speaking and listening Leung and Teasdale (1997 b) reported that when a group of
EAL teaching staff, all serving in the same local education authority but assigned to dif-
ferent schools, were asked to comment and to judge some noncontrived classroom per-
formances of students from diverse language backgrounds from another school area
on video, they appeared to operate constructs such as “native-speaker like,” “accent,”
and “task focus,” which were not in the official level descriptions (see Appendix 1
for Levels 1–4 descriptions). This kind of finding points to the possibility of teacher-
invoking constructs other than those set out in the published assessment scales.
It would seem that there is a great deal to be learned about teacher assessment prac-
tices within even the relatively well-established curriculum and assessment schemes.
The publication and standardization of curriculum and assessment statements does
not by itself lead to shared practice or perception. There appears to be variability in
both procedures and criteria of assessment. This draws attention to the need for fur-
ther development in both institutional assessment organization and procedure, and
collective teacher qua assessor practice. At this point we will turn to some of the even
 48. CLASSROOM TEACHER ASSESSMENT 877

less visible issues of teacher knowledge, beliefs, and values at the level of individual
teacher qua assessor practice.

INDIVIDUAL PRACTICE

The practice of teacher assessment becomes even more complex if we try to understand
what happens when teachers assess, without conscious planning, as part of ordinary
classroom interaction with students, that is, when they consider themselves to be
teaching. Breen (1997, p. 96) refers to this kind of assessment graphically as “assess-
ment on the run.” The online and fleeting nature of this kind of formative assessment
makes it very difficult to know what construct, in other words, what question(s) or
what abilities, are being foregrounded and how they are interpreted. For instance, an
assessment descriptor such as “pupils talk about matters of immediate interest” (De-
partment for Education and Employment [DfEE] and Qualifications and Curriculum
Authority [QCA], 1999) is very broad and teachers need to interpret its meaning in
terms of classroom spoken language. For some time now it has been generally rec-
ognized that students bring to curriculum and assessment tasks their understanding
and interpretation of what is to be done (often with others) in specific contexts; there-
fore assessment has to take account of this agentive aspect of student performance
(Murphy, 1996). If it is also accepted that, in view of the contingent, dynamic, and
yet intensely active (and interactive) nature of classroom activities, teachers are not
passive instruments of curriculum and assessment schemes, then it follows that there
is a very good reason to ask questions about how teachers construe their assessment
activities and student performance. This difficulty is, of course, a problem for the re-
searcher, not for the teacher as assessor. After all, the teacher is already happily, so to
speak, operating in the classroom and has a good sense of what is happening. How-
ever, if teacher assessment is to be understood better, it would be useful to explore
the aspects of curriculum content and theories of knowledge and learning (folk or
formal) being foregrounded in these moments of assessment by teachers. A number
of relevant theoretical and empirical studies will be looked at in the next section.
In a case study of assessment of speaking and listening in English within the Na-
tional Curriculum in England, Leung and Teasdale (1997a) and Leung (1999) carried
out semistructured interviews with teachers in two elementary schools to explore their
representations of spoken English. The interviews were carried out in three phases.
The first phase was focused on the teachers’ interpretations of the first four levels on
the official National Curriculum scale (Department for Education [DfE], 1995), without
reference to the students in their own linguistically diverse classes. The second phase
interviews elicited views and evaluative comments from the teachers, from memory,
on some of their students’ spoken English performance. In the final interviews the
teachers were invited to watch video clips of ordinary noncontrived activities of the
students in their classes and at the end of each clip the teachers were asked to comment
on what they saw in relation to the use of spoken English. Of particular interest to this
discussion are the comments on the specific students made by the teachers after each
video segment in the final phase interviews. The following five teacher comments are
highly suggestive of a set of complex, experience-informed, and episodic narrativelike
reasoning:

a) Interview context: Having watched a short video clip of a particular child in

classroom situations, the teacher informant was asked to elaborate on the child’s
reluctance to listen and respond, a feature noticed and mentioned by the teacher
informant in the first place.
878 LEUNG

Very much personalities, very much tied to her personality sometimes children you can see
that they are not understanding because they don’t respond when you say something . . . with
Nosheen it’s not that she can’t understand it’s just she won’t give herself time to really
reflect on what she’s been asked to do and I think that’s the personality thing. (Leung,
1999, p. 233)

b) Interview context: Having watched a short video clip of a particular child work-
ing with other children, the teacher informant was asked to comment.
Sushma’s understanding is not bad. Her mother doesn’t speak much English, but her father
is excellent. He is a leader in the community and his understanding and standard is very
good. (Leung, 1999, p. 234)

c) Interview context: Having watched a short video clip of a particular child talking
to another child, the teacher informant was asked to comment.
Interesting that she, em, said to Sadhna at one point ‘Sadhna,’ and she said this perfect
sentence, which obviously she has heard lots, ‘Sadhna, can I have . . . ’ something to do with
buttercups. And the next sentence the words ‘what him had.’ So it’s interesting again, the
variations of awareness of a sentence which has been dependent on, which she has learned
and internalized and she’s become quite dependent on say, whereas she is wanting to speak
more spontaneously and she’s getting mixed up, but it is still excellent the fact that she has
got that far. (Leung, 1999)

d) Interview context: On seeing a video clip showing a child trying hard to explain
something to her friend, the teacher informant commented.
. . . to me a lot of that just proves the point that a lot of children get to Level 2, it’s a very
wide range of skills that they’ve got to acquire and it’s before they get to Level 3, which is
difficult, and this is a problem we get with most of the Asian children. So they stay at 2 for
quite a long time, so we get a big range in that level. (Leung, 1999)

e) Interview: On seeing a video clip, the teacher interviewee commented that a

particular pupil was able to understand very little until recently. She was invited
to elaborate on that point.
Yeah, well she didn’t know what was going on, whereas now looking at that tape I could see
that she was trying to really interact with the other children. She was trying to join in. She
most probably just didn’t know what copying meant, when Saeeda said ‘don’t copy mine’
or something and she said like ‘yes’ or whatever it was. But she most probably doesn’t know
what copying meant, but she was doing the right things. She knew it was a question and
she obviously just wanted to interact.’ (Leung, 1999, p. 235)

These comments suggest that the teacher informants were working with categories
such as personality, family, sentence-level grammar from a (possibly untheorized) sec-
ond language acquisition perspective, and different expectations of language devel-
opment and sequence of development for second language students. These categories
cannot be traced back to the level descriptions in the published National Curriculum
English scales (see Appendix 1). The narrativized nature of some of the comments
suggests that the teacher informants did not see the use or the learning of spoken
language as just a school- or classroom-engendered activity; there is a strong sense
that the total life experience of the student, as perceived by the teachers, was being
brought into the picture. Breen (1997, p. 98) reports a broadly similar finding in a study
of ESL assessment by elementary teachers working in Australia and cites this teacher
statement as representative of the 25 teachers in the study: “What I observe and how
they talk to me. A lot of it is observation and how they’re relating to one another, how
they’re playing in the shops and how they’re mixing.”
The point about teachers attending to the ‘whole child’ has also been raised by
Torrance and Pryor (1998). In their study of teacher assessment in elementary schools
 48. CLASSROOM TEACHER ASSESSMENT 879

in England, they note that teachers tended to sit or stand with a particular group in
class (whereas the rest got on with their work) and

while the purpose . . . was ostensibly to observe and question, often the opportunity arose
to intervene and extend or “scaffold” the group’s learning . . . the teacher often appeared
to be using a Vygotskian guided discovery approach to learning . . . observing and ques-
tioning the group as they worked, but also intervening to support learning when appro-
priate . . . (Torrance & Pryor, 1998, p. 29)

This Vygotskian approach, however, seemed to be more practice-based than a theoret-

ically articulated position because the teachers concerned also spoke about learning
in Piagetian terms of good management of learning tasks. Torrance and Pryor also
observe that teacher assessment was seen by many of their teachers as a means of
obtaining information about a child’s knowledge and progress to plan forward and

. . . concern for the “whole-child” was noted with respect to making ipsative judgments
about progress in the classroom—what had done before, whether what they were doing
now represented real progress—irrespective of whether or not it met a criterion for a
particular level of achievement . . . (Torrance & Pryor, 1998, pp. 36–37).

In recent years elementary teachers in England have been encouraged to familiar-

ize themselves with formal aspects of the English language and to teach explicitly
the structural elements of English, including sentence-level grammar. Terms such as
‘phonemes,’ ‘nouns,’ and ‘structure’ have entered into the public curriculum discourse
in highly visible forms through the official teaching programs (see, for example, De-
partment for Education and Employment [DfEE], 1999). In an exploration of teachers’
language knowledge, Gardner and Rea-Dickins (2001, p. 169), as part of their work
on assessment of English language learners in mainstream classes, report that, among
other things, in their data “only a limited set of such terms are available for confident
use to some teachers.” An example of this observation can be seen in the following
teacher utterance when the teacher concerned was commenting on what she was try-
ing to assess in a classroom question-and-answer exchange with a student about a
visit to another school:

. . . understanding different question forms. The “what” particularly the “how” they
found very difficult. And there’s lots of . . . there’s tell me about . . . that’s not so much a
question, did you enjoy?, would you like to. . . . (Gardner & Rea-Dickins, 2001)

The teacher’s attention was focused on the students’ knowledge and understanding
of different ways of asking questions. Gardner and Rea-Dickins point out that the
teacher concerned appeared to be aware of the difference between form and function
but the lack of an explicit language model and the associated metalanguage made
it difficult for her to express her points directly. It seems quite clear that the teacher
knew that ‘tell me about . . . ’ was not in an interrogative form but was performing a
question function. The issue here is not about that particular teacher’s knowledge, but
this observation points to the fact that teachers’ own professional knowledge about the
content of official curriculum and assessment schemes may not be taken for granted.
Indeed, these studies raise a question about the role of professional development for
teachers, particularly where several assessment schemes or frameworks, statutory
and/or optional, are in place. In a study of the influence of teachers’ working contexts
on their use of ESL assessment frameworks in Australia, Rohl (1997, p. 88) reports
that “where teachers had a choice of frameworks, they used those for which they had
received professional development.”
880 LEUNG

MOVING BEYOND PARADIGM-BOUND

CLAIMS AND STRICTURES

Whereas there is a great deal of potential pedagogic merit in teacher assessment, its
formative (or perhaps more aptly, informative) value cannot be assumed just because
of its apparent ‘naturalness,’ ‘real-lifeness,’ and ‘directness’ in the order of things
in the classroom. The appeal to these qualities, as Huerta-Macı́as’ and Gipps’ argu-
ments appear to have suggested, is in a sense a defensive strategy against criticisms
stemming from a psychometric perspective on conventional notions of validity and
reliability. Brown and Hudson’s (1998, p. 656) injunction that “designers and users
of alternative assessments must make every effort to structure the ways they de-
sign, pilot, analyze, and revise the procedures so the reliability and validity of the
procedures can be studied, demonstrated, and improved” is understandable if the
concern is with using teacher-made assessment for public accountability and student
comparison purposes. In pedagogically integrated teacher assessment of individual
students, the concerns for psychometric properties are not a priority. Indeed Lynch’s
(2001) discussion would suggest that different sets of epistemological and ontolog-
ical questions should be asked for this kind of teacher assessment. The concept of
construct-referenced assessment (Wiliam, 2001a) is useful in that it opens the way to
an examination of the kind of information teachers seek and the basis of their decision
making. In other words, it is precisely the ‘naturalness’ and ‘real-lifeness’ of teacher
reasoning and teacher action that need examination.
The earlier discussion would suggest that in terms of institutional or community
and individual practices there are at least three kinds of questions that require some
immediate attention:

r What do teachers do when they carry out teacher assessment?

r What do teachers look for when they are assessing?
r What theory or “standards” do teachers use when they make judgments and
decisions?

These questions should be posed with reference to real practitioner communities. If

teacher assessment is to be understood as construct-referenced assessment situated
in specific social and educational environments, then it would not be meaningful to
attempt to address these questions as context-free phenomena at this stage of devel-
opment. For instance, assessment descriptors such as “pupils show understanding of
the ways in which meaning and information are conveyed in a range of texts” (Depart-
ment for Education and Employment [DfEE], 1999, p. 57) necessarily take on a local
interpretation. The available research evidence seems to indicate that there is a great
deal of variability within individual education systems and among teachers within
a locality. A well-recognized measure to reduce variability is to introduce or to in-
crease the role of group moderation—teachers discussing samples of student work and
attempting to achieve some degree of consensus, particularly in contexts where teach-
ers are meant to use published criteria (and where the outcome of teacher assessment
is also used for official or quasi-official recording and reporting purposes). Clarke
and Gipps (2000, p. 40) argue that if we are “. . . ‘to warrant assessment-based conclu-
sions” without resorting to highly standardized procedures . . . then we must ensure
that teachers have common understandings of the criterion performance . . . this can
be developed through group moderation.”
Group moderation can clearly play an important part in promoting some degree
of consistency in the outcomes of teacher assessment. In general group moderation
tends to be a part of the formal apparatus or infrastructure of official assessment
 48. CLASSROOM TEACHER ASSESSMENT 881

systems. Everyday, ad hoc, nonreported teacher assessment that is key to effective

teaching and learning is rarely, if ever, assisted by the facility of group moderation.
However, the central idea behind group moderation, that is, teachers discussing their
points of view and professional decisions about students’ work, is potentially very
useful in building up a shared understanding and practice within a community of
teachers. The opportunities afforded by preservice teacher education and particularly
in-service staff development programs can be used for this purpose. However, if
teacher assessment is going to make a genuine contribution to the quality of teaching
and learning, then it is necessary to move beyond achieving some sort of professional
consensus among peers (which may be based on irrelevant or, worse, ill-informed
opinions). McNamara (2001, pp. 344–345) argues that

The role of the language testing researcher in aiding this process can include:

r working to develop the articulation of constructs in assessment frameworks in such a

way that they are potentially of maximum benefit to teachers in this process of reflection
and evaluation of the detail of individual performance;
r researching effective procedures for promoting critical reflection on learner perfor-
mance by teachers, for example, by developing techniques and opportunities for re-
flection that can be carried out in ‘real time’ during classroom activity, and comparing
them with “slowed down” procedures that require the recording of performance and
subsequent analysis and evaluation for diagnostic purposes.

There is a strong intimation of a researcher-teacher collaborative approach to research

that creates processes in which teachers are providers of data and active agents in
professional development. In other words, teacher assessment development programs
should be, among other things, concerned with expanding and/or helping to harness
teachers’ professional knowledge and know-how in relevant fields.
Three examples of the type of teacher assessment research and development work
that may begin to address the issues raised by McNamara will be discussed here. All
three are attempts to engage with some specific aspects of teacher assessment practice
in the National Curriculum in England by making use of actual classroom data or
professional knowledge and experience in professional development activities with
trainee or practicing teachers. The first example is concerned with the assessment of
spoken English. The second relates to assessment of written English and the third to
teachers’ understanding of the authority of the use of assessment scales for different
purposes.

Example 1
The assessment of listening and speaking in English in elementary school is meant to
be carried out by the teacher in ordinary classroom activities. Evidence reported earlier
would suggest that teachers draw on criteria outside the current assessment scheme
(Leung, 1999; Leung & Teasdale, 1997a, 1997b; Teasdale & Leung, 2000). Furthermore,
the narrativized observational accounts offered by teachers are highly indicative of
a view of students’ use of English as straightforward evidence of what the students
know, that is, the competence residing inside the individual. In other words, the in-
teractive nature of classroom language and the part played by the teachers in shaping
the interactions, and therefore the students’ language use, appear to be hidden from
view. One way of foregrounding the socially constructed and socially constrained
nature of classroom language use is to look at some classroom interaction data and to
draw attention to the teacher’s part in shaping the students’ use. The following is an
example of the type of data that can be used6 :
882 LEUNG

(Context of the activity: the teacher is trying to encourage the students to recall
what happened in the previous numeracy session.)

T: Oh dear dear dear dear dear! Do you remember we had some little
pots like this on the table and how many coins did I tell you to choose
to start with?
Ps: Two!
T: Two, so you chose two coins
Pupil 26: We were
T: No no da da dat And then what did you have to do?
Ps: Draw them!
T: You drew round them and then what did you do?
Pupil 27: Had to count them.
T: We had to
Ps: Count them
T: To see how, did you say how many? How
Ps: Much
T: Much! To see how much we’ve got. Let’s do this one, look I’ve chosen a
Ps: Five
T: Five pence. How do I know it’s a five pence?
Ps: ’Cos it’s got five on it!
T: ’Cos it’s got a five on it. And then what is this one?
Ps: A two!
T: And how do I know it’s a two then?
Ps: ’Cos it’s got a two on it!
T: Right now, how many do we have to count on this time?
Ps: Five!
Ps: (echo) Five!
T: Five. How many counts? How many counts on this one?
Ps: Two!
Ps: (echo) Two!
T: Right let’s do it all together, are you ready?

By describing and analyzing this short extract of the teacher–pupil interactions, it

is possible to draw attention to, among other things, the teacher-directed nature of the
interaction, the particular kind of framing of pupil responses, and the restricted nature
of the students’ language use. This kind of analysis could lead to wider discussions on
the prevalence of the I(nitiation)-R(esponse)-F(eedback) pattern of classroom commu-
nication and alternatives that may engender richer language use (e.g., van Lier, 1996,
2000).

Example 2
This example is concerned with the assessment of written English. It has been widely
accepted by elementary teachers working in multiethnic and multilingual schools
that English language learners tend to be assessed at Level 2 English for a long time
before they move up (see the relevant teacher remarks cited earlier in Leung, 1999).
The following two written texts were produced by elementary students; Text 1 was
written by an English language learner:

Text 1:
Once upon a time I was sleping in my bed room. Then suddely I feel over and
I feelt a crown on my hede. And I was in Buckingham palace. Hooray hooray I
 48. CLASSROOM TEACHER ASSESSMENT 883

am a Qween. Bring me my food. yummy yummy dinner. Then she put her dres
on. Then she went for a woock. And then she cam back home.
Text 2:
Once in the night I had a dream that I was Queen for the day. early next morning
I woke up and I was still half a sleep and I banged in to the skirting board. I
saw a crown fall in to the skirting board. I saw a crown fall of my head I said,
‘wow, I’m Queen,’ I yelled. I went to play with my xylophone it had all different
kinds of jewel on it and diamonds on it. I went to London and then suddenly
Buckingham Palace guards came and put swords up to my neck and said, ‘who
are you’ and I said tiny voice I’m Queen Christina and get those filthy swords
of of me ‘certainly your highness. and they all kissed my hand and as soon as I
got in I washed my hands with soap to get the grubi kissis of my hands. Then I
opened up buckingham Palace and I had thousands of Jewels and that was the
end of my day of being Queen.

Both texts were rated by the teacher (of the two students) as Level 2 written English
(see Appendix 2 for level descriptions). By comparing and contrasting the language
features and content of these two pieces of writing, it is possible to draw attention to,
among other things, the interpretation of level description meaning; the differences be-
tween the two pieces in terms of grammatical accuracy, social and cultural knowledge,
and knowledge of genre; the use of a mother tongue-normed assessment scale for stu-
dents from diverse linguistic backgrounds, and the meanings of the assessment levels.

Example 3
The third example is concerned with teachers’ understanding of the authority and the
use of assessment scales for different purposes. A teacher recorded this in her audio-
journal after an introductory session on the Australian-based ESL Scales (Curriculum
Corporation, 1994), which was/is not widely used in England:
(The teacher started the diary by explaining that the students, aged 8 or 9, were
regarded as at National Curriculum English Level 1; the normal expectation is for
7-year-olds to be at Level 2. She also explained that she was working with the students
to develop their literacy in English and she had not been involved in the assessment
of these children using the National Curriculum scales.)

Well I began reading the levels we were given [by the staff development tutor], and
[the level descriptions] put me off really to start with because Level B1 it said beginning
writing, I couldn’t reconcile beginning writing with the fact that these children are 8 or
9 years old and all have been writing at least a year . . . and that definitely influenced the
way I looked at that, uhm I quickly flipped through it, I could see that they were beyond
that. I had a little look at Level B2, again a little bit longer, the suggestions of evidence,
again I could see pretty quickly they’ve got beyond that as well. I suspected this to be
the case, after all they were a good Level 1 under the English scheme. Looking at Level
B3 I took a little longer over this because it says things like communication, write simply
about topics of personal significance, write simply, write sentences that made a coherent
statement, I began to think that perhaps I was getting close to my children. (Tape pause.)

I still couldn’t get it out of my head that this Level B3 couldn’t be relevant to my children
because they weren’t beginners in the time sense of the word. They’ve all got B3.5 and
B3.6 but B3.7 they had some of these, they could do some of these but not all, and there
seemed to be quite a difference in the level of expertise needed between some of these,
for instance, the one which was based on write sentences, based on repetitive sentences,
modelled patterns, they could all do that and certainly Kamal, he’d done an awful lot
of that in his last year with me. And yet at the end they were to use basic punctuation
to separate out ideas, capitals to start a sentence, full-stop to end, and Hilda definitely
884 LEUNG

wasn’t doing that. She’s only got one full-stop in the middle of the page and one at the
end of the page. She’s got sentences in the middle which have no full-stop. So I did find
that, I felt that the difference between the levels I’d expect to see those things in young
children was quite different from what I’d expect to see them in an older child.
(See Appendix 3 for relevant ESL Scales descriptors.)

This teacher’s account can be used to trigger discussion on the differences between
what McKay (2001) refers to as long-term and short-term assessment. In short-term
assessment it is likely that the teacher would wish to pay close attention to the dis-
crete items or performance indicators within a level description, for example, “rec-
ognize and respond to common signs, brand names, and advertisements and logos”
(Curriculum Corporation, 1994, p. 64). One of the purposes for short-term assess-
ment would be to look at students’ achievement “in the task, the unit of work, or
on the course of work” (McKay, 2001, p. 18). Pedagogically long-term assessment is
concerned with students’ progress over time to identify overall areas of strength and
weakness, to plan for “teaching and learning to aim for end-of-school-study success”
(McKay, 2001, p. 19). For long-term assessment, an assessment scale is more like a
model of development. The levels within a scale represent a sort of route map that
sets out the overall picture of progress. In this sense the individual components within
a level matter less than the overall ‘levelness.’ Another possible topic of discussion
would be the authority and the soundness of assessment scales. Some teachers may
find the sequence of progression and/or the component parts of a particular level or
stage ill-fitting in terms of their perceptions of students’ performance. Any observed
discrepancy can be used to open up explicit discussions on whether teachers’ own pro-
fessional experience and practically gained knowledge should have any role to play
in interpreting and analyzing assessment scales and, in a more critical guise, whether
published assessment schemes should be assessed and evaluated by teachers.
These are examples of some of the possibilities that have emerged in a specific ed-
ucational context. Different or changing circumstances will produce different types of
issues and possibilities. The important point here is that locally identified issues are
worked on with reference to theory and principles drawn from the wider networks of
research and scholarship. The researcher is positioned as an interested outsider whose
claim to empirical knowledge crucially depends on access to actual and teachers’ per-
ceptions of classroom practice. This kind of researcher–teacher collaboration clearly
has a professional development dimension with teachers’ views and practices serving
as starting points of discussion, not as “problems” to be fixed through in-service de-
velopment activities. One of the roles of the researcher, qua professional development
facilitator, in this context is to provide opportunities of critical engagement with infor-
mation and theories emanating from relevant fields of research and education. And,
equally important for this discussion, it requires the researcher to pay attention to
teachers’ ways of seeing and doing things as a primary research datum, not as points
of information to be assimilated as data or rejected as irrelevant noise with reference
to a pre-adopted theoretical model.
All this represents an epistemological departure from the practice of framing re-
search within established paradigms and theoretical models in the psychometric
tradition. Attending to teachers’ professional knowledge and practice in this way
systematically would contribute toward understanding the “construct” in construct-
referenced assessment, a phenomenon that is far from clearly understood. This kind of
understanding is vital for the development of a grounded, dynamic, and contextually
sensitive research agenda. What is being suggested here is not some sort of value-free
exercise whereby anything goes in the name of empiricism! This call for working with
local teachers’ assessment practice and perceptions as points of departure, providing
teachers with access to wider theories and research literature, offering opportunities
 48. CLASSROOM TEACHER ASSESSMENT 885

for critical discussion and reflection, and observing and charting these phenomena as
part of research, is intended to contribute to the quality of teaching and learning.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The strength and the value of pedagogically oriented classroom teacher assessment
lie in its integration with the normal processes of teaching and learning. It can provide
useful close-up information on student learning in context. The information generated
can also be used indirectly to inform development or change in pedagogy and cur-
riculum, and to provide feedback to students. In this sense, it plays an important and
indispensable educational role that is quite different from standardized testing. On
this view, it can be argued that teacher assessment is sui generis and therefore the evalu-
ation criteria traditionally associated with psychometric testing such as reliability and
validity are not necessarily and automatically relevant, especially when the outcomes
of teacher assessment are not used for public comparison and reporting purposes.
The notion of construct-referenced assessment provides an interesting epistemo-
logical turn that can lead to a re-framing of questions to be asked. Instead of asking
“How valid and reliable is teacher assessment?” as a form of testing, the questions
are now “What do teachers look for in their classroom assessment?” and “How useful
is the information produced by this kind of assessment for thinking about learning
and teaching?”. A related shift in orientation is the need to attend to the local as
much as the universal or the general. All teaching and learning takes place in highly
specific contexts—different participants, age groups, time periods, educational and
social environments, and so on—and teacher assessment takes place within a unique
mix of individuals and circumstances in each instance. This acknowledgment of the
local argues for the building up of a close-up knowledge of a representative range of
teacher practices before attempting generalizations, or to return to the point made by
Wiliam (2001a, p. 172) cited earlier: “We try to theorize what is actually being done.”
Therefore at this stage of development it is important to ask the questions of teacher
assessment raised here in relation to groups or communities of teachers working in
broadly identifiable domains such as disciplines/subject areas or phases of education.
Linn, Baker, and Dunbar (1991, p. 17) argue that, with reference to what they refer
to as complex, performance-based assessment, “High priority needs to be given to the
collection of evidence about the intended and unintended effects of assessments on
ways teachers and students spend their time and think about the goals of education.
It cannot just be assumed that a more “authentic” assessment will result in classroom
activities that are more conducive to learning.” Recontextualizing this statement to
the present discussion, it may well be said that one should not assume that just be-
cause teacher assessment takes place in natural and real classroom contexts, it will
automatically yield pedagogically useful information or lead to higher quality learn-
ing or teaching. Much depends on teacher knowledge and action, both at the level of
an individual practitioner and as a member of a community of practice. The research
agenda for teacher assessment, seen in this light, should investigate what teachers look
for and do when they carry out classroom assessment, how they use the information
yielded for teaching purposes, and how this kind of research knowledge can be used
in professional development.

APPENDIX 1

National Curriculum Subject English (DFE, 1995, p. 26)

Speaking and Listening Levels 1–3
886 LEUNG

Level 1
Pupils talk about matters of immediate interest. They listen to others and usually
respond appropriately. They convey simple meanings to a range of listeners, speaking
audibly, and begin to extend their ideas or accounts by giving some detail.

Level 2
Pupils begin to show confidence in talking and listening, particularly where the top-
ics interest them. On occasions, they show awareness of the needs of the listener by
including relevant detail. In developing and explaining their ideas they speak clearly
and use a growing vocabulary. They usually listen carefully and respond with increas-
ing appropriateness to what others say. They are beginning to be aware that in some
situations a more formal vocabulary and tone of voice are used.

Level 3
Pupils talk and listen confidently in different contexts, exploring and communicating
ideas. In discussion, they show understanding of the main points. Through relevant
comments and questions, they show they have listened carefully. They begin to adapt
what they say to the needs of the listener, varying the use of vocabulary and the level
of detail. They are beginning to be aware of standard English and when it is used.

APPENDIX 2

National Curriculum (subject) English (DfEE & QCA, 1999, p. 59)

Writing Levels 1–2

Level 1
Pupils’ writing communicates meaning through simple words and phrases. In their
reading or their writing, pupils begin to show awareness of how full stops are used.
Letters are usually clearly shaped and correctly orientated.

Level 2
Pupils’ writing communicates meaning in both narrative and non-narrative forms,
using appropriate and interesting vocabulary, and showing some awareness of the
reader. Ideas are developed in a sequence of sentences, sometimes demarcated by cap-
ital letters and full stops. Simple, monosyllabic words are usually spelt correctly, and
where there are inaccuracies the alternative is phonetically plausible. In handwriting,
letters are accurately formed and consistent in size.

APPENDIX 3

ESL Scale Level B3 Beginning Writing (Curriculum Corporation, 1994, p. 47)

B3.7
Writes several coherently linked sentences using basic structures and well-known
vocabulary.
Evident when students, for example:
r Write sentences based on simple repetitive, modeled patterns (‘I play . . . ,’ ‘I go
to lunch . . . ,’ ‘I go to home’).
 48. CLASSROOM TEACHER ASSESSMENT 887
r Write sentences reflecting spoken English in vocabulary and structure (Yesterday
I . . . . ,’ then I . . . ’).
r Write ‘run-on sentences’ (‘At school we work and at school we play and at school
we read and at school . . . ’).
r Link sentences using common conjunctions (and, then, but).
r Write sentences using basic subject-verb-object patterns (‘I study maths’).
r Use common language patterns learned in class (‘I can ,’ ‘he is . . . ’).
r Use the language of instruction for writing simple procedures (simple impera-
tives: draw, cut, stop, run).
r Write sentences using past tense verbs and adverbial phrases of time (‘In holidays
I went . . . ’).
r Use words commonly related to a topic (holiday, stay home, play).
r Use some standard English letter patterns when writing new words (scool for
school, wite for white, sow for saw).
r Use basic punctuation to separate ideas (capitals to start a sentence, full stop to
end a sentence).

NOTES

1. For further discussion on assessment and learning, see Black and Wiliam (1998a) and Black (2001).
2. Indeed, even the statement on teacher assessment by the QCA, an official curriculum and assessment
authority in England, can be seen in this light.
3. The background reference is the work of Lave and Wenger (1991).
4. In England compulsory schooling is divided into four Key Stages—KS1covers ages 5–7, KS2 8–11, KS3
12–14, and KS4 15–16.
5. A set of modified Level 1 descriptors, together with two pre-Level 1 levels, were introduced recently to
accommodate early stage English as an additional/second language students (QCA, 2000). These EAL-
modified levels appear to have been written with very young children in mind. The assumption appears
to be that once the students have passed the very early stages of learning English, they can be assessed
according to the mother tongue-normed scales (DfEE & QCA, 1999). However, English language learners
enter the school system at all ages.
6. This data is drawn from the Leverhulme Numeracy Program, a 5-year research program (1997–2002) that
focuses on student attainment in numeracy and is based at King’s College in London. The researchers
are Alison Tomlin and Brian Street (King’s College, London) and Dave Baker (Brighton University).

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Bachman, L. F. (2000). Modern language testing at the turn of the century: Assuring that what we count
counts. Language Testing, 17(1), 1–42.
Bachman, L. F., & Palmer, A. S. (1996). Language testing in practice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Black, P. (2001). Formative assessment and curriculum consequences. In D. Scott (Ed.), Curriculum and
assessment (pp. 7–23). Westport, CT: Ablex.
Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998a). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in Education, 5(1), 7–73.
Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998b). Inside the black box. London: King’s College London.
Breen, M. P. (1997). The relationship between assessment frameworks and classroom pedagogy. In
M. Breen, C. Barratt-Pugh, B. Derewianka, H. House, C. Hudson, T. Lumley, & M. Rohl (Eds.),
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pp. 91–128). Canberra: DEETYA.
Brindley, G. (1998). Assessing in the AMEP: Current trends and future directions. Prospect, 13(3), 59–73.
Brindley, G. (2001). Outcomes-based assessment in practice: Some examples and emerging insights. Lan-
guage Testing, 18(4), 393–407.
Brown, A. (1995). The effect of rater variables in the development of an occupation-specific language
performance test. Language Testing, 12(1), 1–15.
Brown, J. D., & Hudson, T. (1998). The alternatives in language assessment. TESOL Quarterly, 32(4), 653–765.
Clarke, S., & Gipps, C. (2000). The role of teachers in teacher assessment in England 1996–1998. Evaluation
and Research in Education, 4(1), 38–52.
Cohen, A. (1994). Assessing language ability in the classroom. (2nd ed.). Boston: Heinle & Heinle.
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Department of Employment and Education, & Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. (1999). English:
The national curriculum for England. London: DfEE and QCA.
Garcı́a, G. E., & Pearson, P. D. (1994). Assessment and diversity. In L. Darling-Hammond (Ed.), Review of
Research in Education, 20 (pp. 337–391). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.
Gardner, S., & Rea-Dickins, P. (2001). Conglomeration or chameleon? Teachers’ representations of language
in the assessment of learners with English as an additional language. Language Awareness, 10(2&3),
161–177.
Genesee, F., & Upshur, J. A. (1996). Classroom-based evaluation in second language education. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Gipps, C. (1994). Beyond testing: Towards a theory of educational measurement. London: Falmer Press.
Haertel, E. (1992). Performance measurement. In M. C. Alkins (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Research (6th
ed., Vol. 13, pp. 984–989). New York: Macmillan.
Huerta-Macı́as, A. (1995). Alternative assessment: Responses to commonly asked questions. TESOL Journal,
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Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning, legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
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Leung, C. (1999). Teachers’ response to linguistic diversity. In A. Tosi & C. Leung (Eds.), Rethinking language
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VII

Identity, Culture, and

Critical Pedagogy in
Second Language Teaching
and Learning

889
890
Introduction

In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, second language (L2) teaching and learning were largely
seen as having to do with the formal properties of language, such as grammar, lexicon,
and pronunciation. In the 1980s, however, researchers and practitioners began to
recognize that learning a second language involves a great deal more than attaining L2
linguistic proficiency. In her study of culture and the individual, Rosaldo (1984) points
out that the constructs of personhood, identity, culture, and language are intertwined
in the social milieu where people live and the reality that they construct. According
to Rosaldo, culture shapes and binds an individual’s or a group’s social and cognitive
concepts.
The study of identity and culture, and critical perspectives on L2 pedagogy are
relatively late arrivals on the scene of language teaching and learning. In general,
research into these abstract facets of second language are concerned with construction
of identity in various social and linguistic contexts, culture as the way of life of a people,
the social frameworks that evolve within a group or a larger society (Hinkel, 1999).
On the other hand, researchers believe that language use may have little to do with
the true causes of human behavior and often serves to mask them.
By the 1980s and 1990s, research on L2 teaching and learning also added a focus on
the social contexts in which second languages are taught and learned. In recent years,
multidisciplinary studies on culture have been carried out in various domains of
applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language policy. The environments in which
languages are learned and taught often serve as research grounds where the impact on
L2 learning of learners’ identities, culture, and predominant approaches to language
teaching can be examined. The new venues of investigation began to address the
many complex issues of social identity, culture, and power that are inextricably inter-
twined.
A large number of publications emerged to describe and analyze the profound
impact of sojourn and immigration and the vital need for L2 learning on individuals’
views of themselves and their environments. For example, Peirce (1995) explains that
social identity can be understood in terms of how people see themselves and their
social roles in relation to others, as well as the ways in which they understand their
past, present, and future.
In research on social contexts of language teaching and learning, the concepts of
identity and culture are not static, but complex, perpetually evolving, and sensitive
to such diverse social constructs as social status, education, language contact, current
and shifting ideologies, and historical and political legacies. A different perspective
on how one’s identity can be bound up with language lies in the combined macro- and
microanalytic approach. The sociocultural view of research presents a broad picture
of how language contributes to the formation of identity and culture within the social
contexts and the politics of power and how cultural identity is continually threatened
by economic, political, and power-balance insecurities.

891
892 PART VII: IDENTITY, CULTURE, AND CRITICAL PEDAGOGY

The three chapters in Part VII emphasize that language or a language variety is
fundamentally tied to the construction of identity of individuals, as members of social
groups. For example, such languages as English, which has become a lingua franca,
have been themselves altered and “nativized” in various parts of the world. As an
outcome, the nativization of language gives rise to new varieties, new discourses, and
linguistic identities that emerge at the conflation of a language’s past and present.
r In Chapter 49, “Considerations of Identity in L2 Learning,” Thomas Ricento
considers sociocultural aspects and processes of identity construction and change.
In recent years, many innovative studies in Applied Linguistics have focused on the
sociocultural rather than psychological dimensions of identity, and Ricento’s perspec-
tive primarily encompasses the research on the complex connections among language,
identity, and social discourses bound up with relations of power. Thus, identity is pro-
posed to be a contingent process that pivots on the dialectic relations between learners
and the various worlds and experiences. Since an individual identity is not fixed but
is transformed by experience, the transnational character of various immigrant com-
munities can have many implications for language pedagogy and learning. Ricento
emphasizes that common and often popular assumptions that immigrants who arrive
in the United States have the goal of assimilating and losing their native language and
culture do not apply. In L2 teaching, the identities of L2 learners are deeply connected
to their membership in distinct, but frequently interrelated, communities.
r In Chapter 50, “Teaching and Researching Intercultural Competence,” Michael
Byram and Anwei Feng present a sociolinguistic and ethnosemantics point of view to
promote culture teaching and learning in education. They emphasize that in educa-
tion and learning of culture, the issues of values and ideology play a prominent role,
and thus, language teaching susceptible to political and social influences necessarily
entails political education and the many considerations of “neohumanist” practices,
and cultural relativity. Both teachers and learners need to see as critical the findings of
attitudes and motivation research, as well as the complex relationships between teach-
ing styles, materials, methods, and learners’ ability to adopt new perspectives. In all,
Byram and Feng point out that the cultural dimension and intercultural competence
in language teaching has grown to become a new emphasis in language teaching and
learning. On the other hand, whereas attaining intercultural competence may be seen
as positive, it also necessitates the development of critical awareness and the pursuit
of democratic processes and values.

The issue of power and its maintenance and distribution in language teaching and
learning, and in the wider society represents a key consideration in critical pedagogy.
This domain of critical analysis focuses on how and in whose interests knowledge
is promulgated and teaching is carried out. Ideally, critical pedagogy envisions the
goals of learning and education as directed toward the emancipation of the learner.
One of the main tenets of critical pedagogy is that the very enterprise of teaching in
general, and language teaching in particular, constitute a part of the system of beliefs
and values that have the combined effect of maintaining an unequal distribution of
power in the society.
r In Chapter 51, “Critical Pedagogy in L2 Learning and Teaching,” Suresh Cana-
garajah states clearly that teaching language to students from many minority groups
is a political activity that for far too long L2 teachers and researchers have had an
“idyllic” view of their work. Canagarajah argues that, when L2 teaching is seen as a
means for providing students linguistic and communicative skills, they simply over-
look the fact that this activity is motivated by geopolitical realities. Thus, according to
Canagarajah, the dominant principles in language teaching have long served to hide
 INTRODUCTION 893

the controversial means toward ideological ends within the social power structure.
Critical pedagogy is not merely a set of ideas or theories, but a way of carrying out
language teaching and learning motivated by a clear-cut attitude toward classrooms
as a part of a wider society. Canagarajah asserts that students and teachers alike must
be prepared to understand how teaching and learning are part and parcel of the so-
cial contexts of power and identify the ways to unmask the implications of power
in teaching. The purpose of critical pedagogy is to transform the means and ends
of learning and to construct more egalitarian, equitable, and ethical educational and
social environments untainted by power and domination. Canagarajah defines the
term “critical” as intended to contrast with such terms as “detached, objective, dis-
passionate, instrumental, practical, and descriptive” that have been used to describe
“noncritical” traditions of the L2 enterprise.

REFERENCES

Hinkel, E. (Ed.). (1999). Culture in second language teaching and learning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Peirce, B. N. (1995). Social identity, investment, and language learning. TESOL Quarterly, 29(1), 9–31.
Rosaldo, M. (1984). Toward an anthropology of self and feeling. In R. Shweder & R. LeVine (Eds.), Culture
theory (pp. 137–157). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
894
49

Considerations of Identity
in L2 Learning
Thomas Ricento
University of Texas, San Antonio

INTRODUCTION

My focus in this chapter will be on the sociocultural dimensions and processes of

identity formation and transformation as they relate to the varied contexts of second
language learning. A great deal of attention has been paid to this topic in recent years
in the literatures of second language learning and applied linguistics. In this chap-
ter, I will highlight important theoretical and methodological approaches that have
helped to expand and enrich our understanding of commonly used terms in second
language acquisition (SLA) theory such as motivation, native speaker, and second
language proficiency. My focus will be on the sociocultural rather than psychological
dimensions of identity, as this is the area in which the greatest innovation has taken
place in applied linguistics research.
Much of the research I will describe concerns the ways in which identity is consti-
tuted through and by language, and how these processes occur within broader social
discourses with their inscribed power relations. Applied linguists and second lan-
guage acquisition (SLA) researchers have developed frameworks for exploring how
a learner’s identity influences, and is influenced by, the various settings in which
learning takes place. Within sociocultural approaches (e.g., Bakhtin, 1986; Bourdieu,
1991; Lantolf, 2000; Le Page & Tabouret-Keller, 1985; Ochs, 1988; Schecter & Bayley,
1997; Vygotsky, 1978), identity is not viewed as a fixed, invariant attribute in the
“mind” of the individual learner. Rather, identity is theorized as a contingent process
involving dialectic relations between learners and the various worlds and experiences
they inhabit and which act on them. Since individual identity is not a fixed attribute,
it is inaccurate to ascribe totalizing group-based identities and behaviors based on
language, ethnicity, religion, or national origin. It is neither descriptively accurate
nor pedagogically useful to classify, for example, Japanese students as diffident, in-
troverted, and nonlinear thinkers, as has often been the case in previous positivistic
research (see Kubota, 1999, for discussion on this point). Although a particular cultural
group may share common beliefs and practices, the representation of these beliefs and
practices as ethnic traits perpetuates stereotypical thinking about the ‘other’ that is
895
896 RICENTO

often based on cultural constructions imposed by ‘outsiders’ through various con-

tact processes: conquest, intermarriage, absorption (see, for example, Said, 1993, and
Willinsky, 1998, on the legacies of imperialism). These sociocultural constructions of
the ‘other’ may eventually come to be seen as self-evident not only by the ‘outside’
group but to varying degrees and in various guises by the culture thus described as
well. Furthermore, attempts to legitimize the ‘other’ usually results in the reaffirma-
tion of normative categories in which the ‘normal’ (for example, heterosexuality or
Western ways of thinking) is counterpoised to the ‘other’ (for example, homosexuality
or Oriental ways of thinking).
Glynn Williams (1999) argues that in American sociology, ethnicity became a di-
chotomized construct of the normative/standard group—a unitary citizenry speak-
ing a common language (us)—and non-normative/nonstandard groups—including
those speaking other languages—(them). This naturalizing of a sociological construct
(ethnicity) informs the widely held popular view promoted by Western scholarship
that ‘reasonable’ (modern) people should naturally become part of the culture of the
state (or the transnational world) and speak ‘its’ language, whereas ‘irrational’ (tradi-
tional) people will tend to cling to their ‘ethnic language and culture.’ Yet, the preva-
lence of cultural hybridity and multilingualism throughout the non-Western (and,
increasingly, Western) world suggests that received views are no longer descriptively
adequate. In SLA and Applied Linguistics research, attribution of group-based, ethnic
characteristics has tended to perpetuate difference in negative terms vis-à-vis Western,
and especially Anglo-American, norms and expectations (see Pennycook, 1998, for an
extended discussion on this point; and Dwight Atkinson, 1999, for analysis and dis-
cussion of the role of culture in second language acquisition research and pedagogy).
Therefore, characterizations of, for example Japanese, let alone ‘Asian’ students, are
likely to be more harmful than helpful to language educators. Nor can one’s social or
cultural identities or affiliations be predicted by the language(s) that person speaks.

IDENTITY AND SLA RESEARCH

Approaches to identity in (SLA) research have changed considerably over the past
decades, reflecting shifts in thinking about how and why second and foreign language
learning takes place, and especially the nature and effects of interactions between
the learner and contexts of learning. It is useful to understand why these changes
in approach occurred in order to contextualize current thinking about identity and
language learning.
Early work in SLA was influenced by the theories of social identity developed by
Tajfel (1981). Tajfel understood social identity as being derived from an individual’s
membership in a social group (or groups). If an individual’s emotional needs were
not met by their identification with a particular group, that person could change
their group affiliation(s), although that might not always be possible. Drawing on
this work, Giles and Johnson (1981, 1987) developed their ethnolinguistic identity
theory in which language was posited as a prominent marker of group membership
and social identity. If a change in group membership involved linguistic adaptation,
one result could be subtractive bilingualism or even language erosion and loss over
time. The connections between language and identity have been explored as well by
interactional sociolinguists, such as Gumperz (1982) and Heller (1982, 1987, 1995). In
this research, both the choice of language (code) and the use of the code in particular
ways signal “social relationships based on shared or unshared group memberships”
(Heller, 1982, p. 5). Gumperz (1982, p. 66) used the terms “we code” to characterize
the minority, in-group language, and “they code” to characterize the majority, out-
group language. Gumperz notes that code switching is used to signal various group
 49. CONSIDERATIONS OF IDENTITY IN L2 LEARNING 897

memberships and identities. In SLA research, identity was conceptualized as a group

attribute. A key concept in several theories is that of social distance, a concept that was
operationalized in John Schumann’s Acculturation Model (1976, 1978). Distance here
was used in an abstract (even metaphorical) sense to indicate the degree of similarity
between two cultures. Schumann hypothesized that the greater the social distance
between two cultures, the more difficulty the learner would have in acquiring the
target language, whereas the smaller the social distance, the more likely the learner
would be successful in acquiring the target language. Schumann assumed that less
social distance entailed greater social solidarity between two cultures. In other words,
the degree to which the learner identifies with another culture, the more motivated he
or she will be to acquire that culture’s language.
Although Schumann’s model provided language educators with useful metaphors
to guide their practice and seemed to comport with many of their intuitions about
the whys and wherefores of successful SLA, it has not stood up to empirical scrutiny,
in part because it attempts to control for dynamic, interactive processes that are not
easily isolated or measured. In fact, even on its own terms, Schumann’s hypothesis is
not upheld. Analysis of Schumann’s original data shows that his primary informant,
“Alberto,” was progressing toward more frequent use of targetlike forms despite his
relative isolation and distance from native speakers of English in the United States
(Berdan, 1996).
Another model from SLA research of relevance to any discussion of identity was
proposed by Gardner and Lambert (1972). These researchers studied foreign lan-
guage learners in Canada, the United States, and the Philippines to determine the
role played by attitude and motivation in language learning. Based on their research,
they divided clusters of attitudes into two basic types of motivation: instrumental and
integrative. Instrumental motivation reflects targeted, pragmatic purposes for learn-
ing a language, such as for career advancement, to study in another country, to pass
an important exam, and so on. Integrative motivation comes about when a learner
has a desire to integrate themselves within the second language cultural group, to
become a part of that society. Lambert found that integrative motivation was associ-
ated with high scores on proficiency tests in a foreign language. The conclusion was
that a high degree of integrative motivation tended to correlate better with success-
ful L2 acquisition than did instrumental motivation, although there could be excep-
tions. Other scholars soon reported contrary findings. Lukmani (1972) investigated
the English acquisition of Marathi-speaking Indian students and found those with
higher instrumental motivation scored high in tests of English proficiency. Au (1988)
reviewed 27 studies that employed the integrative-instrumental construct and found
that the measurement of motivation and the theory behind these measurements were
questionable. Modifications to the theory were proposed, including one by Graham
(1984) who argued that integrative assimilation could be broken down into integrative
and assimilative motivation. Integrative motivation concerns a language learner’s de-
sire to learn the target language to be able to communicate with, or find out about,
members of the target language culture, and does not imply direct contact with the
target language group. In contrast, assimilative motivation is the desire to become
an indistinguishable member of the target speech community, and usually requires
prolonged contact with that community (in Brown, 1994, p. 155). The important point
to note here is the presupposition that a learner should be comfortable with and pos-
itively disposed toward a target culture group in order to successfully acquire the
language, and if the learner identifies with that culture, he or she will more likely be
motivated to acquire the target language. One problem with these approaches is that
they presuppose (often unwittingly) an exclusively assimilationist model in which the
price of acceptance into a host culture is the loss of one’s identity, or at the least the
adoption of dual identities. Another possibility, to be discussed in the next section,
898 RICENTO

is that identities in multilingual contexts are transformed, complex, dynamic, and

variable.
The bias in much of the SLA research from the 1960s through the 1980s presupposed
the conflictual aspects of language contact. Borrowing from the cultural anthropolog-
ical literature (e.g., Foster, 1962, Hall, 1959), applied linguists tended to characterize
L2 learning as a “clash of consciousness” Mark Clarke (1976, p. 380) likened second
language learning to schizophrenia in which “social encounters become inherently
threatening, and defense mechanisms are employed to reduce the trauma.” Accul-
turation was described by Brown (1994, p. 171, relying on the research of Larson &
Smalley, 1972) as proceeding through four stages: euphoria, culture shock, culture
stress, assimilation or adaptation to the new culture and acceptance of the “new” per-
son that has developed. Recent qualitative research, including first-person accounts
in the form of personal narratives (to be discussed later), provides a far more complex
picture of what can happen in second language contact situations.
To summarize earlier work in SLA research, there was little emphasis on the inter-
action of an individual’s multiple memberships based on gender, class, race, linguistic
repertoire, or on how these memberships were understood and played out in different
learning contexts (although see McNamara, 1997, for a discussion of the continuing
relevance of Tajfel’s theories in SLA research). Furthermore, the motivation of L2
learners was often measured in relation to optimal models of positive identification
leading to assimilation of some type, or to less than optimal models leading to varying
degrees of failure to assimilate and, as a result, failure to acquire nativelike fluency
in the target language. It is no accident that the use of dichotomous and scalar etic
variables from psychology and sociology coincided with the positivistic, structural
paradigms that guided (and continue to guide) SLA research (see Pennycook, 1989,
and Lantolf, 1996, for a discussion of positivism in Applied Linguistics research). As
new theories from poststructuralist and critical paradigms became influential in Ap-
plied Linguistics research, the characterizations of learners and the contexts in which
learning occurs changed dramatically.

RECENT APPROACHES TO IDENTITY IN SLA RESEARCH

Language, Identity, and Investment

In a series of articles (1995, 1997), a special-topic issue of TESOL Quarterly (31(3), 1997),
and a monograph (2000), Bonny Norton has developed a number of ideas with impor-
tant consequences for second language acquisition theory. In a richly contextualized
qualitative study involving five female immigrant language learners in Canada, Nor-
ton (2000, p. 5) shows how learner identity influences motivation and, ultimately,
acquisition of a second language. Norton uses the term identity “to reference how a
person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is con-
structed across time and space, and how the person understands possibilities for the
future.” At least two aspects of SLA theory are called into question by Norton. First,
she claims that SLA theorists “have not developed a comprehensive theory of identity
that integrates the language learner and the language learning context . . . furthermore,
they have not questioned how relations of power in the social world impact on social
interaction between second language learners and target language speakers” (p. 4).
She cites the work of Monica Heller (1987) who demonstrates the central role of lan-
guage in the negotiation of a person’s sense of self at different points in time and in
different contexts, and in allowing a person access (or lack thereof) to powerful so-
cial networks that give learners the opportunity to speak. Following Foucault (1980),
Norton takes the position that “power does not operate only at the macro level of
 49. CONSIDERATIONS OF IDENTITY IN L2 LEARNING 899

powerful institutions such as the legal system, the education system and the social
welfare system, but also at the micro level of everyday social encounters between
people with differential access to symbolic and material resources—encounters that
are inevitably produced within language” (Norton, 2000, p. 7).
Another important influence on Norton’s work comes from French sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu, whose work on the relation between identity and symbolic power
is invoked to help explain how hierarchies based on social status influence the “right
to speech,” which Norton translates from the French to mean the “right to speak,” as
well as the “power to impose reception” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 75). Bourdieu’s notion of
cultural capital is particularly relevant for research in language and identity. Accord-
ing to Bourdieu and Passeron (1977), cultural capital refers to the “knowledge and
modes of thought that characterize different classes and groups in relation to specific
sets of social forms” (cited in Norton, 2000, p. 10). Norton uses the term investment to
characterize the complex motives and desires that language learners may have vis-à-
vis a target language. According to Norton, “if learners invest in a second language,
they do so with the understanding that they will acquire a wider range of symbolic
and material resources, which will in turn increase the value of their cultural capital”
(p. 10). Furthermore, because learners have complex social histories and multiple de-
sires, “they are constantly organizing and reorganizing a sense of who they are and
how they relate to the social world. Thus an investment in the target language is also
an investment in a learner’s own identity, an identity which is constantly changing
across time and space” (p. 11).
The implications of this approach for SLA research can be summarized. First, the
assumption that SLA researchers and educators should operate with is that “speech,
speakers, and social relationships are inseparable” (Norton, 1997, p. 410). Therefore,
theories and research in SLA that do not take into full account the social aspect of
language learning and use cannot be taken seriously. Second, an individual’s identity
in L2 contexts is mediated by the reactions of others to that individual’s social and
cultural position, which, in turn, can influence that individual’s motivation to learn in
ways that are not predictable using standard psychological or sociological categories
and variables mentioned earlier in this chapter. Norton’s (2000) study of immigrant
female language learners in Canada demonstrates the different effects of diverse and
complex social interactions on the learners’ acquisition and use of English.
Norton’s idea of investment has been used by other researchers in diverse settings.
McKay and Wong (1996) found that the needs and desires of language learners deter-
mined their investment in learning the target language. Angelil-Carter (1997) found it
useful to break down the concept of investment into specific domains of learning, such
as literacies, or other discourses “that are dislodged and reconstructed over time and
space” (p. 268). Along these lines, Starfield (2002) shows how in postapartheid South
Africa differential ability to use linguistic features of authority within the essay-text
genre results in one (White) student’s ability to construct a powerful, authoritative tex-
tual and discoursal identity for himself, whereas another (Black) student, who relies
on the words of recognized authorities in the discipline, is labeled a plagiarizer. The
successful student relies on his highly developed ‘textual’ capital; the unsuccessful
student fails to negotiate an authoritative “self as author” (p. 121).

Language, Identity, and Gender

The study of language and gender in linguistics coincided with the growth of the
feminist movement in the 1970s. Early work by Lakoff (1975) and Thorne and Henley
(1975) stimulated several decades of research on the relations among sex, power, and
language. This research has been subsumed under the headings deficit, dominance,
and difference. Within the deficit framework, women were characterized as deficient
900 RICENTO

in their use of language compared to men (e.g., Lakoff, 1975). Thus, Lakoff argued,
women used more tag questions (e.g., You’re coming to dinner tomorrow, aren’t you?),
hedges, certain ‘feminine’ adjectives and expressions, and so on compared to men.
Lakoff argued that these linguistic structures reflected females’ relative insecurity and
inferior social position in relation to males. In the dominance model (e.g., Fishman,
1983; West & Zimmerman, 1983; Zimmerman & West, 1975), patterns of male-female
interactions in conversation were analyzed. By measuring the amount of talk, nature
and frequency of interruptions, number of questions asked, number of turns taken,
and ability to introduce and maintain conversational topics, these researchers pro-
vided quantitative evidence to support the claim that male-female conversational
patterns mirrored broader social power imbalances. Specifically, they found that in
mixed gender conversations, men talked and interrupted more than women, occupied
more of the conversational ‘floor,’ and were more successful in controlling the topic of
conversation. The third paradigm, the gender differences model, argued that men and
women were socialized in different cultures (male and female) in which they learned
different rules for appropriate verbal interaction (e.g., Maltz & Borker, 1982; Tannen,
1990). According to Tannen, women are socialized to be concerned about maintaining
social relations and solidarity in their conversations, whereas men are socialized to
be more focused on the informational aspects of conversation, concerned more about
their status than on the feelings of their interlocutors.
Applied linguists interpreted findings in the difference approach as supporting
their claims that female learners have superior learning strategies compared to men
(e.g., Oxford, 1993). SLA researchers influenced by the two cultures approach found,
for example, that men interact to produce more output (Gass & Varonis, 1986) and
that female NSs were likely to ask more helpful questions and to negotiate meaning
in a more consistent way than male NSs (Pica et al., 1991).
Critical work in the 1990s (e.g., Cameron, 1992; Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1999;
Gal, 1991; Trömel-Plötz, 1991) showed the ways in which earlier research tended to
essentialize ‘women’ and ‘men’ and failed to consider the effects of different interac-
tional contexts in diverse cultural settings. The shortcomings of the deficit, dominance,
and difference paradigms in language and gender research stem, in large part, from
the conceptualization of gender as a series of personal traits or attributes rather than
as a socially constructed set of relations and practices (Pavlenko & Piller, 2001, p. 22).
Within critical, and especially postmodern, theory gender is not viewed as a static
(or stable) attribute, but rather as “a system of social relations and discursive prac-
tices” (p. 23). Therefore, gender itself as a social variable is mediated by other social
variables, such as race, social class, educational background and experience, cultural
norms, and so on. Understood in this way, gender itself is neither exclusively (or
always) enabling or disabling in terms of language acquisition, learning, or use.
Pavlenko and Piller (2001, p. 17) cite several researchers (e.g., Ehrlich, 1997; Woolard,
1997) who have pointed out the growing gap between the study of SLA and bilin-
gualism and the study of language and gender. To remedy this situation, they propose
to bring together the disparate literatures of second language acquisition and bilin-
gualism, and the study of language and gender into a new framework they label
multilingualism, second language learning, and gender. In doing this, Pavlenko and
Piller describe four areas of research that could comprise such a field of inquiry and
report important findings within each area. Three of these four areas are of particular
importance to L2 educators and will be described here.
The first area is ‘Gendered access to linguistic resources in multilingual contexts.’
The research Pavlenko and Piller present is concerned with the ways in which gen-
der privileges access to second language skills in different societies. For example,
they cite research by Goldstein, (1995), Harvey (1994), Hill (1987), Holmes (1993),
Lofton (1996), Losey (1995), Spedding (1994), Stevens (1986), and Swigart (1992) that
 49. CONSIDERATIONS OF IDENTITY IN L2 LEARNING 901

shows the ways in which men have access to the symbolic capital of a second lan-
guage, whereas women are restricted by various gatekeeping practices from gain-
ing access to majority language education and the workplace (p. 24). Pavlenko and
Piller also cite research that shows how men are disadvantaged by ideologies of lan-
guage and gender from achieving success in L2 learning (e.g., Günthner, 1992; Moon,
2000).
The second area of research findings in this proposed new paradigm concerns
‘Gendered agency in second language learning and use.’ The research grouped under
this heading explores the intrinsic relationship between gender and agency in the
process of L2 learning and use. According to Pavlenko and Piller (2001, p. 29):

This view implies that in some cases L2 users may decide to learn the second, or any
additional, language only to a certain extent, which allows them to be proficient, but
without the consequences of losing the old and adopting the new ways of being in the
world. In other contexts, their L2 learning may be accompanied by a full transition to the
new linguistic community and L1 loss. And yet in others they may resist the language
that positions them unfavorably.

Examples of these three possible outcomes are provided. Of particular interest to

ESL/EFL educators are studies that show that women around the world are learn-
ing English as a means of liberating themselves from the confines of patriarchy
(Kobayashi, 2000; Matsui, 1995; Solé, 1978). Other research shows how women are
motivated to learn a second language in order to improve their social and economic
status (e.g., Gal, 1978; McDonald, 1994).
The third area described by Pavlenko and Piller is ‘Critical and feminist peda-
gogy.’ Of particular interest in this area is gender representation in teaching mate-
rials. Borrowing from linguistic research on the various ways in which the English
language represents gendered social relations and hierarchies (e.g., Graddol & Swann,
1989), applied linguists and TESL/TEFL specialists have analyzed how these repre-
sentations are reproduced in ESL textbooks. For example, content analyses of ESL
textbooks published in the 1970s and 1980s revealed stereotyped male and female
roles and promoted the use of masculine generics such as ‘he,’ ‘man,’ or ‘mankind’
(Hartman & Judd, 1978; Porreca, 1984; Sunderland, 1992). Other more recent stud-
ies have found stereotypical portrayals of gender roles in EFL textbooks published
in Japan (McGregor, 1998) and Russian textbooks published in the United States
(Shardakova & Pavlenko, 2004). Cynthia Nelson (1999) argues that queer theory, as
opposed to the straight/gay binary, offers the possibility of problematizing the very
notion of sexual identities in ESL/EFL classrooms. Nelson comments that “a queer
approach recognizes that sexual identities are not universal but are done in different
ways in different cultural contexts, and it calls for a close look at how identities are
produced through day-to-day interactions” (pp. 377–378).

Language, Identity, Race, and Ethnicity

Ethnicity, like race, is a sociological construct that both reflects and serves various
sociopolitical interests. One’s ethnicity may be ascribed, chosen, contested, and/or
contingent. As Heller (1987) points out, ethnicity is a product of opposition because
persons growing up in a homogeneous society would not define themselves nor be
defined as ethnic. Within postmodern scholarship, ethnicity is understood as being
produced in specific circumstances of social, economic, and historical relations of
power that are reinforced and reproduced in everyday social encounters (Norton,
2000, p. 13). In concurrence with Rockhill (1987), Norton (2000, p. 13) takes the po-
sition that “ethnicity, gender, and class are not experienced as a series of discrete
902 RICENTO

background variables, but are all, in complex and interconnected ways, implicated in
the construction of identity and the possibilities of speech.”
Recently, this position has been explored in a variety of L2 contexts. A number
of studies and special-topic issues of journals (e.g., Linguistics and Education, 8(1,2),
1996; Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3(4), 1999; The International Journal of Bilingualism, 5(2),
2001) have examined the complex relations between choice of code and learner iden-
tity in defined contexts. An important finding has been that the language(s) (and
language varieties) one speaks are not necessarily markers of a particular ethnic iden-
tity. Depending on where, when, and how a second or third language is acquired, a
speaker’s identification with that language (and the culture with which it is identi-
fied) will vary in often unpredictable ways. This is demonstrated in the research of
Rampton (1995, 1999a, 1999b); Leung, Harris, and Rampton (1997); Blackledge and
Pavlenko (2001); Pavlenko (1998), among others. To capture the complexity of learner
identity in ESL contexts, Leung, Harris, and Rampton (1997, p. 418) suggest that
the terms ‘native speaker’ and ‘mother tongue’ be changed to ‘language expertise,’
‘language inheritance,’ and ‘language affiliation.’ Instead of asking “Is the learner a
native speaker of Punjabi?”, the teacher should ask “What is the learner’s linguis-
tic repertoire? Is the learner’s relationship to these languages based on expertise,
inheritance, affiliation, or a combination?” (p. 418). In an ethnographic study of a
Sikh community in England, Hall (2002) explores the contrast between Punjabi as a
reified political symbol and the ways in which Sikh teenagers actually use Punjabi
in different contexts and for different purposes. Hall (2002, p. 114) notes that as
these teenagers move through the social worlds that constitute their everyday lives
“[they] actively construct linguistic practices that make use of a mixture of linguistic
forms and styles in relation to influences, expectations, and interests that are sit-
uational and shifting. Sikh teens assess and reassess the value of Punjabi as they
participate in different types of social interaction, media consumption, and cultural
events.” In a critical ethnographic study of Francophone African youths studying
ESL in an urban Canadian setting, Ibrahim (1999, p. 349) argues that these youths
enter “a social imaginary—a discursive space in which they are already imagined,
constructed, and thus treated as Blacks by hegemonic discourses and groups . . . This
imaginery . . . influences what and how these students linguistically and culturally
learn . . . [i.e.,] Black stylized English, which they access in hip-hop culture and rap
lyrical and linguistic styles.”
Two special issues of Linguistics and Education titled “Education in Multilingual
Settings: Discourse, Identities, and Power” (Martin-Jones & Heller, 1996) explore “the
role of education in the production and reproduction of cultural identity and social
inequality in multilingual communities” (p. 4). A common framework to the research
presented, borrowed from Bourdieu (1977, 1982), is legitimate language. The editors
have chosen multilingual settings as particularly revealing sites to explore the role
played by schools in the production and reproduction of social identities and unequal
relations of power, since the “language practices of educational institutions are bound
up in the legitimization of relations of power among ethnolinguistic groups” (p. 128).
The editors also correctly point out that these processes must be contextualized within
broader historical processes of colonialism, postcolonialism, globalization, and nation-
alist and minority rights movements (e.g., Grillo, 1989; May, 2001; Phillipson, 1992;
Tollefson, 1991). The articles in Volume I focus on the ways in which participants in
different educational activities contribute (often unwittingly) to the (re)production of
hegemonic relations through their bilingual or monolingual discursive practices in
the postcolonial nations of Botswana, Burundi, Hong Kong, and Malta, along with
England. The research in Volume II focuses on the ways in which participants in ed-
ucational settings contest the legitimacy of discursive practices and the prevailing
symbolic order in Canada, England, Brazil, and Australia.
 49. CONSIDERATIONS OF IDENTITY IN L2 LEARNING 903

The findings of this research suggest that the roles played by dominant groups in
multilingual educational settings have direct and indirect consequences on language
acquisition processes. For example, if greater value is attached to language x than
language y, this will be conveyed through classroom interactions (how do partici-
pants express their attitudes and beliefs about a language, and its speakers, through
their discourses), curricular choices (which language is used for instruction, which
language has value for particular educational paths), linguistic behavior (which va-
riety of a language is valued or devalued, and how are these perceived evaluations
reflected in learners’ linguistic repertoires), learners’ identities (how do learners see
themselves positioned in relation to other languages and cultures), and motivations
(is the learner positively or negatively motivated to learn the language, generally, and
for what purposes). The research presented in Martin-Jones and Heller (1996) offers
an important theoretical and methodological framework for investigating relations
between power, identity, and second language learning.

Native Speaker, Non-native Speaker, and Identity

A great deal of SLA and foreign language (FL) research has focused on mismatches
between the learner’s culture and target language culture to account for the learner’s
inability to achieve “nativelike” proficiency in a second or foreign language. The use
of the term “nativelike” by researchers and practitioners reveals a widely (often im-
plicitly) held view that the native speaker is the norm toward which language learners
should strive to emulate. Robert Phillipson (2000, p. 98) notes the terms native/non-
native themselves are “offensive and hierarchical in that they take the native as the
norm, and define the Other negatively in relation to this norm.” Ironically, as Widdow-
son (1994) points out, although persons socialized in their L1 as native speakers will
possess an insider’s knowledge of many facets of that language, the reality is that the
vast majority of English Language Learners (ELLs) in the world today are instructed
by non-native speakers (NNSs). Furthermore, English is now more commonly spo-
ken as a second, rather than first, language by bilinguals and is used more frequently
for intercultural communication between non-native speakers than between native
speakers (see Crystal, 1997). This trend will accelerate for the foreseeable future (see
David Graddol’s “The decline of the native speaker,” 1999). The implications of these
facts for approaches to understanding the goals and processes of language learning
in second and foreign language contexts are profound. Not only are traditional crite-
ria for language competence and proficiency rapidly becoming outdated as “global”
languages such as English occupy specialized niches and have achieved the status
of indigenized varieties in many countries such as India, Singapore, and Nigeria (see
Kachru, 1982, 1986), but identification with a “home” culture has decreasing relevance
for the vast majority of ESL/EFL speakers.
The legacies of colonialism (see Canagarajah, 1999; Pennycook, 1998; Phillipson,
1992; Ridge, 2000) that too often inform Applied Linguistics research and English
Language Teaching (ELT) have begun to be systematically uncovered and critiqued in
recent years. One aspect of this legacy has been the problematizing of the subordinate
positioning of ELL vis-à-vis NS in many contexts worldwide, a process characterized
as ‘Othering’ by Kubota (2001). Responses (negative and positive) to ‘Othering’ and
to the experiences, in general, of NNS in various settings have been explored in col-
lections (e.g., Braine, 1999; Norton, 1997), in many articles and chapters (e.g., Brutt-
Griffler & Samimy, 1999; Canagarajah, 2000; Flowerdew, 2000; Kubota, 1999, 2001;
Leung, Harris, & Rampton, 1997; Lin, Wang, Akamatsu, & Riazi, 2002; Liu, 1999;
Morgan, 2002; Pavlenko, 1998, 2001; Piller, 2002; Rampton, 1990; Spack, 1997), and
monographs (e.g., Canagarajah, 1999; Davies, 1991; Medgyes, 1994; Norton, 2000;
Pennycook, 1998; Rampton, 1995).
904 RICENTO

A methodology that is particularly suited to exploring the topic of identity for L2

users is the personal narrative or life history. A number of important studies have used
this technique to explore L2 users’ introspective accounts of their experiences “cross-
ing” into other cultures and languages. In their exploration of first-person narratives
of late/adult bilingual writers, Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000, p. 157) claim that “first-
person accounts in the form of personal narratives provide a much richer source of
data than do third-person distal observations.” Whereas the tradition of hermeneutic
research in SLA has focused mainly on the ‘here-and-now’ or ‘in process’ descrip-
tions of the second language learning process by learners and researchers, Pavlenko
and Lantolf’s goal is “to establish ‘retroactive’ first-person narratives as a legitimate
source of data on the learning process by teasing out in a theoretically informed way
insights provided by the life stories of people who have struggled through cultural
border crossings” (p. 158). Based on their analysis of the autobiographical work of sev-
eral American and French authors of Eastern European origin, all of whom learned
their second language (in which they work) as adults, Pavlenko and Lantolf identify
particular sites of reconstruction of identity. Following Pavlenko (1998), they use self-
translation as a unifying metaphor that entails a phase of continuous loss followed
later by an overlapping second phase of gain and reconstruction. The initial phase of
loss is segmented into five stages (pp. 162–163):

1. loss of one’s linguistic identity (“careless baptism,” according to Hoffman, 1989).

2. loss of all subjectivities.
3. loss of the frame of reference and the link between the signifier and the signified.
4. loss of the inner voice.
5. first language attrition.

The phase of recovery and (re)construction encompasses four critical stages:

1. appropriation of others’ voices.

2. emergence of one’s own new voice, often in writing first.
3. translation therapy: reconstruction of one’s past.
4. continuous growth “into” new positions and subjectivities.

Pavlenko and Lantolf conclude that “it is ultimately through their own intentions and
agency that people decide to undergo or not undergo the frequently agonizing process
of linguistic, cultural, and personal transformation documented in the preceding nar-
ratives” (p. 171). They point out, however, that such a decision may be influenced by
many factors, including the person’s positioning in the native discourse and the power
relations between the discourses involved. This research is relevant to SLA theory in
that it suggests that “‘failure’ to attain ‘ultimately’ in a second language is an issue
that arises from the imposition of the third-person objectivist perspective informed
by a particular linguistic ideology based on the NS/NNS dichotomy” (p. 170). One’s
linguistic competence in a new culture reflects a process of transformation rather than
one of replacement, in which the ultimate outcome represents an identity that is not
exclusively anchored in one culture/language or another. As Pavlenko and Lantolf
put it, “crossing a border is about ‘renarratizing’ a life” (p. 174).
While Pavlenko and Lantolf explore the autobiographies of late/adult bilingual
writers, Lin, Wang, Akamatsu, and Riazi (2002) in a special topic issue of the Journal
of Language, Identity, and Education (“Celebrating local knowledge on language and
education,” Canagarajah (Ed.), 2002) explore the life histories of applied linguists
whose experiences as English language learners began much earlier. These language
educators use the technique of the collective story (see Richardson, 1985) where the
personal/biographical and the sociological/political intersect. Their purpose is to
 49. CONSIDERATIONS OF IDENTITY IN L2 LEARNING 905

explore and analyze “our encounters and experiences with English in our own life tra-
jectories just as we are constructing them and performing through them new voices,
expanded identities, and alternative subject positions” (p. 296). The authors, who
studied English from childhood in different parts of Asia—mainland China, colonial
Hong Kong, Japan, and Iran—completed their doctoral studies in English language
education in Canada in the early 1990s. Having presented their biographies to a main-
stream audience at the 2001 TESOL convention, the authors decided to further explore
their writings by “reflexively analyzing them, linking them to current discourses of
language learning and identity, and local production of disciplinary knowledge in
applied linguistics” (p. 300). Although each author’s trajectory was unique, they col-
lectively identify a similar storyline that they divide into four stages: English from
initially being a more or less irrelevant or external language for instrumental pur-
poses (getting good grades, entering into a good school, getting a good job, climbing
the socioeconomic ladder) to becoming an intimate language for self-expansion and
enrichment, for exploration of new horizons and new knowledge and understanding
of different peoples and the world. In order to destabilize the pervasive hierarchy of
racial, cultural, and linguistic relations, the authors argue it is necessary to deconstruct
the dichotomized and essentialized categories of Self and Other rooted in colonialist
discourse and manifested in classifications such as native, native-like, and non-native
English speakers. In a move toward re-imagining and altering these discourses, the
authors propose a paradigm shift from doing TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers
of Other Languages) to doing TEGCOM (Teaching English for Globalized Commu-
nication). Rather than assume (as the name and discourses of TESOL do) that it is
the “Other-language” speaker who needs “pedagogical treatment,” the authors sug-
gest that we should imagine a TEGCOM class in which all learners are monolingual
“native English speakers” who need to be instructed in the ways of using English for
cross-cultural communication (e.g., cross-cultural pragmatic skills and awareness) in
specific contexts (e.g., for conducting business in Japan, China, or Iran).

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

As should be evident at this point, the essentializing of L2 learners as members of a

national culture or language group has been widely (and rightly) criticized by crit-
ical and postmodern scholars in recent years. As Rosaldo (1993, p. 217) has noted,
cultural identities are “always in motion, not frozen for inspection.” Yet, as Hansen
and Liu (1997, p. 572) point out, despite the fact that many researchers have acknowl-
edged the dynamic nature of social identity, they still use methods—questionnaires,
observations, interviews, and so forth—that “do not allow for dynamism, as they
are typically one-time occurrences.” Although these methods should not be aban-
doned, additional methods discussed in this chapter (e.g., first-person narratives, col-
lective stories, longitudinal studies, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic research),
should be employed in the study of identity in L2 and FL settings. These methods
have generated a rich source of data and have deepened and widened our under-
standing of the complexity of identity, showing the limitations of dichotic opposi-
tional categories such as native/non-native, proficient/limited proficiency, assimi-
lated/alienated, Western/Oriental in the interpretation of human motivations and
desires. Spack (1997, p. 773) points out that “when teachers and researchers exercise
the power to identify, we actually may be imposing an ethnocentric ideology and in-
advertently supporting the essentializing discourse that represents cultural groups as
stable or homogeneous entities.” She suggests that rather than asking “What should
we name students?”, we should ask “Should we name students?” She suggests that
we follow the lead of critical cultural anthropologists who argue that those who have
906 RICENTO

been the objects of analysis can now “speak for themselves, represent their own lives”
(Friedman, 1994, p. 71).
Issues of naming and labeling apply equally in the case of seemingly neutral terms,
such as ‘Mother Tongue.’ The articles in Ricento and Wiley (2002) show the ways in
which this term has been appropriated, rejected, or reappropriated for different ide-
ological and political purposes. However, by analyzing the texts and discourses of
different subjectivities, there is the possibility to identify “third places” (Kramsch,
1993) in which new/re-articulations of our identities through linguistic and cultural
contact experiences can be explored. An excellent example of such a move is found in
the work of the South African scholar Sinfree Makoni. Makoni (cited in Pennycook,
2002, pp. 25–26) argues that “unless African languages are disinvented, some ways
of conceptualization of the social world consistent with European missionary impe-
rialism will be sustained into the next century . . . disinvention argues that African
languages in their current ways of conceptualization are European scripts.” Penny-
cook suggests that disinvention, rather than reification, of languages “might lead us to
address questions of language in education rather differently, not focusing so much on
reified notions of dominant languages and mother tongues as on trying to understand
the complex and hybrid mixtures of semiotic tools that are actually used” (p. 26).
There are many exciting possibilities in the study of identity and L2 learning. One
area that is receiving attention recently is the transnational character of many immi-
grant communities and the implications for language pedagogy and learning. Pita
and Utakis (2002) examine the economic, political, social, cultural, and linguistic di-
mensions of the Dominican community in New York City. They argue that in order
to function effectively in their lives, members of this community require enriched
bilingual bicultural programs, as opposed to just ESL, to promote parallel develop-
ment so that students can succeed in either country. With reference to the Dominican
community in New York, old assumptions that immigrants come to the United States
to assimilate and lose their ancestral language and culture do not apply. Educators
who deal with this and similar populations need to understand that the identities
of their L2 learners are deeply connected to their status as members of distinct, but
interrelated, communities, in which bilingualism (as opposed to monolingualism) is
the norm.
Finally, ESL and EFL teachers have a responsibility to consider how their peda-
gogical practices enable or challenge prevailing social hierarchies. McMahill (2001)
describes how she was able to stimulate class discussions on women’s issues in Japan
using the topic of mother/daughter relationships. McMahill describes how these EFL
learners can appropriate English as a weapon for self-empowerment for women in
Japan and for women of color in the world. Another example of the possibilities of a
critical pedagogy is found in Canagarajah (1999). The author provides insights into
the ways that teachers and students in a postcolonial setting (Sri Lanka) can nego-
tiate the challenges posed to their identity, community membership, and values, by
the vernacular and English. The research approaches and findings presented in this
chapter suggest starting points for critical, self-reflexive inquiry about how our prac-
tices as teachers might better serve the complex interests, desires, and identities of our
second and foreign language students around the world.

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50

Teaching and Researching

Intercultural Competence
Michael Byram
Anwei Feng
University of Durham

INTRODUCTION

Three main perspectives are identifiable in teaching for intercultural competence and
communication, even though there is inevitable overlap among them:

1. Culture teaching is moving toward an ethnographic perspective.

2. Culture teaching is moving toward a critical perspective.
3. Culture teaching focuses on preparation for residence in another country, often
without attention to language learning.

The first two perspectives are found in the work that arises from general education, in
schooling or higher education. The third is associated more with the world of work,
business, and commerce.
Increased interest in teaching has also led to more research. The relationship be-
tween the two is complex and sometimes uneasy. We shall see in the discussion of
approaches to teaching that the pursuit of intercultural competence brings language
teachers, who might have seen their purpose as developing skills (the four linguis-
tic skills and culture as the “fifth dimension” Damen, 1987), into close contact with
moral and political education as they deal with values and education for democracy.
Teaching culture can quickly become a matter of conviction and ideology with hopes
and intentions that may or may not be underpinned by research. This is not to say,
however, that research is value-free, and in the second part of this chapter we shall
present a distinction between research and scholarship that helps to demonstrate that
research also needs to be evaluated not only in terms of validity and reliability but
with an awareness of the values that it inevitably embodies.

911
912 BYRAM AND FENG

CONTEXT AND LANGUAGE AND CULTURE TEACHING

Most of the recent literature on teaching culture has apparently arisen from the increas-
ing importance attached to context in theoretical discussions in sociolinguistics, cul-
tural studies teaching, and intercultural communication. Gudykunst and Kim (1992)
argue that in intercultural interactions two types of context come into play: external
context and internal context. The former refers to the settings or locations where the
interaction takes place and the meanings the society attaches to them. Whereas the
latter, internal context, is the culture the interactants bring to the encounters. In inter-
cultural communication, misunderstanding is much more likely to occur because the
internal contexts, that is, the ways interactants use to perceive the situations and each
other and the meanings they associate with the settings can differ greatly from one
culture to another. Thus, it is essential for language learners to be effective in culture
learning.
Such views are shared by Kramsch (1993) who summarizes the discussions of
the notion of context along five lines: linguistic, situational, interactional, cultural,
and intertextual. She argues that teachers need to help learners of foreign languages
discover potential meanings through explorations of the context of the discourse
under study. The more contextual clues learners can identify, the more likely their
learning becomes meaningful. The fruits of this view can now be seen in contemporary
collections of articles and monographs describing classroom methods that focus on
the interplay between language and culture (e.g., Fantini, 1997; Lo Bianco, Liddicoat,
& Crozet, 1999; Byram & Grundy, 2002; Moran, 2001; Morgan & Cain, 2000).

ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES

The extensive discussions on context have resulted, first of all, in the systematic adop-
tion of an ethnographic approach to culture learning and teaching. In the past few
decades, the ethnographic approach has gained currency in the literature of sociolin-
guistics. Particularly since Hymes (1974) proposed an ethnographic framework that
takes into account various factors involved in speaking, the ethnographic approach
has been adopted repeatedly by sociolinguistic researchers to conduct empirical stud-
ies into the interrelationships between language and society (e.g., Hill & Hill, 1986;
Milroy, 1987; Lindenfeld, 1990). Sociolinguists usually define ethnography as a dis-
ciplined way to observe, ask, record, reflect, compare, analyze, and report. Hymes
(1981) further notes that:

Of all forms of scientific knowledge, ethnography is the most open, the most compatible
with a democratic way of life, the least likely to produce a world in which experts con-
trol knowledge at the expense of those who are studied. The skills of ethnography are
enhancements of skills all normal persons employ in everyday life. . . . It (ethnography)
mediates between what members of a given community know and do, and accumulates
comparative understanding of what members of communities generally have known and
done. (p. 57)

Ethnography has attracted language educators partly because access to countries

where a target language is spoken has become increasingly easier for language learn-
ers and partly because language educators and scholars have ever more realized
that language teaching can benefit from application of other disciplines rather than
drawing solely on theoretical linguistics. The value of ethnography is particularly no-
ticeable as the literature on culture learning and cultural studies teaching has grown in
recent years. Discussions about the close relationship between language and sociocul-
tural patterns in the literature of cultural studies, anthropology, and sociolinguistics
 50. INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE 913

have prompted language education scholars such as Paulston (1974), McLeod (1976),
Damen (1987), and Byram (1989a) to examine the relevance of anthropological, so-
ciolinguistic, and cultural studies methodology for language and culture teaching.
Coupled with social changes of the late 20th century that are encapsulated in the
words globalization and internationalization, an increasing number of educational in-
stitutions particularly in the industrialized countries have developed programs for
students to study abroad. Most of these programs are claimed to be part of the agen-
das to internationalize educational systems (Murphy-Lejeune, 2002; Kauffmann et al.,
1992) and many have the dual purposes of improving proficiency in the target lan-
guage and developing their intercultural competence and ethnographic skills (Byram,
1989b; Coleman, 1995; Roberts et al., 2001).

Ethnographic Study in Naturalistic Settings

An ethnographic perspective in language education, first of all, takes naturalistic set-
tings, that is, real-world situations, as most effective and central to culture learning.
This view is most illustrated in the literature on study abroad. According to Murphy-
Lejeune (2002), in 1996, UNESCO estimated that the number of internationally mobile
students reached 1,400,000 worldwide and projected an increase of 50,000 students
each year in the years to come. Among these students a large number study abroad
for educational purposes whereas many are obliged to study abroad for economic
and political reasons. The ethnographic experience of these internationally mobile
students attracts the attention of researchers of various disciplines including those in
language and culture learning and acquisition. Research findings, particularly those
obtained from in-depth interviews, often show a close relationship between students’
ethnographic experience and their intellectual development (including development
of learners’ linguistic competence) (Dyson, 1988; DeKeyser, 1991), international per-
spectives and positive attitudes toward otherness (Carlson et al., 1990; Kauffmann
et al., 1992; Murphy-Lejeune, 2002). In her article on interviews of 50 students who
spent a year in a European country other than in their own, Murphy-Lejeune (2003,
p. 113) states that the experience is generally positively felt by many interviewees
as an adaptation process. This process does not always bring about a drastic change
in personality but it evidently leads to a “personal expansion, an opening of one’s
potential universe.”
Many language educators see these study-abroad programs as opportunities not
only to develop learners’ linguistic competence but their cultural awareness and inter-
cultural competence. Armstrong (1984) researched more than a hundred high school
students who participated in a 7-week language study program in Mexico and found
that the stay positively influenced the students’ attitude toward the host culture and
the target language and led to a higher level of cultural awareness. In the European
context, the proximity of countries with different languages and the advantages of
living in a multilingual continent, have led to major increases in the number of young
learners experiencing other cultures that can be exploited with an ethnographic ap-
proach (Byram & Snow, 1997).
Having studied the effects of studying abroad on university-level students, Jurasek
(1996) concludes that in learning another language it is important for a learner to
engage in the ethnographic process of observing, participating, describing, analyzing,
and interpreting. This engagement is much more significant than the product of the
study itself. He further suggests that as a consequence of such an approach learners
will gain increased awareness with regard to perception and perspective and improve
their ability to a lesser or greater extent of recognizing what things might look like
from the perspective of members of another culture. Perhaps, the most comprehensive
ethnographic program for language students is the one that was designed and carried
914 BYRAM AND FENG

out by researchers at a British university (see Roberts et al., 2001; Barro et al., 1998).
The program was conducted over a period of 3 years in three distinct phases: the
presojourn acquisition of ethnographic methods and concepts, the during-sojourn
ethnographic fieldwork, and the postsojourn write-up of a monograph.
Most ethnographic projects such as this and study-abroad programs described
earlier have reportedly produced positive impact on learners in terms of intercultural
awareness, interest in otherness, intellectual and personal development. Nevertheless,
some research findings indicate that negative experience in foreign countries can
reinforce stereotypes (Coleman, 1997, 1998) and some students even feel that the
year abroad is a “lost year” as they lose contact with their home school and their
fellow students (Lewis & Stickler, 2000). In response to these, education scholars and
institutions have used or experimented with various measures to help achieve the
specified aims. These include formal training of students before residence abroad, as
in Roberts et al. (2001), regular visits by home institutions, and regular report or diary
writing by students (Lewis & Stickler, 2000). Most of the measures are reported to be
effective in bringing about positive outcomes.

Ethnographic Study in Structured Settings

Recent literature on ethnography has also expanded to professional development and
culture teaching in a structured language classroom. Language education researchers
have explored a range of ways in which teachers as well as learners can be encouraged
to “live an ethnographic life,” depending on the context of learning and resources
available. Both research findings and theoretical discussions demonstrate a strong
interest in the ethnographic perspective for culture learning and teaching, whether
it takes place in the country where the target language is spoken or in a structured
language classroom.
In discussing ethnography for culture teaching and learning in language educa-
tion, many scholars maintain that teachers first of all need to be ethnographers them-
selves capable of dealing with cultural issues with understanding and sensitivity. It is
mistaken to assume that teachers can competently provide explanations of complex
issues to their students by simply drawing on text information and personal expe-
rience. Damen (1987) is one of the keen promoters of ethnography for professional
development of language teachers and for culture teaching in language classrooms.
She suggests seven steps for teachers, preservice or in-service, to plan an individual
ethnographic project. She names the procedure “pragmatic ethnography” because
she states that the procedure is to “serve personal and practical purposes and not to
provide scientific data and theory” (p. 63). Although this model does not explicitly
suggest that the teacher ask the students to use the same approach to culture learning,
there is potential for doing so and the teacher is encouraged to link their ethnographic
learning experience with teaching practice.
Literature documenting language teachers’ attempts to study their students’ per-
ceptions of language learning, attitudes, and classroom behavior using an ethno-
graphic approach is increasing (Canagarajah, 1993; Atkinson & Ramanathan, 1995;
Barkhuizen, 1998). The findings of most of these studies shed new light on materials
selection, lesson planning, and classroom teaching as Damen expects. That is the very
reason why Holliday (1994) argues that each time a language teacher meets a new
group of students or a curriculum planner enters a new institution they should apply
ethnographic skills to discovering the “hidden agendas” and life objectives of their
students. It is the hidden objectives of their students that determine whether they ac-
cept or reject the curricular innovations and the teaching and learning methodology
used by the teacher. In a later article, Holliday (1996) further states that in ethno-
graphic studies into teaching English as an international language a teacher should
 50. INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE 915

not restrict research to empirical research on verbal data but develop a “sociologi-
cal imagination,” the ability to locate themselves and their actions (as a teacher cum
researcher) critically within a wider community or world scenario.
In recent years, even more significant is the fact that many attempts have been made
to equip students with ethnographic techniques to conduct language-and-culture
projects themselves in their own classrooms and neighboring communities. Robinson-
Stuart and Nocon (1996) report an experimental study they carried out in an American
university. In this study, the students studying Spanish as a foreign language were
trained to employ ethnographic interview skills to study the local Spanish speakers.
Both quantitative and qualitative results reveal that most language students bene-
fited cognitively, affectively, and intellectually as they demonstrated a more positive
attitude toward the cultural perspectives of local target language speakers, showed
more interest in learning the target language, and practiced the life skill of active lis-
tening. Byram and Cain (1998) describe an experiment carried out in two schools in
France and England using an ethnographic approach, and argue for greater efforts
in exploring other disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and ethnography in
language teaching practice. Carel (2001) reports a project that made use of information
technology to develop in students cultural sensitivity and intercultural competence
in the classroom. For this, she designed and implemented an interactive computer
courseware package that enabled students to use ethnographic skills to observe and
analyze cultural phenomena, do virtual fieldwork, and reflect on their own culture
and their previous views of the target culture. Similarly, a project in Bulgaria has ex-
plored the ways in which the skills of the ethnographer in collecting and analyzing
data and studying their meanings comparatively with data from one’s own culture,
can be brought into the classroom (e.g., Topuzova, 2001). In his monograph, Corbett
(2003) also argues for ethnography as one of the most important features of the inter-
cultural approach. As ethnographic skills such as observing, interviewing, analyzing,
and reporting are all vital skills for students when they encounter otherness first-
hand, they need to be trained and incorporated into language curricula. He offers
practical suggestions and methods to conduct interviews, to make use of resources
and to explore cultures in general using an ethnographic approach. Finally, Fleming
(1998, 2003) shows how drama teaching, as a unique form of classroom teaching, can
be linked with ethnographic methodology to enable learners to see others’ behavior
and their own through the eyes of “made strangers,” a process of active participant
observation and reflection.
The potential of the Internet for virtual ethnography seems obvious but has not
yet been fully explored. One particularly interesting project combines the use of the
immediacy of the Internet and a constructivist pedagogy whereby one student group
is linked to another and both compare and contrast their responses to culture-specific
phenomena, relate these to sociological data, and begin to discover patterns of beliefs,
values, and behaviors in the other’s society and culture (Furstenberg et al., 2001).

CRITICAL APPROACHES

Culture Teaching and Political Education

It is widely acknowledged by educationists and language researchers that education
is never neutral and foreign language education has a political role to play in any ed-
ucation system of the world. Many language scholars and educators therefore argue
that foreign language teachers should take social and political responsibilities in the
education of the young in the contemporary world. Byram (1997), for example, places
political education firmly at the center of his model for intercultural communicative.
916 BYRAM AND FENG

He suggests that insights from citizenship education, education for democracy, human
rights and peace education, and cultural studies can be drawn to establish criteria of
evaluation and mediation between cultures. Byram and Risager (1999) further elabo-
rate this stance with data from their empirical studies in two European countries. They
show how geopolitical changes affect language educators’ perceptions of language
teaching and analyze and recommend ways to respond to these changes in language
education.
In her monograph on critical citizenship, Guilherme (2002) puts even greater and
more explicit emphasis on the political dimension for foreign language and culture
education. The critical model she proposes integrates three components that are all
politically based. First, she argues for human rights education and education for
democratic citizenship through opposing philosophies to promote critical cultural
awareness in teaching a foreign language and culture. The second component is an in-
terdisciplinary one that consists of cultural studies, intercultural communication, and
critical pedagogy. The third comprises a series of “operations.” pedagogical strategies
that function at various levels in terms of local, national, and global geopolitics and in
relation to “existential” references, namely attitudes, values, and beliefs. She suggests,
however, that integration, particularly critical pedagogy, in foreign language/culture
education, although important and attempted in some studies, requires further re-
search.
As an initial step toward a critical perspective in language and culture teaching,
quite a few monographs have been written recently to provide theoretical underpin-
nings and practical ideas for foreign language teacher training. A common feature of
these writings is their attempts to deal explicitly and critically with the social, political,
and ideological aspects in language and language learning and teaching. Nieto (1999,
2002) addresses issues of cultural diversity and identity in relation to language edu-
cation in American classrooms and suggests community and classroom activities in
settings ranging from multicultural classrooms to district or national levels. In carrying
out these activities, in-service and preservice language educators are encouraged to
reflect on their practice and perceptions of language teaching and learning, conduct
ethnographic field work, and experience the critical perspective through activities
such as curriculum design. Reagan and Osborn (2002) link foreign language educa-
tion with critical pedagogy and propose what they call the “metalinguistic content”
for foreign language education, moving beyond pragmatic pedagogical concerns to
the social and political domains relevant to language teaching.
The purpose for some of these writers is not only to make learners take new per-
spectives and reflect on their own, but to focus on some principled and universal
“meanings,” in order to avoid the relativism of postmodernism. Corbett sees this as
“neohumanist,” placing respect for individuals at the heart of the enterprise:

The intercultural learner moves amongst cultures, in a process of continual negotiation,

learning to cope with the inevitable changes, in a manner that is ultimately empowering
and enriching. The home culture is never denied nor demeaned, yet the intercultural
learner will find his or her attitudes and beliefs challenged by contact with others, and
the process of interaction will lead to the kind of personal growth characterised by ‘pro-
gressive’ curricula. (2003)

Culture Taught as a Dialogic Process

An important feature of a critical perspective in language education is the dialogic
approach that emphasizes a teacher-student relationship of mutual respect, freedom
of expression, and dialogic sharing. A dialogic approach to language and culture
teaching moves away from the traditional concept of teaching knowledge as an “I/It”
 50. INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE 917

phenomenon (I teach it, you learn it) to a teaching method that problematizes the very
concepts under study (Tomic, 2000). These include the concepts of “culture” itself,
“cultural identity,” “carriers of culture,” and “nonverbal communication” (Hoffman,
1999; Woodward, 1997; Scollon & Scollon, 1995). Tomic argues that in culture teaching
and learning it is the individual’s voice that has more resonance than the “culture.”
Language learners undergo the empowering process as they realize that each person’s
voice counts.
Based on the view that language and culture learning is a dialogic process of inter-
action with others, Morgan and Cain (2000) conducted a project that aimed to enable
secondary students in two schools of two countries (England and France) to learn
about each other’s culture and their own and learn how to decenter and take the
other’s perspective. The articles in Fenner (2001) also represent a dialogic perspective
in dealing with culture in a classroom context. Based on theories exploring the inter-
relationship between text and reader and reading and writing processes as dynamic
dialogues, the authors examine the interactions between the learners themselves, the
cultures involved, learners and teachers, and texts and readers. Common to all the
articles is the fact that the practices they present are based on classroom activities
using authentic texts ranging from literary texts and drama to Internet materials.
The authenticity of texts for intercultural teaching is important. It is true that many
of the texts or discourses traditionally defined as authentic texts are produced by
native speakers for the consumption of other native speakers of that language. It is
thus not difficult to find in the literature that some argue against using authentic texts
in a language classroom on the ground that it is almost impossible for the classroom to
provide the contextual conditions for the authentic language data to be authenticated
by learners. However, intercultural authenticity (Feng & Byram, 2002) regards the
issue of inauthentic context not as an obstacle but as an opportunity to explore the
language and culture, including the context, from all angles through dialogues. First, it
can encourage students’ voices, not silence them, by asking what their initial response
to and interpretation of the discourse is. Second, it can lead to discussions of the
context, the possible intended audience, and the intended meaning. And third, it may
enable both the students and the teacher to gain a multifaceted perspective through
negotiations and mediation.

Culture Taught as Knowledge Subject to Scrutiny

The most conventional and also the most criticized perspective of culture teaching
is what critics call the facts-oriented approach in which culture is basically viewed
as civilization, the “big C” culture, as well as everyday lives, the “small c” culture
(Oswalt, 1970; Brooks, 1975; Chastain, 1976). In this facts-oriented approach, culture
is normally dissected into small segments that are listed as topics for teaching. Many
critics take this approach as inappropriate or even damaging, arguing that it ignores
the fact that the major component of what we call the culture “is a social construct, a
product of self and other perceptions” (Kramsch, 1993, p. 205). It may well lead to the
teaching of stereotypes.
Nonetheless, the facts-oriented perspective in teaching culture is not entirely aban-
doned, particularly in language teaching situations where learners have limited op-
portunities to expose to otherness and relatively fewer resources to explore the target
culture. In effect, many language scholars in these contexts have been making constant
efforts to address the theoretical concerns of this approach and to develop it into a
“critical model.” Hu and Gao (1997), for example, argue that the majority of millions
of foreign language learners in China are too ignorant of the basic formulaic facts of
the culture they are studying. The knowledge of the facts is undoubtedly necessary as
a starting point for culture learning. They warn of the risks and negative implications
918 BYRAM AND FENG

in teaching stereotypical knowledge as they point out that facts only will inevitably
lead to superficial learning and may enhance stereotypes and ethnocentrism. To deal
with this paradox, they propose an approach where first learners are taught stereo-
typical knowledge (to build an open “bridge” in their figurative terms). Immediately,
this knowledge is put under scrutiny, by providing learners with a variety of rep-
resentations of the cultural product or concept under discussion. This is to make
learners aware that there are hidden “barriers” along the seemingly straight, easy-to-
cross “bridge.” The repetition of the process will effectively make learners culturally
sophisticated and eventually obtain the “key” to becoming intercultural speakers.
In a similar line of thought, Doyé (1999) puts forward a “strategy for cultural stud-
ies” for foreign language classrooms that starts with stereotypical information. The
12-step procedure, in summary, engages learners in exploring preknowledge, creating
cognitive dissonance, replacing stereotypical images, exploiting related sources of in-
formation and nonverbal communication, comparing others with own, and moving
beyond the culture of the target language. This process not only enriches learners’
knowledge by studying the culture from different angles, but also improves their
skills in comparing and discovering by exploring related sources, and enables them
to become open-minded and critical, by reflecting on their ‘natural’ way of looking at
others and perhaps their own.

CULTURE TEACHING AND CULTURE TRAINING

The work reviewed so far has general educational purposes as well as the intention
to develop learners’ practical competences. We have seen that Hymes stressed the
democratic character of ethnography, and we have seen the increase in the relationship
of culture teaching to critical pedagogy with its democratic principles and focus on
critical analysis. The location for this work is above all the foreign or second language
classroom in schools or universities, and this has two important implications.
The first of these is that language and culture are seen as inseparable in the learning
process; students learn a language and its cultural implications, even where they
are learning it as a lingua franca. They learn to communicate in a new language
and this in itself is part of the experience of decentering, which gives them a fresh
perspective, a critical perspective, on the taken-for-granted world that surrounds
them. Their competence is both intercultural and communicative (Byram, 1997). The
second implication is that teachers of languages who might have previously seen
themselves as developing in their learners’ skills and knowledge, perhaps with a hope
that this would lead to attitude change, now find themselves engaged with values.
In practice, the significance of this democratic, educational dimension can be wa-
tered down, as teachers prepare their learners for examinations that do not, and
perhaps should not, attempt to assess the effect of values and moral education on
learners. One of the effects of contemporary emphasis on “quality and standards” in
most education systems is to reinforce “teaching to the test.” Language teachers who
are culturally minded would understandably adopt an ad hoc approach to teaching
culture as it appears during their focus on linguistic matters; this is the worst-case
scenario. When contextual factors are favorable, they would, at their best, design a
syllabus to teach culture systematically through the use of cultural awareness activi-
ties and discussion of critical incidents. In these situations, the practical activities for
language classrooms designed in Damen (1987), Tomalin and Stempleski (1993), and
Fantini (1997) are typically used.
It is also important to bear in mind this difference between principle and practice
as we turn to the third general perspective in our review: work that trains people for
sojourns in other countries. Here, in principle, the emphasis is on skills and knowl-
edge for practical purposes, but the educational effects in practice can also include
 50. INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE 919

the decentering and challenge that leads to reassessment of the taken-for-granted

world. On the other hand, the distinction between training for intercultural com-
petence without a focus on language learning, and the combination of language and
culture learning in general education is usually clear. Culture teaching in this perspec-
tive focuses exclusively on the specific information of the country where the sojourner
is going for a short or long stay and offers specific communication patterns, the do’s
and don’ts, for living and working in that context. The approach does not usually
take the language level of the sojourner into account and is used particularly for short
training programs for personnel going abroad for business and studying purposes.
Numerous texts with titles such as Living in Japan, Communicating with Arabs, Study-
ing and Living in the USA and so on are written as resource books for culture specific
study.
The theoretical basis for this work is largely psychological. Bennett’s model for the
development of intercultural sensitivity (1993) is often cited, and Ward, Bochner, and
Furnham (2001) is a recent review and analysis of psychological theory in this field.
An alternative approach is to focus on the linguistic foundation for intercultural rela-
tionships. Trainers in this approach try to ensure that, irrespective of whose language
is being used, learners become aware of the significance of speech acts, turn taking,
register directness/indirectness, and so on. Often the assumption is that learners will
not have time to acquire a new language, will use a lingua franca, usually English, and
therefore need to understand these other features to become sensitive to the nature of
the communication. Here the underlying theoretical basis is a comparative linguistic
analysis of discourse, most significantly represented in the work of Scollon and Scollon
(1995), and presented in its practical implications in Pan, Scollon, and Scollon (2002).
The analysis of work on cross-cultural training would need a chapter in itself, and
insofar as this work does not focus on language teaching and learning, would be
beyond our scope. There are many handbooks and manuals (e.g., Fowler & Mumfort,
1995, 1999; Cushner & Brislin, 1997; Kohls & Knight, 1994). Many of these have been
produced in the United States where the notion of cross-cultural training has been
strong, but in the last decade there has been an increasing interest in Europe too. The
work of Hofstede (1991) and Trompenaar (1993) is widely cited, and there are practical
handbooks and guides increasingly available (e.g., Gibson, 2000; Hofstede, Pederson,
& Hofstede, 2002). There are also many materials that remain copyrighted and not
widely available for commercial reasons. The main thrust of all this work has been to
prepare people to go to other countries, but it also has relevance in giving those who
are immigrant to a country an introduction and a program of transition.
What is evident and carefully documented in Dahlen’s (1997) critique of the way
these interculturalists “package” knowledge of culture, is that there is a close rela-
tionship with the business world and with the marketplace. Dahlen argues that this
leads to an approach to culture that is a commodification of a dated concept of culture,
concluding with some irony:

More generally, there is a need for conversations between interculturalists and academics
for mutual benefit.

Perhaps one bridge is offered by recent work that explores the implications for lan-
guage learning of a sociocultural theory of mind (Lantolf, 2000a). Here the perspective
taken is that learning is mediated by interaction with other people in a given sociocul-
tural context, and that we can better understand the learning of other languages by
analyzing how that interaction takes place. The significance for culture teaching and
training is yet to be determined, but it suggests that research is needed to analyze the
ways in which people learn other cultures and learn about other cultures in interaction
with people who embody them. It is to the research agenda in general, that we turn
next.
920 BYRAM AND FENG

APPROACHES TO RESEARCH

Researching Foreign Language Teaching and Learning

The research questions that can be asked about culture learning in a foreign language
learning context depend partly on whether the researcher is seeking explanation or un-
derstanding (von Wright, 1971). From an explanation perspective, hypotheses about
the relationships among culture learning and other aspects of learning and teaching
can be quickly established, for example:
r The relationship between ‘the’ foreign culture, or perceptions of it, and the mo-
tivation for learning.
r The relationship between language learning and attitudes to and/or perceptions
of other cultures and peoples.
r The relationship between teaching techniques and/or methodologies and knowl-
edge about other cultures.
r The relationship between learning (about) another culture and learners’ percep-
tions of and/or attitudes toward their own culture.
r The relationship between culture teaching (or absence thereof) and vocabulary
learning.
r The relationship between culture learning and the development of specific social
identities, particularly national identity.

The best researched account of culture learning is undoubtedly the search for ex-
planation of relationships between learners’ understanding of other cultures and their
motivation and achievement in language learning. In early research by Gardner and
Lambert (1972), the notion of “integrative” motivation—the desire to learn a language
to be in some sense closer to speakers of the language—was considered the best basis
for success. Later research (Dörnyei, 1998) has shown that “instrumental” motivation
can be more important than “integrative,” depending on the social context in which
languages are learnt. Later research has also shown that many other factors need to
be taken into consideration, not least the impact of classroom conditions (Dörnyei,
2001). Where a language is dissociated in learners’ perceptions from all links with na-
tive speakers—as may be the case with English as an International Language—then
“instrumental” or “pragmatic” motivation will be the better concept for explaining
achievement.
On the other hand, integrative motivation expressed as a positive interest in peoples
and cultures associated with a language is still a significant area of research. This aspect
of motivation—it is only one aspect of a very complex issue—is also related to research
on attitudes. In both cases, assumptions that there are linear and unidirectional causal
relationships between attitudes or motivation on the one hand and achievement in
language learning on the other are misplaced. It is for this reason that researchers
have constructed complex models that attempt to show the inter-relationships among
attitudes, motivations, self-concepts, environmental factors, and instructional factors.
The complexity of such models may appear, to applied linguists and teachers, to
limit severely their usefulness for teaching, and when Dörnyei and Csizer (1998)
offer “ten commandments for motivating language learners” based on research, these
might appear intuitively self-evident. However, the significance of culture learning is
reinforced by their inclusion of “familiarize learners with the target language culture.”
Whatever the precise formulation of the hypothesis, the causal relationship be-
tween language learning and teaching and culture learning in the form of insights
and attitudes is one that has been researched, albeit sparingly. Byram, Esarte-Sarries,
and Taylor (1991) investigated the effects of different styles of language and culture
 50. INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE 921

teaching on learners’ perceptions and understanding of a national culture. Their con-

clusions were disappointing in the sense that they could find no discernible effect
of teaching, but a strong presence of other factors from outside the classroom and
the school. More recently, Australian researchers have investigated the relationship
of teaching to attitude formation, which again is disappointing in that there seems to
be no causal relationship between teaching and positive attitudes (Ingram & O’Neill,
2002).
There is therefore a major area in the relationships between teaching and under-
standing of and attitudes toward self and other, own and foreign cultures that needs
much more research. Such research could be informed and enriched by other work on
culture learning. Much of this is comparative in methodology, comparing, for example,
culture-specific views and reactions to communicative language teaching (in China
and ‘the West,’ Rao, 2002), in Colombia and the United States (Schulz, 2001). There
is a particularly well-mined seam of research on vocabulary differences between, for
example, English and Chinese (Cortazzi & Shen, 2001) or English and German (Olk,
2002) or French and English (Boers & Demecheleer, 2001). In most cases, research that
thus analyzes speakers’ understanding of apparently similar vocabulary draws out
implications for teaching and learning.
There are also analyses of differences in other aspects of communication: different
cultural values and communication styles (FitzGerald, 2003), or different discourse
strategies (Orsoni, 2001).
Research that is focused on understanding rather than explanation may not always
appear to have immediate relevance to Applied Linguists and language teachers, par-
ticularly when it deals with phenomena outside the classroom. This is nonetheless an
important area because it situates language and culture learning in social contexts.
Lantolf (1999, 2000a, 2000b) has argued for a theoretical position that recognizes the
value of understanding processes of culture learning from the perspective of learn-
ers in informal learning contexts. Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000) have used personal
stories as a basis for analyzing “second language learning as participation and the
(re)construction of selves.” There are recent studies which analyze problems of “iden-
tity loss” as children learn languages (Downes, 2001; Jo, 2001) or “identity mainte-
nance” for children of minority groups learning their heritage language (Mills, 2001).
The particular role of the textbook in supporting learners’ identity has also been ana-
lyzed (Arbex, 2001).
The learners in some of these studies are from minority groups or find themselves
in an identity-threatening situation. There is also a growing research interest in the
impact of language and culture learning on the cultural identities of learners in ma-
jority groups, especially when they spend time in another country to improve their
learning (Crawshaw, Callen, & Tusting, 2001; Jordan, 2001). Related research investi-
gates the interplay among social context, perceptions of self, and language learning
(Miller, 2003).

Scholarship and Foreign Language Teaching

Work that we classify as scholarship, is that which is concerned with intervention in
the status quo of foreign language learning in order to develop it in a certain direction,
and is far more frequent than research. Whereas the quality of research will be judged
by criteria of clarity of conceptual analysis, validity and reliability of data, rigor in
interpreting and drawing conclusions from data, scholarly work is often judged by
the power of the argument and the rhetoric that sustains it, by the relevance of the
argument to a given time and place, and by the support cited from research. Argument
about “what ought to be” may depend more or less closely on research and the analysis
of “what is.” Proposals for future directions may be judged, irrespective of research, as
922 BYRAM AND FENG

realistic or unrealistic/ideal. Scholarship reflects, more than research, the relationship

of language learning and teaching to the social conditions in which it is located. As
the contemporary world changes to a state of globalization, for example, arguments
about culture learning have changed too.
Contemporary scholarship is therefore concerned with and a reflection of social and
political contents, and the responses of theorists and social commentators. In Germany,
for example, Kramer has argued for attention to a “cultural studies” dimension to
the teaching of English that has its roots in the critical social analysis of Raymond
Williams and Stuart Hall in England (Kramer, 1997). Kramer argues that the study
of English (Anglistik) needs to respond to the new ways in which people live their
lives, engage in their culture, in a time of rapid change. The study of language and
culture should address questions of “how we live” and also “how we ought to live,”
thus introducing an explicitly ethical dimension to teaching and learning. Starkey, too,
introduces a strong ethical dimension by arguing that language and culture teaching
should take note of and introduce human rights education into its aims and purposes
(Starkey, 2002).
Changing social conditions are reflected in the work of Kramsch and Zarate. The
former argues, like Kramer, for new purposes and re-definitions of language study
to respond to “epistemological shifts occurring in academia” (Kramsch, 1995, p. xiv)
and her argument that language study creates “a third place,” a privileged and ques-
tioning location, where learners gain special insights into their own and others cul-
tures, has become widely accepted. Zarate (2003), too, redefines the nature and pur-
poses of language and culture learning, stressing the significance of in-between or
border locations and the need for language teaching to respond to the particular
challenges of European integration, as nation–states and national identities fuse and
change.
Such authors present new perspectives and purposes. By doing so they open up new
questions for research and scholarship. For example, researchers might explore the
self-understanding of learners and teachers living in these newly defined conditions.
Scholars who are interested in intervention and development work can find guidance
in their planning from these new purposes, and new teaching objectives that follow
from them.
There are some signs of this in intervention and development work already, al-
though the relationship of classroom practice to pedagogical aims and ethical ques-
tions is not frequent enough. We reviewed recent publications abstracted in Language
Teaching and concluded that intervention and development work is currently often fo-
cused on the problems of difference and distance, and how to overcome them. Culture
learning is perceived as even less feasible if confined to the classroom than language
learning. Culture learning needs to be experiential and experience of difference has
to be at the center of learners’ and teachers’ attention.
Unsurprisingly, new communication technologies are promoted as a means of over-
coming distance and giving learners experience of interacting with native speakers.
E-mail contacts (Liaw & Johnson, 2001; Belz, 2001; Jogan, Heredia, & Aguilera, 2001),
electronic conferencing (Truscott & Morley, 2001) and the Internet as a source of infor-
mation (Herron et al., 2002; Gruber-Miller & Benton, 2001) are representative of this
trend.
Tandem learning, originally developed as a means of enhancing linguistic compe-
tence, is a means of creating opportunities for culture learning (Rohrbach & Winiger,
2001; Kötter, 2001). Where possible visits and exchanges are offered to language
learners for the same purposes, there are similar attempts to create culture learning
(Gohard-Radenkovic, 2001; Harbon, 2002; Breugnot, 2001).
Implicit in these approaches is the assumption that interaction with people who
embody a culture, who are native speakers of a language, is crucial. This then leads to
 50. INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE 923

debate and argument for (and against) the use of native speakers as teachers (Hinkel,
2001; Jiang, 2001). The debate about the advantages of non-native and native speakers
with respect to teaching language (Medgyes, 1994) is thus beginning to be extended
to teaching culture, and the related question of the relationship between teachers’
experience of other cultures and their introduction of a cultural dimension into their
teaching is being investigated (Aleksandrowicz-Pedich & Lazar, 2002).
Analysis of the cultural content of textbooks is a well-established area and insofar
as it has begun to develop theoretically well-founded criteria, might be better clas-
sified as research into the effects of teaching on learners’ perceptions (Sercu, 2000).
Reports on the difficulties of using textbooks written in one country when teaching in
another (Yakhontova, 2001) are, however, like reports of difficulties of using Western
communication technology in non-Western countries (Smith, 2001; Takagaki, 2001).
Feng and Byram (2002) adopt a more intercultural perspective in content analysis, and
argue for intercultural representation in selecting textbook materials and analysis of
intention and interpretation in handling authentic texts in the classroom.

Research and Scholarship in Second Language Teaching and Learning

The distinction between foreign and second language learning is often considered
by those concerned with Second Language Acquisition research as unimportant. Re-
search on bilingual education where students learn through the medium of another
language than their first or dominant language would not make a distinction between
learners who are immigrants to another country and learning through the official lan-
guage of that country, and learners who simply go to a school where it has been decided
to teach them through the medium of another language. However, it is important when
thinking about the cultural issues involved because of the inevitability of some kind
of culture learning when learners live in another culture, which they do not have if
they are exposed to language learning only in the classroom. The learning of English
is a special case in many countries because of the dominance of English-language
media, and the inevitable exposure to manifestations of U.S. American culture.
Where some Second Language Acquisition research does make a distinction is be-
tween tutored and untutored learning, the latter often being the experience of adult
immigrants whereas child immigrants are provided with formal, tutored language
learning opportunities (Perdue, 2000). Nonetheless, this research seeks to answer
questions about the acquisition of language as a system, what paths are taken by
learners, what relationships there are among attitudes and motivation factors, why
they stop learning so that their language fossilizes. Further questions that need to
be asked concern how people, children and adults, acquire the concepts of their new
cultural environment, the “keywords” that distinguish one language from another
(Wierzbicka, 1997) the “rich points” of a culture (Agar, 1991). As Lantolf puts it:

Although it may be possible for people to develop an intellectual understanding and

tolerance of other cultures, a more interesting question, perhaps, is if, and to what extent,
it is possible for people to become cognitively like members of other cultures; that is, can
adults learn to construct and see the world through culturally different eyes. (1999, p. 29)

Lantolf then provides a useful survey of research that has examined the acquisition
of lexis and metaphors, but points out that this is still at an early stage.
Another recent development is beginning to extend the range of interest of Sec-
ond Language Acquisition in the way we have suggested is necessary. Norton (2000)
argues that language acquisition is influenced by social relationships, by the social
identities that immigrants are allowed to develop by the society in which they live. By
careful case studies, she shows that the questions concerning the rate of acquisition,
924 BYRAM AND FENG

motivation, fossilization, precisely those questions that focus on language as a system,

can be better explained by attention to the social conditions and the social identities
present in the experience. Miller (2003) has carried out similar work with children,
studying the cases of ten immigrant children in Australia in-depth to analyze the ways
in which their self-representations impact on their language acquisition.
A further recent development approaches these questions through an attempt to
understand the experience, particularly of adult language learners. Pavlenko (1998)
has analyzed autobiographical accounts of language learning, notably in what she
describes as “acclaimed literary masterpieces” whose authors have demonstrated a
particular sensitivity and ability to recall and reflect on their learning experience. What
is particularly interesting is that, although she starts with a focus on Second Language
Acquisition and a search for further insight into the acquisition of language as system,
she ends with questions about identity, about the possible incompatibilities of living
in two languages.
In second language learning, then, there are more questions than answers, and re-
search is only just beginning, but the distinction between “pure” research and “com-
mitted” scholarship, is just as valid, and in the next section we turn to the question of
taking a position and the consequences that follow.

Taking a Position and Identifying Research Needs

One of the purposes of a review article or chapter is to evaluate, and not only present,
research and scholarship. Where there is no disagreement about the purposes of re-
search, then the task is to clarify criteria for good theories and make judgments about
which research best meets those criteria. This seems to be the case in research on
Second Language Acquisition (Long, 2000), which takes its lead from some forms of
research in the natural sciences. The question is to decide which theories provide the
best understanding of how second languages are acquired.
Evaluation of intervention and development work is less simple because there often
remain implicit purposes, because the accounts of what is done are not sufficiently
detailed, and because experimental conditions are not rigorous. Here, then, teachers
read teachers’ accounts and rely on their professional intuition and judgment. This is
not without value since internalized professional criteria are not arbitrary; they reflect
current theories as transmitted in teacher education. At the same time, of course, they
remain often unarticulated and therefore not open to review and revision.
Evaluation of scholarship that is focused on “what ought to be” and argues for a par-
ticular position—such as those mentioned earlier associated with Kramsch, Kramer,
and Zarate—is a more complex issue. There are no simple criteria beyond those of
logical, clear and well-supported argument. Behind these, there is often a philosophi-
cal position, an ideology of axioms concerning the bases of human interaction, beliefs
about the nature of human beings, and the societies they form. Discussion of aims
and purposes of culture and language teaching and learning at this level is quickly
seen to be related to judgments of values and desirable education.
In her discussion of the ways in which language teaching should change in univer-
sities in the United States, as a consequence of “major upheavals that are shaking at
the foundation of the old idea of the university,” Kramsch argues that “relevance” is
a crucial issue, that there is:

Renewed pressure on universities to serve national political and economic interests of

the time by justifying their choice of the knowledge they produce and transmit, and
by demonstrating its relevance to the current needs of society. Foreign languages are
particularly vulnerable to this pressure. (1995, p. xvi)
 50. INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE 925

She argues that language should be taught as social practice and that we should
teach “meanings that are relevant both to the native speakers and to our students.”
If these are representative views then language and culture study is, first, a means
to other ends and, second, an acquisition of knowledge of relevant meanings. Kram-
sch goes on, however, to say that learners can be made to reflect on their own social
upbringing and cultural values as a consequence of study. The overlap between schol-
arship and teaching thus becomes evident and takes us back to our earlier discussion
of critical approaches to teaching.
We have thus seen that where culture teaching-and-learning takes place in an ed-
ucational context, questions of values and ideology are inevitable. Once this is ac-
cepted, there are implications for the evaluation of research and scholarship that go
beyond technical discussions of best theories. This means that, if the position outlined
earlier—let us call it language and political education—is accepted, then research and
scholarship on culture teaching and learning can be judged not only in terms of its
rigor and clarity, but also in terms of the contribution it makes to understanding cur-
rent practice and developing new, “neohumanist” practices, while bearing in mind
the issues of cultural relativity. Thus to take the example of motivation research, as
well as investigating the impact of integrative motivation, there should be research
that investigates the relationship between teaching styles, materials, methods, and
the ability to take new perspectives, to be critical, to understand, and act according to
the principles of democratic citizenship.
An alternative to this ideology-driven approach to evaluation is to identify gaps
in the research. The most obvious, when research on culture learning is compared
with that on language learning, is the lack of work on acquisition. Sercu (2004, p. 84)
points out that empirical research on the acquisition of intercultural competence “is
still very limited, and at any rate far more limited than that of studies investigating
second language acquisition,” and in fact she is obliged to analyze work that focuses
mainly on language acquisition in her survey. She nonetheless presents a discussion
of the variables that would have to be taken into consideration in acquisition studies:
teacher variables, learner variables, teaching materials, and assessment processes. This
approach assumes however that culture acquisition can be treated in the same way as
language acquisition. It may not be quite so simple, not least because of the difficulty
of delineating the “object” to be acquired, which is much easier with language.
An alternative perspective for language learning that might be extended to culture
learning is suggested by the distinction made by Sfard (1998) between the acquisi-
tion metaphor and the participation metaphor. Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000) apply
this to language learning. The acquisition metaphor presents learning as the ability
to internalize knowledge as an object, as a commodity. Thus, language learning is
conceptualized as the internalization of rules and specific linguistic entities. The par-
ticipation metaphor makes us think of learning as “a process of becoming a member
of a certain community” (Sfard, 1998, p. 6).
The use of this metaphor of participation (combined with acquisition as Sfard says)
is particularly apposite for culture teaching provided that the critical dimension of
teaching is not forgotten. Culture learning can thus be conceptualized as socialization,
by the teacher as mediator, into another culture. The teacher acts as mediator between
learners and those who are already members of the language-and-culture group of
which they seek understanding. At the same time, if it is axiomatic for the teacher that
learners should reflect critically and analytically on their own culture, the participation
and socialization process is not focused exclusively on other cultures. For it is not the
purpose of teaching, we would contend, to change learners into members of another
culture, but to make them part of the group who see themselves as mediators, able to
compare, juxtapose, and analyze.
926 BYRAM AND FENG

CONCLUSION

Our review has shown that activity in teaching and researching the cultural dimension
and intercultural competence in language teaching has developed rapidly in the last
decades. We have also argued that this work cannot avoid engagement with and
challenges to values and ideas, and that this is, if not a new direction for language
teachers and researchers, at least a new emphasis. It reminds us that language teaching
has always been susceptible to political and social influences, whether it was the use
of English teaching in Germany in the 1920s to boost the self-esteem of German pupils
(Neuner, 1988, p. 36), or the use of English teaching in former colonial countries to
re-assert Western hegemony (Phillipson, 1992; Pennycook, 1994, 1998). It suggests
however that the contribution might also be positive—the development of critical
awareness, the pursuit of democratic processes and values—while reminding us that
even these need to be challenged.
The increase in the volume of work does not inevitably mean an improvement in
quality, and there is a need to develop more systematically a program of research
rather than ad hoc efforts that may not have a lasting effect. This is the task for the
research and teaching community.

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51

Critical Pedagogy in L2 Learning

and Teaching
Suresh Canagarajah
Baruch College, City University of New York

Critical pedagogy entered the second language (L2) scene quite belatedly, at least
in comparison to its sister disciplines literature, composition, and education. Marx-
ist orientations to the material and ideological implications of learning were already
being discussed around the 1970s by Williams (1977) in literature, Ohmann (1976)
in composition, and Giroux (1979) in education. Although teaching a colonial lan-
guage to students from many minority language groups is a controversial activity
fraught with political significance, L2 professionals largely adopted an idyllic inno-
cence toward their work. This attitude was shaped by the structuralist perspective
on language (which orientated to proficiency as the rule-governed deployment of ab-
stract value-free grammar), behaviorist orientation to learning (which assumed that
the calculated exposure to linguistic stimuli would facilitate competence among docile
students), and the positivistic tradition to language acquisition research (which stip-
ulated that a controlled observation of learning in clinically circumscribed settings
would reveal the processes of acquisition that help construct the methods and ma-
terials for successful learning). L2 teaching was motivated by the pragmatic attitude
of equipping students with the linguistic and communicative skills that would make
them socially functional. With hindsight, critical practitioners would now argue that
these apolitical disciplinary principles were indeed motivated by geopolitical realities.
English Language Teaching, or ELT, (as sponsored by cultural agencies like the United
States Information Agency and the British Council) became an important activity after
decolonization and around the Cold War when English language was perceived as a
more effective medium of hegemony (see Phillipson, 1992). The dominant principles
in the discipline, therefore, served to mask the controversial material and ideological
ends of ELT pedagogy (Pennycook, 1989, 1994a).
It is around the late 1980s and early 1990s that we begin to see the stirrings of a criti-
cal orientation to L2 learning in the mainline journals in the field (see Pennycook, 1989;
Peirce, 1989; Auerbach, 1993; Benesch, 1993; Canagarajah, 1993a, 1993b). To list such
developments as decolonization, the Cold War, and ethnic revivalism as the social
conditions that determine the emergence of this pedagogical orientation is to adopt
an unnecessarily reductive approach. Suffice it to say that this was a hectic time of
931
932 CANAGARAJAH

intellectual questioning and discursive reconstruction in the academy. With the mod-
ernist values of the Enlightenment tradition being challenged, there was a range of
critical theories coming into prominence from diverse socially marginalized groups.
Although the period prided itself as being “post” everything (as displayed in the
choice of labels for its popular discourses—poststructuralism, postmodernism, post-
Marxism, postcolonialism), other affected groups were right to question the smug
multicultural ethos emerging in the West (see Bahri, 1997; Prendergast, 1998). Femi-
nism, critical race theory, subaltern studies, and queer theory inspired a more radical
critique of the models of diversity in fashion.1 As for L2 pedagogy, all this represented
a healthy climate of research and application. The school didn’t have the dogmatic
character that marked the critical orientations in its sister disciplines. It also moved
away from the deterministic brands of thinking that Marxism imposed on previous
models of education. Thus critical pedagogy in L2 has always been sympathetic to
the agency of subjects; the shaping influence of culture, discourse, and consciousness
(and not just of economic and material conditions) on learning activity; the relative
autonomy of specific social domains to critically negotiate the machinations of eco-
nomic and political structures; and the power of local settings like the classroom to
develop cultures of resistance to larger political forces. All of these positions may be
rejected by certain versions of Marxism (see Canagarajah, 1999a, pp. 27–35). For this
reason, it was worth the wait. The field began to ask critical questions of L2 learning
from multiple, flexible, and broad angles or orientation, unlike the disciplines that
practiced critical pedagogies before the 1970s.
Given this history, it is difficult to define critical pedagogy in our field according to
a static body of ideas or a limited set of philosophical axioms. In fact, it is dangerous
to define it so. Theories can narrow down the perspectives from which the learning
activity should be interpreted. While theories are enabling (in opening our eyes to
the issues that matter in a specific activity), they can also be limiting. This is not to
deny the well-known axiom that there is nothing as practical as a theory—that is,
any activity or practice is informed by a body of assumptions, and demands certain
explanatory frameworks to make sense of it. Personally, I prefer to adopt a tool box
approach to theory. We must feel free to pick and choose among the available criti-
cal theories as relevant for the diverse students, classrooms, and communities we are
working with. To define critical pedagogy, then, we should turn to the other end of the
theory/praxis dichotomy and orientate to it as a form of practice. Critical pedagogy is
not a set of ideas, but a way of “doing” learning and teaching. It is a practice motivated
by a distinct attitude toward classrooms and society. Critical students and teachers are
prepared to situate learning in the relevant social contexts, unravel the implications
of power in pedagogical activity, and commit themselves to transforming the means
and ends of learning, in order to construct more egalitarian, equitable, and ethical
educational and social environments. In this sense, the term critical contrasts with
terms like detached, objective, dispassionate, instrumental, practical, and descrip-
tive, which have informed “noncritical” traditions of L2 practice from the modernist
philosophical perspective.2
If we define critical pedagogy (CP) in such a practice-oriented manner, we may
infer that it is not just another method or school for teaching L2. The temptation
for many instructors is to treat CP as one more method among the many we have,
ranging from grammar-translation to learner strategy training. Others treat CP as
a special school, such as the cognitive process, contrastive rhetoric, or English for
Academic Purposes (EAP) approaches in the teaching of writing. However, CP is a
fundamentally different way of doing L2 learning and teaching. Everything in ped-
agogical activity gets transformed in the process. To practice CP, we must situate all
the activities, skills, proficiencies, and standards in the social context and interrogate
them in relation to power. To use a cliched term, CP affords a new “paradigm” for
 51. CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN L2 LEARNING AND TEACHING 933

teaching L2. Given these assumptions, it is possible to apply the adjective “critical” to
any domain of pedagogy with predictable results. Although we already have a string
of labels with the adjective attached to it—such as critical contrastive rhetoric (Kubota,
1999), critical classroom discourse analysis (Kumaravadivelu, 1999), critical writing
(Canagarajah, 1993a), critical applied linguistics (Pennycook, 2001), and critical EAP
(Benesch, 2001)—we don’t have to stop there.
Although critical practitioners may apply this orientation to everything in L2 learn-
ing activity, it is possible to review here only the prominent traditions of research prac-
tice that have been reported in the professional literature. I must confess, however,
that many of the assumptions and orientations of CP have seeped into the profession
in a pervasive manner (as it certainly should) that it is becoming difficult to identify
CP as a distinct persuasion anymore. Many teachers/researchers have begun to situ-
ate their practice in configurations of power without labeling their work as CP. It is
possible, then, that some of the scholars I review here may feel more at home in other
chapters of the handbook, on identity, culture, or language acquisition. However,
since their research/teaching practice is sensitive to power, they still help develop a
CP orientation to L2.
I begin by exemplifying critical research in certain well-known areas of L2 peda-
gogy.3 I have to leave out areas like language socialization, classroom discourse, atti-
tudes and motivation, identity, teacher education, and language policy planning for
other chapters that focus exclusively on them. In the second section, I move on to
identify the central issues that scholars wrestle with in critical research and interpre-
tation. New researchers have to mind these ongoing debates as they undertake their
own studies. In the final section, I review the methods that critical researchers adopt
to study issues of power in language learning. As I will explain, research on CP is
itself motivated by critical assumptions, constituting a unique approach of “critical
research.” I conclude with a consideration of the unique rhetorical challenges that
concern critical researchers as they attempt to represent their findings in scholarly
publications, inspiring them to discover genres that are consistent with their philo-
sophical assumptions.

AREAS OF RESEARCH INTEREST

Critical Academic Literacy

More research reports in CP relate to practices of reading and writing than to other
areas like speaking and listening. Perhaps there is the unstated assumption that the
more spontaneous acts of speaking and listening don’t conveniently provide the space
for critical reflection in order to question and alter manifestations of power in inter-
personal interactions. Reading and writing, being slightly detached activities, have
provided more possibilities for intervention. Even in the latter, there are more reports
relating to macro-textual domains than those on the use of grammar or vocabulary.
Though we have a well-established critical tradition on orientating to sentence-level
rules from the time of critical linguistics (see Fowler & Kress, 1979) and stretching up
to more recent forms of critical discourse analysis (see Fairclough, 2000; Gee, 2000),
there are very few research projects using this approach in classroom learning. Al-
though exemplary articles on how critical linguistics can help classroom language
learning are available (see Fairclough, 2000), they haven’t inspired active research.
The few case studies that focus on grammar-level issues in literacy (perhaps in-
directly influenced by the critical linguistics school) provide some useful leads that
can be pursued by other critical practitioners. Using news reports during the Gulf
War, Brian Morgan (1998) enables immigrant students to interpret the way lexical
934 CANAGARAJAH

items, the grammatical status of words, and syntactical choices construct meanings
that favor the North American position in this conflict. The collocation of words used
to describe both parties in this conflict are shown to lack neutrality. This sensitivity
enables students to read critically and unravel the ideological interests that motivate
language in these news reports.
In an example of how we can move from critique to transformation, Min-zhan Lu
(1994) shows how a peculiar grammatical modal used by a Chinese-Malaysian student
indicates a move toward creative language use. The student uses the construction
“can able to” consistently—in a rule-governed way. The structure seems to connote
for her “ability from the perspective of the external circumstances” (Lu, 1994, p. 452).
Although she is aware of the modal “can,” she finds that this is loaded with a volitionist
connotation that is more typical of the western sense of agency. She wants to express
the need to achieve independence despite community constraints (as informed by
her personal experience of coming to study in the United States, despite the family’s
view that the place of a woman is inside the home). Lu doesn’t immediately accept
this “nonstandard” usage. She makes this an opportunity to discuss with students
the ways in which English grammar assumes ideological positions that may not be
suitable for the interests of other speakers. She then encourages her students to explore
what other creative alternatives they may have for negotiating an expression of their
unique meanings through English language. Surprisingly, some students opt to use
the “nonstandard” usage within quotation marks, or with a footnote mentioning the
need for this unusual modal, to show their critical and creative language usage. There
is more scope for studies on how students can be made sensitive to ideological values
in texts and encouraged to make grammatical choices critically.
More studies have been conducted on the extra-sentential aspects of text construc-
tion than on sentence-level grammar. This power-sensitive textual critique was built
on the excellent descriptive work of the schools of English for Academic Purposes,
Genre Analysis, and English for Specific Purposes. Through a careful observation
of communication in academic settings and analyses of texts produced in scholarly
communities, these schools have unraveled the hidden conventions that characterize
the genre of academic literacy. However, their work is motivated by the pragmatic
attitude that, while these conventions may be value-ridden and favor the ideologies of
the dominant English speech communities, these are the conventions that students of
all languages have to know in order to succeed in the academic setting. Benesch (1993)
has taken this pragmatism to task. She has shown that leaving the underlying values
and interests of this genre unquestioned is itself an ideological position and is by no
means neutral. Critical practitioners have argued for the need to teach students the
ways in which these conventions serve to limit membership in the academic commu-
nity (Canagarajah, 1993a). They have shown the ways in which the typical academic
posture of detachment and objectivity excludes other ways of knowing that are more
empathic and personal, including writings that are more involved and narrative, as in
the case of women and other minority communities (see Belcher, 1997; Benesch, 1993;
Canagarajah, 2002b). They have argued for the need to negotiate competing writing
traditions for more independent expression, rather than mimicking academic con-
ventions. Insights have been borrowed from critical compositionists in the L1 circles
(i.e., Bizzell, 1992) to develop such a pedagogy. Benesch (1999, 2001) reports on at-
tempts to motivate L2 students to read and write critically in academic settings, ques-
tioning their own assumptions and those of the experts in different fields.
Moving beyond grammar and text to more rhetorically based issues, the ways in
which students can adopt transformative practices to construct variant discourses
has been explored only recently with the theorization of “voice” in feminist circles.
It is more mature/professional multilingual writers (such as ESL teachers and aca-
demic scholars) who have provided examples of how they have struggled with the
 51. CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN L2 LEARNING AND TEACHING 935

multiple discourses from their backgrounds to create a space for alternative styles in
the academic text or to appropriate the established conventions for their more radical
purposes. This new line of research constitutes largely narrative, personal, and reflec-
tive case studies (see Belcher & Connor, 2001; Casanave & Vandrick, 2003). Xiao Ming
Li (1999) reflects on the conflicts she faced between her formal Chinese ethos and the
highly individuated American academic writing. Her attempts to adopt American
or Chinese conventions in their own terms led to academic marginalization. It was
when she developed the confidence to draw from the strengths of both traditions
and adopt a “third” discourse that her voice was taken seriously by the academic
audience. Her theorization is similar to the report of Kramsch and Lam (1999) who
study several multilingual writers to show how the “third spaces” they construct in
their textual world serve to creatively complicate accepted conventions and empower
these writers for critical expression.
We must note that studies on reading/writing are now not limited to the text, but
adopt a more holistic approach in situating textual reception and production in social
processes. Using the term literacy practice studies, scholars in this tradition address
issues of power and difference with great complexity. Whereas well-known studies
in this tradition focus on literacy in the L1 context, the field is expanding to include
multilingual students. A recent collection of ethnographic studies by Street (2001)
brings out some familiar themes in this tradition: how the literacy encouraged in the
classroom doesn’t always meet the real-world needs of students; how the dominant
methods of teaching literacy don’t relate well to the local traditions of literacy acquisi-
tion; and how the learners appropriate what is taught by teachers and other sponsors
of literacy for divergent local uses and purposes. On the whole, these studies serve
to remind educators that rather than imposing their own vision of what kinds of
literacy are needed for learners and how they should be taught to them (albeit for
the enlightened purpose of empowering them), it is more important to listen to local
communities (especially in periphery contexts) to understand their motivations. In a
similar vein, Pennycook (1996) situates the writing of Chinese students in social con-
text to show how the perception of plagiarism in their writing can be explained from
their socialization into modes of thinking and communicating that value the place of
authoritative texts in their society. In a case study that will remain a model for holistic
inquiry into literacy acquisition, Paul Prior (1998) compares the initiation of two ESL
graduate students into disciplinary writing. Critical to the success of both students
is the way they manage to negotiate the influences from the multiple channels of
communication from family, work, and society into accomplishing their purposes in
their academic writing. The more successful student is not only more receptive to
these influences, but also displays the confidence to negotiate her personal interests
with those of the authoritative discourses in the discipline. The less successful student
forms a dependent relationship with her faculty advisor.
A research approach that expands the analysis of L2 texts to cultural context and
remains indigenous to ESOL is contrastive rhetoric (see Kaplan, 1966; Connor, 1996).
However, critical practitioners have had to broaden this approach to address is-
sues of power. The limitation of contrastive rhetoric (at least in some of the tradi-
tional versions) is that although cultural difference is respected, it is not situated in
power. Contrastive rhetoricians seem to be saying: “With the knowledge that all dis-
courses/cultures are equal, we can move on to adopt the established conventions for a
specific context.” However, discourses are not equal. In specific social contexts, certain
discourses are privileged. Continuing to use them uncritically only serves to uphold
their power. The established discourses colonize other communities, providing in-
ferior status to their forms of writing and shaping their thinking (see Canagarajah,
1996). Additionally, contrastive rhetoricians define the cultural differences of other
communities in stereotypical and homogeneous terms (thus “essentializing” them).
936 CANAGARAJAH

They also define cultures in biased terms, using the dominant culture is the norm in
their description. Other cultures serve as foils for the dominant culture (i.e., they are
“othered”), with the implication that they are of secondary status (see Kubota, 1999).
Such rhetorical descriptions suppress the complexity, historical dynamism, and even
internal conflicts within these cultures. In fact, with English enjoying hegemonic status
globally, it is naı̈ve to treat students from other cultures as employing an uncontami-
nated “native” discourse. In the light of such orientations to culture in writing, critical
practitioners have researched the following:
r Situate the “culture” displayed in L2 writing in contexts of history and power
to show that the hybridity in these texts reflects a complex process of resistance
and appropriation of local and globally powerful cultures (Kubota, 1999).
r Explore the process by which students shuttle between local and “target lan-
guage” communities in their writings in L1 and L2, critically negotiating cultures
in the process (Canagarajah, 2000);
r Analyze the products of such negotiation and shuttling to show how texts may
adopt a critical orientation on both discourses, with varying levels of rhetorical
and ideological effectiveness (see Canagarajah, 2002a, pp. 118–121).

Encouraged by such research, critical practitioners now argue for the need to make
L2 writers critique their own discourses as well as that of English in order to practice
a critical writing that negotiates cultures. Trying to represent their “native” culture
in L2 texts or conforming to Anglophone culture one-sidedly don’t reflect a critical
positioning of the writer in the text.

Learning Processes, Strategies, and Styles

Critical research has also challenged the stereotypes about the preferred learning
styles of ESOL students. We have heard it said that students from traditional com-
munities (in Asia, Africa, and Latin America) prefer memorization, rote learning,
and product-oriented pedagogies. The favored approaches in the field are of course
process-oriented. Holliday defines the ideal conditions for language learning en-
dorsed by the ELT research tradition as follows: “This learning group ideal sets the
conditions for a process-oriented, task-based, inductive, collaborative, communica-
tive English language teaching methodology” (1994, p. 54). The ELT research and
professional circles treat this as “the optimum interactional parameters within which
classroom language learning can take place” (Holliday, 1994, p. 54). Myron Tuman
(1988) describes how the change toward process-oriented approaches of writing in
the American academy is unconditionally treated as a more progressive pedagogical
development. It is not surprising then that some ESL teachers display a missionary
zeal in enforcing such learning strategies in their classrooms. They sincerely think that
they are empowering foreign students and developing a more democratic learning
environment. Western experts conducting teacher development in traditional Asian
learning environments have attempted to impose process-oriented pedagogies in the
place of the prevailing product-oriented ones (see Pennington, 1995).
Critical practitioners have questioned this learning group ideal of ELT. They have
opened up several useful lines of thinking on the process/product debate in L2 learn-
ing. Product-oriented approaches cannot be dismissed as dysfunctional in all contexts.
Several scholars have pointed out that there is a real need for ESL students in some
learning situations to desire a knowledge of the rules and conventions of English (see
Leki, 1991). As Lisa Delpit (1995) has pointed out in the case of African American
students, for those who don’t know the established codes, insisting on a more in-
direct acquisition of grammar through creative activities may prove confusing and
 51. CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN L2 LEARNING AND TEACHING 937

irrelevant. Whereas process strategies work well for mainstream students who already
have some knowledge of the socially valued codes, it may result in letting minority
students sink or swim on their own. Furthermore, older students who come to western
institutions for college or graduate-level education may favor a form-oriented learn-
ing, unlike younger learners who can benefit more from an inductive or immersion
approach (Leki, 1995). Some recent ethnographies from communities with limited
material/educational resources (thus, featuring large classrooms and few textbooks
for students) show that a product-oriented pedagogy is quite effective in developing
literacy in English (see Muchiri et al., 1995; Wright, 2001). Teachers make the best of
a pedagogical situation when they are the sole educational resource.
Several other scholars have given more social and psychological complexity to
the learning styles of ESL students by situating product-oriented learning in context.
Pennycook (1996) points out that the memorization techniques of the Chinese students
he worked with were motivated by a respect for others who have previously put
those ideas in more effective ways. It is not taking other people’s words, but how they
are used that is important. The fresh contexts in which Chinese students use these
words show their creativity. After all, in the postmodern context of intertextuality, we
recognize that all of us borrow words from elsewhere for our purposes and, at any
rate, the words we use already come with the meanings given by history and society.
Furthermore, product-oriented learning may have oppositional significance
(Canagarajah, 1993b; Resnick, 1993; Muchiri et al., 1995). Resnick (1993), for exam-
ple, argues that in the context where Puerto Rican ESL students are caught between
cultural/ideological identification with Spanish nationalism and the economic reality
of North American market benefits, they make a compromise by adopting a product-
oriented learning. Through this approach they are making the statement that they
don’t envision using English for everyday communicative purposes. They need En-
glish (or more specifically, the certification of proficiency in English) to vie for jobs
and other utilitarian purposes.
Those who treat a product-oriented learning as encouraging a passive and con-
forming attitude are going too far in stereotyping ESL students. First, everyone has
the agency to adopt diverse forms of thinking; no one is culturally determined to be
only quiescent. Critical practitioners show that critical thinking can be expressed in
many different forms. Sometimes, silence or taciturnity can be motivated by opposi-
tional attitudes (Schenke, 1991). Students refrain from participating in communicative
activities in the classroom as they see no relevance to their everyday life. This is an
active form of refusal, and not conformity. Of course, sometimes they unquestioningly
conform to teachers’ expectations (although they sense a threat to their cultural and
ideological integrity) because they recognize that they are compelled to earn credit
in ESL in order to attain their other objectives in life (Chick, 1986). The best defense
for them is a mechanical reproduction of notes and rules in examinations without an
internalization of the values or communicative facility in the language. Other forms
of indirect opposition may involve parody, satire, and humor (see Canagarajah, 1990,
1993c). Anthropologists point to subtle behavior traits through which people from
disempowered communities express their protest as they don’t want to provoke the
dominant groups by overt opposition (see Scott, 1990). Foot dragging, cheating, name
calling, mimicking, and stealing are forms in which they express opposition behind
the backs of those in authority. Therefore, in our research, we must become more
sensitive to subtler ways in which the critical thinking of our students may manifest
itself. Not always do minority students have the luxury of openly expressing id-
iosyncratic views in the name of individualism—as privileged students are disposed
to do.
To understand the subtle learning strategies students adopt in order to negoti-
ate unfavorable pedagogies, we have to analyze the classroom more deeply, taking
938 CANAGARAJAH

into consideration the many sites and relationships that elude the public spaces and
authority figures (i.e., teachers, researchers, administrators) in typical classroom re-
search. In classroom ethnographies in a variety of pedagogical contexts, I have come
to identify spaces/interactions that students define as separate for themselves. I call
these spaces classroom underlife (Canagarajah, 1997). Other researchers in L2 contexts
have identified a similar site, though they don’t use the same label or framework of
analysis (see Chick, 1986; Rampton, 1995; Martin-Jones & Heller, 1996). They may
constitute micro-level interactions like gossip, passing of notes, and unauthorized
conversations and topics behind the back of the teacher. Or they could be practiced
in larger level interactions in small group discussions, e-mail or chat rooms in the
computer-mediated classes, and graffiti in textbooks and notebooks passed around
among the students. In most cases, these sites are constructed in locations that are
treated as outside the surveillance of authority figures.
The rationale for activities in classroom underlife can be explained in many ways.
Mary Louise Pratt (1991) explains this site as motivated by a need for solidarity, relief,
and protection for students from the ideological assaults and reproductive threats of
the school. Robert Brooke (1987) borrows Goffmanesque social psychology to explain
this as a needed site for students to construct alternate identities that differ from
those shaped by the school. Although these orientations look at classroom underlife
as largely passive, defensive, or individualistic, my research shows that there is also a
subversive, collective, and resistant function as students construct values, identities,
and relationships that encourage a transformative orientation toward learning and
society (see Canagarajah, 1995, 1997). For me, these spaces are largely oppositional to
the ideologies and interests of authority figures in the educational domain. Whereas
the public sites of the classroom enforce a narrower range of legitimized discourses,
and pressure students to adopt uniform identities, safe houses provide them a space
for the display of more complex discourses and mixed identities. Rather than being
deviant and distractional, these sites are profoundly educational as students reframe
and reinterpret authorized curricula, textbooks, and discourses to favor their own
contexts and interests.
Given such complexity in learning processes, there is a significant line of research
inquiry into the effects of ESL textbooks published in Anglo-American communi-
ties (informed by their preferred learning group ideal). Deborah Cameron (2002) and
David Block (2002) argue that there is a current tendency for publishers to adopt
uniform learning styles and discourses in ELT textbooks in the name of globaliza-
tion and its presumed homogeneity in the required languages and discourses. Block
sarcastically charges them for promoting “McCommunication.” Such textbooks are
understandably not informed by the communicative needs and cultural practices of
local student groups. The consequences of using such materials have been well articu-
lated by critical researchers. There is a reproductive effect (as the values and codes are
spread locally) in classes where students and teachers are less critical in their learning
(Raj, 1982). In some others, there is a clash of discordant discourses as the expectations
of the publishers and host community don’t match, affecting the motivation and inter-
est of the students (Canagarajah, 1993b; Gray, 2002). In still others, there is resistance
and appropriation as ideologically better informed teachers and students reinterpret
or localize the discourses of the textbook for their own purposes (see Canagarajah,
1993c; Martin, in press).
In the area of methods, too, the profession has validated approaches that suit the
preferred learning styles of western communities. Although new methods are period-
ically publicized with great fanfare, bolstered by claims of effectiveness and pedagog-
ical success, they are largely versions of the same process paradigm. In more recent
times, such approaches as task-based teaching, learner-strategy training, student-
centered pedagogies, and learner-autonomy practices seem to take us further along
 51. CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN L2 LEARNING AND TEACHING 939

the process-oriented paradigm. Fortunately, we are in a position to recognize now

that “there is no best method” (Prabhu, 1990). Kumaravadivelu (1994) rightly argues
that we should abandon the notion that there are preconstructed methods that can
be implemented wholesale in the classroom and can assure pedagogical success. We
have to now think of responding more directly to the needs and learning styles of
our students, sensitive to the cultures and social conditions relevant to the classroom
context, as we adopt pedagogical practices that are suitable. It is possible that we
may eclectically draw from previously defined methods. However, this is better than
coming to the classroom with a predisposition toward a specific method because it
has been touted as universally relevant and successful. Kumaravadivelu (1994) calls
these new pedagogical realizations as constituting the postmethod condition.
The postmethod realization is important for several reasons. Critical practitioners
have pointed out that methods are ideological—contrary to the myth that methods are
value-free instruments for pragmatic purposes. As Pennycook (1989) has pointed out,
methods are loaded with a range of “interests.” Apart from the economic interests of
textbook publishers and the ideological interests of the communities exporting these
methods elsewhere, there are the interests of researchers who are separated from class-
rooms and practitioners. Pennycook has pointed out the interesting demography in
our field that, while practitioners are largely females, scholars/researchers are largely
male. In the context of periphery communities, the export of these authoritative meth-
ods (backed by the credentials of the elite institutions and scholars in the West) has led
to stifling the professionalism of local practitioners. The postmethod condition would
empower periphery practitioners to develop teaching approaches that are more rele-
vant to their pedagogical contexts, rather than depending on the center for methods
that are considered authoritative.

Target Language?
As they become sensitive to the diverse discourses represented in the classroom and
attempt to accommodate them in the learning process, critical researchers are con-
cerned about the target language proficiency teachers should strive for among ESL
students. It used to be commonly accepted that the dominant dialects spoken by the
“native speakers” was the target (i.e., Standard American English, or the dominant
dialects of South East England). The local varieties spoken in postcolonial commu-
nities were considered transitional interlanguages and pidgins or corrupt forms of
creoles and “broken English.”
Such traditional assumptions have been effectively challenged since Kachru (1986)
displayed the system and logic of nativized Englishes. Since then, non-native teach-
ers have called on ELT professional circles to live up to the values of descriptive
linguistics, which teaches us that there are no linguistic bases for considering one
dialect as superior to the other, that local dialects reflect the sociocultural contexts of
their development, and that they are functional for the communities that use them
(representing their identity, solidarity, and worldview). We are now in the process of
redefining dichotomies such as native speaker/non-native speaker and standard di-
alect/nonstandard dialect. A problem with these notions is that they assume that the
native speaker and his or her language as the norm (Singh, 1998). As such, they display
a comparative fallacy (see Cook, 1999). We are moving toward the egalitarian position
that English is a plural language with a system that accommodates different norms
and grammars in different regions; that we are all native speakers of this pluralized
global English; and that we should develop alternate terminology for native/non-
native speaker that avoids notions of birth or blood relationships with a language
(perhaps terms that focus purely on proficiency, such as expert and novice speakers
of various dialects?).
940 CANAGARAJAH

These developments would be of purely theoretical interest, if not for several so-
cial changes that validate them. With postmodern forms of hybrid communication,
inspired by processes of globalization, transnational communities, and web-based
interactions, we are more sensitive to the fluidity in languages, discourses, and reg-
isters. We recognize the need for proficiency in multiliteracies to be competent in
postmodern reading/writing practices (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000). Skills in negotiating
diverse dialects of English become important in the global village. More important,
we recognize that “non-native speakers” are fast outpacing in number the native
speakers of the inner circle (Graddol, 1999). These realizations generate new imper-
atives regarding the place of diverse dialects in the language classroom (Holliday,
in press).
Critical practitioners have unraveled the economic and ideological motivations be-
hind the valorization of standard English and the authority of the native speakers in
language pedagogy. What has come to be called the native speaker fallacy (see Phillipson,
1992) justifies the preferred position of native speaker teachers in the employment
market. The authority of native varieties permit textbook publishers to produce uni-
form materials for classrooms all over the world. These assumptions make it difficult
to accommodate postcolonial Englishes and cultures in the language classroom, bol-
stering the function of standard English as a tool for ideological domination. Other
scholars have gone into the pedagogical implications of imposing standards of “native
speaker” communities in classrooms elsewhere. In the context of South African class-
rooms, Peirce (1989) argues that standard English provides unequal subject positions
to speakers of the local dialect “People’s English.” An instructional system based on
alien norms disempowers students, filling them with feelings of inferiority. She goes
on to narrate how local teachers have begun to use texts written in local dialects to in-
crease the relevance of the language and to explore issues and interests that concern the
local community. I have reported elsewhere how students from marginalized/rural
backgrounds in Sri Lanka see little relevance for standard American English as they
have no prospects for going abroad to use this dialect (Canagarajah, 1993b). They also
sense that such language and discourse pose conflicts for their cultural integrity as
they are confronted with values that are alien. Although this develops a perfunctory,
product-oriented attitude to English language learning, the students also go on to use
local dialects in surreptitious ways in underlife discourse to practice a dialect that is
more meaningful for them.
Researchers have pointed out how some of the local variants demonstrate students’
attempts to appropriate English. It might be said that any language has to be taken
over by the speaker, adapted to local conditions, filled with local values, and used
with independence and confidence in order for one to develop a voice in it. What
appears as ungrammatical or nonidiomatic usage may in fact be creative adaptations
of the language for one’s own purposes. Note in Lu’s (1994) example pointed out
earlier, how the Chinese-Malaysian student is developing a grammatical structure
that is ideologically better suited to serve her interests. In a telling observation, Lu
points out that the rest of the class later used the modal half-jokingly. As they used
it more often, the modal took on a life of its own. Such are the ways new dialects are
born.
Another study, by Eva Lam (2000), shows how the use of local variants doesn’t
hinder proficiency in socially and professionally valued dialects. In an ethnography
of a Chinese American student, Almon, she shows how a student who is tongue-tied
in the ESL class (because of its insistence on standard English), is very expressive in
the Internet. He writes e-mail to fans of Japanese pop music, develops a web page
in English to talk about his interests, and visits chat rooms to interact with other sec-
ond language speakers. His confident and creative use of diverse dialects of English
develops the motivation to strengthen his acquisition of the preferred dialect in the
 51. CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN L2 LEARNING AND TEACHING 941

classroom. The relevance of the language in extra-classroom contexts of interaction

inspires him to master standard English in the classroom. As Lam’s study shows, a
repertoire of variant dialects is important for many today to be functional in the post-
modern world. Rather than developing a mastery of a specific code, students need
the interactional skills to negotiate dialect differences with their interlocutors. For this
purpose, an awareness of diverse dialects is a resource that should be educationally
validated. Rather than teaching standard dialects one-sidedly, it might be more impor-
tant to develop a repertoire of dialects—with an awareness of their values, structure,
and their contextual appropriateness in different situations.
Discussions of target language should go further to include the place of the first
languages ESL students speak. Gone are the days when we treated the L1 as needing to
be suppressed if one is to become a proficient speaker of an L2. The dominant assump-
tion was that L1 interfered with and hindered L2 acquisition. We know from recent
research that skills and language awareness developed in L1 can transfer positively
to L2 (Cummins, 1991), that a validation of the student’s L1 can reduce the inhibitions
against English and develop positive affect to enhance acquisition (Auerbach, 1993),
and that a multilingual self can be formed of diverse languages without dysfunctional
consequences for the students (Kramsch, 2000). Skuttnab-Kangas (1992) considers it
a violation of linguistic human rights to teach English in isolation from the first lan-
guages of the students. She argues that an ELT pedagogy based on English-only in
the classroom can lead to the gradual devaluation of L1 and decline in proficiency. It
can convey to students the inequality of languages, with a low estimation of their L1.
This unequal relationship of languages in the ESL classroom can get reproduced out-
side. This can lead to the vernaculars declining in currency and status, with English
continuing its hegemony worldwide.
Researchers on language acquisition outside the class have pointed out that, in
natural contexts, English is acquired together with L1 in many multilingual and post-
colonial communities (Sridhar, 1994). In fact, codeswitching is an important medium
of communication in such communities. It might be said that codeswitching has more
communicative functionality than unmixed English in these contexts. However, typi-
cally, codeswitching is not tolerated in ESL classes. The dominant notions of linguistic
purity still prevent practitioners from permitting language mixing in the classroom.
Codeswitching, however, may appear as another form of appropriating English for
local purposes according to local values. As we saw in the previous section, students’
spontaneous acts of codeswitching in classrooms may show a natural desire to de-
velop communicative competence in a discourse that is more relevant and meaningful
for them. Many scholars are now moving to the position that codeswitching may con-
stitute a valid medium of communication in its own right and that we should give
this some attention in our pedagogy (see Canagarajah, 1995; Heller & Martin-Jones,
2001).
The reality of hybrid languages reminds teachers that multilingual students shut-
tle between communities in their everyday life. (We now recognize that under the
influence of globalization and the Internet, even dominant speakers of English in the
“native communities” have to move fluidly between communicative contexts that
demand a competence in different codes.) In this context, it is important to consider
how ESL pedagogy can teach skills of linguistic negotiation that enables students to
move across languages and communities. Teaching English without reference to the
first language of the students may disempower them in the multilingual life in the
postmodern world. It may also be treated as a vain attempt to reduce the hybridity of
personal and social life with an imposition of English Only. Multilingual speakers may
use their proficiency in languages for critical expression in the communities they shut-
tle between. I have reported elsewhere how some Sri Lankan faculty members shuttle
between the vernacular and mainstream academic communities in their research
942 CANAGARAJAH

writing (see Canagarajah, 2002b). In writing in Tamil to the local scholars, they adopt a
largely narrative and personalized discourse with their claims developed indirectly;
however, compared to other typical articles in Tamil, they adopt a relatively more
objective and argumentative approach in order to challenge local scholars from what
they perceive as unclear formulations of the thesis or ad hominem arguments. When
they write in English, we can see a shift to a more explicit and detached development
in deference to the conventions in mainstream research articles. However, they dis-
play more involvement and develop a “nativized” voice in this discourse to challenge
what they see as the mechanical, value-free, and noncommittal discourse of scientific
positivism. In this way, they draw from their multilingual competence the resources
to challenge both the native and the mainstream communities. Such communicative
activities prove the hidden power in multilingual speakers to use the resources from
competing languages to develop a critical point of view. As postcolonial scholars like
Bhabha (1994) have theorized, the “in-betweenness” of multilingual/multicultural
subjects develops in them a peculiar “double vision” to adopt multiple viewpoints
on the languages they use.

ISSUES OF CONTESTATION

As space prevents me from providing an exhaustive review of the evolving literature

on critical research in diverse fields of L2 learning, it is prudent to identify the central
issues that concern this line of inquiry. Although many scholars don’t make these
concerns clear or adopt an explicit position on them, inevitably they have to navigate
these issues as they practice critical teaching and research. Internal debates continue
among critical practitioners, and new researchers entering this field have to consider
how they would position themselves in relation to these issues. We can formulate
these central concerns as follows:
Structure and Agency. Critical practitioners rightly take into consideration abstract
arrangements of social organization, political establishment, economic infrastructure,
and ideological complexes for the ways they condition students to think and behave in
conformity to the status quo (see Phillipson, 1992). However, this emphasis shouldn’t
be allowed to eclipse the power of individuals to see through the designs of the
powerful, critique the status quo, and work toward structural change. The danger
is that sometimes human agency is romanticized to such an extent that the subtle
and persistent workings of social structure are simplified (see Zamel, 1997). We have
to be open to the possibility that structure and agency will interact with each other
dialectically in an ongoing and relentless fashion, without foreclosing the possibility
for human agents to resist social institutions.
Reproduction and Transformation. Our position on the previous debate may influence
how we view possibilities for transforming or reproducing discourses and structures.
Reproductionist studies show the power of economic and ideological forces to shape
the thinking of individuals or workings of institutions in an all-encompassing fashion
(Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). They alert us to the pervasive and subtle way in which
power controls all domains of life, but this may lead to a deterministic view of society
and individuals. Others have felt the need, therefore, to emphasize that people and
institutions enjoy a relative autonomy from larger structures to find spaces for diverse
degrees of opposition and change (Giroux, 1983).
History and Desire. It is possible to consider the workings of power as an external
manifestation through history and society. From this perspective, we would critique
power objectively (Rajagopalan, 1999). However, it is important to see that our own
consciousness, subjectivity, and desire are shaped by diverse histories of domination.
There is a need, therefore, to be reflexive in analyzing how the marks of domination
 51. CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN L2 LEARNING AND TEACHING 943

and struggle are manifested in our thinking and behavior (Schenke, 1991). We have to
unravel the workings of power not only externally in history, but also in subjectivity.
Opposition and Resistance. Since the dynamic between history and desire, or repro-
duction and transformation, is so complex, student response to domination can differ
widely. Whereas some may accommodate to values and structures that are unfavor-
able to them, others will react against them, but this reaction can also be divergent.
Many researchers find it important to distinguish resistance, which displays ideolog-
ical clarity and commitment to collective action for social transformation, from mere
opposition, which is unclear, ambivalent, and largely passive (see Canagarajah, 1993b;
Giroux, 1983). The latter is largely a vague, instinctive behavior that fails to sustain
consciousness raising or mobilize groups for concerted social action.
Macro- and Micro-levels of Intervention. What is the effective level of pedagogical
intervention that would lead to lasting changes? Some scholars focus on changing
educational policies by lobbying established structures such as boards, organizations,
and administrators. Among them are those who would hold the state and other politi-
cal authorities responsible for initiating pedagogical change (Skuttnab-Kangas, 2002).
Although this line of work shouldn’t be ignored, we mustn’t underestimate the power
of local level changes that happen in classrooms everyday (Canagarajah, 1999b). If we
accept the relative autonomy of institutions, we shouldn’t be surprised that teachers
and students enjoy spaces for significant critical thinking and action even in a context
marked by unfair conditions. The local changes can in fact transcend their immediate
context to unsettle larger institutional structures.
Student Autonomy and Teacher Control. Some critical practitioners consider teachers
as the enlightened intellects who should lead their students toward critical thinking
and practice by exerting their authority. Students do have to be challenged sometimes
to open their eyes to issues of inequality and exploitation (see hooks, 1989). Others
have pointed out that students (especially those from marginalized backgrounds)
come with personal experience and direct insights from their life that should shape a
critical practice relevant to them. Furthermore, teachers should be humble enough to
learn liberatory values and thinking from their students (see Canagarajah, 1997). In
fact, teachers who come from a privileged background and identify with educational
authorities may discover their own ideological limitations and complicity with power.
However, as in the other constructs, we should learn to balance both orientations
in our pedagogy. Teachers and students may collaborate constructively for change
(Canagarajah, 1999a, pp. 193–197).
Voice and Access. Should critical practitioners provide marginalized students ac-
cess to the dominant codes or, rather, empower their own vernaculars for educational
and professional purposes? Some would consider teaching dominant codes (such
as “standard English” or mainstream literacy conventions) as reifying their hege-
mony (Skuttnab-Kangas, 1992). Therefore, they would favor encouraging the use of
marginalized codes in mainstream contexts. Others would argue that without a mas-
tery of the dominant codes minority students cannot survive in the educational and
professional world (see Street, 2001, for studies that explore different sides of this
debate). Although we should acknowledge the claims of both positions, we needn’t
reduce linguistic proficiency to univocal codes and discourses (i.e., a case of either
vernacular or dominant codes). It is good for students to be multilingual. Learning
dominant codes with a critical attitude can go hand in hand with negotiating spaces
for the vernacular discourses in the mainstream.
Inclusion and Interrogation. How should we set about changing curricula and text-
books? Should we fight for more inclusive representation, with marginalized cultures
and communities given equal importance as dominant cultures (see Gray, 2002; Peirce,
1989)? Or should we say that it is idealistic to expect such a level of diversity, and
simply encourage students to critique biased/limited representations in the existing
944 CANAGARAJAH

curricula? The latter approach sounds more pragmatic in a context where economic
and market interests shape curricular decisions. However, there are creative ways in
which students’ cultures can be incorporated into the learning agenda. Students can
themselves bring texts from their families and neighborhoods for discussion in the
class. Vernacular resources can also be developed in the classroom from students’ own
talk and writing (see Auerbach et al., 1996).

CRITICAL RESEARCH METHODS AND REPORTING

Critical research differs from descriptive approaches (as in descriptive linguistics or

descriptive ethnography), which adopt a detached, objective, value-free orientation to
knowledge. Critical approaches align themselves with the post-Enlightenment philo-
sophical tradition in situating research in the social context to consider how knowl-
edge is shaped by the values of human agents and communities, implicated in power
differences, and favorable for democratizing relationships and institutions (see Pen-
nycook, 1994b). Therefore, a critical approach questions the separation of constructs
such as the following (where the second term in each pair is treated as constituting
the valid approach in traditional research):

r Theory and method: In descriptive approaches, research methods are considered

atheoretical. They are treated as practical instruments or value-free procedures to
attain objective knowledge. They are considered neutral and transparent, suitable
for gaining an undistorted view of reality, but CP treats methods as ideological (see
Pennycook, 1989). Methods come with their own orientations to reality, informed by
values that offer certain selective perspectives. As such, methods are partial (in both
senses of the term: incomplete and biased) as I will exemplify through the sociolin-
guistic interview method discussed next. From this perspective, each method comes
with its own implicit theories of knowledge and social relations (Peirce, 1995b).
r Interpretation and data: In descriptive research, data is considered hard and raw—
that is, factual, pure of bias, and devoid of values. After the data is collected with
the use of objective instruments and procedures, the more subjective interpretive
procedure is supposed to follow, but CP assumes that the data presupposes an inter-
pretation. It is already collected by human agents with certain presuppositions about
their research objectives from specific contexts of experience. CP would advise that
we reflexively analyze the data to make explicit the interpretation presupposed by it
in order to develop generalizations that are of greater validity, rather than imposing
selective interpretations in the guise of scientific neutrality.
r Subjective and objective: Descriptive research considers it possible to detach our-
selves from the matter studied to develop an objective approach to inquiry. CP would
consider all research as colored by the intentions, experiences, values, and predis-
positions of researchers. Even those conducted by impersonal instruments (i.e., data
generated and analyzed by a computer software) show the marks of human agency
as the software is written and the data fed by human beings. CP would encourage
researchers to engage more frankly with the research process in order to bring out
both the strengths and limits of one’s own involvement in the study (see Harding,
1991).
r Contextual and universal: Although all research is situated in a specific context,
the objective of descriptive research is to filter out the particularities of the process
in order to generate facts and constructs of universal validity. However, CP would
acknowledge that all research is situated and that it is important to appreciate the
particularity of each study in order to realistically assess the relativity of one’s findings
and generalize more cautiously (see hooks, 1989; Prior, 1998). Of course, there are
 51. CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN L2 LEARNING AND TEACHING 945

unique insights generated by the specificity of a research context that contributes to

the richness of each research experience. The haste to universalize the study/findings
may suppress local insights of more far reaching value.
r Applied and disinterested: Traditional research has taken pride in conducting re-
search for purely descriptive purposes. Concerns about how to apply this knowledge
are supposed to pollute the objectivity and purity of research. However, for CP, re-
search is conducted for the difference it will make for social betterment and human
development. There are strong ethical values that motivate research. Rather than cor-
rupting the research experience, such practical concerns give a deeper commitment
and ethical framework that would enhance the meaning of one’s research. In fact,
there have always been ulterior motivations (not made explicit) in the so-called pure
sciences (Nandy, 1990). Knowledge has always been implicated in social and politi-
cal processes. If we don’t engage in its uses, knowledge would be appropriated for
unethical purposes by default.

There is a small range of emerging research approaches that accommodate a critical

orientation to inquiry. Critical ethnography treats the classroom/school as a cultural site
and inquires into the ways in which culture may serve as a dominating or empowering
force in pedagogy (see Canagarajah, 1993b). Action research enables teachers to criti-
cally reflect on their classroom experience, as they manage their teaching and research
to complement each other (Nunan, 1990). A variant of this is Participant Action Research,
which encourages the teacher to collaborate with students, giving them a greater role
in designing the pedagogy and research, in order to produce knowledge relevant to
their interests (Auerbach, 1994). Self-reflexive studies encourage the subject to become a
researcher of his or her own learning/teaching experience, as one’s own struggles and
responsive strategies are a rich source of knowledge if they can be elicited and inter-
preted in a disciplined way4 (Belcher & Connor, 2001). Critical Language Socialization
situates processes of second language acquisition (SLA) in sociopolitical context (see
Peirce, 1995a; Kramsch & Lam, 1999). It is not impossible to tailor other established
research approaches, such as discourse analysis, language planning/policy studies,
or literacy studies to take on the critical assumptions outlined here.
Whereas critical practitioners in ESL have begun to design research projects that
accommodate these orientations, not many of them are alert to the fact that re-
search reporting can itself impose values uncongenial to critical research. It is pos-
sible that the established genres of the research article may not always be suitable
for reporting studies that adopt critical approaches. The dominant IMRD (Introduc-
tion/Method/Results/Discussion) structure is more amenable for reporting descrip-
tive studies informed by Enlightenment values, enabling a detached, inductive, con-
trolled, and authorially imposed version of the findings (see Canagarajah, 1996). Other
emergent genres of research reporting adopt:

r Reflexivity, in representing the personal shaping of the findings, in light of the

changing biases, subject positions, and involvement of the researcher (see Wright,
2001).
r Narrativity, for a more indirect, context-bound, and personal form of theorization
(see Canagarajah, 2001b; Belcher, 1997).
r Multivocality, for textualizing the plural perspectives and voices of different in-
formants, researchers, participants on the same pedagogical feature (see Chopra,
2001).
r Authorial collaboration, in involving the participants/informants in the represen-
tation of the findings (see Auerbach et al., 1996; Lin et al., 2002).
946 CANAGARAJAH
r Open-endedness, in dramatizing the tensions in interpretation and data from the
field, and encouraging the readers to form alternate paradigms of interpretation
(see Robinson-Pant, 2001).

It is important for the researcher to develop a mode of textual representation that is

sensitive to issues of power and difference. Compared to fields like ethnography or
even L1 composition studies, where there is a heightened sense of textual creativity,
ESL research reports appear to be more regulated—possibly because the main research
journals in the field are still influenced by modernist values.

CONCLUSION

Defining critical pedagogy or research in terms of a static set of rules or axioms, espe-
cially by scholarship removed from local practices, would lead to ossified paradigms
that constitute a “p.c.” (politically correct) approach. Perhaps the best way to define
critical pedagogy is as a heuristic, made up of the conceptual tensions described in
the second section above.5 The questions posed by these conflicting issues should be
answered in relation to the conditions characterizing specific pedagogical contexts as
we develop an appropriate teaching and research practice ground up. However, this
open-endedness shouldn’t be romanticized. It is possible that some of the other fea-
tures in my characterization of theory and practice in L2 critical research—especially,
the rejection of the noncommittal pragmatism in teaching and a positivistic detach-
ment in research—may sound too insistent and uncompromising for some. Such a
discriminating characterization is important to safeguard against the increasingly
cliched use of “empowerment” and “critical” in the professional discourse. As crit-
ical pedagogy loses its marginal (even “pariah”) status in the field, we have to be
alert against the reverse trend of transforming it into a cheap fad—or into another
income-generating pedagogical industry.

NOTES

1. For an introduction to these schools of thinking, see Harding, 1991; Prendergast, 1998; Bhabha, 1994;
Nelson, 1999, respectively.
2. For a detailed and accessible introduction to critical pedagogy, see Canagarajah, 2002a, pp. 1–8.
3. I am assuming in this discussion that learners of English as a second or foreign language experience
unequal power status. If we accept that English is a globally powerful language (enjoying more status
and resources than any other language in the world today) then those who come from other language
groups to learn this as a second language are in an unequal relationship to it linguistically. Though their
minority status may vary from a purely economic, academic, or professional point of view, it is possible
to assert that learners of English as a second language experience unequal power relationships from a
linguistic standpoint.
4. For exemplary studies see, Casanave & Vandrick, in press; Lin et al., 2002; Kramsch & Lam, 1999.
5. We should also keep in mind the other important dialectic introduced in the beginning of the article,
i.e., theory and practice. I also explored the differing levels of effectiveness of process and product in
different pedagogical contexts.

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950
VIII

Language Planning
and Policy and
Language Rights

Guest Editor:
Richard B. Baldauf, Jr.
University of Queensland

951
952
Introduction

Richard B. Baldauf, Jr.

University of Queensland

In this section of the Handbook, a framework for and overview of the important re-
search issues for language policy and planning are presented. Following an introduc-
tory chapter that examines some general key issues and provides a possible frame-
work for the types of activities that define the field, five chapters cover each of the
archetypal activity types: status planning, corpus planning, language-in-education
planning, prestige planning, and critical approaches to language planning, with par-
ticular emphasis on minority language rights. Within each of these areas, important
recent research directions for language teaching and learning are discussed. The recent
publication of two new journals in the field, Current Issues in Language Planning and
Language Policy, the founding of a number of discipline-related journals, and the pub-
lication of books that take a critical perspective on language planning is indicative of
the field’s new-found sense of vitality.
Initially, Richard Baldauf (chap. 52) confronts the relevance of a section on language
policy and planning (LPP) for a handbook devoted to research on language learning
and teaching. Although large scale, usually national, planning—often undertaken
by governments and meant to influence, if not change, ways of speaking or literacy
practices within a society—may seem remote and only marginally relevant to the other
issues being discussed in this Handbook, Baldauf argues that relevance to research on
language teaching and learning exists on at least two counts:

r First, broadly speaking, language policies and the subsequent implementation

planning that occur at least partially provide the structure or policy context for
language learning and teaching and contribute to defining what counts as re-
search.
r Second, at a more micro level, decisions that administrators and/or teachers
make about who teaches what language, in what manner, for what purpose, and
to whom, have small-scale policy consequences as these decisions either reinforce
policy or begin to undermine it, thereby contributing to the development of new
policy.

The chapter goes on to provide a brief historical context for the more theoretical
perspective that is outlined as a possible framework for understanding the discipline.
A brief overview of the goals that make up four of the activity types typically used
to define the discipline (i.e., status planning, corpus planning, language-in-education
planning, and prestige planning) then follows.
953
954 BALDAUF

It is noted that other ways of defining the discipline are possible (e.g., language
management) and that although the four sets of activity types and their goals make
sense for descriptive pedagogical purposes, this makes them, of necessity, overly
simplistic. In practice, language policy and planning goals normally are multiple and
more complex, often cutting across activity types and sometimes coming into conflict
with one another.
In the second part of the chapter, Baldauf explores three key general issues that need
to be considered when thinking about the various activity types related to language
policy and planning, those being:
r Levels of language planning. Much of the research cited in the chapters in this section
has as its focus polity or macro level language policy and planning. Although
such research has an important impact on second language learning and teaching
by setting agendas and through the allocation of resources, language policy and
planning can also occur at other levels—meso and micro—although these two
remain underrepresented in the literature. Some micro examples are discussed.
r Over and covert language planning. Language policy and planning can either be
overt (explicit, planned) or covert (implicit, unplanned)—or may not be done
at all. Although the notion of “unplanned” planning, or the failure to address
language issues, may seem in the context of language planning to be an oxy-
moron, such (in)decisions have a major impact on how languages are learned
and taught, and some of these issues are explored in this section.
r Critiques of language planning. As a classic case of applied linguistics, it is possible
to critique language policy and planning from either an applied or a theoretical
perspective. It is argued that neither practitioners (who should be informed by
principals and by research, but who may be caught up in the necessities of political
expediency) nor those more inclined to theoretical analysis (who should be taking
some account of what is possible, but who may instead be interested in creating
solutions for virtual problems) may be satisfied by some disciplinary approaches.
Contextualization and a focus on the micro are two directions that planners are
moving in to strengthen the field.

In the second chapter in this section, Theo van Els (chap. 53) examines what is
known about status planning, where the concern is with the status of languages as
second languages, that is, with such high-level planning questions as “Which second
languages should be known, learned, and taught?”, “What aspects of the language(s)
chosen should be known, learned, and taught, that is, which variety and to what
level?”, “Who should learn them and to whom should they be taught?”, and “When
should learning begin and under what circumstances?”, and the particular needs
for second languages that lie beneath such choices. These issues are illustrated in
particular by examples from the Netherlands and Europe more generally.
The chapter argues that there are four aspects related to the status of second lan-
guages.

1. Their status for their own communicative purposes.

2. Their role as second languages—as a lingua franca or as a language of instruction.
3. Their role as immigrant or ethnic minority languages.
4. The degree to which promotion of a second language impacts on linguistic or
language rights.

These aspects all need to be taken into account when making status planning de-
cisions. Van Els argues, however, that whatever the status purposes, status planning
decisions should be based on community needs. The chapter focuses on the nature of
 PART VIII: PLANNING, POLICY AND RIGHTS 955

needs and how these needs can be identified and therefore planned for through status
planning. Van Els argues that there is an adequate knowledge base and theoretical
framework to tackle all status problems in the field of second language learning and
teaching, but that there still seems to be a preference for uninformed laymen (politi-
cians) developing policies without any recourse to empirical findings or advice.
In the third chapter in this section, Anthony Liddicoat (chap. 54) examines what
is known about corpus planning and its relation to language teaching and research.
Corpus planning—with its focus on the nature of the language to be taught and
learned—is the activity area most dependent on linguistic input for its methodol-
ogy, but it is shaped by status planning decisions; its output contributes in a major
way to language-in-education planning; and it may contribute to, or benefit from, the
prestige that a language has in the community. Liddicoat initially describes in some
detail the research foundations for the corpus planning process (i.e., condification—
graphization, grammatication and lexication, and elaboration—lexical development,
stylistic development, renovation), providing examples related both to polities and
languages. Having an understanding of this process provides a basis for the produc-
tion of corpus planning products, more specifically syllabus development and materi-
als development. It is at this point that the language teaching and learning implications
of corpus planning become most evident, particularly as teachers are often involved
in syllabus and materials development and modification for use in classrooms.
In the fourth chapter in this section, Richard Baldauf and Robert B. Kaplan
(chap. 55) examine language-in-education policy and planning, sometimes known
as acquisition policy. It is noted that language-in-education policy and planning often
constitutes the sole language planning activity in many polities, but that such activi-
ties are limited in their impact by slow rates of dissemination, a limited audience, and
often a lack of resources. Although language-in-education planning occurs most often
in schools, it also implicates less systematic teaching situations in the community or
the workplace.
The chapter goes on to examine seven key language-in-education policy goals (i.e.,
access policy, personnel policy, curriculum policy, methodology and materials pol-
icy, resourcing policy, community policy, evaluation policy) and four key language-
in-education planning goals (i.e., language maintenance, language reacquisition,
foreign/second language learning, language shift) by looking at examples of the im-
plementation of these goals in three polities: Japan, Sweden, and North Korea. A
number of general implications for language-in-education are then drawn from these
descriptions and those from other similar polity studies available in the published
literature.
In the fifth chapter in this section, Dennis Ager (chap. 56) discusses prestige or
image planning. Noting that as this is not a well developed area within LPP, Ager
suggests that it may initially be helpful for readers to look at three examples: Wales,
Malaysia, and Quebec. The examination of LPP in these polities suggests that there
may be three separate activities that underlie prestige planning. First, image (prestige)
seems to be related to ethnic or civic identity (real or imagined) and the promotion
of a language, as in the case of Quebec. Second, image seems to be used to describe a
method of implementing and manipulating language policy as in Wales. Finaly, image
has something to do with motive and the activities of language planners themselves
and the communities they plan for, as in Malaysia and increasingly Quebec. Each of
these three notions of image is explored in detail, bringing in further examples to
illustrate these categorizations. In the final section, Ager illustrates how various as-
pects of motivation related to powerful states and powerless communities contribute
to language policy development. Issues of prestige or image have implications for
research into the teaching and learning of languages and for the implementation of
minority language rights.
956 BALDAUF

In the final chapter in this section, Stephen May (chap. 57) explores the intercon-
nections between LPP and minority language rights (MLR), sometimes referred to
as linguistic human rights. The chapter discusses the often complex and contested
nature of the interaction between LPP and MLR, highlighting the wider sociohistor-
ical, sociocultural and sociopolitical analysis of LPP, particularly as it relates to the
question of the status, use, and power of minority languages in the modern world.
This approach contrasts with the apolitical, ahistorical, and technicist paradigm that
has characterized LPP, particularly in its early development. Although this modernist,
constructivist approach to developing national languages was seen as a strength in
developing national languages, it has lead to the pejorative positioning of minority
languages and their speakers and to the consequent development of research on MLR.
The chapter outlines the concerns of MLR advocates in the context of language ecology
and linguistic human rights paradigms.
The particular research issues that May addresses in the chapter include: lan-
guage shift and loss; language ecology; nationalism, minoritization, and historical
constructionism; language replacement and social mobility; linguistic human rights;
tolerance- and promotion-oriented language rights; and developments in interna-
tional and national law. May argues that as a result of these research influences,
language planners and policymakers are now addressing more overtly the political
and ideological aspects of LPP as well as their consequences for minority languages.
In the micro planning sense, these issues are also finding their way more explicity into
the language teaching and learning literature.
This section provides a comprehensive overview of language planning as a field
and the critiques that have been made of it in the context of research in second language
teaching and learning.
52

Language Planning and Policy

Research: An Overview
Richard B. Baldauf, Jr.
University of Queensland

INTRODUCTION

The relevance of a section on language policy and planning for a handbook devoted
to research on language learning and teaching could well be questioned. This is es-
pecially the case as many applied linguists define language planning in terms of
large-scale, usually national, planning, often undertaken by governments and meant
to influence, if not change, ways of speaking or literacy practices within a society
(Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997, p. 3). Although such issues may seem remote and only
marginally relevant to the other issues being discussed in this Handbook, it can be ar-
gued that language planning and policy is relevant to research on language teaching
and learning on at least two counts. First, broadly speaking, the language policies
and the subsequent implementation planning that occur, at least partially provide
the structure or policy context for language learning and teaching and contribute to
defining what counts as research. Second, at a more micro level, decisions that admin-
istrators and/or teachers make about who teaches what language, in what manner,
for what purpose, to whom have small-scale policy consequences as these decisions
either reinforce policy or begin to undermine it, thereby contributing to the develop-
ment of new policy. Therefore, it behooves us to examine the research about language
policy and planning processes to develop an understanding of how such practices
impact language learning and teaching.
This section of the Handbook on language planning is set out as follows. This chap-
ter examines some of the more general theoretical issues that contribute to providing
a framing context for language policy and planning. It is followed by chapters that
examine four aspects that are generally considered to comprise the field: status plan-
ning (about society), corpus planning (about language), language-in-education (or
acquisition) planning (about learning) and (most recently) prestige planning (about
image). Finally, planning of any sort is about the distribution of resources and power,
and the final chapter in this section examines the important social contextual aspects
of language planning, especially the impact that such policy and planning has on

957
958 BALDAUF

minority language rights. Initially, however, it is useful to start with some definitions
and a conceptual overview.

LANGUAGE PLANNING MODELS

Some Definitions
Although it can be demonstrated that a number of the concepts related to language
policy and planning began to develop in the work of the Prague School out of the
need for Czech language standardization and development that arose as part of the
emergence of the new Czechoslovakian Republic after the World War I (see, e.g.,
Neustupný & Nekvapil, 2003), language management, as it came to be called, did
not initially develop wider currency. Instead, the discipline of language planning—
called language engineering by some early practitioners—developed anew in the
1950s out of the similar, but more widespread, needs for large-scale government lan-
guage planning in the new, decolonizing independent states, particularly those in East
Africa—Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia—(Fox, 1975) and in South
and Southeast Asia—the Indian subcontinent, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philip-
pines (see e.g., Fishman, 1974). In one of the earliest volumes specifically devoted to
the new discipline (Rubin & Jernudd, 1971, p. xvi), language planning was defined
as the deliberate, future-oriented systematic-change of language code, use and/or
speaking, undertaken by some organization mandated for such purposes—most vis-
ibly by governments (see e.g., Baldauf & Kaplan, 2003)—in some social situation, that
is, in a community of speakers. Language planning often is directed by, or leads to,
the promulgation of language policy(s).
The discipline of language planning differentiates between language policy (the
plan) and language planning (plan implementation) although the two terms are fre-
quently used interchangeably in the literature. The former, language policies, are bod-
ies of ideas, laws, regulations, rules, and practices intended to achieve some planned
language change. Such policy may be realized in very formal or overt ways, through
language planning documents and pronouncements (e.g., constitutions, legislation,
policy statements), which may have either symbolic or substantive intent. Alternately,
policy may be inferred from more informal statements of intent (i.e., in the discourse
of language, politics, and society), or policy may be left unstated or covert. Language
planning, in the subcategory sense, focuses on the implementation of these plans
(Kaplan & Baldauf, 2003).
Although language planning in the 1950s and 1960s was an out growth of the pos-
itivistic economic, linguistic, and social science paradigms that dominated the three
post-World War II decades, by the 1970s, it was apparent that language problems were
not unique to developing nations but were much more widely applicable to macro (i.e.,
state-level) language problems and situations. Since the 1990s, critical approaches to
the discipline and the broader context of the discipline have become more important
(see Ricento, 2000a, and Tollefson, 2002, for somewhat different historical perspec-
tives), as those involved with the discipline have taken on issues such as language
ecology (e.g., Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997; Mühlhäusler, 2000), language rights (e.g., May,
2001), and the place of languages other than English (e.g., Maurais & Morris, 2003;
Pennycook, 1998; Ricento, 2000b).1

AN EVOLVING LANGUAGE PLANNING FRAMEWORK

As one might expect, over the last 35 years a number of those involved in lan-
guage planning have put forward their ideas about what might constitute a model
 52. LANGUAGE PLANNING AND POLICY RESEARCH 959

for language policy and planning (e.g., Ferguson, 1968; Fishman, 1974; Haarmann,
1990; Haugen, 1983; Neustupný, 1974), whereas others (e.g., Annamalai & Rubin,
1980; Bentahila & Davies, 1993; Nahir, 1984) have contributed to understanding the
discipline by concentrating on language planning goals. Kaplan and Baldauf (1997)
have argued that these ideas need to be framed within an ecological context, whereas
Hornberger (1994) was the first to explicitly bring the model and goals strands to-
gether in a single framework. Kaplan and Baldauf (2003) have developed a revised
and expanded version of the framework and have provided a number of illustrative
examples from the Pacific basin for each of the goals. However, despite all of this
theory-oriented activity, most language planning and policy practitioners probably
would agree that insufficient research has been done to allow a complete and accurate
model of the discipline to be constructed.
Still, it is useful to reflect on what is known. When thinking about the things that
contribute to a model, both policy (i.e., form) and planning (i.e., function) components
need to be considered as well as whether such policy and planning is or will be overt
(explicit) or covert (implicit) in terms of the way it is decided and put into action.
It is also useful to understand that language policy and planning occurs at different
levels—the macro, the meso, and the micro—and that these may have differential
effects on research on language learning and teaching. In addition, when language
policy and planning is undertaken, there is a significant underlying historical and
social component that helps to frame ongoing work. (See the polity studies in Kaplan
and Baldauf, 2003, or individual polity studies in Current Issues in Language Planning
for examples.)
A framework reflecting these issues, which is elaborated in greater detail in the
sections that follow, is set out in Table 52.1. More specifically, the framework suggests
that the practice of language policy and planning may be one of four types: status
planning (about society), corpus planning (about language), language-in-education
(acquisition) planning (about learning), or prestige planning (about image). Each of
these four types of language planning can be realized from two approaches: a pol-
icy approach—with an emphasis on form: basic language and policy decisions and
their implementation; or a cultivation approach—with an emphasis on the functional
extension of language development and use. These eight language planning perspec-
tives are best understood through the goals planners set out to achieve. However,
it is important to understand that most of the goals in this framework are not inde-
pendent of one other, that is, policy-planning goals normally lead to goals related to
cultivation-planning support. A particular language planning matter may also have
embedded in it several different goals, which may even be contradictory, for example,
the widespread introduction of a strong foreign language (like English) may poten-
tially conflict in the school curriculum with goals related to the importance of local
and regional language maintenance. Nor are goals normally implemented in isolation,
but as part of a broader (even if covert or unstated) set of objectives.
Finally, although a framework such as this is useful as a pedagogical device for
explaining the scope of and some possible sequences for language planning, it should
not be taken literally as a map of either how to do language planning or what happens
in real language planning situations. In addition, as the subsequent chapters in this
section show, there still is not complete agreement within the field on the terminology
that is to be used or how various concepts are to be defined and applied (also see,
Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997, p. 14). Rather, this chapter should serve as a starting point for
understanding the discipline and the issues that confront policymakers and planners
involved in research on second language learning and teaching.
Having set out a possible framework for the discipline, let us now briefly examine
each of the four types of policy and planning goals and then the issue of the social
context in which such goals exist. The brief descriptions provided in this chapter
 TABLE 52.1
An Evolving Framework for Language Planning Goals by Levels and Awareness

960
Levels Planning Processes and Goals

Macro Meso Micro

Awareness of Goals
Policy Planning Cultivation Planning
Approaches to Goals (on form) (on function) Overt Covert Overt Covert Overt Covert

Productive Goals Goals Goals

Status Planning Status Standardization Status Planning
(about society)
r Officialization Revival
r Nationalization
rRestoration
r Proscription
rRevitalization
rReversal
Maintenance
Interlingual communication
rInternational
rIntranational
Spread
Corpus Planning Standardization Corpus Elaboration
(about language)
r Graphization Lexical modernization
r Grammatication Stylistic modernization
r Lexication Renovation
Auxiliary Code rPurification
r Graphization rReform
r Grammatication rStylistic simplification
r Lexication rTerminological unification
Internationalization
Language-in-Education Policy Development Acquisition Planning
Planning Access policy Reacquisition
(about learning) Personnel policy Maintenance
Curriculum policy Foreign/second language
Methods & materials policy Shift
Resourcing policy
Community policy
Evaluation policy
Receptive Goal
Prestige Planning Language Promotion Intellectualization
(about image)
r Official/Government
r Language of science
r Institutional
r Language of professions
r Pressure group
r Language of high culture
r Individual

Note. Adapted from R. B. Kaplan & R. B. Baldauf, Jr. (2003). Language and Language-in-Education Planning (p. 202), Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer.
 52. LANGUAGE PLANNING AND POLICY RESEARCH 961

outline the broad nature of language policy and planning. These five topics then
are developed in the subsequent chapters with a more specific focus on research in
learning and teaching.

Status Planning Goals

Status planning consists of those social goals that are external to the language and
that a society must make about the environment or language ecology in which a
language(s) is used. As van Els (chap. 53, this volume) points out, detailed status
planning, especially as it relates to language learning and teaching, is a process that
is well understood, but is a relatively neglected activity in practice. The goals of
status planning relate either to the policy planning—about the form of language(s),
that is, status standardization (officialization, nationalization and proscription) or to
cultivation planning about functions, that is, the revival (restoration, revitalization,
reversal), maintenance, interlingual communication (international, intranational) and
spread of languages (see e.g., Haugen, 1983).

Corpus Planning Goals

Corpus planning is directed at those linguistic goals related to language itself that
need to be made to codify, standardize, or modify and elaborate a language(s). These
goals relate either to policy planning about the linguistic form of the language(s), that
is, corpus standardization and auxiliary code standardization (graphization includ-
ing orthographic reform, grammatication, lexication), or to cultivation planning about
enhancing linguistic functions, that is, lexical modernization, stylistic modernization,
renovation (purification, reform, stylistic simplification, terminological unification),
and internationalization. Language renovation may involve language purification,
that is, the removal of foreign (lexical) influences or the adherence to the classical
forms and lexicon of a language. Written forms of a language, by definition, are more
standardized and purified than the corresponding oral forms. Although the applica-
tion of technical linguistic skills is central to meeting corpus planning goals, corpus
planning also involves making choices or selecting alternatives that have a social as-
pect and that must be resolved for such planning to be successful. (See, e.g., Baldauf,
1990; Clyne, 1997; Haugen, 1983). Liddicoat (chap. 54, this volume) examines how
corpus planning relates to language learning and teaching.

Language-In-Education (Acquisition) Planning Goals

Language-in-education planning is the area most explicitly related to language learn-
ing and teaching. It focuses on those user-related learning decisions that need to be
made to develop language education programs and teach a language(s) for various
purposes. These goals relate to policy planning about the form of a language learning
program(s), that is, access policy, personnel policy, curriculum policy, methods and
materials policy, resourcing policy, community policy; evaluation policy; or to cul-
tivation planning for enhancing language teaching functions, that is, reacquisition,
maintenance, foreign language/second language, and shift. Although language-in-
education planning should co-occur with the other planning types, this frequently
does not happen, and language-in-education planning, through schooling, can be-
come the sole language change agent. (See e.g., Baldauf & Ingram, 2003; Cooper, 1989;
Ingram, 1990; Kaplan & Baldauf, chap. 55, this volume; Paulston & McLaughlin, 1994;
Spolsky, 1978).
962 BALDAUF

Prestige Planning Goals

Prestige planning is directed at those goals related to the image a language needs to de-
velop to promote and intellectualize that language(s). These goals relate either to pol-
icy planning by those individuals or groups that have or take the responsibility to cre-
ate the image of the language(s), that is, language promotion (via official/government,
institutional, pressure group, individual), or to cultivation planning by enhancing the
functional image and status of the language in key language domains, that is, intellec-
tualization (language of science, language of professions, language of high culture).
Prestige planning represents a separate receptive or value function range of activities
to status, corpus, and language-in-education planning, which are productive activi-
ties that influences how the three former planning activities are acted on and received.
Prestige or efficiency of organizational impact levels influences the success of a lan-
guage plan and the uses to which languages are put (see, Ager, 2001; chap. 56, this
volume; Haarmann, 1990).

Language Planning and Language Rights

As the definition previously provided by Rubin and Jernudd (1971) has indicated,
language planning is not just a technical exercise involving status, corpus, language-
in-education, and prestige planning but occurs in a social context. Kaplan and Baldauf
(1997) have referred to this context as a language ecology noting that when one changes
one language in an ecology, the other languages in that ecology are also affected and
usually changed in some manner. As with other ecologies, power relationships exist
and groups using one language may dominate or exclude or may tolerate or promote
other languages. This occurs not only at the macro policy level, but also in institu-
tions, including schools and classrooms. It is, therefore, an issue that is important for
language policymakers and planners interested in language learning and teaching to
consider.
Initial language policy and planning projects, with their positivistic beliefs and
focus on problem solutions, did not provide much critique of, nor explicit focus on, the
broader context. In part this was because it was assumed that broadly based planning
teams would bring expertise that would take contextual matters like language rights
into account as part of the development of the best possible policy and planning
implementation for a given situation (see e.g., Jernudd & Baldauf, 1987). However,
in recent years the resultant problem of the “insiders’ paradox” has become more
apparent, that is, the difficulties that planners have in dealing with the real political
and linguistic issues of the day while being able to take an unbiased view of their own
planning (Baldauf & Kaplan, 2004). Critical studies of the context and the impact of
policy and planning have grown and attracted a lot of scholarly attention, well beyond
the formal domains of language planning and policy. Professional bodies like TESOL
have set up subsections—Sociopolitical Concerns—to develop this area as it relates to
their profession (e.g., Hall & Eggington, 2000). May (chap. 57, this volume) provides
an overview of these issues as they apply to the language policy and planning context.

LANGUAGE MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK

As indicated in the introductory section, this view of a language planning framework

is not the only way of conceptualizing the discipline. Another compatible perspec-
tive to the description of how languages are planned and managed is the language
management approach. Although the most recent discussions of this approach relate
to Quebec (e.g., Cormier & Guilloton, 2001; Jernudd & Neustupný, 1987; also see
Neustupný, 1983, 1985), the material presented here is briefly summarized from an
 52. LANGUAGE PLANNING AND POLICY RESEARCH 963

introduction to the classical case of Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic (see,
Neustupný & Nekvapil, 2003).
In the context of language management, management refers to a wide range of acts
of attention to “language problems.” Initially these problems were conceptualized as
occurring in the narrow linguistic sense, but according to current practice areas such
as discourse, politeness, intercultural communication, proofreading, speech therapy,
or literary criticism are implicated. The basic features of language management may
be summarized as follows:

r Management may be simple—dealing with specific, often individual problems—

or organized—involving multiple participants in the discussion (potential ideo-
logical) of the management process.
r Management is a process in which deviation from some particular norm (or expec-
tation) is noted and evaluated, an adjustment plan selected, and then implemented.
r Linguistic management is nested within communicative management, which
is nested within socioeconomic management, that is, one cannot change lan-
guage forms (e.g., gender-loaded words) unless communicative and socioeco-
nomic management also occurs.
r Language management recognizes that decisions and plans are based on interests
and power relations within the community (Jernudd, 1996; Neustupný, 1996).

Neustupný and Nekvapil (2003) state that language management can occur at a
number of different levels (from micro to macro) and that this approach is compatible
with other evolving language planning frameworks, but argue that it is more com-
prehensive, that is, it is more explicit about what needs to be done in order to arrest
language and communication problems. More specifically, once deviation from some
particular norm is noted and evaluated, there are a number of strategies, based on
a “Hymesian model” (Neustupný, 1987, 1997) that exist and are subject to language
management (the eight being: participant, variety, situational set, function, setting,
content, frame, and channel). These provide processes to understand and/or bring
about language change.

LEVELS OF LANGUAGE PLANNING

Work published on language policy and planning, including much of the research
cited in the accompanying chapters, has focused on polity or macro-level language
policy and planning. Although such research has an important impact on second
language learning and teaching by setting agendas and through the allocation of re-
sources, language policy and planning can also occur at a number of different levels—
macro, meso, and micro—although the latter two remain underrepresented in the lit-
erature. However, because actual planning at the macro level is very much a political
process (Baldauf & Kaplan, 2003)—at least in the first instance—for many researchers
and practitioners, it is planning at the meso2 and particularly the micro level where
they could be most involved.
There are those, of course, who would argue that almost by definition language
policy and planning is a classic case of macro-sociolinguistics or macro-applied lin-
guistics. From this perspective, it is difficult enough to provide a coherent framework
for language planning at the polity or macro level without trying to extend the model
to smaller scale studies (Davies, 1999). This view is reflected in much of the published
literature that relates to a description or evaluation of some aspect of polity-level pol-
icy or planning (Baldauf, 2002). Furthermore, it can be argued that “the impact that
language planning and policy has depends heavily on meso and micro level involve-
ment and support” (Kaplan & Baldauf, 2003, pp. 201–202; also see Kaplan & Baldauf,
964 BALDAUF

1997). That is, that there is a need for language policy and planning, if it is to be
successful, to extend down through the system—for example, the creation of macro
policy (e.g., the development of the Australian Language and Literacy Policy) has an
impact on classrooms and on teachers (Breen, 2002), and is an extension of research
at the macro level.
Therefore, small-scale language policy and planning problems discussed in the
literature typically refer to an analysis of macro issues arising from the language
problems to be found in nation states. Normally there is little or no suggestion that
independent micro-level policy should be developed or that planning should extend
beyond what is required to implement macro policy. Rather, it is the impact of macro
polity policy or its refinement (or the lack thereof) on micro situations that is being
examined (Baldauf, 2004). In contrast to this, micro language policy should originate
at the micro and not the macro level. Micro planning refers to cases where businesses,
institutions, groups, or individuals create what might be recognized as a language
policy and plan to utilize and develop their language resources. Such a policy is
not directly the result of some larger macro policy, but is a response to the needs of
individuals or groups, their own “language problems,” their own need for language
management. It is difficult to identify studies of micro language policy and planning
in the literature. Perhaps this is because such work currently is not valued because
it doesn’t belong to an “authentic” research genre, or perhaps because business and
other micro sites are less open to public scrutiny (and therefore academic analysis) than
governmental entities, or perhaps because publication occurs in “business-related”
journals under different headings (Baldauf, 2004).
Some examples of studies (or proposals for studies) at the micro level include the
suggestion that Irish language learning and teaching in Northern Ireland needs to be
fostered independently at the local level (Mac Giolla Chriost, 2002), that a focus on
sojourner status by parents and children was an effective contextual language plan-
ning strategy for maintaining Japanese for bilingual children whose parents were of
Japanese background (Yoshimitsu, 2000), or that problems with the bilingual materi-
als produced by the banking sector in Los Angeles indicated there was a substantial
failure on the part of banks to serve their non-English speaking clientele (Kaplan,
Touchstone, & Hagstrom, 1995; Touchstone, Kaplan, & Hagstrom, 1996). Corson’s
(1999) analysis of school contexts provides an excellent starting point for anyone
concerned with developing school-based (micro) language planning and policy. It
provides a detailed discussion and a set of questions for micro language planners
interested in developing school-based policy in first language (L1), second language
(L2), literacy, oracy, bilingual or multilingual education programs. For those taking
a language management approach, the macro–micro divide is less problematic for
while language management may be organized, it may be, and in fact often must be,
simple as well.
Thus, although language planning is frequently viewed as a macro activity, it is
normally extended to micro situations for implementation, but it also can be applied
as an independent process in a variety of language learning and teaching situations.
Research on such micro aspects is generally lacking, but would contribute to a bet-
ter understanding of both policy implementation and the solution of micro policy
problems.

OVERT AND COVERT LANGUAGE PLANNING

Another important characteristic of language planning is that policy and planning

can be either be overt (explicit, planned) or covert (implicit, unplanned) or may not
be done at all. While the notion of “unplanned” planning or the failure to address
 52. LANGUAGE PLANNING AND POLICY RESEARCH 965

language issues, may seem in the context of language planning, to be an oxymoron, it

is not, because such (in)decisions have a major impact on how languages are learned
and taught. Much of what passes for planning occurs informally, off the record, and
sometimes without much explicit thought by those involved. Baldauf (1994) has called
this “unplanned language planning” because language policy decisions are being
taken without thinking explicitly about them or their consequences. Baldauf (1994)
and Kaplan and Baldauf (1997, pp. 298–299) suggest there are four reasons why con-
siderations of formal planning need to consider the informal or unplanned. These can
briefly summarized as:
r Planned and unplanned features often coexist is the same context and the un-
planned can alter or pervert the planning process. In Papua New Guinea (Swan &
Lewis, 1990), Côte d’Ivoire (Djité, 2000), Tunisia (Daoud, 2001), and South Africa
(Heugh, 2003) some aspects of language (and languages) are planned, whereas others
are not, and the failure to address the latter distorts the policy and planning processes
and outcomes.
r The absence of some activity (i.e., language planning) often provides information
about the activity. In relation to diglossic language use in social and political situations,
examples one might look at include: in Papua New Guinea where English is the official
language, Tok Pisin is ignored in policy terms (Swan & Lewis, 1990), or Côte d’Ivoire
(Djité, 2000) where the promotion and valorization of autochthonous languages and
Popular French are ignored in policy terms in relation to Standard French. In Malaysia,
Ozóg (1993) asserts that the focus on Bahasa Melayu in the National Language Policy
and the inability to talk about English for reasons of national harmony have limited
Malays’ access to the language at a time when the language is important for economic
and scientific advancement. (In 2003, English was reintroduced to teach some content
areas in all schools in Malaysia.)
r Language policy and planning activities are power related and may be invoked
to ensure social control rather than to implement desirable language change. For ex-
ample, Sommer (1991) examines the power exercised by bureaucracies in shaping
language plans to suit political needs, whereas Souaiaia (1990) and Daoud (2001) dis-
cuss how the political interests of the elites has effected the progress of Arabicization
in the Maghreb.
r Much micro language planning is unplanned because most people or groups
feel quite competent—often based on their native-speaker competence—to become
involved in such language activities. The two articles by Kaplan, Touchstone, and
Hagstrom (1995) and Touchstone, Kaplan, and Hagstrom (1996) concerning bilingual
banking brochures in Los Angeles are illustrative of this point.

However, Eggington (2002, p. 405) argues that discussion at this level tends to
“cast rather benign attributes on this phenomenon” and that it is also important
to look at the underlying motivations and ideologies that are being revealed when
“unplanning” occurs. He suggests that there are two somewhat overlapping cate-
gories of unplanning in language policy and planning that need to be examined, those
being:
r Unplanned language planning as social engineering planning that is often used
as a nonconsultative, ideologically driven, top-down process that provides simplistic
solutions to virtual problems. Eggington (2002, pp. 408–412) illustrates the nature of
such problems using the specific examples from the right and the left of the sociopo-
litical spectrum—the Official English movement in the United States, and the language
rights movement found in many international contexts. He argues that the assumptions
that underlie these “problems” are questionable—that is, English is not threatened in
966 BALDAUF

the United States, nor will the opportunities for children to learn their parents’ idiom
in schools save those languages from extinction. He concludes that such ideologically
driven “fixes” to perceived language problems, may in some cases exacerbate the
problems and lead to a host of unintended consequences.
r Unplanned language planning conducted by nonspecialists examines decisions
about what language to use in a particular situation, for example, in a multinational
project or to address the minority language needs of children in schools. Although it
can be argued that from a power ideologies perspective that the selection of English in
such situations would be motivated by hegemonic considerations, Eggington (2002,
p. 415) suggests that an equally valid hypothesis would be that language is selected
to meet communicative needs.

Thus, rather than being an oxymoron, these arguments suggest that unplanned
language planning is an important phenomenon to consider, because it provides
one of the reasons why there has been a growing critical focus on language policy
and planning activity, including issues of language rights (see May, chap. 57, this
volume).

CRITIQUES OF LANGUAGE PLANNING

As this chapter demonstrates, language planning and policy is perhaps the classic case
of applied linguistics. But, the balance between the applied and the theoretical that
this implies does not sit easily with neither practitioners, who should be informed by
principals and by research, but who may be caught up in the necessities of political
expediency, nor those more inclined to theoretical analysis, who should be taking some
account of what is possible, but who may instead be interested in creating solutions
for what Eggington (2002) calls virtual problems. However, this underlying tension
means that beyond issues related to the “insiders paradox” mentioned previously, and
issues related to context and language rights (see May, chap. 57, this volume), there
have been some general critiques of language planning as a discipline, particularly
from a postmodern perspective (e.g., Luke, McHoul, & Mey, 1990; Tollefson, 1991)
and more recently in terms of ecolinguistics (Kibbee, 2003). Some of the postmodern
critiques of practice-based language planners and language planning can be said to
be based around the following issues (Fishman, 1994, p. 91):

r Language planning is conducted by elites that are governed by their own self-
interest—for example, in Côte d’Ivoire (Djité, 2000) or the Maghreb (Souaiaia,
1990).
r Language planning reproduces rather than overcomes sociocultural and econo-
technical inequalities—the classic case being South Africa (Heugh, 2003;
Kamwangamalu, 2001).
r Language planning inhibits or counteracts multiculturalism—for example, in the
European Union (Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1999; cf. van Els, 2001).
r Language planning espouses worldwide Westernization and modernization
leading to new sociocultural, econotechnical and conceptual colonialism—for
example, in Hong Kong (Pennycook, 1998).
r Ethnographic research is the most appropriate methodology for avoiding the
traps posed by the previously mentioned shortcomings.

Fishman (1994, p. 97) has argued that these five critiques focused mainly on the-
oretical issues related to an analysis of language planning theory rather than on an
analysis of practice and that “very little language planning practice has actually been
 52. LANGUAGE PLANNING AND POLICY RESEARCH 967

informed by language planning theory.” He also points out that although issues of
language rights of minorities are important, the solutions suggested or implied by
these critiques should not replace one kind of exploitation of minorities with another
nor replace one existing minority with a new minority created by the process intended
to redress current injustice. Language planners need to contribute to the empower-
ment of the disadvantaged and the education of the advantaged. But, languages will
be planned, and:

language planning will be utilised by both those who favor and those who oppose
whatever the socio-political climate may be. This is a truth that neo-Marxist and post-
structuralist critics of language planning never seem to grasp and, therefore, they never
seem to go beyond their critique as decisively or as productively as they state their cri-
tique. (Fishman, 1994, p. 98)

In addition, Tollefson (2002, pp. 419–420) suggests that there are two further criti-
cisms of language policy and planning that relate to local impact. These can be said
to have had a more substantial impact on the field, as they relate more directly to
practice. These are:
r The failure to realize the complexity of problems, to adequately analyze the im-
pact of local context on policies and plans, and, therefore, the failure of policies
to achieve their lofty goals.
r Lack of attention paid to language practices and attitudes of communities affected
by macro language policies and planning.

Those interested in language planning have moved to accommodate these issues,

and more recent studies of language planning have had more limited aims and have
begun to focus on micro problems where context can be more easily incorporated.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

This chapter has provided a brief overview of the discipline of language policy and
planning and an indication of some of its intersections with the research on learning
and teaching. It has been argued that language policy and planning is a dynamic field
for application and study. As a discipline, it has moved from being a methodology
for solving language problems in developing nations to a way of examining language
problems in general. It has moved from a focus on societal and linguistic concerns
to add the dimensions of language-in-education (acquisition) planning and prestige
planning to its scope of activities. It has moved from taking context as an internal
variable to be manipulated only as part of the planning process to increasingly making
it an external one for that is the basis for critique. It has begun to move from an exclusive
focus on large-scale language problems to look at language problems in smaller, more
everyday contexts, including businesses and schools. It has recognized that it is not
only overt policy and planning, but covert or “unplanned” policy, or even the failure
to take any policy decisions at all, that affects the nature of language, including the
teaching and learning context. Furthermore, there is a recognition of the central role
that politics plays in language policy and planning decisions. In addition, Tollefson
(2002) suggests that in the future, language planners need to take more notice of the
role that legal frameworks play in determining what kinds of policies and practices are
possible in particular polities. He also argues that language planners need to establish
closer links with sociology and with the discourses of ideology and identity. It is also
likely that the issue of language rights will be a central question for language planners
to consider.
968 BALDAUF

In the chapters that follow, the four types of language policy and planning outlined
in the framework are discussed in detail. The final chapter in the section examines the
context of language policy and planning with a particular focus on language rights.

NOTES

1. As Baldauf (2002) indicates, the published literature related to language policy and planning is quite
numerous but is spread across a broad range of publications with only a few key journals or book
series focusing specifically on the discipline. For example, the Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts
database for 1973–1998 contains about 6,000 references to language policy and/or language planning,
whereas I have developed a database containing between two and three times that many articles.
The articles cited in this chapter are therefore only indicative of the literature. To avoid duplication,
many specific references to issues and areas introduced in this chapter, but developed in the other
five chapters in this section, can be found in those chapters. Some key journals for the discipline in-
clude: the International Journal of the Sociology of Language (1974–), the (New) Language Planning Newsletter
(1975–), Terminogramme/Revue d’Aménagement Linguistique (c. 1975–), Language Problems & Language Plan-
ning (1977–), the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (1980–), Current Issues in Language
Planning (2000–), Language Policy (2002–). Journals like the TESOL Quarterly have had special issues
related to aspects of language planning.
2. See Williams (1994) for a macro/meso/micro example relating to the anglicization of Wales.

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53

Status Planning for Learning

and Teaching
Theo van Els
Radboud University Nijmegen

INTRODUCTION

Although a distinction is often made between second and foreign language learning and
teaching, based on different didactic procedures, as the example of The Netherlands
illustrates, there are only few societies in which the distinction actually applies. Dutch
learned by Turkish immigrants is a clear instance of second language learning, but the
learning of Turkish by autochthonous Dutch speakers may be either foreign or second
language learning, depending on what relationships the learner in question has with
the Turkish minority. On the other hand, the learning of English by speakers of Dutch
is normally considered foreign language learning—English having no official second
language status in the country—but this language is so predominant in day-to-day
life that the learner receives a great deal of extracurricular support beyond that gained
through classroom teaching.
In the present chapter this distinction is not made, rather the whole field is referred
to as second language learning and teaching, although for reasons of space the focus is
on planning for languages that are basically external to the society in question. How-
ever, roughly speaking, what is said about planning for foreign languages, mutatis
mutandis, also applies more generally.
This chapter with its focus on status planning only examines part of second lan-
guage learning and teaching planning. Corpus planning issues such as syllabus and
materials development, language-in-education planning or didactic issues concerning
the learning and teaching of second languages, and prestige planning are dealt with
in chapters 54 by Liddicoat, 55 by Kaplan and Baldauf, and 56 by Ager, respectively.
Here the concern is with the status of languages as second languages, that is, with
such high-level planning questions as “Which second languages should be known,
learned, and taught?”, “What aspects of the language(s) chosen should be known,
learned, and taught, that is, which variety and to what level?”, “Who should learn
them and to whom should they be taught?”, and “When should learning begin and
under what circumstances?” and the particular needs for second languages that lie
beneath such choices.
971
972 VAN ELS

Status planning for second language learning and teaching—the focus of this chap-
ter is not the same as, nor does it require, a national languages policy or a national
second language(s) policy. The former, for example, regulates the position, the use, or
the preservation of a nation’s language(s). What, for instance, are the rights of the
speakers of the language(s) not designated as national language(s)? The latter kind
of policy specifies regulations or measures regarding the position of and use of sec-
ond languages in the country; thus, it may regulate the use of second languages in
courtrooms, by foreigners (van Els, 1994, p. 36).
Although the chief point of departure is traditional national level second language
status planning, some attention is also given to the macro-level of supra-national or
interstate planning. Whenever the argument is supported with examples, the chapter
shows a bias toward the European scene, in particular the European Union on the one
hand and The Netherlands on the other.

STATUS PLANNING: GENERAL ASPECTS

Before examining second language status planning, some terminological clarification

is required. It has become customary to distinguish among status planning, corpus plan-
ning, and acquisition planning, referred to by some as language-in-education planning or
educational planning (see e.g., Ager, 2001, p. 5; Spolsky & Shohamy, 2000; Kaplan &
Baldauf, chap. 55, this volume). This distinction is not always consistently made, in
particular one finds that language-in-education planning overlaps with the other two cat-
egories. For example, the Dutch National Action Program for Foreign Languages is called
an example of acquisition planning by Spolsky and Shohamy (1997, p. 101), whereas
by implication Lambert (2000, p. 172) classifies it as an example of status planning. Or,
Spolsky and Shohamy (2000, pp. 13–14), explicitly subsume under acquisition policy
the specification of “which segment of the population (such as all or part of the school
population or of a specific occupational group) should spend a defined amount of
time acquiring defined levels of competence in specific languages;” whereas, except
for the definition of the specific “amount of time to be spent;” these activities could
be classified as belonging to status planning for learning and teaching. In this chapter
only choices of which language to teach form part of and are treated as the main
issue in status planning for learning and teaching, which also includes the subsequent
choices regarding, for example, to what level and by whom the language(s) selected
should be learned. However, terminological correctness is not pursued at any cost,
and the chapter may transgress into language-in-education planning at times as a conse-
quence.

Status of Second Languages

The status of second languages can be said to have four aspects to it. First, there
is the status that languages have, so to speak, for “themselves,” both in internal and
external communication. Languages compete with each other, that is, some languages
are preferred over others for communication purposes between speakers of different
languages. Internally, in multilingual communities, a language may be assigned the
status of (one of) the national language(s) and externally a language may be selected
to serve as the means of international communication. Status planning for languages
of that kind is not a topic that is central to our discussion. However, the prestige or
weight that a language carries in comparison to other languages is certainly a factor
to be taken into account in status planning for learning and teaching.
Second, there is the status that languages may be assigned in their role as second lan-
guages, from the perspective of their use in countries outside the home country. There
are two particular functions (i.e., those of lingua franca and language of instruction)
 53. STATUS PLANNING 973

that need to be discussed to define what relevance this kind of status may have for
the learning and teaching of the languages in question.
A lingua franca, strictly speaking, is “a medium of communication between people
or groups of people each speaking a different native language” (Gnutzmann, 2000,
p. 357). Two types may be distinguished: a pidginlike type, which commonly has a mix
of elements from different languages, very often based on one of the former colonial
languages (i.e., English, French, or Spanish) and one or more indigenous languages,
and second, a particular language type. English is a case in point when it is used for
international communication as often there are no native speakers taking part in the
communication. In such situations, non-native users tend to take over the “ownership”
of the language and to adapt it according to their own needs and linguistic capacities
(e.g., simplifying vocabulary and syntax) thereby becoming “minority shareholders
in the global resource” that international English has become (Graddol, 1997, p. 23).
English as it is used between non-native and native speakers of the language is defi-
nitely not the lingua franca variant.
The wide distribution of English as a lingua franca is important in planning consid-
erations because the ownership situation—nobody’s exclusive ‘possession’—makes
it a very suitable candidate for acceptance as second-language-for-all. However, it
would be a mistake to think that it could fulfil the diverse range of second-language
needs on its own.
The second function that English has in many countries where the language is
not indigenous, is that of language of instruction in the educational system. Many
youngsters receive all their instruction in (an)other language(s) than the one they were
born into. This is even more the case when those born into local and regional dialects
deviating considerably from the standard language are included. However, there is
only one particular case that will be examined—choosing a non-native language of
instruction that serves other than general educational purposes.
This occurs when instruction in most or all of the nonlanguage school subjects
is given in one of the second languages of the prevailing curriculum, because one
expects that in that way a higher command of the respective second language may
be achieved—either more quickly or efficiently—than in regular second language
classes. This approach, referred to as Content-based Instruction (CBI) or Content and
Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) by some or classified as bilingual education by
others (as it has much in common from a didactic point of view), has recently attracted
a lot of attention in some Western European countries. The choice of the particular
second language for CBI forms part of the field of status planning for learning and
teaching, but the reasons why CBI is selected to speed up the learning and teaching
of the second language in question, or the didactic ways in which CBI lessons are
conducted are not.
The third aspect relates to immigrant or ethnic minority languages. There are two per-
spectives from which these languages may be of interest in status planning for second
language learning and teaching. One is that of the languages themselves, the other is
that of their speakers. From the former perspective, immigrant languages are in com-
petition with all the other “foreign” second languages when planning decisions are to
be taken. Such languages, no doubt, may represent a greater (communication) need
for the planning country in question, because relations with their home countries
gain in importance, simply by the presence of considerable numbers of immigrant
speakers of these languages. The latter perspective, that is, of the immigrant language
speakers, concerns them as consumers or customers of second language learning and
teaching provisions, because their position differs from that of their autochthonous
compatriots. Immigrant children sustain an extra language learning load because of
their ethnic language background. On the positive side, it may be very helpful for the
planning country to avail itself of the special language competence that immigrants
974 VAN ELS

bring with them to fulfill the country’s second language needs, but this raises the ques-
tion of why set up teaching programs in such languages for autochthonous citizens,
if the relevant linguistic competence is already available in the community (Lambert,
1994, p. 50). On the other hand, immigrants should not be treated as different from
their co-citizens if they are to achieve equal opportunities. They have a right to attain
the same levels of education as other citizens, but if their second—that is, in the strict
sense of foreign—language qualifications are less than those of their compatriots, it
may be a serious setback to their socioeconomic possibilities.
This leads us to the fourth, and final, aspect, linguistic or language rights (see May,
chap. 57, this volume) and the related topic of linguistic imperialism that sometimes is
bracketed with it. Both topics have only restricted relevance in the status planning for
second language learning and teaching context.
It is quite understandable that nation-states should try to achieve as prominent a
position as possible for their language in interstate communication. Language pro-
motion may range from such mild forms as offering help in curriculum and materials
development to the more imperialistic extremes—where others are forced to learn
and use the language while having their first language(s) suppressed—which were
not unusual during the colonial and postcolonial period (see e.g., Phillipson, 1992).
The view, however, that the present-day prominent international position of English
is mainly to be attributed to devious imperialistic behavior on the part of the British
and the Americans has been challenged (see e.g., Fishman, Conrad, & Rubal-Lopez,
1996; Spolsky & Shohamy, 1999). The main argument for adopting languages as sec-
ond languages in (post) colonial situations starts from a consideration of the needs of
the people from abroad, the non-natives, both as individuals and as a group. In this
context, linguistic rights as they are defined in such documents as the draft “Univer-
sal Declaration of Linguistic Rights” and in the “European Charter for Regional and
Minority Languages” (see e.g., Ager, 2001, pp. 34, 93; Phillipson & Skutnab-Kangas,
1999) are not really applicable to second language learning and teaching because lin-
guistic rights are concerned with the use, maintenance, development, and learning
of native—usually minority—languages and related cultures by those born into these
languages and cultures. It is also a fallacy to think that in order to maintain European
plurilinguality, people should be made to learn the minor languages, even if they have
no personal need for them (see, van Els, 2002, p. 347).

Factors Relevant to the Status Planning Process

The prime preoccupation in status planning for second language learning and teach-
ing is the choice of the second languages that need to be learned and taught. The
second languages that are provided for in the educational system should be selected
in such a way that the country’s current and future needs for second languages are
satisfied in an optimal way. Needs, therefore, are an important factor to consider in the
status planning process; moreover, it is of the utmost importance to be very specific
about what these needs are and to what extent they are felt in the country. Such questions
as “How great is the demand for each individual second language?” or “Does every
citizen have a need for the same linguistic skills, or the same level of command of
those skills?” or “Is there a stable needs pattern?” must be answered before solutions
can be proposed in national policy to questions like “Is it necessary for all citizens
or just for specific professional groups to receive instruction in a particular second
language?” or “How many languages, and which languages, are required?” To arrive
at satisfactory answers to such questions, needs research is vital.
However, even if needs analysis research findings are to be the most significant
source for a national policy, due consideration must be taken of things like the lan-
guage policies advocated by neighboring countries, the level of difficulty of individual
 53. STATUS PLANNING 975

second languages, or the availability in the educational system of suitable teaching

materials and adequately trained teachers. National policy decisions based only on
needs data, however carefully gathered and analyzed, may well fail to meet the de-
sired objectives.

Levels and Types of Status Planning Decisions

Second language status policies may differ in a great many respects. In the process
leading up to a final policy statement, a variety of types of decisions have to be taken,
based on individual and group expertise.
First, the possible decision-making “agents” in the process have to consider the vari-
ous aspects on which decisions are based, even when using a restricted definition of
second language status planning focusing on what to learn and teach. This question
includes issues like: Whether or not to learn and/or teach (a) second language(s) at
all, which language(s) to what level(s) by/to whom, and which varieties or aspects of
the language(s) to select. The most obvious decision-making agents for formulating
a national second language learning and teaching policy include: the pupils, their
parents or caretakers, the teachers, the school authorities, the local and/or regional
authorities, the school inspectors, and the national government. Roughly speaking,
there are three levels: the school, the region, and the nation, each with their sub-levels
(see e.g., van Els, 1993, p. 9, 1994, p. 36); others identify the major agents as individu-
als, communities, and states (Ager, 2001, p. 6). The authority that the decisions made
at these levels have, clearly differs—decisions of individual teachers have an impact
only within their classrooms, whereas regional decisions hold for all schools within a
region and national decisions for all schools in the country.
In planning for second language learning and teaching on a national scale the first
issue to settle is where or with whom or at which level the authority lies with respect
to the various decisions that have to be made. A national policy holds a clear pro-
nouncement on the distribution of planning authority, both with respect to who carries
authority for what and what kind or type of authority that is. But, a policy truly na-
tional in the above sense is not to be seen as synonymous with a fully centralized policy.
Centralization refers to the degree to which policy decisions are made at the national
level and that varies by country depending on history, traditions, and geographic and
demographic make-up of the country—for example, the number of inhabitants and
the ethnic stratification of the population. However, subject-related arguments for
government interference also exist. Because of their present international surround-
ings, European countries all have a national ruling that one or more second languages
should be offered in all secondary schools. Some countries have a national specifi-
cation as to the minimum number of second languages that pupils should actually
learn; others even have a ruling as to which specific second language(s) everybody
should be taught. The degree of specification is largely determined by the quality
of the insight policymakers have into the various policy-relevant factors. (See later
sections on “Second Language Needs” and “Other Factors.”)
The introduction of the notion of degrees of specification leads to a discussion of the
second issue in this section, that is, types of planning statements. For example, in the
following list of statements, there is an increasing degree of specification:

r That there should be second language learning and teaching in schools.

r That schools should offer a particular number of second languages for the pupils
to take.
r That pupils should learn a particular number of languages.
r That specific languages should be offered.
r That pupils should learn particular languages.
976 VAN ELS

Specificity is one feature that may lead to distinctions between types of decisions;
another such feature is the degree of obligation or compulsion that decisions imply
for the learners. Big differences exist among countries regarding the degree to which
second language learning is an obligatory subject for pupils, ranging from the freedom
to choose not to learn any second languages to the obligation to go through centrally
defined curricula with centrally run final examinations in a specified number of second
languages (e.g., Lambert, 1997, p. 82).

SECOND LANGUAGE NEEDS

There has been little principled discussion in the second language learning and teach-
ing planning literature of the needs issue (van Els, 1994, p. 37). The fairly recent
Encyclopedia of Language and Education, which has a separate volume on “Language
Policy and Political Issues in Education” (Wodak & Corson, 1997), doesn’t have a
separate chapter on the subject of needs, treating it only in passing (see Christ, 1997a).
The more recent Encyclopedia of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education (Baker & Prys
Jones, 1998) mentions it very briefly. In the latter case, as in many others, the subject of
needs is only brought up in connection with the work of the Modern Languages Pro-
gramme of the Council of Europe, which employs a very limited interpretation of that
notion.
The notion of needs draws on typical arguments summarized by van Els, Bon-
gaerts, Extra, Van Os, and Janssen-van Dieten (1984) in favor of the learning of second
languages first collected by Rivers (1968, pp. 8–9); the advantages of second language
learning usually cited represent a curious collection:

r It aids intellectual development.

r It aids cultural development by bringing pupils into contact with the literature
written in other languages.
r It enriches pupils’ personalities by bringing them into contact with other customs,
norms, and ways of thinking.
r It deepens the understanding of the way in which language, also the native
language, works.
r It enables pupils to communicate with speakers of a different language.
r It contributes to better international relations.

They are all—it should be stressed—valid arguments in favor of learning second

languages. A closer look at them, however, shows immediately that the list, restricted
as it is, contains arguments falling into a number of different categories, which can
be hard to balance against one another when difficult choices have to be made. For
example, when one has to make a case for the introduction of second language teaching
into a school system at the expense of another subject for which some of the same
arguments are equally valid, or especially when a choice between languages has to be
made. Only in cases when in general terms an argument has to be made for second
language learning as such—as in the United States or Great Britain, whose national
language has such a wide distribution that there does not seem to be any desperate
need of acquiring competence in any other language—is a random accumulation of
arguments such as these helpful.
In the next section we first discuss the various types of needs that we think should—
and may fruitfully—be distinguished. From Rivers’ (1968) list it is clear that there
are other factors other than needs that may be brought up as arguments for second
language learning. These are dealt with in the subsequent section “Other Factors.” In
a separate subsection, the question of how needs can be empirically investigated is
examined.
 53. STATUS PLANNING 977

Types of Needs
So far we have assumed that needs have to do with the underlying—whether explicitly
recognized or latently felt—wants, drives, deficits, or other motivating factors that
make an individual require a command of a particular second language and, thus,
serve as urgent motives to learn the language. However, it is more complex than that.
In recent reviews of the concept, it has been shown that the term is open to several
interpretations. For example, Clark (1999, p. 539) points out that the term has also
been used for learner characteristics (e.g., age, motivation, preferred learning style)
that may affect the learning process, whereas others also understand it to mean “what
learners will need to do in the learning situation in order to learn” (Brindley, 2000,
p. 438; see also Clark, 1999). It is highly preferable, however, to restrict the use of the
term to the drives and wants that require an individual to learn a second language.
Other interpretations that may represent aspects and factors in the learning process,
in as far as they are relevant to status planning, will be accommodated in our model
under the category of “Other Factors Besides Needs.” Other aspects and factors, such
as learning styles and motivation, clearly should find a place in language-in-education
planning or in prestige planning.
Returning to the subject of needs in the restricted sense of the term, arguments for
second language learning, such as the ones given previously, are all in one way or
another statements of needs, however distantly. It is not uncommon, when attempts
at defining or categorizing needs are undertaken, to divide needs into pairs of polar
opposites, like individual versus societal or national. From a planning point of view,
such divisions are not very useful, as societal needs cannot be separated from indi-
vidual needs—societal needs are always transformable into, that is, have been derived
from, the individual needs of (a number of) members of that society. In essence, all
educational needs are individual. On the other hand, not all individual needs are also
societal; they only take on a societal dimension when society declares needs of (groups
of) individuals important enough to take them into account when formulating a na-
tional educational policy. In the same way, other common polar opposite pairs (e.g.,
nonutilitarian, cultural, or formative versus utilitarian, directly useful, or capitalizable) do
not provide any clear-cut distinctions. Furthermore, talking about the issues in these
terms may lead people to carelessly equating utilitarian with political and practical
(Phillips, 1989, p. xiv).
In sum, from the distinctions proposed, inadequate as they are, it becomes clear
that needs, when taken in their restricted sense, may be very different in character.
However, these distinctions do not supply a categorization that could form a proper
basis for status planning discussions. A more helpful criterion for distinguishing be-
tween needs than the ones used so far, lies in the degree of communicative competence
required to fulfill a need (see van Els et al., 1984, p. 162; van Els, 1994, pp. 37–38). On
the basis of that criterion, three broad categories of needs may be distinguished:

1. Communicative needs: one may want to be competent in a particular second lan-

guage in order to be able to communicate effectively with speakers of that language.
2. Language competence-related needs: one may want to become familiar, for example,
with the way of life, culture, and, more specifically, the literature of another people
with a differing language; competence in the second language in which that culture
is embedded and in which the literary texts are written, is not, strictly speaking, a
prerequisite to fulfill this need.
3. Needs distantly, or not at all, related to language competence: one wants to acquire
particular social and/or intellectual skills of a general nature, such as empathy and
rational thinking; such general educational objectives may be pursued equally well, or
possibly better, through the learning and teaching of a variety of other school subjects
than second languages.
978 VAN ELS

The three categories of needs—which together can easily accommodate all the
needs underlying Rivers’ (1968) arguments—show different degrees of relationship
with actual second language competence with the relationship becoming more indi-
rect and more diffuse as one proceeds down the list. With needs of the third category,
the relationship is very tenuous—there are many other ways to satisfy the needs than
by being made to learn a second language. With those of the first category, there is no
way around acquiring some degree of actual competence in the second language(s),
although this may not apply to the needs of the second category. Literary texts can
best be read in the original language, which presupposes a high command of the sec-
ond language making it very common for people to read them in translation. A better
understanding of speakers of other languages in general and their cultures may be
brought about by providing for the learning and teaching of just one second language,
no matter which one, even when it is taught through mother-tongue instruction.
The great advantage of applying the criterion of actual second language compe-
tence is that it clarifies the issue considerably when choices between second languages
have to be made or when the cause of second language teaching as such in the school
curriculum has to be defended against other subjects. Only if needs of the first cate-
gory can be demonstrated, can a clear case be made for second language teaching as
such. That is why it is so hard in a country like the United States to secure a place for
second language teaching in the secondary school curricula. Although as a package
Rivers’ (1968) arguments may be valid or convincing, they fail to clinch the argument
for second languages in schools for Americans who are in a position to use their native
tongue in large parts of the world. When abroad, they (are given the impression that
they) can cope without any competence in any second language (see e.g., Lambert,
1994, p. 55). In most countries of the world, on the other hand, the question is not
so much “Should we learn a second language?” but rather “Which language(s), how
many of them, and which skills should be learned to what levels of competence?”
In such cases, first category needs are more important than those in the other two
categories.
However, the conclusion just drawn should not be misunderstood. It should not
lead people to think that category two and three needs can be treated as quantité
négligeable. They may be very valuable objectives to realize in second language teach-
ing, and in status planning they should be accounted for, even if needs of the first
category have led to a choice of one particular second language. Therefore, needs re-
search cannot and should not be restricted to investigating only category one needs,
but should be set up in such a way that the need for actual second language compe-
tence is determined as unequivocally as possible.

Needs Research
What the needs just discussed all have in common is that they reside in and originate
from the individual as (prospective) second language user. From that point of view
the needs factor differs fundamentally from all the Other Factors discussed in the
next section. The other factors are all either external to the individual person or, in
as far as they are internal, they relate to the individual as a learning person, not as a
user of (second) languages. In developing a status plan for second language learning
and teaching, data related to all factors must be collected empirically and taken into
consideration. However, this chapter is restricted to research into needs as they have
been previously defined.1
Because research into needs would seem to be a necessary complement to status
planning for second language learning and teaching, it is surprising that such research
is a relatively late development and, moreover, has been a rare phenomenon even in
recent times. Early summaries were presented by Bausch, Bliesener, Christ, Schröder,
 53. STATUS PLANNING 979

& Weisbrod (1978, pp. 375–405) and Christ (1980, pp. 87–102) and the state of the art
until about 1980—regarding a number of European countries, the United States, and
Australia—was discussed at an international gathering of experts in 1982 (see van Els
& Oud-de Glas, 1983). Christ’s (1991, pp. 48–53) brief summary or more recent review
articles by Clark (1999) and Brindley (2000) provide few recent references.
What research there is has been mostly conducted in the context of second lan-
guage teaching for business and commerce, that is, in connection with special pur-
pose programs. It is striking how few countries seem to have had recourse to empirical
investigations of the nation’s second language needs; notable exceptions being The
Netherlands in the late 1970s (van Els et al., 1984, p. 166), the Belgian replication of
the Dutch investigations in the early 1980s (Verdoodt & Sente, 1983) and, to some
extent, Finland in the second half of the decade (Takala, 1993). In Australia, where the
development of an all-encompassing national languages policy has been given much
attention, empirical assessment of the second language needs was not the basis of the
status planning proposals in that field (see e.g., Clyne, 1991).
It also seems significant to note how seldom these investigations are included
in research reviews (e.g., Arrouays, 1990; Brindley, 1989, 2000; Clark, 1999; Phillips,
1989). Exceptions are to be found in publications stemming from or inspired by the
National Foreign Language Center in Washington, DC (see e.g., Lambert, 1997; Spol-
sky & Shohamy, 1997, 2000). Needs analysis and research are still associated almost
exclusively by many with the work performed in connection with the Modern Lan-
guages Programme of the Council of Europe. This very influential program and its
philosophy are presented following a discussion of some general aspects relating to
needs research design. A lengthier introduction into needs research design is to be
found in van Els & Oud-de Glas (1983, pp. 3–12) and in Van Hest & Oud-de Glas
(1991, pp. 7–21).
When examining the need for communicative competence, it is necessary to have
further defined:
r What we understand by communicative competence.
r Who is in need of communicative competence.
r What exactly to be in need of means.
Communicative competence is generally understood in its wider and “richer” meaning
first developed in some detail in the context of the Council of Europe program (see
e.g., Trim, 1994; Van Ek, 2000; Van Ek & Alexander, 1975). There is not only linguistic
competence involved (i.e., the ability to use the rules of the language adequately), but
also an additional set of five competences, namely:
r Sociolinguistic: an awareness of the ways in which such conditions as setting and
relationships between communication partners determine the choice of language
forms.
r Discourse: the ability to construct and interpret written and oral texts.
r Strategic: the ability to cope with gaps in the language user’s command of the
language.
r Sociocultural: an awareness of the ways in which the context of language use
affects the choice of language forms.
r Social: the ability to use general social strategies.
Without debating the merits of distinguishing this particular set of (sub)components,
the point being made is that when assessing the need for communicative competence,
a richer concept than just linguistic is being examined. Moreover, if it is done properly,
there is no necessity to separately assess other aspects, such as sociocultural or strategic
980 VAN ELS

competence. Such an approach means that in needs research one cannot restrict oneself
to investigating only the linguistic content (i.e., phonological, grammatical, or lexical
content), nor to describing communicative competence in terms of the four macro-
skills (i.e., speaking, writing, listening, and reading). Rather, one relies on a situational
and functional description of language, such as the one that formed the model of
specification for the behavioral second language teaching objectives developed in the
context of the Council of Europe program. In the model, the following components
are specified (see Van Ek & Alexander, 1975, p. 5; Van Ek, 2000):

r The situations in which the second language user will find himself, including the
topics occurring in them and the relevant settings, and social and psychological roles.
r The language activities or the skills the user will engage in.
r The language functions to be fulfilled, such as giving information or turning down
an offer.
r The notions that the user will have to handle.
r The language forms, such as lexical or syntactic elements.
r An indication of the degree of skill needed.

In a research model that relies mainly on a situational and functional description,

situations are indicated in which the second language may be used and also the
functions that the user must be able to perform. This leads to questionnaire items
like writing a short businesslike letter (in relation to e.g., holidays or a hobby) or
giving or receiving oral instructions or advice specifically related to one’s work. This
type of questions is very helpful from two different perspectives: the nonspecialist
can actually understand them, but the answers offer material for detailed linguistic
analysis.
Who it is whose needs should be investigated depends on the aim and scope of the
research project. One may be interested in finding out about the needs of particular
sectors of society, of particular individuals or groups of individuals, but one may also
be interested in establishing a nationwide picture. The thing to keep in mind is that
the subject of the needs investigated does not necessarily coincide with the person(s)
questioned.
What constitutes the object of needs research is not as straightforward as it may
seem, even if there is agreement that the analysis should result in a description of
what aspects of communicative competence are sought, to what level, under what
circumstances, and when. Different needs research projects and related discussions
tend to approach the problem from a number of different perspectives. A common
practice is not to describe the need per se, but to follow a narrower definition of the
term, namely, need as lack of competence, that is, to focus on “the gap between the for-
eign language competence required and the amount of foreign language competence
available on the part of the language user” (Van Hest & Oud-de Glas, 1991, p. 10).
In addition, German scholars often make a distinction between Bedarf and Bedürfnisse
(see Christ, 1991, p. 50), which Clark (1987, p. 106) defines as “socially agreed objective
needs” and “individually determined subjective needs” respectively. The difference,
however, between the two is not so much a difference in kind—which terms such as
objective and subjective suggest—as in status. Other perspectives that people have
taken vary most notably along the following two axes:

r A time axis, that is, actually experienced needs (present) versus expected needs
(future).
r An awareness axis, that is, actually felt needs (explicit) versus hidden, not-felt
needs (latent).
 53. STATUS PLANNING 981

As for the time axis, if one is planning for the future, it is insufficient to rely on a
simple description of present experience. As for the awareness axis, an assessment by
(groups of) individuals of their own present and future felt needs may not lay bare
language needs that may well be essential to them personally—or to the organization
or nation to which they belong—but of which they are not aware. It is a well-known
fact that people tend to avoid, either consciously or unconsciously, getting into com-
munication situations for which they fear they lack the appropriate language skills.
Finally, the language competence required as a consequence of strategic decisions re-
garding opening up new commercial markets for a firm or new political alliances for
a country is not likely to be something that individuals are aware of personally. In this
context, Van Hest & Oud-de Glas (1991) speak of (the need for) language competence
as a key asset.
As for needs research methods, there are, basically, three possible routes to take in
order sto arrive at an assessment of the need for language competence:
r Collecting factual data on the language(s) in question, as, for example, its inter-
national status and the number of its speakers.
r Collecting people’s opinions on present or future second language performance.
r Recording of actual second language performance in relevant language use situa-
tions.

The first route, that is, the gathering of indicators indicative of communicative
needs, is a very indirect way to gain an insight into actual language competence needs
and, therefore, usually involves a great deal of interpreting of the findings. A recent
example based on such factual data is The Nuffield Languages Inquiry in Great Britain
(Nuffield Foundation, 2000), a large-scale investigation undertaken at the request
of the government into both the country’s second languages needs and its present
language capability. Besides an intensive program of interviews aimed at gaining
information on people’s experiences with and the advice of experts on second lan-
guage use, major surveys were conducted of data indicative of second language use
in the public and the private sectors. Merkx (2000) provides another example where
estimates and findings concerning government and business manpower needs for
personnel trained in second languages and area studies play a prominent role.
The third route, that is, the recording of actual second language use, is the least
commonly followed. Recording of sufficient and sufficiently relevant samples of actual
second language use is usually very difficult to achieve and is, moreover, very costly.
Most projects, therefore, heavily rely on methodology of the second route, that is
gathering information on present and/or future second language use from people
who have direct experience with the second language domains. The people with
that kind of experience may be divided into two groups. One may interrogate the
individuals who are in need of second language competence, that is, the so-called
users, but one may also interrogate persons who are in direct contact with the users,
for example, employers or personnel managers, that is, the so-called requirers.

Other Factors
Besides the obviously important needs factor, other numerous and diverse factors
have to be taken into account in status planning, either because they have an intrin-
sic value of their own or because they present an obstacle to achieving a particular
learning objective. They may be usefully grouped into four categories, although it
is necessary to point out that there is no strict separation between the factors and
that sometimes there is overlap with the needs category. These factors are briefly
summarized in the following sections.
982 VAN ELS

Language Policy Factors

There are internal and external language policy factors to be considered. The internal
languages situation of a country, where a number of languages—whether indige-
nous or nonindigenous—are spoken, requires primary attention. Learning another
language of the country is often given priority over learning a second language from
abroad. Moreover, the choice of a second language(s) may be made dependent on
what languages the country has internally. The position of French, for example, as a
second language is likely to be different in The Netherlands than in Belgium, where
the language also has the status of national language, and, therefore, serves another
national purpose as well. It has also been argued that learning the languages of ethnic
minorities as second languages by members of the majority may further the cause of
the minority groups of the country and promote national cohesion. This, some would
say, could be a strong argument for breaking up the traditional second languages
curriculum, for example, in a country like The Netherlands where Frisian might be
given greater prominence. (Van der Avoird, Broeder, & Extra, 2001, p. 232.)
However, primacy may be given to the external languages situation, which may
have a number of language-related aspects that impact on national status planning
for second language learning and teaching. The focus is not so much the pressure
that foreign countries put on other nations to pay proper attention to the learning
of their languages, but the need for intercultural communication. The needs as of
the receiving nation should be the decisive factor, not the interest that the native
speakers of a particular language have in promoting their language for international
communication (see e.g., Ammon, 2000).
Another factor may be the desire to make special provision for learning the lan-
guages spoken in neighboring countries, irrespective of the status of those countries
or of their languages in the rest of the world. Moreover, a country also has to take into
account the language situation of the international alliances and organizations it be-
longs to, in particular the (second) languages policies pursued by such organizations.
Cases in point are provided by the situation in the European Union (EU) where the
learning of EU languages, in particular those of the neighboring countries, is strongly
advocated and, to some extent, also supported to promote mobility and cohesion.
Such a policy is the natural corollary of the decision that the monolingual option is
not an acceptable basis for greater European integration (see Ager, 2001, p. 72).
As to the extent to which the institutional language policy of international organiza-
tions should be taken into account in national planning for second language learning
and teaching it should have an impact on national second language planning only in as
far as it engenders an actual second language competence need for the country. From
this perspective it is hardly relevant whether a choice is made for a monolingual or a
plurilingual international institutional model. The only decisive fact is the amount of
second language competence the country’s representatives require to be able to func-
tion adequately in the institutions in question. On the whole, the number of people
actually representing a country forms only a small proportion of its population and
their competence needs, while high, are, therefore, comparatively negligible.

Linguistic Factors
Languages are related to each other to different degrees—members of families of
languages may be very closely related. The greater the distance between individual
languages, the fewer features of vocabulary and syntax they share and, in general,
the heavier the learning load for those who have to acquire a competence in the re-
spective second language. Language distance is a factor, therefore, that may have to be
taken into account in status planning because of its learnability and cross-linguistic
 53. STATUS PLANNING 983

transfer impact (see e.g., Odlin, 1989). Given space in the curriculum, choices be-
tween languages that otherwise show a comparable needs pattern may be made based
on the time needed to obtain the required competence level or the degree to which
the learning of the language in question may facilitate the subsequent acquisition
of skills in other related languages. For similar reasons, in cases where there is very
little need for specific second language teaching, the introduction of a planned lan-
guage, like Esperanto, or a lingua franca has been advocated (see e.g., Christ, 1997a,
p. 130).

Psychological Factors
A number of aspects of bilingualism and second language learning are relevant when
policy choices have to be made regarding, for example, which second language to
teach first, whether more languages can be learned simultaneously (and, if so, how
many), and at what age to start second language teaching. Besides the competence
needs factor, the optimal age for learning second languages is an important factor to
be taken into consideration.
Other such psychological considerations, related to language distance, are the per-
ceived ease or difficulty of learning particular languages and subskills. As for the
former, the learning of Japanese, or for that matter French, offers more obstacles to
native speakers of Dutch than the learning of English or German. However, that de-
gree of difficulty does not correlate directly with degree of structural (dis)similarity
between the languages because people’s perceptions of learning difficulty can be im-
portant. For example, although German may be considered to be linguistically more
closely related to Dutch than English, Dutch secondary school pupils generally hold
German to be the more problematic language (Oud-de Glas 1997, p. 44). However, this
perception is not shared by older generations, who believe that German is the easier
language to learn. When it comes to the relative difficulty of learning the subskills,
there is a generally held assumption that acquiring the productive skills of speak-
ing and writing is more difficult than acquiring listening and reading. However, the
policymaking relevance of this may be counterbalanced by another psychological fac-
tor, namely, that learners, also the less gifted, tend to be more motivated to learn the
productive skills, in particular, speaking.

Educational Factors
Aspects of the educational context may have an overriding influence on the process of
status planning. Perhaps the most important of such factors is that the time available
for second language teaching is nearly always limited, especially in secondary educa-
tion systems, where a great many other subject areas claim a place in the curriculum.
The time constraint is particularly pressing in countries where the demand for second
languages is great. Under those circumstances there is usually much less room for
adopting a noncommittal attitude toward questions regarding which languages to
offer, whether to make learning them obligatory, and at what age to make pupils start
learning second languages (See “Specific Aspects of Actual Status Planning Decisions”
for more on obligation and articulation).
Other important and very obvious educational factors lie in the availability of suit-
able teaching materials and adequately trained teachers. Lacking these, introducing a
second language in the school curriculum makes no sense. The well-documented, very
disappointing results of the British experiment with French in primary schools have in
part been attributed to the lack of suitable teaching materials and to the methodology
adopted (Buckby, 1976, p. 345).
984 VAN ELS

A NATIONAL SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING

AND TEACHING POLICY

The ultimate aim of status planning for second language learning is the formulation
of a second language learning and teaching policy with a national scope. Specifically
with a view to exploring the development of a national policy, the next two sections
return to the roles that both needs and other factors have to play, before several features
of a truly national policy are discussed.

A National Needs Picture

When devising a national policy, information on the needs of the country should be
drawn from as great a variety of sectors, sources, and respondents in a society as
possible. Empirically based needs research, if properly conducted, yields a picture of
the needs of both individual persons and specific groups of individuals, for example,
the vocational needs of employees of particular industries or the personal needs of the
general public. If, on the basis of such findings, a second language teaching in general
education policy has to be formulated for the country as a whole, a separate effort has
to be made to infer the national needs pattern required for that purpose. The different
needs data, possibly representing diverging needs patterns, have to be integrated
into an overall, national needs picture. Simply combining the data from various,
often dissimilar, sources concerning various, often conflicting, fields of activity and
interest is unlikely to produce a usable result. For example, the vocational needs
for second languages, collected from extensive interview sessions, may have to be
weighed against leisure time needs, based on statistical data from the tourist industry.
The decisions as to how much weight to allot in a national needs pattern to the needs of
such interest groups as business and commerce, culture and arts, and general interest
are political decisions. A national needs pattern never transpires automatically from
research findings.

Weighing Up All Policy Factors

When in second language learning and teaching planning a proper assessment of
the national needs pattern has been arrived at, the moment has come to consider
the contribution that other factors make to the planning process. Such factors can
impact the planning outcome, interacting in all sorts of ways depending on the specific
circumstances under which a national policy has been devised. Two examples from
The Netherlands demonstrate this point.
First, with regard to the teaching of English, there is no doubt whatsoever that
all Dutch nationals need to acquire a usually fairly high command of the language.
Taken by itself the needs side suggests that all Dutch citizens should learn English
and, what is more, should learn it as early as possible. Such considerations have also
been the basis for the decision to select English for the more or less exclusive position
of the first language to be taught to all primary school pupils in the country. However,
the self-evident preferred position of English in the Dutch educational system has
been queried (De Bot, 2000). The omnipresence of English in Dutch society is, in itself,
very supportive of the acquisition of English, both from the point of view of actual
competence acquisition and, also, from the point of view of motivation. On the one
hand, in a sense there is no escaping picking up the language; on the other hand, the
need for it is so evident to everyone that the Dutch require few external motivational
incentives to learn it. Therefore, De Bot proposes that (part of) the time now devoted
to primary school English would be better spent on either German or French. In
the light of the massive national need for languages, the room in schools for second
 53. STATUS PLANNING 985

language teaching is comparatively limited and what room there is should, therefore,
be allocated with care.
The other example concerns the introduction several years ago of the so-called
partial qualifications for French and German in upper secondary education. In a na-
tionwide investigation of the second language needs of the country—conducted in
the late 1970s and revisited in the late 1980s—convincing evidence was found for not
only an overwhelming need for English but also a considerable need for French and
German, especially among sectors of society catered to by upper secondary education
(see Oud-de Glas, 1983; van Els & Van Hest, 1992). In an attempt to reconcile the gen-
erally agreed desirability to make all three languages obligatory subjects for everyone
in upper secondary education—on the one hand, a return to the situation that had
once been the practice and on the other hand the scarcity of curricular time—only par-
tial qualifications were made obligatory for French, and German, that is, only reading
comprehension, the skill for which the universities had expressed a preference, was
included in the set of final examination requirements for the languages in question.
However, what seemed to be a perfect compromise has not been the success that ed-
ucational planners had expected. Opposition to the partial qualification solution has
grown in the few years since it was introduced to such a degree that abolition of the
concept is on the present political agenda. It is unnecessary in this discussion to ex-
pand on the reasons for its rejection by teachers. In developing a seemingly obvious
and rationalistic compromise, the planners had overlooked the views and feelings
that the professionals in the field, a major factor in the educational context, had on
what constitutes language competence and on how second languages must be taught.

A National Policy
In previous sections, “Types of Needs” and “Needs Research,” a number of things
were mentioned that concern national planning for second language learning and
teaching, that is, the national plan should state which decision-making agents have
which specific planning responsibilities for what planning issues and to what degree
of specificity. Some of the aspects of this are discussed in more explicit terms in the
following section, but there is one feature of a truly national policy that still needs to
be discussed.
In general, planning statements tend to be limited in scope. Many, actually, focus
exclusively on (general) secondary education. There may also be specific attention for
the less commonly taught languages (LCTs). A truly national policy, however, sets
out to be all-encompassing, both with regard to the demand for second languages—it
should not only deal with the academic need for languages—and with the supply
of second languages and second language teaching. Thus, not only the facilities pro-
vided in secondary education should be considered, but the whole gamut of all edu-
cational sectors, including nongovernment-funded private language instruction (see
e.g., Christ, 1991, p. 66). This is not to say that drawing up proposals for secondary
education only is illegitimate in itself, but in doing so one should be aware of how this
sector relates to all other sectors in which second language teaching is provided. In
many countries the demand for second language competence is so great that catering
for it only in secondary education is out of the question. A case in point, again, is The
Netherlands (see van Els & Van Hest, 1992, p. 33; for another quite different example
in Tunisia see Daoud, 2001).
Statistics on second language provision in the school systems, that is, primary and
lower and upper general secondary education, for a great many European countries,
can be found in a recent publication of the European Union (see Eurydice, 2001).
Because private initiatives outside the school system, such as language courses offered
by enterprises or local authorities, are not covered, a full insight into the second
986 VAN ELS

language learning and teaching policy of the countries involved cannot be gained from
the publication. Bergentoft (1994) presents a comparative survey of second language
teaching in a number of European countries, including Russia and Japan, but it is
equally focused on the government-sponsored sectors of mainly secondary education
and, thus, doesn’t give a full picture either.
National second language teaching policies, that is, policies with a wider coverage
than just the primary, secondary, and higher sectors of the regular school system, are
very rare. For example, in Finland, where second language teaching policy has been
an issue of great importance since the early 1960s, the policy proposals have only dealt
with the regular school system, in particular primary and secondary education. An
interesting feature of the Finnish effort has been that, on the basis of needs analyses, ed-
ucational measures have been proposed aimed at achieving explicitly stated national
quantitative and qualitative targets (Latomaa & Nuolijärvi, 2002; Sajavaara, 1997;
Takala, 1993, p. 59). Therefore, there are only a few instances that may be called national
in the sense that they are also oriented toward out-of-school, mainly adult, learning
of languages (see e.g., Lambert, 1997, p. 80). The most recent instance is the Nuffield
Languages Inquiry with recommendations for second language learning and teaching
in England and Wales, which, for example, explicitly calls on the government to take
strategic responsibility for lifelong language learning (Nuffield Foundation, 2000).
The Australian national languages policy that was developed in the late 1980s,
primarily to support the language-in-education policies developed by the States (Ager,
2001, p. 95; Clyne, 1991; Lo Bianco, 1987). It had a wider coverage than second language
learning and teaching, taking as its central focus the internal languages situation of
the country, in particular the place and function of the languages other than English
(LOTE). The central principle of the national policy was that Australia is a multilingual
society that has renounced the pursuit of the ideal of the one-language-only nation,
but revisions to this policy since 1991 have put a greater emphasis on English (Kaplan
& Baldauf, 2003, p. 143). The major policy instrument is the stimulation of as many
language learning opportunities as possible, both within and outside of the regular
school system.
The final instance that deserves mention is the National Action Programme on Foreign
Languages of The Netherlands drawn up around 1990 (van Els & Van Hest, 1992; see
also, e.g., Lambert, 1994, 1997; van Els, 1993, 1994). Although the National Action Pro-
gramme is a set of second language policy recommendations, that cover both school
system and out-of-school educational provision and that were developed in relation
one with the other, they were not formulated as a fully integrated document stand-
ing in its own right. Nevertheless, the full set of recommendations became official
government policy in 1992 with the establishment of a Task Force commissioned to
implement the recommendations (see Tuin & Westhoff, 1997). The distinguishing fea-
tures of the Dutch enterprise are not only its scope, but also its being based to a large
extent on the outcomes of empirical needs research. The Dutch undertaking, which
has attracted quite a bit of international attention (see e.g., Christ, 1997b; Spolsky &
Shohamy, 1997), arose from a conference held at the instigation of national organi-
zations in business and commerce and organized by the Dutch government. Almost
simultaneously, that is, in the late 1980s, a similar conference took place in France (see
Arrouays, 1990), which was not government convened and which did not lead to a
similar national action plan.

SPECIFIC ASPECTS OF ACTUAL STATUS PLANNING DECISIONS

There are number of specific aspects of the actual planning process that deserve fur-
ther treatment in the status planning context, but only two, namely, the obligatory/
 53. STATUS PLANNING 987

nonobligatory question and the need for articulation across levels for (a) particular
language(s) are discussed. Other aspects deserving attention include:

r International perspectives on second language planning, in particular the need

that growing international mobility has created for making second language compe-
tence comparable and, therefore, measurable across national educational systems and
across languages, for example, the Common European Framework (see Trim, 2000) and
European Language Portfolio (see Dobson, 2000).
r The role that so-called language-enablers might play in national second language
planning, for example, the use of the internet or several kinds of translation services
(see Lambert, 2000, p. 181).

Obligatory or Nonobligatory Second Language Learning

As previously indicated, great differences exist between countries in the degree to
which second language learning is made obligatory for the learners in the school
system depending on the national policy decision as to which decision-making agent
the authority is assigned to regarding how many and which language(s) to learn. The
wide array of different national arrangements that result all can be justified and none
is preferable, as long as the assignment of decision-making authority is based on a
proper weighing up of all the policy factors. However, the issue of diversification
requires some further discussion.
Diversification is sometimes a hotly debated issue in discussions about how many
and which languages ought to be offered to, and/or should be chosen by, pupils or, for
that matter, schools, in primary and especially secondary education (see e.g., Christ,
1991; Phillips, 1989; van Els, 1988, p. 59, 1994, p. 40). Diversification refers to expanding
the number of languages offered and implies extending the freedom of choice for
the learners. Various forms of diversification may be distinguished. For instance, it
may apply both to the obligatory and to the nonobligatory segment of the second
language curriculum. As is the case in many countries, there may be an obligation for
all pupils in secondary education to learn at least one second language, while at the
same time the choice of that language is left to the learners. Furthermore, when there
is an increase in the demand in a country for second languages, that may be translated
into an expansion of the number of languages offered to pupils and/or programs in
schools to choose from. Such a policy is often advocated and justified mainly on the
argument that the learners themselves know best where their interests lie and that
over time their specific individual choices taken together will yield the outcome that
is optimally suited to the country’s needs pattern. But, when all the evidence points
to an overall need for learning one particular language—English being a case in point
in many countries—what purpose is served by leaving it to individual learners to
choose another second language that is against their own interest?
There are other questions that could be raised in connection with what seems to be
a good idea in principle. Even in the circumstance where the need for second language
learning remains unspecified or that the need is rather diffuse with respect to which
specific language(s) would serve the country’s purposes best, offering a seemingly
unlimited number of languages may not be the best answer. For one thing, when
there is so much choice, clear ideas about aims and levels to be achieved in any of
these languages may be lacking and may not seem to be an urgent matter. Moreover,
offering many optional languages may lead to a fragmentation of the attention that
each of these languages receives, in particular in such matters as the development of
teaching materials, the training of qualified teachers and the required research effort.
The notion of diversification, although very attractive at first sight, may produce
actual outcomes that belie the high hopes that usually accompanied its introduction
988 VAN ELS

(see, e.g., Phillips, 1989, p. xi). Instead of offering as many optional languages as
possible for schools and/or pupils to choose from, as an easy way out, (at one time
the national curriculum of England and Wales offered a choice of 19 languages—
see e.g., Clark, 1989, p. 119), it normally would be better to articulate more precisely
what the country’s second language needs are. Comparing the highly decentralized
American approach with the highly centralized Dutch approach to second language
learning and teaching planning, in particular for secondary education, Lambert (1997)
suggests that the Americans “would be well advised to examine the Dutch example
closely to determine afresh whether the pattern of total disaggregation of planning
and decision-making so prevalent in America is fully effective” (p. 28).

Planning Second Languages Articulation

Planning for what the Americans call articulation and the British call progression is
critically important. In the analyses of the Nuffield Languages Inquiry it is concluded
that there is a lack of coherence in the governmental approach to the field of second
language teaching in the educational system. What is needed is a rational path of
learning from primary school to university and beyond (Nuffield Foundation, 2000).
As Lambert (2000) notes, an effective second language learning and teaching plan
“should include all levels and forms of instruction and use” (p. 184). We have already
stressed that a truly national policy deserving of that name should cover all sectors
in which language education is provided, that is, it should be all-encompassing. In
the planning process, the focus should be on the architecture of the system, that is,
on “what the building blocks are and how they can be assembled.” Lambert (1994)
blames the disappointing results of American second language teaching on the inef-
fectual structure of the system, not on “how we teach” (p. 49). Elsewhere he speaks of
“the essentially laissez-faire system in the United States” (Lambert, 1997, p. 85). Dis-
regarding or ignoring the existence of the potential contributions each sector makes
to second languages may lead to losses of several types. In many countries there is a
strong tendency to more or less exclusively look to either secondary or higher educa-
tion to satisfy whatever second language needs have been revealed (see e.g., van Els,
1994, p. 40; Lambert, 1994, p. 49). This often leads to overtaxing the possibilities of the
educational sector in question, both quantitatively and qualitatively. That is to say, on
the one hand, one expects to be able to accommodate additional languages where the
available space has already been taken up by other languages; this, not uncommonly,
leads to the decision to widen the number of optional languages. On the other hand,
the longitudinal aspect of planning is often overlooked, that is, the achievements as
well as potential of both preceding and following sectors are fully neglected (see, also,
De Bot & van Els, 2000). The devastating effects of this phenomenon in a number of
the second language teaching projects in primary education are well documented. A
case in point is how the absence of proper longitudinal planning between primary
and secondary school curricula has greatly thwarted the development of the teaching
of English in primary schools, as, for example, in The Netherlands.
Finally, too often the sector in question is required to deliver language competen-
cies that it is not qualified to offer. Thus, general secondary education also may be
expected to cater to needs that are specifically vocational in kind, or for higher levels
of competence that would be better taught in higher education. A lot could be gained
in educational systems across the world, if proper consideration was given in second
language planning to such structural aspects.

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

The focus of this chapter has been on the major high-level questions of status plan-
ning for second language learning and teaching and the ways that answers should
 53. STATUS PLANNING 989

be sought to those questions. A select number of such questions from the research
literature have been examined suggesting that a complete enough picture can be pre-
sented of the essential issues in status planning for second language learning and
teaching, of their comparative importance, and of their relationships to each other
when actual planning decisions have to be made. A sufficient knowledge base and
an adequate theoretical framework exist to tackle all status planning problems in the
field of second language learning and teaching.
All education is basically aimed at satisfying learning needs of individuals and
groups of individuals. What constitutes needs for second languages and how such
needs are to be defined has been elucidated in a number of research projects. We now
know how to investigate such needs and how to achieve an empirical basis for a needs-
oriented second language learning and teaching plan. The road from needs data to
such plans, however, is not a direct one. The chapter also highlights the important
contribution that other factors (i.e., linguistic, psychological, or educational) besides
needs make. Enough is known about their role in second language learning and
teaching to weigh—at least in principle—their impact on actual second language
teaching programs and, thus, to be able to decide how far conclusions based on an
analysis of the needs picture should be adjusted.
The chapter highlights two additional findings. First, there is very little empirical
research into needs or into the nature, scope, and interaction of the other factors.
Second, the theoretical framework outlined in the chapter has hardly ever been used
to plan second language activities anywhere in the world. A poignant example of
this is the fact that again and again when a particular sector of a national educational
system plans a new second language teaching curriculum, the planners do this with
complete disregard to the relevant curricula of other sectors.
Thus, although the theoretical framework is available and we have the means and
the instruments to assemble all the materials needed for well-founded policy state-
ments for second language learning and teaching, very little along those lines has
been attempted in the past and the prospects for the future are hardly encouraging. Of
course, some progress has been made in the past few decades; there are signs of a grow-
ing awareness of the need for a rational approach to curricular changes. But the nor-
mal practice in second language learning and teaching planning—as in all educational
planning, for all we know—still is for uninformed laymen to develop policies without
any recourse to empirical findings or expert advice. Even in The Netherlands, one of
the pioneers in the field when it developed its National Action Programme for second
language teaching, the latest adaptations in the national curricula for primary and sec-
ondary education have been introduced in the old, well-established, amateurish way
that many thought had been left behind for good. How long will it take before people in
responsible status planning positions realize that having had personal experience with
education does not as such qualify one to make properly founded policy decisions?

NOTES

1. Research activity covers a wider range of topics than those that are discussed in this chapter, and these
have also been used as the basis for status planning purposes. Recent examples include the Nuffield
Languages Inquiry (Nuffield Foundation, 2000) conducted in the United Kingdom and a number of
studies in the United States reported on by Merkx (2000).

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Wodak, R., & Corson, D. (Eds.). (1997). Encyclopedia of language and education. Dordrecht, The Netherlands:
Kluwer Academic.
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54

Corpus Planning: Syllabus

and Materials Development
Anthony J. Liddicoat
Griffith University

INTRODUCTION

Corpus planning focuses on those elements of language planning that are linguistic
and internal to language (Baldauf, 1990; Bamgbose, 1989). Corpus planning, together
with status planning and language-in-education (or acquisition) planning and more
recently prestige planning, is one of the core areas of language planning (Cooper,
1989; Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997, 2003; Baldauf, chap. 52, this volume). Although this di-
vision is both conventional and also hermeneutically useful for dealing with different
underlying goals, processes, and concepts, these components articulate with and are
influenced by each other. Status planning makes demands of the linguistic code being
planned: As new sets of functions are allocated to languages, this has an impact on the
code itself, which has to be able to be used in new domains and to communicate about
new topics (Cooper, 1989). Therefore, changes at the societal level, have consequences
at the linguistic level, and status planning drives corpus planning (see e.g., North
Korea in Kaplan & Baldauf, 2003). In addition, corpus planning is implemented largely
through education, and corpus planning decisions affect the form of the language that
is used and valued within an educational system. Matters of language prestige may
also have an impact on the extent to which some aspects of corpus planning are
accepted in a speech community.
This chapter will examine corpus planning from a general perspective, but with
a specific emphasis on how corpus planning articulates with language-in-education
planning on the assumption that “education is an important variable in most language
planning situations” (Baldauf, 1990, p. 22). In corpus planning, education becomes a
significant variable in its implementation when the language being planned is dissem-
inated through schooling (Haugen, 1983). In order for this to happen, the language
needs to be included in syllabi and materials in which the results of corpus planning
are given a pedagogical form. The discussion here will begin by considering the pro-
cesses involved in corpus planning and then consider the products that emerge from
these processes and the issues relevant for their use in educational settings.

993
994 LIDDICOAT

CORPUS PLANNING PROCESSES

The process of corpus planning is conventionally divided into processes of codification

and processes of elaboration (or cultivation) (Eastman, 1983; Haugen, 1983; Kaplan
& Baldauf, 1997). Codification refers to the selection and standardization of a linguis-
tic norm. Elaboration involves developing the linguistic resources of the language
for dealing with new domains of language use and for thematizing new realities.
Although the application of technical linguistic skills is central to corpus planning,
corpus planning involves more than simple linguistically based decision making.
Most important, successful corpus planning must take into consideration the political
and social consequences of linguistic decision making (Cooper, 1989; Hagège, 1983).

Codification
Codification involves formalizing a set of linguistic and usually literate norms (Haas,
1982; Haugen, 1983; Woods, 1985). This involves determining which dialect/variety
of the language will serve as the basis for the standard language and reducing the
amount of variation in the language to create a more regular and uniform linguistic
structure. The selection of the norm on which a standard language is to be devel-
oped has political consequences, which may involve empowering or consolidating
the power of some groups (that is, native speakers of the chosen norm) and disem-
powering or marginalizing others who do not speak the language (Luke, McHoul &
Mey, 1990).
The selection of a norm may come about where no overt language planning has
occurred, as in the case of selecting southeastern English, Paris French, Amsterdam
Dutch, or Tokyo Japanese as the basis of national standard. In these cases, the political,
economic, or social power exerted by these centers has driven the standardization
process. However, in many cases the selection of the norm is the result of direct, overt
language planning. In both cases, the selection of the norm is the result of decisions
that are not purely linguistic, but that are influenced by economic, social, and political
factors (Hagège, 1983). Serbo-Croatian (the official language of the former Yugoslavia)
had two standard variants, known as Ekavian and Ijekavian distinguished in the
pronunciation (and writing) of the vowel in small number of words as either e or (i)je:
for example, bel vs bijel (бел vs бийел) meaning “white.” The former variant is native
to the area around Belgrade, the latter elsewhere in Serbia and in other areas, notably
Bosnia and Croatia. In June 1996, the Republika Srpska declared the nonindigenous
Ekavian spellings to be the only official form (Dragosavljević, 2003). The choice of
an Ekavian norm was motivated by a linguistically based cleavage: Ekavian was
seen as Serbian, Ijekavian as Croatian/Muslim, even though the Ekavian–Ijekavian
dichotomy had never been ethnically based (Dragosavljevic, 2000, 2003). The decision
to select only the Ekavian norm was motivated by a nationalist desire to symbolize a
Serbian identity and to distinguish Bosnian Serbs linguistically from other Bosnians.
The decree was eventually overturned (in September 1998) in favor of official status for
both variants and both scripts again for nationalistic reasons: Too strong an association
between Ekavian and Serbian identity undermined Serbian identities of Ijekavian
speakers and fears that prestigious literary works written by Serbs in Ijekavian would
be identified with Croatian (Dragosavljevic, 2003).
The central focus of codification is the written language, although features of spoken
language are sometimes deliberately planned. However, even where there is no overt
language planning aimed at establishing spoken norms, these tend to develop from
the basis of the written standard (Hagège, 1983). The development of a standard
language where no such language has existed before alters the language ecology found
within a society (Mühlhäusler, 1996). In particular, standardized written languages
 54. CORPUS PLANNING 995

develop an authority that is not usually enjoyed by nonstandardized and unwritten

forms of language and become prescriptions for “good” language use (McGroarty,
1996). In fact, standardization and the spread of a single authoritative variety through
education leads to the development of a prestige written language that is acquired
primarily through education (Milroy & Milroy, 1985; McGroarty, 1996).
The work of codification is usually divided into three separate activities, which
have been termed by Haugen (1983):
r Graphization: the development of a writing and orthographic system.
r Grammatication: the development of a standard grammar.
r Lexication: the development of a standard lexicon and terminology.

Graphization
Graphization involves the development, selection, and modification of scripts and
of the orthographic conventions of the language. In the world’s languages, three
basic types of writing systems are usually identified: alphabet systems where each
symbol represents a sound, syllabaries where each symbol represents a syllable, and
logographic scripts in which each symbol represents a unit of meaning (e.g., Eastman,
1983). The reality is, however, that scripts cannot be categorised strictly into one of
these categories (Unger, 1996). Moreover, some languages have mixed scripts, such
as Japanese, which combines two syllabaries (hiragana and katakana) with a set of
logographic symbols (kanji).
Graphization involves a decision about whether to adapt an existing script for
the language to be written or whether to develop a new script for that particular
language (Annamalai & Dahal, 1986). The advantage of using an existing script is that
the script that already exists is supported by existing infrastructure and technology
and has the potential for transferability in the learning of other languages. However,
the development of a new script can be an important cultural artifact for a language
group and can function as a marker of linguistic identity for users of the script. These
motivations can be seen in the graphization movements of West Africa in the 19th
century that sought to establish unique writing systems based primarily on indigenous
graphic forms (Dalby, 1968).
A large number of existing scripts are alphabetic, including both established scripts
extended to new languages and newly developed scripts (e.g., Bassa and Bambara
alphabets in West Africa). Alphabetic scripts are particularly useful for languages that
have a large number of possible syllables as they minimize the number of syllables
needed to represent the language. Nonetheless, a number of languages have created
syllabaries (e.g., Kpelle, Loma and Vai syllabaries in West Africa, Far Soomaali syl-
labary in Somalia) and a few have adapted existing syllabaries to their language (e.g.,
Ainu in Japan). The case of Ainu is interesting because the katakana syllabary that has
been adopted is designed for a language with a basic CV syllabic pattern with very few
codas. Ainu, however, permits a wide range of CVC syllables that cannot easily be rep-
resented by katakana. In order to represent syllable final consonants, Ainu makes use of
a subscript version of a katakana symbol beginning with the appropriate consonant.
This is also the case for CV combinations not available in the katakana syllabary that
are written with a katakana symbol representing the consonant and a subscript vowel
symbol. It is therefore possible that an Ainu word with a CVC structure will be written
with three katakana symbols each of which actually represents only a single phoneme
in a quasi-alphabetic subsystem, for example, chep “fish” = chi+e+pu.
The question of the best writing system to use for a particular language is not
uncontroversial. Cooper (1989) has identified two sets of criteria that may be used
996 LIDDICOAT

to evaluate the effectiveness of a script: psycholinguistic criteria and sociolinguistic

criteria. Psycholinguistic criteria include how easy the script is to learn, how easy it
is to use in reading and writing, how easily it can be used to transfer skills to another
language, and how easy it is to reproduce with current technology. These criteria may
be in conflict with one another and the interpretation of the criteria themselves is very
much determined by the underlying theoretical construction of the nature of literacy
(Berry, 1977; Cooper, 1989). Sociolinguistic criteria include the relationship between
the script and aspects of a group’s religious, political, ethnic, or nationalist aspirations,
the functionality of the script within the linguistic ecology, the prestige of the script
within the society, and the symbolic associations people make with the script (cf. also
Annamalai & Dahal, 1986; Eastman, 1983; Mühlhäusler, 1996). Cooper (1989) argues
that sociolinguistic criteria are in fact much more important than psycholinguistic
criteria in determining the level of acceptance of a script.
Script selection can be a marker of political, social, or national identity (Hagège,
1983) and various orthographic changes have as their motivation an issue of political
or social identity. The replacement of Arabic script by Latin script in Turkish, for
example, was motivated in part by the inadequacies of the existing orthography.
However, the decision to replace rather than reform the existing orthography was
motivated by a desire to affirm the westernization and secularization of the country
as important national goals and to distance modern Turkey from its Islamic Ottoman
past (Bazin, 1983). Similarly, in North Korea, the replacement of a mixed writing
system involving phonologically based indigenous hangul characters and ideographic
Chinese characters with a pure hangul system was argued by North Korean language
planners as a necessary step in facilitating the acquisition of literacy. However, at
the same time, the removal of Chinese characters also had a nationalist function in
emphasizing Korean cultural identity and freedom from external cultural influence,
while at the same time, developing distinctiveness between North Korean written
in “culturally pure” hangul and South Korean, which retained the use of Chinese
characters (Kumatani, 1990). In the former USSR, the replacement of Latin and Arabic
scripts by Cyrillic during the Stalinist era served to reinforce a sense of unified national
identity and to weaken the cultural distinctiveness of minority groups in the context
of a movement toward Russification of the Soviet Union (Imart, 1983–1984).
It may be the case that the selection of a standard orthography for a language
may involve selection from among a number of existing nonofficial scripts. This was
the case, for example, for the adoption of an official script for Somali in 1973. At the
time of choosing an official script, Somali had been written in a number of different
ways by different groups within the country (Andrzewski, 1983). The most widely
used script appears to have been Far Soomaali an indigenous syllabary developed in
the 1920s, which had been diffused through adult literacy campaigns. A Latin-based
orthography had also been developed by Somali linguists and, although not as widely
diffused as Far Soomaali, it was supported by a culturally important elite. In addition,
Arabic was used by some (Islamic) writers of Somali, although a standardized Arabic
orthography had not emerged and there was a great deal of variation in the use of
Arabic script. This meant that, at the time of independence, the issue of choosing a
script was highly politicized, with different groups promoting different scripts for
nationalist, modernizing, or religious reasons. The selection of the Latin-based script
as the standard orthography for Somali was, in the end, the result of the political
influence of a modernizing, secularist, anti-traditionalist group in the government of
the time (Andrzewski, 1983).
Changes of script, especially dramatic ones, do not come without a cost in terms of
creating a cultural rupture. Where one script is replaced by another and only the new
script is taught in basic education, access to material produced before the script reform
is restricted unless a substantial program of transliteration of older publications is
 54. CORPUS PLANNING 997

undertaken (Bazin, 1983). Such programs of extensive transliteration are rare and the
end result is that older writings in the language become restricted to specialists who
have been educated in both the old script and the new (Annamalai & Dahal, 1986).
In a similar vein, the adoption of the Cyrillic script as the official script of the
Bosnian Serb Republika Srpska in 1996 and the abolition of Latin script resulted from
a desire to maximize linguistic links with Serbia proper and to establish linguistic
distinctiveness between Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats and Muslims, who used
Latin script (Dragosavljevic, 2003).
In cases where a script has been in use, it may be felt by the society that some
modification of the script is desirable. Such modifications are usually the result of a
perception that the current script system is too difficult to acquire or that the current
script does not adequately represent the language. An important example of script
reform in order to make a writing system easier to acquire can be seen in the various
movements in Japanese and Chinese to simplify writing systems based on Chinese
characters. In the case of Japan, the emphasis on script reform has been to reduce the
number of Chinese characters (kanji) in everyday use (Unger, 1996). In Japan, this has
been accomplished by publishing lists of approved kanji, beginning in 1934 with the
Hyojun Kanji Jihyo (Standard Kanji List) of 2,528 characters and being further reduced
in the 1946 Toyo (current use) kanji list of 1,850 characters. The Toyo list was further
supplemented in 1949 by a list of permissible readings simplifying the complexities in-
volved in the pronunciations of the characters and recommendations about approved
character shapes in printing, harmonizing printed and written forms of some char-
acters (Seeley, 1991; Unger, 1996). These reforms have undergone gradual relaxation
since the end of the 1950s and the approved kanji list, which has undergone some ex-
pansion, is seen as recommending a minimum number of kanji for educated use, rather
than a maximum limit (Unger, 1996). In the Peoples Republic of China, the emphasis in
script reform has been on the simplification of the forms of the characters themselves,
particularly on the reduction of the numbers of strokes required for writing charac-
ters. As Coulmas (1983) notes, however, the simplification of Chinese characters has
been of more benefit to writers than to readers and although characters have become
easier to write, the simplification has also meant a loss of distinctiveness for readers.
Once a script has been chosen, corpus planners are also faced with issues of how
to represent the sounds of the language using that script: that is, what spelling con-
ventions will be adopted. Such decisions are not simply motivated by the best fit
between the sounds of the language and symbols of the script. Where a subordi-
nated language and a dominant language share the same script, the decision has to
be made as to whether the sound–symbol correspondences for the two languages
should be the same. For example, in developing a writing system for an indigenous
language of Spanish-speaking South America, the syllables /ka/, /ku/ and /ki/ may
be written as ka, ku, ki as in Awa Pit (Ecuador, Colombia) or alternatively the Spanish-
influenced spellings ca, cu, qui as in Quechua. The former system has the advantage of
a consistency of sound–symbol correspondence for the velar /k/, whereas the latter
corresponds with the standard conventions of the dominant language, even though
those conventions stem from historical developments in Spanish that are not relevant
to Quechua. Kephardt (1992) distinguishes between a minimizing approach to orthog-
raphy, which seeks to reduce the sound–symbol differences between languages (i.e.,
ca, cu, que), and a maximizing approach, which develops a distinctive set of sound–
symbol correspondences for the language for which a new system is being developed
(i.e., ka, ku, ke).
However, the choice of sound–symbol conventions, like the choice of script, is
complex and many nonlinguistic factors can be important. For example, a minimizing
approach to orthography may be seen as conveying the prestige or social value of
the dominant variety to the newly developed system, as facilitating acquisition of the
998 LIDDICOAT

dominant system, or as avoiding possible stigmatization if the language is perceived

to be unusual or unlike other languages. In Samoa in the 1960s, the removal of the
symbols ‘ and ?, which represented a glottal stop and a long vowel respectively, was
based in part on a desire to make the language appear more “normal” as such symbols
were not found in other languages, especially English (So’o, 1997). At the same time
a minimizing approach may lead to literacy difficulties if the underlying phonologies
for the systems involved are too widely different. For example, Dunn (2000) reports
that the use of Russian combinatory rules in the Cyrillic orthography used for Chukchi
is an important contributor to low literacy levels in that language as the complexity of
the system makes literacy in Russian and a knowledge of Russian orthographic rules
a prerequisite for literacy in Chukchi.
Spelling systems may also be revised, usually because the spelling conventions
that exist in the language are felt to be too complex or too anomalous, or because they
no longer accurately reflect current pronunciations. Webster’s attempts at reform-
ing American English spelling in the wake of independence are in part an attempt
to simplify and regularize the conventions of English spelling. Many of Webster’s
proposals represented quite radical departures from the previous conventions: for
example, proov for prove, hiz for his, det for debt, hed for head. In the end, however, very
few of the proposed changes proved acceptable to American speakers of English and
the resulting reform introduced only minor differences between U.S. and U.K. usage
(Ayto, 1983). In some cases of proposed spelling reform, the existence of complexities
and anomalies have actually been advanced as arguments against reform. This was
the case with the attempt to reform French spelling in the 1990s, where the reforms
were attacked because the regularization of the language was seen as undermining
the language itself (Baddeley, 1993). It was argued by some critics that the difficul-
ties of language are the sign of its strength and quality, and mastering the difficulties
demonstrates intelligence or social worth. The attempt at spelling reform has so far
failed completely (Ager, 1996; Schiffman, 1996).

Grammatication
When a language develops new functions and in particular when a language comes
to be used for writing, education, and supraregional communication, there is a need to
formulate a standard variety of the language (Ferguson, 1988). Essentially the devel-
opment of a standard grammar involves the reduction of the social and/or regional
variation found in the existing spoken language ecology and formulating a set of
grammatical rules that will function as the agreed version of the language to be used
in literate contexts. The first stage in codifying a language is to select the variety or
varieties on which the standard language will be based. The variety selected is usu-
ally a variety that has prestige either because it has important symbolic associations
or because it is the language of an elite group with the social, economic, or political
power to establish their variety as the standard. Commonly, the standard language is
developed around the educated language use of the capital city.
The development of the standardized grammar for a language with no traditional
standard begins as a descriptive enterprise: Linguists record the grammatical structure
found in the designated dialect. The codification of a set of grammatical structures and
their publication as an official grammar of the language, imbues the codified struc-
tures with authority and establishes a norm against which other usage is measured.
The codified grammar, therefore, can become the arbiter of usage, not a reflection
of it. At the same time, the establishment of a standard variety implies the estab-
lishment of nonstandard varieties: varieties that existed prior to standardization, but
that differ from the prescribed standard (Milroy & Milroy, 1985). Such varieties may
become stigmatized as “incorrect” versions of the standard language rather than as
 54. CORPUS PLANNING 999

autonomous patterns of usage. The resulting grammar, however, is usually treated as

a prescriptive grammar, not a descriptive one. The process of codification, therefore,
takes instances of language used in a particular variety as the basis for the codifica-
tion of a grammar (Byron, 1976; Rubin & Jernudd, 1971), prestandard language usage
becomes the basis for the standard language.
In the process of codification, it may be possible for new rules to enter into the
language. In English, the development of the standard written form of the grammar
was characterized by a movement to make the grammar of English better conform
to the grammar of Latin. Rules were introduced proscribing previous patterns of
language use on the justification that such rules did not exist in Latin: for example, split
infinitives, sentence final prepositions, and object pronouns as copula complements.
The aim in this case was aesthetic: the grammar of Latin was deemed to be elegant
and the changes in English were to increase its elegance (Wardhaugh, 1999).

Lexication
The codification of the lexicon develops in much the same way as grammatication.
The main task here is to establish the core lexicon of the language, the agreed meanings
of individual words and their stylistic and thematic conventions of usage (Haugen,
1983). The work of lexication is the publication of the codified forms and meanings
in a dictionary (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997). As with the development of a grammar,
the development of a dictionary typically begins as a descriptive enterprise based on
actual patterns of usage, but results in the establishment of authoritative prescriptions
that can then affect usage (Liddicoat, 2000). The lexicon of a language that has recently
been assigned a new function through status planning, may be well endowed with the
lexical resources needed to discuss indigenous technologies, concepts, and behaviors;
however, it may not be equally well equipped lexically to function in new domains
and functions. As such, the process of creating a dictionary for such a language often
includes not only the codification of the lexicon, but also its elaboration.

Elaboration
Status planning decisions often mean that a language comes to be used for functions
and in domains that had not previously been the case for this language. Where this
happens, the language does not typically have the linguistic resources, in terms of vo-
cabulary and text types, to communicate effectively in these new areas. This does not
mean that the language is unable to communicate new topics and ideas, but rather it
lacks a specialized register with terms and ways of using language specifically devel-
oped for the new area of use (Gonzales, 2002). When the development of new linguistic
resources becomes an object of language planning, this is known as elaboration. Elab-
oration work concerns the development of new lexical items and the development of
new registers and text types (stylistic development), however, most attention in lan-
guage planning is given to the development of new lexical items (Kaplan & Baldauf,
1997). Elaboration can also be used to cover some corpus planning activities that are
not associated with functional change, but with a change in the sociolinguistic context
in which the language is used. Such corpus planning work, which includes elements
such as linguistic purism, nondiscriminatory language, and stylistic simplification,
can be considered to be types of language renovation.

Lexical Development
Lexical development, sometimes called lexical modernization, involves creating
new terminologies to enable users of a language to use the language in a wider range
1000 LIDDICOAT

of contexts than had previously been the case. A chief concern in lexical development
is to ensure intertranslatability between standard languages, and especially between
English, as a key world language of science and technology, and other languages. Al-
though such intertranslatability may seem desirable for many reasons, the process of
developing a modernized lexicon privileges particular (European) systems of knowl-
edge over others. Mühlhäusler (2000) has argued that this may be accelerating the loss
of non-European systems of knowledge, and classificatory and epistemological sys-
tems through a process of homogenizing terminological systems and valuing certain
types of knowledge as modern and technological while devaluing others as traditional
or folk.
The development of new terminology involves decisions about how the new ter-
minology is to be created, and there are two basic ways in which this can be done:
(1) an existing term can be adopted, or (2) a new term can be created. At the time an
official term is needed, it may be the case that people have been talking and writing
about the relevant concept or the artifact before a term has received official approval.
Where such pattern of use occurs and where there is a consensus about the terminol-
ogy among users, it is usually much easier to adopt the current usage rather than to
introduce a new term and persuade people to abandon the existing term. This option,
however, is not always used by language planners because the existing term may not
conform with other language policy objectives, for example, linguistic purism, and a
replacement term may be developed. Where there is no clear consensus in the current
usage, language planners are faced with the choice of either identifying one existing
term to adopt as the official term or developing a new term. In other language plan-
ning contexts, it may be the case that there is no usage of a particular term because
the term has not previously been needed. In this case, adopting an existing term is
not an option and a new term will need to be developed. In some language planning
cases, it may be that terms are not developed unless there is a perceived need for the
term for communicating in a particular domain. In other cases, however, factors other
than communicative need are important. The development of a full range of technical
terms may actually be seen as a matter of prestige for the language, as Fellman and
Fishman (1977) report has been the case for Hebrew lexical development.
Where the decision is made to create a new term, there is then a decision to be made
about how the new term will be created and again there are options: (a) borrow a term
from another language, or (b) develop a term using the existing linguistic stock of the
language.
If a term is borrowed, language planners need to decide on the source language.
In some cases, borrowings are taken from the internationalized lexicon of a particular
subject area: usually the terms with currency in English. This often has the advantage
that specialists working in many disciplines may be familiar with the internationalized
lexicon of their field and, therefore, already know and use these terms and adopting
the borrowing may be no more than confirming current usage (Jernudd, 1977). Such
decisions may also be felt to be appropriate where people routinely need to work
in both the local language and a world language in their discipline and a technical
vocabulary that is in harmony with the internationalized vocabulary may be felt to
be efficient both for those working in the area and students who are being inducted
into it. Terms may be borrowed in the form in which they are found in the donor
language with minimal adaptation to the phonology and orthography of the donor
language, as in the case of le sandwich or le parking in French, or may be nativized to the
host language as in the case of sanduche sandwich or cuásar quasar in Spanish. In cases
where the phonology of the donor and host languages are quite different, nativization
may lead to major restructuring of the borrowed word teeberu (table), ranchi (lunch),
or oosutoraria (Australia) in Japanese.
 54. CORPUS PLANNING 1001

In other cases, political factors may be influential in the choice of the source lan-
guage. For example, in the Soviet Union, Russian provided most of the technical vo-
cabulary for minority languages and Russian technical vocabularies were imposed by
centralized language planning on minority languages (Lewis, 1972). The imposition of
Russian meant that the technical vocabularies of the minority languages was uniform
and this uniformity has to some degree facilitated preparation of education materials
(Cooper, 1989). At the same time, the Russianization of the vocabulary strengthened
the position of Russian and was in harmony with Stalin’s policy of Russification of
the Soviet Union (Lewis, 1972).
In Bahasa, Indonesia, language planners have taken borrowings from multiple
sources. In this case, language planners tend to use European languages, especially
English as a source for lexical items in the sciences and technology, but use Sanskrit, a
language from which Indonesian has historically borrowed words, for the more cul-
turally salient areas of literature, arts, and scholarship (Lowenberg, 1983). In choosing
borrowings from these sources, language planners capitalize on the symbolic associa-
tions these languages have: Sanskrit’s traditional authority and associations with the
Indonesian golden age of the 7th to 14th centuries, Arabic’s associations with Islam,
and English’s associations with modernity and internationalism. In this distribution
of the sources of borrowings, Indonesian language planners are reflecting a need
for a balance in the process of elaboration between the traditional and the modern
(Fishman, 1983).
Borrowing a term from another language is not, however, always desirable or
appropriate. In particular borrowed terms may not be well integrated into the lexicon
as they may not have associations with other lexical items in the same semantic field or
they may not have meanings that are readily apparent. Given these problems, many
language planners opt to create new terms from existing elements of the language by
expanding the range of meanings of an existing lexical item, by creating a new term
using the derivational morphology of the language, or by translating the loan into the
language morpheme by morpheme (calquing). Such new words have the advantage
of being authentic and recognizable as words of the language into which they are
being introduced.
Once lexical forms have been developed, they need to be disseminated for the cor-
pus planning work to be effective. It is usual in most societies for lists of terminologies
to be published, but publication per se does not ensure that the terminologies will be
used and additional dissemination efforts, such as use in education and the media or
incentives to use the terminologies, are needed.

Stylistic Development
The development of conventions for using a language for new functions and in
new domains is not simply a matter of lexical and grammatical codification and elab-
oration. Lexicon and grammar are deployed to create texts. When texts are regularly
produced in a particular culture, regular and identifiable patterns of text structure
emerge and become normative for the production of such texts. Languages develop
discourses and text types appropriate to the domains in which they are used, and
as new domains are added to the communicative repertoire of the language, new
discourses and new text types become relevant. Stylistic development aimed at in-
troducing new discourses and new text types is therefore an important element of
language planning (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997).
Stylistic development can be considered in terms of the development of both a
set of linguistic resources and conventions for expressing particular subject matters
(registers) and the development of sets of textual conventions for organizing and
1002 LIDDICOAT

presenting information (genres). Register, in part, depends on grammatication and

terminological elaboration as a register requires the relevant lexical and grammatical
resources for expressing content (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997). However, register also
depends on the emergence of particular conditions of use for lexis and grammar.
Stylistic development, although linguistically important, has not typically been
given a high profile in language planning research (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997). In part
this seems to result from the difficulty inherent in such planning, particularly as a top-
down process. Stylistic development appears to be a more organic process in which
conventions of register and genre emerge from practice rather than being developed
before practices can be instituted. The features of specific-purpose genres, both in
terms of register and rhetorical structure, are not so much precodified but rather they
emerge within specific discourse communities as these communities communicate
about their subject matters (Swales, 1992). Individuals can also play a very important
role in the emergence of style. For example, Anwar (1980) has suggested that in In-
donesia, Sukarno’s personal style and usage helped to set the norms for the emerging
national language, whereas Gonzalez (2002) traces the origins of a Philipino academic
style and register for psychology to the influence of Virgilio Enriquez at the University
of the Philippines. Genres, therefore, grow out of networks of communicative practice
in which texts are developed to meet contextualized, subject-specific communicative
purposes, and generic features of texts evolve over time as the communicative needs
of the discourse community evolve. It is for this reason that the pre-establishment
of stylistic features is problematic: such action, by establishing conventions outside
an actual communicative context, represent language planning at a remove from and
potentially unrelated to language use in that they furnish prescriptions for texts for
which a social use has not yet been established, and for which clear communicative
purposes have not emerged. Although it is possible that emerging genres will draw
on textual features of the same genre used by the same discipline in another language
(especially English), the emerging genres may also be influenced by the cultural con-
ventions of the language within which they are written. The interrelationship between
discipline-specific textual features and established culturally based communicative
practices is complex and affects all the structural levels of texts (Liddicoat, 1997). As
such, preplanning of genres will find it difficult to predict which discipline factors
and which cultural factors will become important in the emerging genres, although
prestige planning can have an impact on this process (see Ager, chap. 56, this volume).
It has been argued that the appropriate way to plan for stylistic development is
to encourage the use of the language for various new subject matters to provide a
context in which genres and registers can emerge organically. Gonzalez (1990) argues
that the process of stylistic development should begin at tertiary level, with a creative
minority of scholars who would pioneer communicative practice that would then
be diffused into the lower levels of schooling. Alternatively it has been argued that
stylistic development should be a bottom-up process beginning in primary school with
simpler genres and simpler language and diffusing upward through the education
system, gaining in complexity as it goes (Nik Safiah, 1987).
A related strategy has been to provide incentives for the use of the language in
prestigious domains in order to develop the genres and registers of the domains and
to provide models for subsequent language use: for example, Chidambaram (1986)
reports the use of cash prises for civil servants for high quality use of Tamil in official
correspondence.

Renovation
Language renovation is a form of corpus planning that is undertaken when no
functional change has occurred in the language. In the case of renovation, the language
 54. CORPUS PLANNING 1003

is modified in order to achieve a broader social or political goal by exploiting the

symbolic potential of language.

Purism. One common form of renovation is found in linguistic purism (or pu-
rification) that seeks to remove words of foreign origin from the language and re-
place them, where necessary, with words developed from the native linguistic stock
(Thomas, 1991). The terminology purism and purification indicates a perception in such
language planning that languages can be “pure” in some sense.
The usual rationales for purism include notions of better communication, improved
aesthetic qualities, or arguments based on social needs: a pure language is better for
communication because loans from other language create problems for intelligibility;
a pure language has values of wholeness, homogeneity, and correctness; or it may
be felt that foreign elements weaken or divide the community and promote disunity
(Jernudd, 1989; Thomas, 1991). Language purity is not, however, an objective linguis-
tic phenomenon and is primarily ideologically driven. Purism movements tend to
grow out of periods of rapid social change including nationalistic movements: Lan-
guage becomes a symbol of nationalist aspirations—for example, purism in German
(Kirkness, 1975), there is a perception of loss of national status—for example, purism
in French (Schiffman, 1996), or when there is a desire to mark a separated identity—for
example, purism in Croatian (Mikula, 2003).
There are a number of strategies that governments and other organizations can take
in introducing a policy of purification, either individually or in combination (Jernudd,
1989):

r Censorship: monitoring public language and controlling use of proscribed ele-

ments. It has no direct effect on the inventory of the language. Censorship works
to discourage particular uses, however, prohibitions on using a word in pub-
licly sanctioned contexts does not meant that the word will no longer be used in
private contexts.
r Eradication: removing proscribed elements from dictionaries and other publica-
tions. The removal of words from dictionaries and other publications, however,
does not have a direct impact on use.
r Prevention: stemming the tide of incoming words. This requires an official in-
stitution to produce new words for new concepts or products as they enter the
culture, before a name arises spontaneously.
r Replacement: providing acceptable alternatives to proscribed words by reviving
of archaic words, adopting of dialectal forms, creating new words from native
elements, or developing calques.

Nondiscriminatory Language. Another influential form of renovation has been

the movement to develop nondiscriminatory language, most notably the development
and dissemination of gender-neutral language forms. Feminist politics has developed
a view of language that emphasizes the role of language in creating and perpetuating
gender stereotypes and views language as a means of oppression. The language plan-
ning response to this has been to propose changes to the form of the language that
reflects or encodes gender equality (Pauwels, 1998). The movement began as a grass-
roots movement, with feminist writers and groups proposing new forms and usages.
However, the general proposal for a gender inclusive language has now been accepted
by many governments, who are now introducing top-down language planning. The
program for developing gender neutral language has been a corpus planning exercise
that has involved replacing words and structures that are perceived as gendered with
alternative (often new) lexical items using the following strategies:
1004 LIDDICOAT
r Gender neutralizing: removal of overt indications of gender, for example replac-
ing chairman with chair or chairperson.
r Gender-splitting: marking gender overtly to signal the participation of both gen-
ders in the various professions, for example, Spanish medico/medica (doctor), pro-
fesor/profesora (teacher), abogado/abogada (lawyer).
r Gender reduction: removing overt gender markings for one gender as in the case
of using masculine terms for all genders in French le capitaine (captain), l’avocat
(lawyer).
r Gender reversal: replacing a masculine form with a feminine form as in the use
of generic she in place of, or together with, generic he.

Different strategies are chosen by different communities as a solution to the perceived

problem of gendered language and the solution adopted is influenced by the cultural
and linguistic context in which such planning is undertaken.

Stylistic Simplification. In many communities there has been a realization that

the language used in some domains is very complex and may exceed the literacy lev-
els of many of the people who need to have access to this language. This has emerged
as a particular problem in areas where an understanding of rights and responsibilities
is important, as in contracts, taxation, law, etc. In recognition of this problem, some
societies have undertaken renovation work in the form of stylistic simplification in
order to reconstitute overly complex language in a more readable and comprehensible
form. Stylistic simplification has been a particular focus in English-speaking societies
where it is often known as plain English. Plain English emphasizes stylistic features
such as shorter sentences, less complex vocabulary and syntax, more iconic organi-
zation, and decreased redundancy (Eagleson, 1991). Although much work has gone
into the development of plain English documents, the results of this work have so far
not made significant gains in improving text comprehension. In fact, there are argu-
ments that stylistic simplification is in itself not adequate for meeting the goals such
language planning sets. Sless (1995), for example, argues that formal stylistic rules are
not the answer to communication problems; but, rather, there is a need to consider
more widely what good communication means. In particular, Sless argues that formal
simplicity may not affect a reader’s ability to use the information in the text, because
the difficulty is often conceptual as well as linguistic and that stylistic simplicity may
make reader’s problems in understanding a conceptually complex but linguistically
simple document appear more related to defects of the reader than to problems of
communicating complex content.

CORPUS PLANNING PRODUCTS

The products of corpus planning can be considered to be the various artifacts (docu-
ments, texts, etc.) produced by language planners for the codification and/or elabo-
ration of the language and for the implementation of corpus planning in the society.
Although these documents and texts are not limited to educational contexts, the fol-
lowing discussion will focus on those products of the corpus planning process used for
education: specifically, syllabi and materials. These corpus planning products reflect
a link between corpus planning and language-in-education planning (See Kaplan, &
Baldauf, chap. 55, this volume), as syllabi and materials do not simply develop the lin-
guistic code, but develop the linguistic code to meet educational objectives. As such,
the products of corpus planning for schools must go beyond issues of codification
 54. CORPUS PLANNING 1005

and description and present the language in pedagogically useful and appropriate
ways.

Syllabus Development
The relationship between syllabus development and corpus planning is complex in
that the implementation of corpus planning requires a syllabus to be developed for
use of the planned language in schools, whereas at the same time, the development of
syllabi may require further corpus planning to meet the needs of the course content
being developed. In the context of the implementation of corpus planning, syllabus
development provides a context for language use through selecting and grading con-
tent for the teaching that will occur in the language (Nunan, 1988). It is in the context
of the syllabus that materials are developed and new corpus planning needs are iden-
tified. The nature of materials development and further corpus planning derives from
the nature and extent of the syllabi to be developed. A syllabus may be developed
purely for second language teaching or it may be developed for the teaching of some
or all curriculum areas at some or all levels of education. These syllabi need to be
stated in a form that can be disseminated among teachers and education systems,
and as such the syllabus documents themselves can be considered a product of the
corpus planning process. Whatever the syllabus or range of syllabi chosen, the effec-
tive implementation of the syllabus depends on the nature and supply of teaching
materials. Those teaching materials most directly related to corpus planning work
will be considered in the remainder of this chapter.

Materials Development
The development of educational materials is central to corpus development in ver-
nacular languages programs throughout the world and in the implementation status
planning decisions that have brought languages new functions and domains of use.
Some of this development is found in activities more traditionally included in corpus
planning, such as producing grammars and dictionaries; however, most activity is
normally devoted to the production of more specifically school-based materials such
as readers, textbooks, and other classroom materials. The development of classroom
materials is particularly a matter of urgency where a previously unwritten language
is being introduced into the school curriculum and is being used for initial literacy
development. The need is clear. A literacy program cannot function without texts, so
a first step in developing any literacy program must be to ensure that there are texts
to be read.
The materials required for the implementation of language planning are quite
extensive and include language-focused materials such as dictionaries, grammars,
spelling books, etc.; literacy-development materials such as readers; and content-
based materials such as textbooks for the range of subjects taught in the language.
Materials development as corpus planning should ideally be seen as a late stage of
language planning, which is undertaken in conjunction with language planning and
after certain language-in-education decisions have been made. In particular, educa-
tional goals and objectives need to be determined and a syllabus needs to be designed
in order to provide a context in which materials development can be undertaken.
The development of appropriate materials needs to be located within a pedagogi-
cal framework rather than relying on a process of creating ad hoc materials and then
trying to slot them into syllabi and pedagogical objectives. This idea, however, leads
to a practical problem: There is a tension between the need to plan and the need to
implement and sometimes the timetables for the two processes are in conflict as the
result of a need to get programs into place quickly.
1006 LIDDICOAT

It is possible to identify three basic approaches to materials design:

r Experts as producers: experienced educators and/or linguists are commissioned

to produce materials by a government or commercial materials developer. This is the
usual model for materials development in many parts of the world, especially for
larger, well-established languages that provide adequate markets for commercial ma-
terials. In some contexts, government agencies take a central role in the development
of materials for smaller languages that have a place in the national education system.
r Users as producers: teachers themselves develop materials for newly imple-
mented language programs. One common strategy for developing vernacular lan-
guage materials is to organize workshops in which teachers produce literacy mate-
rials by writing stories in the language. This process has been described for Pacific
languages such as Tuvaluan, Kiribati, Tongan, etc. (Liddicoat, 1990) and for the in-
digenous languages of Namibia (Tomlinson, 1995).
r Speakers as producers: speakers of the language develop material, usually in
collaboration with linguists or teachers, who may or may not know the language.
This is sometimes an initiative of government or it may be a grass-roots initiative from
within the community: for example, for materials development in Otomı́/Ñahñú in
Mexico (Lastra, 2001) and for KadazanDusun language of Sabah (Lasimbang & Kinajil,
2000). Any materials development program may be based either on one such approach
or on a combination of approaches.

In many discussions of corpus planning, the establishment of a grammar and dictio-

nary are seen as key outcomes of the corpus planning process (Eastman, 1983; Garvin,
1993; Haugen, 1983). For the purposes of language codification, the production of a
single grammar and a single dictionary encapsulating the norms of the newly codified
language is indeed important, as the aim is the establishment of a single authoritative
norm for the language. However, when the results of corpus planning come to be
implemented, it is more appropriate to consider the production of several grammars
and dictionaries rather than one all-purpose work. This is because the role and scope
of dictionaries and grammars as tools of codification is quite different from those
required for teaching and learning.
One basic distinction that can be made in the case of grammars is between descrip-
tive grammars that seek to present and account for the existing structural features of
a language and pedagogical grammars that have an educational focus (Liddicoat &
Curnow, 2004; Odlin, 1994). However, even within the framework of a pedagogical
grammar, it is important to consider finer distinctions between academic grammars
designed for linguistics and for tertiary-level study, grammars for teachers of the lan-
guage and grammars for learners of the language at various age levels (Dirven, 1990;
Westney, 1994) and grammars for first language teaching and for second/foreign lan-
guage teaching in all of these contexts. In each type of grammar, different content,
explanations, organizational principles, and theoretical perspectives may be required
to fit the grammar for different purposes and different audiences.
Within an educational context, however, not all possible types of grammars will
be necessary and decisions about the development of various types of grammars
should reflect the syllabus and curriculum in which the grammar will be used. As
such, a learner grammar would not be a high priority in a communicative language
program in which the emphasis is on providing comprehensible input rather than on
grammatical instruction, although a teacher grammar may be an important resource
even in this context.
Similar considerations exist in the case of dictionaries with again a range of differ-
ent types of dictionaries being possible (Landau, 1989). Important considerations in
 54. CORPUS PLANNING 1007

corpus planning concern the extent of the coverage of the dictionary, the age of users,
and the number of languages involved. These factors are connected with the domains
of use for the dictionary.
The extent of the language covered by a dictionary is important. A dictionary can
aim to cover as much of the lexicon of the language as possible, and in the estab-
lishment of a codified lexicon for a language this is important. However, a complete
dictionary of the language is not useful or practical in all contexts. This is, of course,
recognized by established dictionary makers, who produce full, shorter, and pocket
versions of dictionaries for different markets. Large-coverage dictionaries, such as the
Oxford English Dictionary, are useful as reference materials but are of limited practi-
cality for classroom use, where a smaller dictionary with a more restricted coverage is
more useful. A large-coverage dictionary of any language encapsulates the magnav-
ocabulary of that language, a vocabulary that exceeds the actual vocabulary of any
individual speaker (Ong, 1982) and although the magnavocabulary is of use in some
contexts, the scope of such dictionaries can be counterproductive in others, including
the classroom. A further type of limited coverage dictionary is the subject-specific
dictionary, such as dictionaries of legal, medical, and scientific terminology. Subject-
specific dictionaries are targeted at specialist and neophyte groups of users and seek
to establish norms of use with that field and are sometimes characterized by longer
definitions and more encyclopedic content (Haiman, 1980; Landau, 1989; Wierzbicka,
1995).
The extent of coverage of a dictionary interacts with the age of users. Younger
learners do not require high coverage dictionaries but, rather, more limited dictio-
naries of high frequency words. The problem with developing such dictionaries in
the early stages of corpus planning lies in the problems of establishing frequency
counts in languages that do not have an established literate tradition and so such
dictionaries necessarily begin on an ad hoc basis. In the initial stages of school literacy
development, a dictionary as such is of limited use and texts with a more limited
range and targeted scope, such as spelling books, are needed. A spelling book can be
distinguished from a dictionary in that it presents only orthographic forms without
definitions, thereby implying that the entries have known, or at least easily knowable,
meanings. Such books function as models for the orthographic system of language
and do not have the checking function that is associated with dictionaries.
The languages in which a dictionary is written is a particularly important issue
for language education. A monolingual dictionary implies a group of users who are
high-proficiency speakers of the language, who require a dictionary for reference in
order to access an expanded version of the vocabulary of the language. If the only
dictionary available for pedagogical use is a monolingual dictionary, such a dictionary
is of very limited use in contexts where the students are not first language speakers of
the language. A bilingual dictionary, in contrast, implies a context of second/foreign
language acquisition and a group of users who are not highly proficient in one of the
language used and who need to check translation equivalents between languages.
Bilingual dictionaries may be unidirectional—implying knowledge of the language of
the headword is at a lower level than the knowledge of the language of the explanation,
or bidirectional—implying no direction of transfer of information or primacy of one
language. The choice of languages in a bilingual dictionary is important where this
dictionary is the sole dictionary of the language. If the dictionary is written in a
language with high prestige but low levels of use within the culture in which it is
being used, the dictionary is of limited practical use, although it may have a high
symbolic status and be associated with greater levels of prestige for the language
(Liddicoat, 2000). Landau (1989) makes the point that bidirectional dictionaries are
not usually designed for a single audience, but rather each language section is usually
designed for native speakers of the language of the head words.
1008 LIDDICOAT

Where stylistic development is a target for corpus planning, one possible means
for doing this is through the productions of manuals of rhetoric or style (Gonzalez,
2002). Such manuals of rhetoric or style exist for many languages; however, they
are problematic. Prescriptive style manuals may not reflect the actual conventions of
writing within a given language and culture, but rather reflect an idealized or intuited
state of writing practice that deviates from the actual writing conventions practiced.
Research-based accounts of genre and rhetoric such as those proposed by Swales
(1992) and Trimble (1985) may, however, be useful where a corpus of relevant texts
exists and for the teaching of established patterns of academic or professional literacy.
In the process of language intellectualization (Gonzalez, 2002), the need for class-
room materials extends beyond the basic artifacts of the linguistic corpus (that is,
dictionaries and grammars). Although these obviously do have a place in language
education, there are many other types of materials that are needed in order to provide
the resources necessary for language education. Languages that are in the process of
being introduced into the education system also need to be supported by textbooks,
literacy materials, and increasingly by information and communication technology
resources. These materials are in a sense secondary to the core work of corpus plan-
ning as they presuppose the establishment of orthographic, grammatical, and textual
norms as their starting point. As such, basic corpus planning provides the input for
the development of other materials; the language developed through corpus plan-
ning then must be shaped by the pedagogical theories, cultural practices, and other
variables of the local educational system.
In some language planning contexts, materials development may take the form of
creating, for example, a whole textbook in the language; however, such large-scale
developments are not always feasible, especially in the short term. One common
procedure for developing materials in languages that as yet have not been used in
education is the development of single-type activities, such as language exercises,
or collections of spoken, written, or visual texts that are presented without an spec-
ification of how they are to be used. Such materials can be produced centrally and
disseminated by teachers, or they may be produced by individual teachers or groups
of teachers. The advantage of single-type materials lies in the time and economic
advantages of producing small-scope materials, although in a context of a general
paucity of materials the ad hoc nature of such materials may lead to difficulties in
implementing a coherent and complete program.
In some cases, the development of school materials in vernacular languages focuses
on the development of initial literacy materials, without similar levels of development
for more advanced students. As such, there is a risk that the same materials may be
re-used at a range of levels and, as such, may prevent older children from expanding
their literacy levels (e.g., the case of Jaru in Australia, cited by Lo Bianco & Rhydwen,
2001) The development of vernacular literacy materials for school use can have an
impact on the ecology of the language for which such materials are developed. In
some communities, the only literacy materials available are schoolbooks; and, as such,
literacy in a vernacular might be solely a school-based activity, with no niche for
vernacular literacy elsewhere in the society. The lack of a viable context for using
literacy in the vernacular outside school may, in fact, undermine the value of the
vernacular that such programs were often designed to reinforce.

CONCLUSION

Although corpus planning is concerned with those elements of language that are
internal to language itself, and the methods of corpus planning draw centrally on
the technical methods of linguistics, any understanding of corpus planning must
 54. CORPUS PLANNING 1009

go beyond considerations of the technical and examine the context in which corpus
planning occurs. For corpus planning, two broad contexts need to be considered: the
sociopolitical context in which planning is done and the educational context through
which corpus planning is implemented. Changes to language form are drawn from
and affect the sociopolitical context, and the symbolic value attached to language(s)
in a society is an important factor in developing appropriate and acceptable forms
with that society. Similarly, corpus planning has implications for the development
of education in the language planned, and the educational requirements for imple-
menting corpus planning may themselves require additional corpus planning work
and/or the modification of corpus planning products to meet educational objectives.
Corpus planning for national development and corpus planning for education appear
to represent two different levels of corpus planning work with different needs and
goals and equal consideration needs to be given to both levels of work for the corpus
plan to be effective.

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1012
55

Language-in-Education Policy
and Planning
Robert B. Kaplan
University of Southern California (Emeritus)
Richard B. Baldauf, Jr.
University of Queensland

INTRODUCTION

Language-in-education planning, sometimes referred to as acquisition planning (Cooper,

1989), is one of four types of language policy and planning, the others being status
planning, corpus planning, and prestige planning. Kaplan and Baldauf (1997) have
suggested that language-in-education planning should be an outcome of national
language planning (i.e., status planning and corpus planning) with prestige plan-
ning contributing as a motivational factor. However, in the real world, language-in-
education planning often constitutes the sole language planning activity in many
polities, a situation far more common than the one in which it is a neat outgrowth
of national language planning. Some authors like Corson (1999) have focused on
this tendency, demonstrating how schools can provide a platform from which all
language-in-education activities could proceed.
However, beyond the obvious systematic discontinuities that result from stand-
alone language-in-education planning, other problems that flow from the inherent
nature of such planning include:

r Slow dissemination: language dissemination through the education system is a

long-term affair, requiring several generations to reach a significant segment of
the population.
r Limited audience: activity of national educational authorities is restricted to that
agency and its dependent schools, teachers, and functions, and has little or no
effect on language planning activities occurring simultaneously in other agencies,
either governmental or private.
r Lack of resources: the education sector is often under-resourced for the tasks it
fulfills.
1013
1014 KAPLAN AND BALDAUF

When language-in-education planning becomes the focal activity, it is sometimes

charged with education-oriented status (van Els, chap. 53, this volume) and corpus
planning—beyond the normal syllabus and education-oriented materials and text-
book creation activities that may accompany such planning (see, Liddicoat, chap. 54,
this volume). Faced with this set of constraints (including commonly the absence of
status and corpus planning specialists), activities such as the preservation and/or
resurrection of moribund language(s) (see e.g., Liddicoat & Bryant, 2001), or intel-
lectualization (modernization) of indigenous language(s) (Gonzalez, 2002) for use as
languages of education (e.g., in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, or South Africa)
can implicate a heavy investment of time and resources. Although such activities may,
given sufficient time, contribute to renewed language vitality, they often implicate a
top-down process where language change emanates from tertiary education or from
education more generally and is diffused to society as a whole.
Although language-in-education planning is most visible and most closely associ-
ated with goals for language and literacy learning in formal educational settings (i.e.,
schools; see Ingram, 1989; Paulston & McLaughlin, 1994, for earlier reviews), it also im-
plicates the less systematic teaching of heritage/community languages (Hornberger,
2004) and activities related to literature and cultural learning, religion, communicative
media, and work-related goals.
For language-in-education policy planning, the policymakers’ problem is to define
and facilitate choices that are relevant to individuals’ interests and needs—to encour-
age active participation (see Prestige and Image Planning, chap. 56, this volume)—
while at the same time ensuring that the general education benefits and societal
needs are being met in the defining political climate. However, the success of meeting
these goals depends largely on policy decisions related to the teachers, the courses of
study, and the materials and resources to be made available. As suggested by Baldauf
(Chap. 52, this volume), there are seven interrelated policy goals that can be said to
influence the success of language-in-education driven policy development:

r Access policy (Who learns what when?).

r Personnel policy (Where do teachers come from and how are they trained?).
r Curriculum policy (What is the objective in language teaching/learning?).
r Methodology and materials policy (What methodology and what materials are
employed over what duration?).
r Resourcing policy (How is everything paid for?).
r Community policy (Who is consulted/involved?).
r Evaluation policy (What’s the connection between assessment on the one hand
and methods and materials that define the educational objectives on the other?).

Unfortunately, these goals are not always systematically addressed, thereby greatly
complicating cultivation planning (i.e., program implementation). This is made fur-
ther problematic by the heterogeneity found in most polity populations, making it
imperative that successful language cultivation embraces several of these goals simul-
taneously. The four language-in-education cultivation planning goals, which relate to
the policy or form-related planning goals, are:

r Language maintenance (For whom—majority or minority language/bilingual

education?).
r Language reacquisition (What languages are slated for revival; why?).
r Foreign/second language learning (What foreign languages (FLs) are taught;
why?).
r Language shift (How are language populations induced/forced to change?).
 55. LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION 1015

Given the political nature of much language-in-education planning (Baldauf &

Kaplan, 2003) and its contextual embeddedness in the language ecology of partic-
ular situations, this chapter is organized around an examination of the situations in
three polities—Japan, Sweden, and North Korea—where these language-in-education
planning goals have been a predominant factor in language policy development and
in the changing or maintaining (i.e., the cultivation) of the language.

LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION PLANNING IN JAPAN

The Japanese language has no legal status in Japan. The current national constitution
makes no mention of language matters. Indeed, there has been only limited govern-
mental language planning to speak of in all of Japan’s previous history except for
the pre-World War II imperial period. It has simply been taken for granted that all
Japanese speak Japanese, and that there is no language problem in need of attention
(Kaplan & Baldauf, 2003, chap. 2). It is important to understand, as Neustupný, and
Tanaka (2003, p. 17) write, “Japanese society still maintains a very strong Modern (i.e.,
not Postmodern) component, with attendant isolation from the rest of the world.”
However, that is not to say that there has been absolutely no language planning. On
the contrary, at the beginning of the Meiji Restoration there was a great deal of concern
on two counts: (a) in the written language, there was considerable style diversity, with
the more academic registers employing great numbers of Chinese characters, thus
making written language inaccessible to the majority of the population (see Kaplan &
Baldauf, 2003, chap. 3 for similar concerns in North Korea); (b) in the spoken language,
there was considerable dialect variation and there was a significant gap between
spoken and written language. Through the final decades of the 19th century and the
first decades of the 20th century, several alternatives were widely debated—reducing
the number of Chinese characters, eliminating Chinese characters entirely, or adopting
a Roman alphabet (Coulmas, 2002). This debate, however, took place largely among
intellectuals, and it was only in 1903 that the Ministry of Education endorsed the first
Modern Standard Japanese textbooks, thereby lending some weight to the development
of a standard variety.
Japanese military success in the 1894–1895 Sino-Japanese war and the 1904–1905
Russo-Japanese war significantly increased militarism and nationalist feeling, and in
emulation of the situation in the West, a popular desire and strong movement for
the development of a national language [kokugo] arose (Twine, 1991; Yamada, 1992). In
1923, as part of the standardization process required for the development of such a
national language, the Interim Committee on the National Language (Rinji Kokugo
Chosakai) published a list of 1,963 Chinese characters for general use. It also was
decided that the oral standard would be the speech of educated Tokyo residents.
Rural dialects were perceived as delaying the learning of the standard, but also as
relics of the old order—they had to be eliminated. This standardizing activity was
conducted largely through the educational system. Thus, from about 1910 to about
1945, the Japanese government became heavily involved in language-in-education
policy, because education provided the means to inculcate several generations of
students into what Japan perceived as its manifest destiny in Asia. The languages of
the impoverished and outnumbered Ainu, as well as of the Okinawans, were banned
as part of turning these people into conforming Imperial subjects.
As Japan conquered and occupied areas of the Asian-Pacific region during this
period, the evolving language policy did not stop with the Japanese Islands, but
was extended to Taiwan (Formosa 1895), Korea (1905), the South Sea Islands (1914),
Manchuria (1932) and it subsequently became a feature of the Greater East Asia
Co-Prosperity Sphere (Coulmas, 2002). Education needed to be provided in these
1016 KAPLAN AND BALDAUF

conquered territories, and the government became centrally concerned with promul-
gating Japanese language, Japanese values, and “Japaneseness” throughout those
polities—that is, stressing moral education and the importance of Japanese national
language (kokugo—not nihongo) using an assimilationist policy (Kaplan & Baldauf,
2003: Rhee, 1992). The idea developed that Japanese should be the common language
of East Asia and indeed should be recognized as a leading world language. However,
since the end of World War II, Japanese language spread policy (Hirakata, 1992) has
had to rely on persuasion rather than force.
After World War II, language policy became a matter of political contention in
the years of the U.S. occupation (Unger, 1996). Language planning was perceived
as an exclusively governmental prerogative, and the absolute control of primary and
secondary education and substantial control of tertiary education, rested entirely with
Monbusho—the Ministry of Education (Shimaoka, 1999). A simplified writing system
became the objective, although still inhibited by debates between traditionalists and
liberal proponents of simplification. But, for the new post-war democratic ideal to take
root, a transparent writing system accessible to all was essential as a precondition for
total literacy, broad political participation, and democratic citizenship.
As a result, reducing the number of Chinese characters became an imperative of
social change. In 1948, the vestigial Council on the National Language produced,
for general use, a list of 1,850 Chinese characters (the Toyo list). With the end of the
occupation and the election of the Liberal Democratic Party, the simplification debate
continued, and between 1966 and 1981 the Toyo list was often amended, resulting in a
new list in 1981 that added some 95 characters to the 1948 list. By the 1990s, economic
factors had become more important; although it was generally conceded that the state
had control over written language, and character lists drawn up by the Japan Industrial
Standards Organization and the International Standards Organization include more
characters than the government’s official list. Indeed, software developers also seemed
to pay little attention to the concerns of the government.
Although an organization known as the Japanese National Language Research In-
stitute (Kokuritu Kokugo Kenkyuzyo) was established under the jurisdiction of the Min-
istry of Education in 1948 “to conduct scientific surveys on the Japanese language and
the linguistic life of the Japanese people in order to create reliable bases for rational-
ization of the Japanese Language” (National Language Research Institute, 1998, p. 1),
the Institute was not a language planning body. It was a research body, licensed only
to make recommendations to the Ministry of Education and has contributed little to
language-in-education planning.
More recent language-in-education debates have centered on the role of English
in Japan. For example, Japan’s then (March 30, 1999) Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi,
appointed a commission charged with defining Japan’s goals in the 21st century. Note
that it was the Prime Minister, a political figure, who appointed the Commission,
and note that the charge of the Commission, though couched in altruistic terms,
was essentially political in the sense that the Prime Minister was seeking to build
a political agenda. The final report of the commission entitled, The Frontier Within:
Individual Empowerment and Better Governance in the New Millennium, was delivered to
Prime Minister Obuchi on January 18, 2000. The discussion of English, and of foreign
language teaching more broadly, constitutes a minor theme in the report—less than 2%
of the total report. The report boldly recommends making English the second official
language of Japan, but the question of how all this activity would be financed is
not addressed. This recommendation created a tempest of discussion in the Japanese
press—indeed, in the world press—but with the untimely death of Prime Minister
Keizo Obuchi (in May 2000), the report essentially disappeared from view in favor
of the much larger issues surrounding Japan’s current economic situation. The furor
of public debate has died down. The teaching of English (and to a lesser extent of
 55. LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION 1017

other foreign languages) remains as it was, vested in the Ministry of Education and
implemented through the schools.

LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION POLICY

Access Policy
In Japan, since the end of World War II, all children have been required to study En-
glish. Initially, English was introduced in middle school, but it has gradually expanded
in both directions; introduction in elementary school is currently (post-2002) being im-
plemented, and students normally continue English studies into tertiary education.
The national college entrance examination, taken by virtually all high school gradu-
ates, contains an English segment, and national university law requires eight credits
in one foreign language, usually English. Many major corporations operate their own
English schools. In addition, there are thousands of private English language schools
(Juku) that make English education an important preoccupation of Japanese students
beyond their formal schooling. Thus, access to English is both required and sustained
for most students. Despite universal access, it is generally acknowledged that out-
comes are relatively negligible. Most students can accomplish whatever they need to
in Japanese; English is simply a boring academic subject.

Personnel Policy
English (or any other language) teachers are drawn from a wide variety of ter-
tiary institutions, which are under the control of the Ministry of Education, making
teacher training fairly standardized across the country. Entry to the profession is via
a multiple-choice examination administered by the board of education in each local-
ity. However, there seems to be little uniform control of language proficiency among
teachers. Many teachers have relatively limited control of the language they are ex-
pected to teach, leading to fairly conservative teaching; that is, teachers teach what
they can—decontextualized grammar and vocabulary, the latter intended to incul-
cate as many words as possible (minimum 1,000 words by the end of junior high
school), but without any sense of their connotative meanings or of their frequency
and distribution.
The Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program, launched in 1987, aims to improve
foreign language teaching of English in Japan while also promoting international ex-
change and “internationalization” of Japan’s regions. Inviting young university grad-
uates to Japan originally to teach English, for a maximum of up to 3 years, or to be
attached to a local government office, this program has grown enormously in numbers
and countries concerned, with a total of some 5,800 JET participants from 37 countries
in Japan during 1999–2000; the bulk still comes from the English-speaking world. The
wider educational enterprise in Japan is enormous with a steeply pyramidal structure
that has 42,484 schools (from elementary to University), 20,710,746 students (out of a
population of about 126,550,000) and 1,017,541 teachers (see, Kaplan, 2000).

Curriculum Policy
The system is very top-down, and the community has little input into policy. The
Ministry of Education dictates curriculum policy that is disseminated in periodic
directives known as Courses of Study. The most recent directives, promulgated in 1993
for junior high schools and in 1994 for senior high schools, emphasize communicative
abilities and international understanding. They are intended to:
1018 KAPLAN AND BALDAUF
r Give more importance to listening and speaking without neglecting reading and
writing.
r Focus teaching more clearly in specific items so that it may be more effective.
r Foster a positive attitude toward mastery of a foreign language among learn-
ers, help them become good speakers of a foreign language, and enhance their
understanding of foreign countries by developing their interest in language and
culture both at home and abroad (Shimaoka, 1999, p. 90).

However, given that lower secondary school provides 3 hours per week of instruc-
tion in each of 3 years and upper secondary school also provides 3 hours of instruction
per week in each of 3 years with 1 additional hour in the first or last year (625 hours of
instruction over 6 years), it is unreasonable to assume that learners will emerge from
the system as good speakers of a foreign language.

Methodology and Materials Policy

The Ministry of Education spells out the English teaching curriculum in great detail
with respect to grammar and vocabulary selection, and authorizes textbooks, meeting
certain criteria, which foreign language learners are required to use. Although teachers
are free to adjust these textbooks to the level and needs of their students, authorized
textbooks must:

r Include the four skills—listening, speaking, reading, and writing—as separate

activities.
r Adopt a flexible arrangement of grammatical items to be taught.
r Include the 507 vocabulary items suggested by the Ministry within a total of
approximately 1,000 items.

Early foreign language methodology, going back to the early Meiji era, was based
on the grammar-translation approach, because communication with native speak-
ers was not an issue. In 1923, Harold Palmer created the Institute for Research in
Language Teaching (IRLT) to promote the “oral approach.” However, English was
disparaged during the years between 1939 and 1945, and English-language teach-
ing virtually disappeared from the Japanese educational system. After World War II,
when English was reinstated in the educational system, teachers were encouraged to
pay more attention to the oral aspects of language teaching. In 1952, with a gift from
the Ford Foundation, the English Language Educational Council (ELEC) was created.
Several U.S. linguists played key parts in the development of ELEC; namely, Charles
C. Fries and Freeman Twaddell, among others. They were responsible for the wide
introduction of the “oral approach” into Japanese education. Because this activity co-
incided with the development and availability of inexpensive tape recorders, so that
recorded native-speaker models became readily available, the oral approach became
entrenched. Both IRLT and ELEC provided regular conferences and workshops to
train teachers and to enhance in-service education. More recently, such organizations
as JACET (Japanese Association of College English Teachers) and JALT (Japanese As-
sociation of Language Teachers, an affiliate of international TESOL) have taken over
much of the activity of conducting conferences to introduce new developments in the
field and of providing workshops for training teachers.

Evaluation Policy
The Ministry of Education has long sponsored an English proficiency test (Eiken) de-
signed to provide information internally within the educational system and externally
 55. LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION 1019

to the business world by identifying individuals deemed to be proficient in English,

but technically, this test is seriously flawed. Furthermore, it is actually independent
of the methodologies and materials used in English language teaching.
In more recent years, both the educational and the business sectors have begun
to use the U.S.-based Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), and the Test
of English for International Communication (TOEIC), as well as the U.K.-based In-
ternational English Language Testing Service (IELTS) battery. Although more valid
and prestigious, these international tests have no connection with the methods and
materials used in EFL teaching in Japan.
The test required of aspiring teachers, because it is prepared and administered in
different localities, is neither valid nor reliable in a technical sense. Hence, there is no
reliable evaluation of foreign language outcomes.

Resourcing Policy
Japan’s gross domestic product (GDP) (as of 1998) was $2,903 trillion (U.S. dollars)
with a per capita figure of $23,100 (U.S. dollars). Education is largely subsidized by
the government, although private schools at all levels (including juku) that charge
tuition have been developing. It is unclear what proportion of the education budget
is spent directly on language education, on the training of language teachers, and on
language assessment. Japanese education is a very large enterprise, completely funded
and controlled by the Ministry of Education. Thus, the percentage of GDP allocated
to various aspects of education, including language education, must be substantial.

LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION CULTIVATION PLANNING

Language Maintenance
In Japan, there is no recognition of the need for any language except Japanese. It is,
absolutely, the majority language. Officially, there are no minority languages. There
are substantial populations of speakers of Korean and Chinese, as well as a small
population of Ainu; in recent years substantial numbers of migrant workers have
arrived in Japan from Bangladesh, Brazil, the Middle East, Nepal, Pakistan, and the
Philippines, not to mention Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
There is, however, no state support for the teaching of minority languages, and there
is little probability that such programs for the children of foreign workers will be
established in the near future.
At the same time, it must be recognized that Japan is a polydialectal society (Kaplan
& Baldauf, 2003; Yamada, 1992).1 From the Meiji period until the mid-1970s, there was
a perceived need to establish both a national means of communication accessible to
all and a unified sense of national identity. The state language policy promoted the
national language (kokugo)2 and the eradication of local dialects (hogen). A reversal of
policy occurred in the mid-1970s, and the new policy has continued through the 1980s
and 1990s. Recent Ministry prescriptions for the teaching of kokugo at primary and
secondary level explicitly state that children should learn to understand the differences
between their local dialects and kokugo and should learn to use each appropriately in
speech, according to setting and circumstances; the common language is always to
be used for written work. There is no groundswell to preserve local dialects; on the
contrary, dialect revival remains largely at the level of “hometown song festivals and
novelty key-rings” (Tokugawa Munemasa, cited in Carroll, 2001, p. 203). Bidialectal
teaching is not endorsed; indeed, the school emphasis lies largely in tolerance of local
dialects. The assumption is that students will learn local dialects at home; however,
the nearly century-long dialect eradication effort has succeeded, and parents brought
1020 KAPLAN AND BALDAUF

up in that environment do not have the local dialects nor do children learn the dialects
at home or in the community (Carroll, 2001). (A notable exception is Okinawan, which
has persisted and which is passed on intergenerationally.) Thus, instead of replacing
dialects with the standard common language, code-switching has become the ideal
(Shibatani, 1990, p. 187).

Language Reacquisition
In Japan there is currently some interest in revivifying Ainu. The impoverished and
outnumbered Ainu were turned into Japanese Imperial subjects in the period of mil-
itarization; the nation needed their services in the army during World War II, and to
serve in the military it was essential that they spoke Japanese. The Ainu language has
only recently been recognized as an area worthy of study (see e.g., DeChicchis, 1995;
Maher, 1997). Ainu is essentially a dead language, although there is a community of
some 15,000 Ainu people living largely in Hokaido as well as some 1,500 in southern
Sakhalin Island (Russia). There are virtually no native speakers left, and the few re-
maining are very elderly. The best that can be hoped for in this context is an historical
preservation, or possibly a small population of second-language speakers of Ainu in
a context in which the language has an extremely limited number of registers. Only
in very recent years has there been action to recognize the Ainu people; Ainu culture
can now be taught, but only to Ainu people. The Ainu language is not included in the
school curriculum.

Foreign/Second Language Learning

In Japan, since the U.S. occupation (1945–1952), the foreign language most widely
taught has been English. More than 95% of all age groups in junior and senior high
school study English, although foreign language study is not required. The study
of Chinese, French, German, and other foreign languages is conducted primarily at
the tertiary level, although the study of Classical Chinese is available as an elective
in senior high school, but is considered part of Japanese language education. The
objective of foreign language education is stated in the directives of the Ministry of
Education:

To foster a positive attitude towards mastery of a foreign language among learners, help
them become good speakers of a foreign language, and enhance their understanding of
foreign countries by developing their interest in language and culture both at home and
abroad (Shimaoka, 1999, p. 90; see discussion under curriculum policy).

Language Shift
In a country like Japan, in which complete control of the educational system is vested
in the Ministry of Education, and in which the objectives of government are based
on a perceived need to establish both a national means of communication accessible
to all and a unified sense of national identity, the state language policy necessarily
promoted the national language (kokugo). Given the persistence of these practices for
more than a century (1868–1978), and the addition after 1926 of the powerful support
of Nippon Hôsô Kyôkai—Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK; Carroll, 1995), the
outcome was predictable; that is, a population highly literate in the national language
to the exclusion of local dialects and foreign languages. As Twine (1991) has noted:

Leaders gradually came to recognize that what was needed in the wake of the tremendous
social upheavals following the Meiji Restoration was the fashioning and refining of that
 55. LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION 1021

language into an instrument which would serve the nation both as a means of achieving
its various planned reforms and as a focus of national pride. (p. 9)

The Ministry of Education is also vested in the notion that the teaching of Japanese
reading and writing should precede the study of foreign languages. The idea of Japan
as a homogeneous society is a popular one, particularly in the discourse of those con-
sidered nihonjinran (a group dedicated to the preservation and purity of the Japanese
language). Part of this widespread notion is the idea that becoming fluent in any
other language makes one “less Japanese”; an idea implicating subtractive bilingual-
ism (Kaplan, 2000).

LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION PLANNING IN SWEDEN

Language-in-education planning in Sweden has a long history that Winsa (2000, p. 108)
argues has been underpinned by sociopolitical and ideological motives, rather than
by pedagogical objectives. As a society that has viewed itself as lying on the periphery
of the Continent—the real Europe that provides the source of high culture—Swedish
language policy has been “based on access to international communication, control
of communities speaking languages/vernaculars other than Swedish, the influence
of theology and religious ideologies, the development of the society and the institu-
tionalisation of education and knowledge.” Thus, despite the fact that Sweden has
no monolingual constitutional requirement, Swedish is the only de facto national lan-
guage (except more recently for Sami in the Sami Parliament) and the official spoken
standard is that of the well-educated living in the capital region.
For centuries, language planning has been the basis for gaining political control
of various language groups in Sweden. During the 17th century when the Swedish
empire was at its greatest extent, the Swedish kings controlled Finland, the Baltic
States, the coastal parts of western Russia, the northern part of Germany and some
former Danish provinces in the south, and Danish-Norwegian provinces in the west.
These areas included 14 spoken languages plus a greater number of varieties and at
least 7 sanctioned written languages. This diversity probably encouraged a strong
interest in standardization of high Swedish and lead to the use of a sociopolitical
diglossia, which excluded the use of local vernaculars from official domains and public
institutions, as a means of subjugating the various language communities (Winsa,
2000). However, by 1809 all these outlying areas had been lost, and the territorial
basis for modern Sweden was formed.
Withthecoming of theProtestantReformation, the vernacularBible and the Swedish
language was used to spread the faith, and this use across various communities con-
tributed to the gradual standardization of high Swedish. By the end of the 17th century,
the Lutheran Church had launched a literacy campaign, supported by a Church Law
in 1686 that mandated that no illiterate was allowed to take Holy Communion and
no unconfirmed person was allowed to marry, a policy leading to high levels of com-
munity literacy (in Swedish). The establishment of formal schools—grammar schools
in 1571 and cathedral (secondary schools) from 1611 (although mainly for the upper
classes)—also shifted language use toward the high variety at the expense of Danish
and Swedish dialect varieties in the south and minority languages like Sami or Finnish
in the north. Although Swedification began much later in the northern part of the coun-
try, the exclusion of Sami and Finish from education and the public sector meant that
an outsider “would hardly notice that the area is trilingual” (Winsa, 2000, p. 153).
In the 1950s, Sweden experienced the beginnings of a large influx of immigrants
and by the 1990s there were a million resident immigrants (over 12% of the country’s
population). Since 1965, the teaching of Swedish as a Second language (Sw2) has been
1022 KAPLAN AND BALDAUF

provided as a right for all immigrants. In 1975, the constitution was changed to include
a paragraph that stated that the cultures of linguistic, religious, and ethnic minori-
ties should be promoted, and, thus, bilingualism was officially supported. Since 1977,
programs of Mother Tongue Instruction (MTI) (later called home language instruc-
tion) have been available, but these are voluntary and currently in decline. Since the
1990s, these programs have been shifted from the central government to the munici-
palities, who have been able to define their own policies and amount of funding for
MTI. Despite this apparent support for multilingualism and these liberal pronounce-
ments and programs that speak of “integration,” Winsa (2000, p. 194) characterizes
Swedish language policy as assimilationist. Many Swedes still have a monolingual
cultural identity—as distinguished from their acceptance of the need for a multi-
lingual foreign language capacity—and this puts continuing pressure to assimilate
on both traditional minority and immigrant language users. This recent activity has
been influenced by Sweden’s desire to be included in the European Union and by the
political requirements of such membership.

LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION POLICY

Access Policy
Sweden provides free and open access to its educational system, and 9 years of at-
tendance (until age 16) is required. A 3-year program of senior secondary school is
optional, but it is estimated that about 98% of students voluntarily continue their
studies. Although funding for places in higher education has some limits, about 30%
of students attend a Swedish college or university within 5 years of high school grad-
uation (Nuwer, 2002). In terms of languages, Swedish or Sw2 are required of students
throughout their schooling, whereas English can begin as early as preschool, but is re-
quired from mid-elementary school. A modern language may also start in preschool,
but is required in junior secondary school. An additional modern language may also
be added in junior secondary school. MTI is available throughout the school years,
depending on the options available or selected. Those options, simplified from Lainio
(2000) for this discussion, allow students, especially those taking Finnish, to engage
with the language in a number of different ways (i.e., as MTI, as a language choice, as a
secondary school language option). As Fig. 55.1 indicates, languages are an important
part of the curriculum, and eligibility and requirements at the school level depend on
such things as funding, teacher availability, or number of students available (e.g., five
for most MTI groups) to make a class group.
At the tertiary level, the language of instruction is usually Swedish, but much of
the literature for courses is in English. However, in the sciences, in prestige areas,
for research degrees, and particularly at the post-graduate level, English is becoming
more widespread, leading to a concern that a Swedish (L)–English (H) diglossia may
be developing (Berg, Hult, & King, 2001).

Personnel Policy
Entrance to teaching is well regulated and teachers must study for a 3.5-Year (for lower
grades) or 4.5-year (for higher grades) diploma that specifies the specialization and
status of the qualification. However, in the fields of minority and immigrant languages
“teacher training courses have not met the demands for teachers in the field, so many
teachers providing the [MTI] programs are inadequately trained. [MTI] . . . problems
are exacerbated by the large number of minority languages in any one school, and
in many cases, by the small number of pupils with the same [first language] L1 in a
particular area” (Boyd, 1999, p. 74).
 55. LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION 1023

Age 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
Grade Pre 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 I II III
Language

Swedish ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------?
Swedish L2 (------------)-----------------------------------------------------------------?
English (------------)(---------------)------------------------------------------------?
Modern Lang 1 (------------------------------)---------------------------------?
Modern Lang 2* (-----)(------------------------? )
MTI3 ((---------------------)(-----------)(--------------------)(----------------)(----------- ? ))
-----? Compulsory, or must legally be offered when chosen.
(-------) Optional, during one or more years, need not be offered.
(----?) Optional, till year X.
((-----)) Optional through the whole school program.
* May involve additional study of English or Sw2.

FIG. 55.1. Language options and eligibility for minority and majority language instruc-
tion in Swedish public schools. Adapted from Lainio (2000). “The Protection and Rejec-
tion of Minority Language in the Swedish School System,” Current Issues in Language
and Society, 7, 32–50.

Curriculum Policy
The teaching of languages has quite clear objectives. First, all students are meant to
become fluent in Swedish so they can fully participate in Swedish society. Second,
the curriculum also seeks to develop a sound technical knowledge of English as a
spoken and written lingua franca for international communication. Students must
also develop either mother tongue language skills (where appropriate) or study one
or two additional foreign languages as part of their compulsory schooling.

Methodology and Materials Policy

Sweden has chosen to adopt a formal standardized curriculum from preschool through
compulsory school up to Grade 9, with national syllabi and formalized educational
objectives. The municipalities have some freedom to decide how the objectives are
implemented, and no particular teaching method is required (Nuwer, 2002). Lainio
(2000) indicates that second language teaching methodology (unspecified) has be-
come a common approach to teaching Swedish in many municipalities because many
classes contain speakers of very mixed background. He adds, however, that such
second language (L2) teaching is “low prestige among politicians and parents, and
to some extent, teachers of other subjects, who are unaware of the importance of L2
instruction” (p. 45). Parents have yet to be convinced of the benefits of bilingual educa-
tion. The introduction of English for all, with it greater emphasis on communication,
has also had an impact on the teaching of foreign languages, moving them away from
the grammar-translation notions that previously underpinned foreign language study.

Evaluation Policy
Although municipalities are fully responsible and accountable for educational deci-
sions, the National Agency for Education (NAE) is responsible for school accredita-
tion and standards from preschool through high school. To ensure quality outcomes,
pupils are evaluated on the required curriculum (including languages) in their 5th
and 9th years of compulsory schooling and the NAE tracks educational development
in districts, provides consultancy help, disseminates results, supports research, etc.
(Nuwer, 2002).
1024 KAPLAN AND BALDAUF

Resourcing Policy
In line with the importance given to education, education in state schools is free at
every level from preschool to university, subject to some restrictions related to age
(beyond 45 at university) and length of time for Sw2 instructional programs and for
university degrees. For compulsory schooling (Grades 1 to 9), school-related expenses
are also paid. Although the state schools are of very high quality, since the law was
changed in 1992 about 3% of pupils have chosen to attend private schools in Sweden
(some of which are language-and/or ethnic-based schools, including a number of
Finnish bilingual schools), mainly in urban areas. A voucher system requires munici-
palities to pay 75% of the average per pupil cost to these schools, as long as the schools
meet state-mandated NAE requirements (Cabau-Lampa, 1999; Nuwer, 2002).
Educational support for immigrants is based on the premise that they should have
the same access to educational entitlements as the native-born population, with some
additional resources being provided to support linguistic and cultural choice. In the-
ory, immigrants can maintain their language (through MTI) and culture or adopt
Swedish norms. Free adult classes in Swedish are also provided. These support poli-
cies apply quite widely to anyone born abroad or who has a parent born abroad (Boyd,
1999).

Community Policy
Historically, education, whether by the state or the church, has been very centralized
and not consultative. Although the current syllabus and programs are very top-down
in some respects in their implementation, the NAE encourages the input of parents,
and surveys of stakeholders (parents, teachers/administrators, students) are taken
to ascertain changes in attitudes and satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the Swedish
school system (Nuwer, 2002). MTI programs and the more recent ability to open
private schools has also provided minority and immigrant language speakers with
choices related to language and cultural studies.

LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION CULTIVATION PLANNING

Language Maintenance
Standard Swedish is the predominant language of the country and is in some respects
gaining in its dominance, although some believe the continued growth of English
poses a long-term threat. The general trend in the minority communities in Sweden is
a rapid decline in the number of bilingual speakers (there are few if any non-Swedish
monolingual speakers) with second-or third-generation Swedish-Finns, the largest
minority community, being Swedish-dominant or Swedish-only users. Although there
are MTI programs available to support minority language maintenance, participation
rates in them are in general declining. The European Union is also having an increas-
ing impact on language maintenance. Although there is an increased requirement to
support minority and immigrant languages and the availability of EU funding for
projects, the European structures also create a new layer of supra-national languages
that are important to learn—hence, the relatively recent requirement for all students
to learn a foreign language other than English. Although that foreign language may
be a minority or immigrant language, in general this development has disadvantaged
the maintenance of smaller and minority languages.

Language Reacquisition
Language reacquisition is not a priority in Sweden. Winsa (2000) reports that most non-
mutually intelligible varieties of Swedish are now extinct and only a small number
 55. LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION 1025

of people speak the remaining varieties. There was a small revival effort in the 1960s,
but it did not gain wide acceptance, perhaps because there were no media models or
obvious situations for using such language varieties. Some local school plans stress
local varieties, but the aim seems to be to strengthen local identity rather than to
reintroduce the varieties.
MTI programs are meant to support maintenance, rather than reacquisition, of
languages like Sami or Meänkieli/Finnish. Although bilingual schooling, cross-border
contacts, and better status for these languages in northern Sweden provides some
hope of their maintenance and/or reacquisition, many of the five Sami languages, in
particular, are endangered and are becoming relics of identity. The Sami Parliament
has not given language issues a high priority. In these circumstances, only North Sami,
the predominant variety in Norway, seems likely to survive. Meänkieli/Finnish is also
in decline, both in domains of use and in numbers of speakers.
Boyd (1999) points out that one of the major problems with MTI—whether in Sw2,
minority, or immigrant languages—is that “much of the instruction in the compulsory
school [Grades 1–9] . . . has been organized along the lines of remedial education,
requiring pupils to leave their regular classes for one or more lessons a week. L1
instruction has taken place primarily after school hours, when children are tired and
have other activities that compete with it (p. 74).” Both pedagogically and attitudinally,
such provision undermines MTI.

Foreign/Second Language Learning

English is the dominant foreign language taught in Sweden, taking over from German
that dominated until the end of World War II (German remains the next largest foreign
language studied). Since 1962, English has been a compulsory subject for all pupils
in schools, thus democratizing languages, moving them away from being a grammar
and translation-based subject for the elite. In 1994, students were required to study
an additional language (i.e., French, German, or Spanish) except for foreign born or
minority students who were able to elect to study their first language. In their final
year of compulsory schooling and in upper secondary school, pupils may elect to
learn a third foreign language or take additional studies in one of the languages they
are already studying (Cabau-Lampa, 1999).

Language Shift
As the brief overview of Swedish history indicates, the religious bureaucracy and gov-
ernment policy has, over a long period of time, encouraged the use of standard high
Swedish by making it the only language of religion, government, and government
institutions. Although the formal coercion to shift to Swedish has disappeared (and
has been replaced by formal support for minority languages), underlying community
attitudes do not seem to have changed, nor are there opportunities to use these lan-
guages or varieties. There is, therefore, a continuing shift to Swedish as the dominant
language and a shift to use English more widely for a variety of purposes.

LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION PLANNING IN NORTH KOREA

Ideally, as noted in the introduction, language-in-education policy ought to be a prod-

uct of national language policy. In the real world, this relationship rarely occurs, and
language-in-education policy often constitutes a stand-alone, singular effort to plan
language. In North Korea, this “ideal” situation exists, and events in North Korea
demonstrate the potential dangers that such an all-encompassing approach can have.
North Korea as an independent political entity came into existence on August 15,
1948, after the defeat of the Japanese who had occupied Korea until 1945 and the
1026 KAPLAN AND BALDAUF

failure of the subsequent reunification talks between the USSR, the United States, the
United Kingdom, and the two Koreas. From that time to the present, the government of
North Korea has undertaken official, sustained, conscious efforts to shape the Korean
language to the political needs of a socialist state. The government has accepted the
sociopolitical value of a national language as the major means for implementing so-
cialist policy and for directing the thinking and behavior of the populace. Obviously,
the language served as well to represent the will of the Party to the citizenry. Language
planning at the highest levels of government was directed by the objectives of socialist
state-building. National language policy gave rise to language-in-education policy.
It has been argued that language policy development in postwar North Korea
may be roughly divided into three periods: The Preparation Period (1945–1953), The
Transition Period (1954–1963), and The Munhwae (Cultured Language) Period (1964
to the present)—these titles obviously assigned after the fact. The Preparation Pe-
riod was most clearly characterized by a massive national literacy campaign. In 1945,
some 30% of the population was believed to be illiterate in any language. In order
to solve the perceived problem—that is, the elimination of illiteracy—in November
1947 the Peoples’ Committee (later the North Korean Peoples’ Committee) adopted
the Winter Illiteracy Eradication Movement in Rural Areas, a 4-month long program
running from December 1947 to March 1948. The government decreed that all persons
between 12 and 50 years of age would participate. A second campaign followed imme-
diately on the heels of the first. The entire population was involved either as teachers
or as learners. Special night classes were mounted in every workplace and village.
The Youth Organization, the Women’s League, and the Peasant’s League were mobi-
lized. Although primary emphasis was placed on literacy, the program also offered an
ideal opportunity for ideological education as well. Simultaneously, the government
mounted the Movement for Total Ideological Mobilization for Founding the Nation.
The government claimed that it had achieved total literacy within 4 years (i.e., by
1949).
In order to achieve total literacy, the language needed to be simplified, because
the learning of the Hangul alphabet was one thing, but the learning of thousands of
Chinese characters was quite another. Thus, the government initiated a program to
eliminate Chinese characters from the language. This activity turned out to be more
complex than literacy education and ideological training, and the campaign spilled
over into the second period. (As previously discussed, a similar undertaking occurred
in Japan from the time of the Meiji restoration.)
Following the Korean War cease fire in July 1953, language planning (intended
“to mobilize everything for economic reconstruction of the socialist fatherland”) be-
came an essential part of the comprehensive national rehabilitation programs under
the Three-Year Economic Rehabilitation and Development Plan (1954–1956). The ob-
jective of this activity was to standardize the language, an activity that was seen to
require the promulgation of a grammar and a dictionary and the promulgation of
standard rules for the Romanization of Korean and the Koreanization of Foreign Words.
This period saw the production of:
r Korean Orthography (Cosene chelcapep), disseminated in 1954.
r Writing Loan Words (Oylaye phyokipep) in 1956/1958.
r Korean Language Grammar 1 (Cosene munpep 1) in 1960.
r Korean Dictionary (Cosenmal sacen) in 1960/1962.
The transition that is recognized in the name of the period was a transition from old
Korean (i.e., the Korean of the colonial period [i.e., the Japanese occupation] and of the
variety used in the South) to the new Korean (i.e., a variety permitting the language
to function as a socialist cultural weapon).
 55. LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION 1027

In 1963, the term meaning cultured nature and attitude (munhwaseng) was introduced
as the most important element for the Korean language standard; this term quickly
became simply cultured language (munhwae)—the name given to standard Korean by
Kim Il Sung in 1966. This third period was significantly concerned with intellectualiza-
tion (modernization) of the language—that is, with prestige planning. It is interesting
to note the gradual migration of interpretation from “the modern speech of the mid-
dle class in Seoul,” to “modern speech most commonly spoken by Koreans” to “the
language of workers and revolutionaries in Pyongyang.” This meaning migration de-
fines the enormous language planning work conducted in the North in the 2 decades
between 1945 and 1965. That work involved both corpus planning and status plan-
ning. All of this preliminary activity came to fruition in the third period—one that
exploited intellectualization and modernization.
Kim Il Sung’s leader’s words (kyosi—literally, “enlightened teaching”) from his
speeches in the mid-1960s and thereafter became the ultimate rationale for all subse-
quent language planning activity in North Korea. (See, especially, Kim, 1977.)

r Kim believed people of the same racial makeup, the same culture, living in the
same territory, could not be considered a nation if they spoke different languages—
thus, the need for a nationalistic, pure standard.
r He further held that people speaking the same language but living under different
political systems can be seen as belonging to the same nation—thus, leaving open an
opportunity for reunification of the two Koreas.
r He reversed the earlier total proscription of Chinese characters on the grounds
that they continued to be used in the South, and, thus, that banning them would
remove one of the common bonds between the two Koreas—again leaving open an
opportunity for reunification of the two Koreas.3
r He defined the teaching of Chinese characters as part of foreign language edu-
cation and banned their use in national language classes and in school textbooks—a
case of having your cake and eating it, too.
r He severely criticised South Korean language practices on the grounds that influ-
ences from Chinese, Japanese, and English were allow to coexist with Korean, thereby
threatening the eventual extinction of Korean.
r He further criticised South Korean for the undemocratic gap between spoken
and written language resulting from a skewed distribution of power.
r He also criticised South Korean as sexist because it retained features that marked
women as subordinate to men.

On the bases of these views, Kim steered Korean language planning, insisting that
the first principle of developing Munhwae was that the language must be nationalistic
(including words deriving from dialects of Korean, which were seen as a rich source
of pure lexicon).

LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION POLICY

Access Policy
In North Korea, national language planning activity has dominated the language-in-
education planning process. The objective was to produce socialist equality within
the population and to eliminate the intellectual class. It was, therefore, essential to
involve the entire population. That objective was introduced in the early literacy cam-
paigns, in which all persons between 12 and 50 years of age were simply required to
participate. The entire population was involved either as teachers or as learners—that
1028 KAPLAN AND BALDAUF

is, college students and teachers became literacy teachers and special schooling for
adults was provided at every level of the societal structure. At present, all children are
required to attend 11 years of basic education. Advanced educational opportunities
are determined by the needs of the state. But the language policy did not extend only
to Hangul; in December 1946, the Preliminary Peoples’ Committee also mandated
Russian language schools in major cities, and by 1948 the study of Russian was made
compulsory at middle school level. All upper level officials of the Party were required
to be fluent in Russian. English, of course, was banned at the time of the Korean
War. Kim later changed his mind as he came to see that the time for one worldwide
socialist state had not yet come. He was disillusioned by the Sino-Soviet disputes
based on national interest rather than socialist principle. In 1964, the North Korean
Workers’ Party issued an edict promoting foreign language education, and English
was introduced into the secondary school curriculum on a 50/50 basis with Russian,
students having no say in the choice. By 1980, English had become the undisputed
foreign language with 80% of students studying it. In 1992, following the collapse
of the USSR, Russian was completely eliminated from the curriculum, and English
became the only mandated foreign language taught.

Personnel Policy
In North Korea, as previously noted, teachers for the masses were drawn initially
from the ranks of college students and teachers. Over time, teacher education became
more institutionalized; at present, teachers are trained at the Institute of Higher Ed-
ucation and Kim Hyong Juk Advanced Teacher-training College.4 However, the first
criterion for every teacher was party loyalty. To a large extent, the system operated on
the assumption that education is a political activity and any (educated) native speaker
is a competent teacher. Teaching Hangul required acceptance of the linguistic crite-
ria laid down in the dictionaries, grammars, and orthographies produced essentially
between 1950 and 1980. In the earlier period, when Russian was a compulsory for-
eign language, Russian teachers were imported from the Soviet Union. Some foreign
languages are currently taught, but they are taught by Korean citizens rather than by
imported native speakers. Chinese characters are taught in foreign language courses
by Korean citizens; because Chinese characters were initially purged from North Ko-
rean Hangul and subsequently reinstated at the specified number of 3,000, widespread
teaching of Chinese characters has not been necessary.5 Ironically, although English
has become the most popular foreign language, it too is taught by North Korean
teachers.

Curriculum Policy
The early need for rapid transition to full literacy was coupled with patriotic (nation-
alistic) and socialist dogma. The use of Hangul-only as the language of government,
education, and cultural activities was made mandatory. One of the purposes of exten-
sive lexical activity was to standardize and codify words that had been introduced
during a decade of socialist state development (e.g., ‘workers’ party,’ ‘people’s army,’
‘people’s front,’ ‘people’s economy,’ ‘people’s liberation war,’ and ‘soviet’) and to al-
ter the meanings of other words (e.g., ‘capitalist,’ which took on all of the negative
semantic connotations common in socialist literature), all based on Marxist/Leninist
principles (Kim, 1977). Kim Il Sung insisted that future dictionaries must be based
on the principle of self-reliance; thus, in so far as possible, rejecting foreign words
and replacing them with “native” words. The idea of basic lexicon on the principle of
the speech of the people (inminseng) was accepted in order to achieve the unification
of speech and writing and to promulgate easily understood and quickly accepted
 55. LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION 1029

words in place of difficult foreign items. The first principle of developing Munhwae
was that it must be nationalistic (including words deriving from dialects of Korean,
which were seen as a rich source of ‘pure’ lexicon). That first principle necessitated
purification—the removal of ‘foreign’ influences. Language curriculum (without ref-
erence to the language being taught) served to inculcate communist ideology.6 In prac-
tice, the State Education Commission draws up both long- and short-term plans for
the promulgation of educational policy and for the development of teaching materi-
als. The State Academy for Research in Education develops educational programs and
teaching materials that are subsequently published by the State’s educational publish-
ing houses, subject to final approval by the State Education Commission. Changes in
textbooks are developed by the National Commission for the Revision of Textbooks,
again subject to approval by the Commission (Chang, 1994).

Methodology and Materials Policy

North Korea is so tightly closed a society that published materials take a long time
to reach the outside world, if they ever do. North Korea is an “impenetrable society
with a totally controlled press [and substantial] restrictions on travel in and out of
the country” (Cumings, 1990, p. 53). It should come as no great surprise that little
has been published on the North Korean educational system, let alone on language
teaching. (There is a 1990 study of education in North Korea (Huh, 1990, cited in Jae,
2002), but it is in Hangul and neither available to nor readable by the authors of this
chapter.) Although materials are not accessible, it is possible to speculate that English
(or any other foreign language for that matter) is not taught to achieve communicative
competence. As Jae (2002) points out, “[l]essons on grammatical rules, pronunciation,
and the like—never mind pragmatics of sociolinguistic conventions—take a back seat
to lessons on ideology. Moreover, North Korea’s English textbooks give priority to the
Juche7 ideology over such topics as the English-speaking peoples and their culture (p.
50).” As Baik and Shim (1995) suggest, North Korean secondary English textbooks
are written in order to embellish the reality in North Korea and to totally distort
reality outside North Korea to legitimize and maintain the present regime. Thus,
although it is impossible to discuss method or materials in any detail, it is possible
to speculate about the intent and more immediate objectives of language instruction.
The methodology is probably a mixture of grammar-translation and an early version
of audiolingualism. The intent is political indoctrination in the socialist ideology of
the state.

Evaluation Policy
Given that little is known about assessment policy in North Korea, and given that edu-
cation in foreign languages appears to be independent of communicative competence,
it seems possible to speculate that assessment policy as such is perhaps rather slight
and probably highly conventional. It is also possible to speculate that the material
tested covers state policy rather than language structure. With respect to the teaching
of Korean, it is again possible to speculate that assessment is perhaps notional. There
is no indication that writing as a distinct skill is taught. Pronunciation, grammar, and
reading are perhaps taught and assessed conventionally. Thus, if there is a connec-
tion between methods and materials on the one hand and assessment on the other,
that connection is not transparent. In practice, evaluation consists of “discovering
whether the pupil’s education by the teacher . . . is properly conducted” (Chang, 1994,
p. 3159). There is a final secondary examination, constructed by municipal and district
education committees.
1030 KAPLAN AND BALDAUF

Resourcing Policy
Little is known about the details of the development of the North Korean national bud-
get. GDP, as of the most recent available figures (1998), is $21.8 billion (U.S. dollars)
GDP per capita is $1,000 (U.S. dollars) and the rate of growth is 5%—as compared
with South Korea, GDP $584.7 billion (U.S. dollars; 12 times as great), GDP per capita
$12,600 (U.S. dollars; 12 times as great), rate of growth 6.8%—placing North Korea
among the world’s poorest nations. But North Korea has the largest standing military
in the world, and it has reportedly suffered greatly from shortages of food resulting
from drought and other natural causes. Given this situation, and given the under-
standing that language education is an important part of government policy, it is
possible to assume that language education is relatively high on the list of govern-
mental priorities, but that resources available are significantly constrained. Chang
(1994, p. 3158) reports that the North Korean government has funded education over
a 11-year period as suggested in the following:

Government expenditure on education in 1,000s of won [estimated average

rate of exchange over the period 1.00 (U.S. dollar)] = 2.1 won

1. 20,333,000 | Educational grants in the amount of $7,524 (U.S. dollars) on

2. 22,203,600 | average cover the cost of education from K to
3. 24,018,600 | university; in 1991 an average grant for a primary
4. 26,158,000 | school student was $163 (U.S. dollars) for a high school
5. 27,328,830 | student $199 (U.S. dollars) and for a university student
6. 28,396,000 | $476 (U.S. dollars) per year. If average income may be
7. 30,085,100 | estimated at $1,000 (U.S. dollars) per year, the grants are
8. 31,660,900 | substantial. However, compared to educational
9. 33,382,940 | expenditures in other countries, the investment
10. 35,513,480 | in education by the North Korean government
11. 36,909,240 | is not impressive.

The percentage expended on foreign language education, or for that matter on the teaching of the
national language, is unknown.

LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION CULTIVATION PLANNING

Language Maintenance
In North Korea, only one language really counts: The North Korean version of Korean,
as written in revised Hangul. From the 1950s, the government has promoted the
exclusive use of Hangul in all sectors of the society. It has purged Chinese characters
(but not completely), it has revised the syntax of the language, the orthography of
the language, and the lexicon. In the lexicon it has purged all vestiges of the Japanese
occupation, it has purged all vestiges of the benighted capitalist perceptions, and
it has created new lexicon along socialist lines as well as supportive of the cult of
adulation of Kim Il Sung. The “sanitized” version has been consistently perceived as
a powerful tool for the achievement of the socialist policies of the government. There
are no minority languages, so it hasn’t been necessary to deal with problems arising
from competing languages. Regional varieties of Korean (North Korean dialects) have
been, on the one hand, seen as sources of authentic Korean lexicon, whereas, on the
other hand, they have been seen as requiring standardization and assimilation into
the “national” variety. Foreign languages, discussed in the following, have played
only a relatively minor role in language planning.
 55. LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION 1031

Language Reacquisition
As noted previously, North Korea is monolingual. No other languages hold any status;
indeed, there aren’t any competing languages. It is important to note that, contrary to
trends elsewhere (e.g., the European Union), the government has diligently striven to
create a monumentally monolingual society with a single objective. Because language
is perceived as a tool of socialist state building, other languages are of no consequence
except as they contribute to the basic principle. Although foreign languages are taught,
they are taught for political purposes—as exemplified in the bit of text cited in endnote
7 “we learn English [or any other language] for our revolution.” Thus, the competing
demands faced by language planning bodies in other polities are irrelevant in North
Korea.

Foreign/Second Language Learning

In the early stages of the development of North Korea, Russian was the only foreign
language available and learning it was mandatory. Russian language schools were
established in major cities, and by 1948, the study of Russian was made compulsory
at middle school level. All upper level officials of the Party were required to be fluent
in Russian. But, as Kim Il Sung became disillusioned with the Soviet Union, especially
after the death of Stalin in 1953, Russian lost its place and was gradually replaced by
English. In 1964, the North Korean Workers’ Party issued an edict promoting foreign
language education, and English was introduced into the secondary school curriculum
on a 50/50 basis with Russian. By 1980, English had become the undisputed first
foreign language with 80% of students studying it. In 1992, following the collapse of
the USSR, Russian was completely removed from the curriculum, and English became
the only mandated foreign language taught. English was introduced on the rationale
that it was necessary for access to science and technology but, in actual fact, it has not
served that end to any significant extent. As Baik (cited in Jae, 2002) has pointed out,
“it is extremely doubtful—North Korea being arguably the most tightly controlled
country in the world—that foreign materials in English, scientific or otherwise, are
freely imported into the country and then made readily available to the general public
(p. 49).” English—indeed, all foreign languages—are taught by North Korean teachers.
Knowledge of 3,000 Chinese characters is required of all students through foreign
language courses taught by North Korean teachers. In addition, Chinese as a foreign
language is gaining in popularity. Aside from English and Chinese, it is possible to
study French, German, or Japanese.

Language Shift
In North Korea, there has been a shift to literacy and to increasing monolingualism.
First literacy and subsequently the “revised” Munhwae (Cultured Language)—a prod-
uct of Kim Il Sung’s thought—were imposed on the North Korean people through
the total mobilization of the social structure including the Youth Organization, the
Women’s League, and the Peasant’s League. As a consequence, the entire population
of North Korea has been shaped into a monumentally monolingual society with a
single objective. All other dialects of Korean spoken in North Korea have been ex-
tinguished. Foreign language learning is rigorously controlled by the state. Because
of the restructuring of Hangul in the North, some Korean linguists are concerned
that the variety employed in the South and that employed in the North are gradually
becoming mutual incomprehensible.
1032 KAPLAN AND BALDAUF

CONCLUSIONS

The three illustrative case studies included in this chapter provide concrete instances
of how the policy and planning aspects of language-in-education policy and planning
goals are implemented in these polities. Had space permitted, it would have been
possible to examine the powerful impact that language-in-education planning has
had in other parts of the world; for example, in Côte d’Ivoire (Djité, 2000) where
the requirement to use French in schools has limited the development of Popular
French and autochthonous languages; in Finland (Latomaa & Nuolijärvi, 2002) where
language-in-education programs support Finnish–Swedish bilingualism and access
to a wide range of foreign languages; in Israel (Spolsky & Shohomy, 1999) where
Hebrew has been revived to create a national language, but where Arabic is taught in
schools and the demand for English is increasing; in Paraguay (Gynan, 2001) where
Spanish and Guarani bilingualism and education have been the battle ground between
the political left and right; in South Africa (Kamwangamalu, 2001) where teaching
African languages in schools, that served apartheid by denying access to Afrikaans
and English, is now struggling to be revalorized to support equity and identity; or in
Tunisia (Daoud, 2001) where Arabicization in schools has to contend with the problem
of multiple standards of the language as well as the strong colonial language French
and an increasingly attractive English.
From these and other instances of language-in-education policy, a number of more
general issues are implicated for language-in-education goals, including:

r Political nature of goal selection process (also see, Baldauf & Kaplan, 2003).
r Lack of professional language and literacy input to policy or planning goals (also
see, van Els, chap. 53, this volume).
r Lack of community consultation or input in most language-in-education deci-
sions.
r Focus of attention on national languages and their development.
r Standardization effects of teaching (national) languages through schools.
r General lack of support for language maintenance for minority languages or
dialects.
r Active suppression of some languages or varieties and/or the failure to support
the continued use or acquisition of others (also see May, chap. 57, this volume).
r Impact of institutional use (e.g., established churches, religious use) on language
choice.
r Continued prominence of former colonial languages.
r Increasing impact of English on educational systems.
r Inadequacy of training for many teachers (both in terms of language and meth-
ods).
r Problem of adequately funding language programs to meet individual and soci-
etal needs.

These points demonstrate that although language-in-education planning is only

one component of language planning, it often plays a central role in language direc-
tions and development in polities around the world.

NOTES

1. The main local dialects are Tohoku (Northern Japan), Kanto (Tokyo area), Kan-sai (Kyoto/Osaka area),
Shimane/Tottori (Shikoku, Hiroshima, and San-in), Kyushu (Northern Kyushu), Kagoshima (Southern
Kyushu), and Okinawan.
 55. LANGUAGE-IN-EDUCATION 1033

2. Dialect differences were mitigated by the use of a generalized variety of Tokyo dialect—spoken kyootuu-
go, and written hyoozyun-go.
3. As early as 1959, however, students in Grades 8 through 10 learned Chinese characters and Sinitic terms.
By 1968, 1,500 characters were required in upper-level middle schools, and an additional 500 characters
were required in high-level technical schools. In 1971, a textbook on Chinese writing appeared using
3,323 characters. In 1972, Kuk-Hanmun Tokbon (A Mixed-Script Reader) appeared for college students,
including 2,000 characters taught in middle and high school and an additional 1,000 characters, the intent
being to permit the expression of high-level concepts in modern Korean (Hannas, 1995, p. 255).
4. The Korean educational system consists basically of a 2-year kindergarten (starting at age 4), a 4-year
primary school and a 6-year secondary school. (Counting only the second year of kindergarten, the
system provides a total 11 years of education.) This system is mandatory and free. Beyond basic education,
there is a 4 to 6 year-university system in parallel with a 4-year Institute of Higher Education, and a
series of 3-year specialized institutions (i.e., industry, agriculture, fisheries) as well as a 6-year medical
school (Chang, 1994).
5. Jae (2002) reports that Chinese seems to be gaining in popularity as a foreign language, but no information
appears to be available on the extent of Chinese language education.
6. Jae (2002, p. 50) cited the following example from a secondary English
textbook:

Teacher: Now close your books everybody. Han Il Nam, how do you spell the word revolution?
Student: r-e-v-o-l-u-t-i-o-n.
Teacher: Very good, thank you. Sit down. Ri Choi Su, what is the Korean [word] for revolution?
Student: Hyekmyeng.
Teacher: Fine, Thank you. Have you any questions? [No questions arise.]
Teacher: Well, Kim In Su, what do you learn English for?
Student: For our revolution.
Teacher: That’s right. It’s true that we learn English for our revolution.

7. Juche may be defined roughly as “self-reliance” as interpreted by Kim Il Sung and proclaimed as party
policy in 1955, following Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, as North Korea began to limit its relationship with
the USSR and as Kim Il Sung asserted his power and independence. Juche forms the guiding ideology of
the country—everyone has control over his or her own destiny; accordingly the people are responsible
for, and are the prime movers of, the social and economic program of the state. Kim attempted to
propagate Juche through the Non-Aligned Nations movement in the hope that he would be recognized
as a world leader, a genius, a hero, and a statesman.

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56

Prestige and Image Planning

Dennis E. Ager
Aston University

INTRODUCTION

Although there has been some discussion of prestige and image planning in the liter-
ature during the last 15 years (e.g., Ager, 1999, 2001; Haarmann, 1990; Omar, 1998), it
is an area that is not as well developed, described, and understood as the traditional
areas of status and corpus planning, or the more recent language-in-education (ac-
quisition) planning. It may, therefore, be useful to begin by examining three examples
of what most people accept as image planning. These examples then lead us to think
image planning might be, in fact, three separate activities: promoting a language,
manipulating image as a method of implementing language policy, and something
deeper to do with the motives of language planners themselves. From an examination
of each of these activities, we could, hopefully, try to set out the relationship between
society, language, and what planners do.

WALES

In the United Kingdom, the 1993 Welsh Language Act, updating the 1967 Act of
the same name, set up a Welsh Language Board (WLB) whose main duty would
be to plan for the Welsh language in Wales. In 1996, the Board published a strategy
document outlining how it intended to promote the language. The document had four
sections:

1. Increasing numbers of Welsh speakers.

2. Providing opportunities to use the language.
3. Changing the habits of language use.
4. Strengthening Welsh as a community language.

The first section is clearly about helping the education system to teach Welsh as
a second or foreign language; the second about the status of the language; and the
fourth has been implemented, among other ways, by setting up mentrau iaith, or small
groups of amateurs to encourage a whole variety of very local initiatives. The third
section is intriguing: It is of a different order. The WLB’s overall aim in this section was
1035
1036 AGER

to nurture confidence among Welsh speakers, by improving its image, and by seeking
to change the linguistic habits of those who use it (Welsh Language Board, 1996).
Knowing that 17.5% of the Welsh population had defined themselves as Welsh
speakers in the 1991 Census, and following the traditional marketing sequence, the
Board first commissioned a survey to identify attitudes toward Welsh language plan-
ning (WLB, 1996). It found that 71% supported using the Welsh language; 88% believed
that the language is something to be proud of; there was a widespread consensus (75%)
that Welsh and English should have equal status in Wales; 82% believed that bilingual
road signs were a good idea; 83% agreed that every public body should be able to
deal with people in both Welsh and English alike; and 45% thought that the private
sector did not use enough of the Welsh language. Against these signs of goodwill,
only 51% believed that Welsh had a future in their own area; 3%, who had been fluent
Welsh speakers while at school, had lost the use of the language since that time; confi-
dence in using the language was highest in intimate and domestic circumstances and
minimal when contacting bodies such as local councils or the (privatized) utilities.
Half the fluent Welsh speakers would fill in the vehicle registration form in English
because they thought the English version was clearer. Such attitudes indicate very
clearly a lack of confidence in the language and an expectation that its main focus
of use would be more and more in the home rather than the public sphere. Yet there
was a fund of goodwill that provided a basis for work on influencing feelings and
attitudes about Welsh in such a way that hope could be given to its speakers for a
broader than domestic future.
The strategy the WLB adopted was to promote the use of the language by young
people; to ensure that services could be provided that would use the language; and
to influence the media. These considerations led to Objectives 13 to 17 of the Board’s
strategy, of which Objectives 13 and 14(a) seem to be specifically about image planning,
as is the second half of Objective 17:

13. to increase the number of young people who use Welsh naturally as a medium
of communication
14. (a) to nurture confidence among Welsh speakers to increase their use of the
language
(b) to ensure that Welsh speakers use the services provided for them
15. to ensure that services provided in Welsh are easily available for the public to
use
16. to promote the use of Welsh by ensuring the appropriate provision of Welsh
language programmes
17. to promote the use of Welsh by ensuring the appropriate provision of published
books, magazines and papers, and by seeking to ensure these are widely read.

Language planning in Wales, as it has been conducted through the WLB, is a matter
of persuasion and influence, rather than control. There are teeth, and there are indeed
provisions for control: The Board can insist on bodies and organizations making Welsh
Language Schemes, and has done so for a large number of public and private orga-
nizations. It has preferred to act, as far as possible, in a consensual and cooperative
way. But the practical results the Board is looking for are intended to happen as a
result of image manipulation: If the image is changed, then Welsh will come to be
used more widely, and Wales can get closer to the ideal of a bilingual society. In 2000,
a second WLB report on the state of the language found that there remained problems:
despite oversampling Welsh speakers in the survey (43% could speak the language,
although the cells were reduced to the correct proportion of 17.5% speakers in the final
results), 28% of the population were still either indifferent to the language or opposed
to its use. One half the nonspeakers were not interested in learning Welsh; only one
 56. PRESTIGE AND IMAGE PLANNING 1037

TABLE 56.1
Percentages of Individuals From England, Scotland, and Wales Identifying
With Geopolitical Entities

Which two or three of these, if any, would you say you most identify with?

Great Britain England Scotland Wales

This local community 41 42 39 32

This region 50 49 62 50
England/Scotland/Wales 45 41 72 81
Britain 40 43 18 27
Europe 16 17 11 16
The Commonwealth 9 10 5 3
The global community 8 9 5 2
None of these ∗ ∗ 0 0
Don’t know 2 2 1 0

Note. Multiple answers were allowed.

From www.mori.com
∗ = small sample sizes.

fourth would make the effort to attend a class. There remains a somewhat tenuous
link between feelings of nationalism and both actual language use and the desire to
use the language, because more than 75% of the sample considered themselves to
be Welsh. Indeed, Welsh nationalism is strong: 81% of a representative sample in a
different survey identified with Wales, as against only 62% with Scotland and 41%
with England in these countries (see Table 56.1). Despite the well-known centrality
of language in the Welsh nationalism that has kept alive the idea of an autonomous
Wales for centuries, the language is still not regarded as essential to Welshness. Image
planning for language through the WLB seems to be intended as a method of bringing
about that Welshness.

MALAYSIA

In the case of “new” nations, the issue for language planning is often one of ensuring
image building for the indigenous language. The identity of the new nation may be
in doubt; it has been colonized, oppressed, or its differences from the major nation
of which it formed a part hidden. Malay in Malaysia is a case in point (Omar, 1998).
Omar looks particularly at the problems facing the creation of an image repertoire for
Malay as opposed to English in domains such as science, the professions, high culture
and refined social interaction, international diplomacy, and high literature. Since in-
dependence in 1957 when strong language-in-education planning was implemented,
Malay has been increasingly used until now undergraduate courses are taught in the
language and some 30% of doctoral theses at the University of Malaya were written
in the language between 1989 and 1995. Scientists in Malaysia still face the challenge
that all other languages do, including major European ones: despite growing use of
Malay, to achieve international recognition and career advancement it is necessary
to publish in English. In the professions, there is a similar tension. There are already
home-grown lawyers, accountants, doctors, dentists—these groups are comfortable
using Malay, but need English to interact with colleagues in other parts of the world
(Omar, 1998, p. 57). Malay, although used as a lingua franca of the region, is not iden-
tified with modern high culture. According to Omar, there may indeed be linguistic
1038 AGER

reasons why the language is little used in this area: Malay is much more marked than
English in terms of sociolinguistic levels. Nonetheless, in high prestige domains such
as diplomacy, at the international level, Malay is used when Malaysia, Indonesia, and
Brunei meet with one another to discuss affairs that pertain to them only. Otherwise,
English is used. In the media, it is a real challenge for Malay creative writers to rise
much above what they have achieved so far. The situation facing Malay is that English
has a very high image. Omar’s overall view is that despite the growth in the use of
Malay, Malay enjoys lower prestige and is generally not chosen because it does not
provide similar economic value as English. Omar seems to consider, therefore, that
image building, although a necessary component of language policy and planning
and certainly a main feature of official attitudes, is unlikely to be successful while
society does not find adequate economic value in the high-status domains necessary
to achieve a positive image for the language. Image planning, here, is a matter of
motive. Language planners, and the Malay speakers as a community, need to find
the inspiration and the urge to convince themselves that Malay is a satisfactory al-
ternative to English in the high-status domains. To change the image of the language
and to conduct image planning successfully, planners need to find an appropriate
motivating ideology, which has not been done yet.

QUEBEC

The language situation in Canada, and particularly in Quebec, is probably the most
studied of any in the world. Image planning has long been a main concern of the
planners in Quebec. They seem to see Quebec less as a province within a federation and
more as an independent nation-state. The view seems to be that image manipulation
will reflect this ideal, and that the task is to encourage the population to assume
an ideal, rather than an actual, identity. To an extent, this is language planning by
an elite for (its own view of) society. Not that planners would have seen things in
this elitist way: the motivating ideology has been that French and French-speakers
were the oppressed minority and needed to create a new identity in order to reject
the political reality of domination by Anglophones. Indeed, the general view among
most commentators is that the language management approach used in Quebec has
as its basis a bottom-up approach to solving language problems (see e.g., Jernudd &
Neustupny, 1987).
The Quebec language planners urge the French-speaking Quebeckers to value their
own language, as a symbol of their own identity. What their own language might be
caused the first problem for the idea of image planning: Is it the French of Paris or
the French of Montreal that should be encouraged? Parisian French has high status;
French speakers in France (50% of all speakers of French in the world) value it highly;
elite speakers in Quebec tamely follow this, as do elite speakers of the language
everywhere. But Quebec French is not Parisian French, and encouraging the mass of
Quebec speakers to value a foreign variety of their own language could only mean
denigrating their own—replacing oppression by English speakers by oppression from
Paris. This aspect of the image problem has still not been altogether resolved for
Quebec, even though robustly rejected at the political and economic levels.
A second image problem arose as pressure mounted for political independence
from the Canadian federation. If French was to be recognized and valued as the
language of ethnic French Quebeckers, where did that leave the other inhabitants
of Quebec? How could a sense of national pride and a desire to encourage civic
nationalism be encouraged among non-French speakers, including the first peoples,
allophones, non-French-speaking immigrants, civic minorities? Could French be the
common language for all, imitating the role of English in the United States where it
 56. PRESTIGE AND IMAGE PLANNING 1039

is the cement that binds rather than the flag of separation? Again, this is an unsolved
problem as planners in Quebec desperately try to shift the focus from ethnicity to
citizenship. Thus, in Quebec, image planning has not yet proved an absolute success,
even though here, image planning is a matter of planning for identity.

THREE WAYS OF LOOKING AT IMAGE

These examples indicate that, when we come to look at the way image planning has
been used by language planners, we are in fact dealing with at least three different
meanings of the term. First, image has to do with reflecting identity (real or imagined),
as in Quebec, whether the term is interpreted as ethnic identity or as civic identity.
Second, image seems to be used to describe a method of implementing language policy,
as in Wales. Third, image has something to do with the motives of planners, and of
the communities they plan for, for doing language planning in the first place, as in
Malaysia, and as Quebec is gradually realizing. Let us deal with these three uses of
image in order.

IMAGE AND IDENTITY

As an area of study, language planning and policy (henceforth LPP) requires under-
standing of and sympathy with a number of disciplines. Some of these are clearly
social, involving such issues as types of social community or category and the na-
ture of the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural environment within which planning
takes place, not to mention, in some well-known instances such as Northern Ireland
or Brittany, simple matters of geography and the physical environment. Other rele-
vant disciplines are part of political science: political behavior; planning processes;
the distinctions between mundane and necessary instrumental and managerial ac-
tivities like developing graphization or deciding terminology and more elevated, or
more ideological, attempts to restore or reinvigorate a language that has dropped
out of use. Economics is also important. The cultural practices of the group are sig-
nificant: religion, its high and popular culture, its ideals, its myths, and its history.
A sociolinguistic assessment of the interplay of languages, language varieties, and
communities in the relevant society is crucial. These disciplines—the sociological, the
political, the economic, the cultural, the sociolinguistic—enable us to understand the
areas to which LPP is then applied: the status of a language, its corpus, its acqui-
sition. But it is the social psychology of the relevant community of users, involving
issues of behavior and attitudes, the way individuals respond to complex stimuli and,
particularly, the nature of group and intergroup relations, that sheds light on the fun-
damentals: why some LPP proposals have been made, why some are unthinkable,
why some are effective and others fall by the wayside. Planning that falls by the way-
side, that is rejected by the target group, is pointless, no matter how well-researched
or technically brilliant. Success in language planning is about succeeding in influ-
encing language behavior, whether this is behavior in using language, identified in
the phrase language-as-instrument, or behavior toward language, often described as
language-as-object. It is this that moves us beyond Cooper’s (1989) definition of an
accounting scheme for LPP. Cooper asked the question: What actors attempt to influ-
ence what behaviors of which people for what ends under what conditions by what
means through what decision-making processes with what effect? We should add the
question: Why?
The importance of influencing behavior is not always clear, although even the
oldest practical language planners like the French Academy know that practical mea-
sures may well be useless unless hearts and minds are convinced. “Every planning
1040 AGER

effort . . . has to rely on a kind of psychological background which favours an effective

implementation of planning goals and which, ultimately, is the most crucial variable
for a long-term success of planning” (Haarmann, 1990, p. 104; see also Kaplan & Bal-
dauf, 1997, pp. 50–51). Haarmann, concerned with language planning as a process,
a continuous activity of controlling language variation under changing social con-
ditions, developed the idea to a three-part classification of three separate functional
ranges of planning: status, corpus, and prestige. Status and corpus planning were
productive, whereas prestige planning was “receptive, required for both status and
corpus planning, and required by both the actors and the targets of planning” (p. 105).
For him, “any kind of planning has to attract positive values, that is, planning activi-
ties must have such prestige as to guarantee a favorable engagement on the part of the
planners, and, moreover, on the part of those who are supposed to use the planned
language” (p. 104). In effect, Haarmann saw language planning as a serious attempt
to achieve success in influencing behavior, considered that what mattered was the
(social) psychology that drove both planners and the targets of planning, and was
convinced that the prestige attributed to the (linguistic) object of planning, both by
planners and by the recipients of the planning, was fundamental to this success:
elementary, in his terminology. Haarmann put language promotion, progressively
more efficient as it was carried out by individuals, pressure groups, institutions, and
by governments, on the same level as activities in corpus and status planning.
Although drawing out and providing a role for prestige planning, this tripartite
distinction is still not altogether satisfactory. Perhaps we need to explore further the
idea of prestige and what it might imply. In the literature and in common parlance,
four terms are involved: status, prestige, identity, and image.
The status of a language in a particular society is its position or standing relative
to other languages. To an extent, this is matter of observable fact, well analyzed and
illustrated in the original concept of diglossia (Ferguson, 1959). Status can be measured
by assessing the number and nature of the domains in which the target language is
used. High-status domains—the elite, Parliament, the judiciary, education, the forces
of law and order—use the high-status language (H) that is essentially the public
language of the state. Low-status languages (L) are used in domestic situations, for
private purposes, and among groups that wish to distinguish themselves from those
holding power, or that are marked as powerless when they are unable to deploy
linguistic skills in the high-status language.
Prestige describes the attitude of members of that society toward this language
relationship, and usually implies an attitudinal scale with one language (or language
variety) having higher prestige than another. Attitude is not necessarily so clearly a
matter of fact as is status and is more difficult to measure even through such techniques
as sociopsychological surveys. Attitude involves three elements:

1. An awareness of the factual situation (e.g., the contrast between H and L).
2. An emotional stance toward it (e.g., a feeling that H is desirable).
3. The desire to take some action in relation to the situation (e.g., learn to use H).

Citizens of a particular state are fully aware that one language (or language variety)
has higher status than another, but may not necessarily accord it higher prestige. In
most cases they will, of course: A high-status language used in the public domain
has high prestige, and in Britain and France standard languages like English and
French will be prestigious as well as enjoying high status. But Welsh has long had
high prestige in (some parts of) Wales, even though generally it was not used in
the higher status domains until devolution in 1998. Conversely, even after it has
been used in the Welsh Assembly, its prestige rating is still not high in all parts of
Wales.
 56. PRESTIGE AND IMAGE PLANNING 1041

The second pair of terms can be similarly contrasted. The identity, of the speakers
of a language, is how they see themselves, the social personality they allocate to their
own group. Like status, this is, to an extent, a matter of measurable sociohistorical
fact. Their own view of their own history, the accepted myths of the relevant society or
community, its social structure, its religion, its media, and its social leaders combine
to mean that it is not necessary to explain every reference to members; that Americans
can expect to find very similar reactions to September 11th everywhere in the United
States; that Scotsmen will feel pride when they see bagpipes or eat haggis. The relative
status of the language(s) through which this fellow-feeling is realized in a community,
its language ecology, is part of that community’s identity, and both status and identity
can be measured or at least described factually.
The term image reflects this identity, in the same way that prestige reflects status.
The image of a language or of the speakers of a language is how that identity is per-
ceived, whether by its own speakers or by others. An attitude, like prestige, image
represents something less tangible, less easily measurable, which may have behav-
ioral consequences. This attitude may be internal, that adopted by members of the
society using the language or set of languages, or it may be external, an attitude
adopted by people outside that society toward that society and its language. There
is a neat parallelism inherent in these terms: status is to prestige what identity is to
image.
Given that diverse terminology is a problem for LPP and its contributing disciplines
in general, it is perhaps not surprising that each of these four terms suffers from
considerable confusion, among experts, by different disciplines as well as among
nonexperts. The distinctions are rarely clear: status and prestige are often used to
mean the same thing. Identity and image are often confused. For us, though, the
status of a language is part of a community’s identity, part of its social structure;
the prestige that a community allocates to a language is part of the image of itself
that community has; it is part of its attitudinal structure. Similarly, the identity of a
community is a fact, but it is the image of that identity that can be positive or negative,
and can be quite different for members of the community than for those outside.
What can language planners interested in prestige planning do? There is a differ-
ence between planning for the real or concrete aspects of language use (status and iden-
tity) and planning for the unreal or social-psychological aspects (image and prestige).
Language planners and particularly policymakers in government or other credible au-
thority, accustomed to social or economic policy issues, often concentrate their efforts
on confirming or changing what they regard as real issues: the status of a language,
its corpus, or, most frequently, its acquisition. A language may, thus, be accepted
into the public domain by legislative fiat, as happened with Scottish Gaelic in 1998;
its spelling may be required to follow certain rules by governmental or nongovern-
mental authorities like publishers or copy editors, as happened (unsuccessfully) with
French in 1990; the teaching of a language may be subject to official direction, both as
to what may be taught and how the job can be done (as when the United Kingdom
National Curriculum specifies both the spelling and the teaching of English). Thus,
using traditional LPP techniques, language status can be changed, fairly easily. Direct
attempts to change prestige are fairly rare, with the Welsh Language Board’s “nur-
turing confidence” significant among them; but they are conceivable. Doing prestige
planning without doing status planning is even rarer.
Can planners change the image of a group’s identity? The contrast between feelings
of nationalism in France and those in the United Kingdom makes the difficulties
clear. France did not achieve its present territory until 1860, but from 1789 on, there
is little doubt that nation, state, language, and the name France/French have been
synonymous for all but a very small minority of the French: The image of the nation
was fixed by the Revolution, even though subsequent changes in the underlying
1042 AGER

reality of identity have been quite large. The United Kingdom is made up of four
nations: England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. It took from 1301, when
English kings took over Wales, to 1536 before the administration was united, to 1830
before the judicial systems were combined. Although royal power combined the two
countries with Scotland in 1603 under the name Great Britain, it took until 1707 before
the parliaments united. The Scottish educational and the judicial systems still remain
different from those of England and Wales. It took from 1801, when Ireland was
added under the name the United Kingdom, to 1922 for the realization to dawn that
the two nations were culturally separate. As a result, British people living in the
United Kingdom are still often at a loss to decide whether they feel more British
than English/Welsh/Scottish/Irish or vice versa. In 1999, on the Moreno nationalism
scale, in England 17% felt English, not British and 15% more English than British;
14% British, not English and 11% more British than English; 37% equally British and
English (The Guardian, Nov. 28, 2000). The language is English, not British. British
social planners have struggled and are struggling to define identity, and an attempt in
2000 to alter the self-perception, the image people recognize, by incorporating changes
brought about by immigration to Britain failed miserably. Yet no one denies that the
British are as patriotic as anyone else—only 7% felt no national sense of belonging.
The reality of identity has changed, but changing the image (self-perception) of that
identity has been and is very difficult. It can change, although it has taken 3 centuries
for the Stuarts’ attempts to make people feel more British than English or Scottish to
make some headway.
Both image and prestige are psychological attitudes. Attitudes can be affected by
propaganda, by deliberate planning, even though the process might be long and
difficult. Let us assume that Quebec wishes to change the identity of its territory,
from being an ethnically determined province to an independent state welcoming
other ethnicities. To change the image of the territory for its inhabitants from being
a home for native French speakers only to one welcoming non-French-speaking mi-
grants requires a lot more than simply changing the rules, as the examples of Britain
and France both show. It is not sufficient simply to create an independent Ireland by
separation from the United Kingdom: it needs further work to establish a positive
self-image for the new country, as continuing emigration seemed to show, even up to
the 1980s. Both image and prestige change need a basis of factual change in identity
and status, but changes in status and identity do not necessarily bring about changes
in image or prestige. If you make Gaelic in Ireland a standard language in educa-
tion, its prestige does not immediately rise. Expecting a different Quebec identity
to arise without changing the image of French as the language (only) of the ethnic
French, and expecting the prestige of French to rise without changing its status; or
planning a rise in prestige for Gaelic without making it useable in education first, are
nonstarters.
So according to our definitions, the status of a language and the identity of its
speakers are features of the linguistic and social systems of a society—both can be
changed by planned actions and sometimes by unplanned ones. (Relative) prestige
and (relative) image are attitudes adopted by people—planning is conceivable for
both, can affect both, but is again much harder for image than for prestige. There is
perhaps a warning here: For planning to be successful, both prestige and image may
need to be changed. Both are (usually) closely connected: language is a core value for
most societies. Changing the prestige of French in Quebec is excellent, but by itself
that will not change the nature of Quebec society. French has to be used and valued
by non-native-French speakers for a change in image to occur. Making Welsh useable
in the public domain and raising its prestige is only half the battle. To make the Welsh
feel Welsh, image has to change, even if the identity does not. Not for nothing do some
language planners concede that planning language is planning society.
 56. PRESTIGE AND IMAGE PLANNING 1043

Similarly, corpus planning and acquisition planning are supposedly basically fac-
tual matters, real features of the political system or the educational structures of the
society, involving decisions that planners can make. But changes in spelling, in the
identity of the language, are now almost impossible to effect in the established lan-
guages: the prestige of the language is fixed, but so is its image as a core element of
the relevant identity. Changes in acquisition planning, in the status of the language
(putting Gaelic in the curriculum of Ireland), are easy to effect. But changes in the
prestige of the languages do not necessarily follow.

IMAGE AND METHOD

Promoting a Language to Bolster the Self-image (Identity) of Speakers

Reversing Language Shift. A first, and perhaps the main, group of cases where
image manipulation is used as a method of planning, rather than as a psychological
equivalent to identity or as a motive, is reversing language shift (RLS; Fishman, 1991,
2001). Catalan in Spain, French in Quebec, Irish in Ireland, and Hebrew both before
the creation of the state of Israel and afterward may stand as examples of the methods
employed. In both of the first two cases the language had low prestige, seemed to be in
decline, and the self-image of its speakers was a mixture of pride in their identity and of
a sort of despair that the future held little hope for that identity. In both cases planners
had a mixture of aims, not by any means limited to language planning. In Catalonia
the planning conducted by Jordi Pujol and his Convergence and Unity Party (CiU) was
mainly oriented toward establishing the political distinctiveness of the territory after
the end of the Franco regime. The methods were mainly political and concentrated on
the creation of the national myth, associating Catalan with the history of Catalonia and
Catalan cultural uniqueness. LPP was oriented toward ensuring the use of Catalan
in the high-status public domains (normalization) as well as in education. In Quebec,
too, the purpose of the Parti Québécois was primarily political although this time the
methods were more social and economic, concentrating on the creation of a factual and
particularly an economic independence both from Canada and, almost as important,
from the power of the United States. In both cases, social planning saw the relative
status of the language as a fundamental, and education in the language as a prime
method of ensuring the success of the planning of society that was envisaged. Both
sets of planners were supposedly fully aware of the importance of image, and both
sets included a range of methods aimed at developing positive images to underline
and reinforce the practical measures.
Irish and Hebrew are rather different cases, where the language acted as a symbol of
newly acquired nationhood and was intended to underline the identity of that nation.
In the case of Irish, the self-image of the target population had suffered because of the
presence of an overwhelmingly powerful neighbor that had conquered them, whose
language had been used in the high-status roles for centuries. The task for the Gaelic
League in 1880 was to ensure that the image of Irish was raised sufficiently to ensure
it could move into these roles and be accepted there. Hebrew is a fundamentally
different case. Here it was not a matter of reaction against one dominant language
or powerful neighbor, but of creating a national myth from the religious unity that
already existed and from a number of associated social and economic myths associated
with the ideas of Zionism. In the process, the languages that were rejected were not
only those of powerful neighbors or supporters, like German, but also languages like
Judeo-Spanish or Yiddish, which had symbolized Jewishness for certain groups and
that could well have been adopted in this role for the nascent nation and state, but
which lost out for different reasons. Eventually, this would result in the development
1044 AGER

of the political nation, with the eventual result that the Hebrew language has now
become the language of the State of Israel. The method was political and amounted
to ensuring that Hebrew was viewed positively, while the others were not.
Fishman (2001), revisiting his earlier studies on reversing language shift, invited
a range of scholars to describe the current situation of individual languages and to
comment on theories and approaches. The Fishman approach relies on fostering an
ethnolinguistic community (X-ians) using their language (X-ish) within an environ-
ment of Y-ians and their language (Y-ish). Full success can only come when there
exists a community of X-ians, transmitting X-ish to their offspring: RLS cannot be
based on acts of charity by outsiders (Fishman quotes the case of New Zealanders
learning Maori through sympathy with the Maori plight). His recipe for action is, in
our terms, internal image planning: “to stress the role of X-ish in family, intimacy, and
ethnocultural authenticity in local identity. Rendering kith and kin into important
allies (even on a cross-border basis) is more important initially (and for a long time
thereafter) than conquering outer space” (Fishman, 2001, p. 475).
Bourhis (2001), in his chapter on Quebec, explores the concept of ethnolinguistic
vitality developed in the years leading to the adoption of the Charter of the French
Language in 1977. His view is that processes such as language shift cannot really
be studied in a sociostructural vacuum, and that an assessment of the relative vital-
ity of ethnolinguistic groups is an essential preliminary to any language planning.
Ethnolinguistic vitality, that which makes a group likely to behave as a distinctive
and collective entity within the intergroup setting (p. 102), derives from demographic
factors such as the absolute numbers of people in the group, their birthrate and im-
migration/emigration situation, together with their distribution; from institutional
support and control factors such as whether the language is used in education and
government services; and from status factors originating in the group’s history, its
economic and social status and that of its language. Planning tried to support French
on all these fronts: in terms of numbers, by attracting immigrants toward French and
ensuring that education in French was protected; in terms of institutional control,
by ensuring that Francophones obtained control, and that French was used in, not
merely education, government services, and politics, but particularly the world of
work and the economic world. In image planning, the stress was placed on making
people aware of the negatives: the low status of French in demography (declining
fertility and the Anglicization of new immigrants) and in institutional control, partic-
ularly in the world of work. “It is the Xmen analysis of the weak position of French (in
these areas) which provided the ideological mobilising tool (threat to French survival)
that convinced the Francophone majority that RLS was vital for the survival of their
language” (p. 111).
Riaǵain’s (2001) analysis of Ireland is concerned to show that language develop-
ments and language policy are related to, if not simply a part of, economic and social
planning and variables.

The social uses of language owe their specifically social value to the fact that they are or-
ganised in systems of social interaction which reproduce the system of social differences.
The state plays a very dominant role in shaping the socioeconomic development and
thus it is necessary to examine policies which relate to economic, and social (particularly
education) issues, and whose intent was not at all language oriented, but which greatly
affect the operation of language policy. (p. 212)

The unique shape and character of Irish language policy since 1922 relies on the fact
that it was the Irish state that dealt with the minority language problem by trying to
reestablish Irish as the national language. On the face of it, the policy has been suc-
cessful: whereas in 1851 the percentage of persons claiming to speak Irish in census
 56. PRESTIGE AND IMAGE PLANNING 1045

returns was 29.1%; in 1996 it was 41.1%. The national increase is primarily caused
by improvement since the 1920s in the proportion of young adults speaking Irish:
for those ages 20 to 24, from 15.8% in 1926 to 51.7% in 1996. These figures mask the
fact that language surveys “suggest that only about 5% of the national population
use Irish as their first or main language. A further 10% use Irish regularly but less in-
tensively in conversation or reading. . . . these levels would appear to have remained
stable over recent decades” (Riagáin, 2001, p. 201). Government policy since 1922 has
been to make Irish compulsory in the schools, so that the average child studies the
language for 13 years. There are about 100 Irish-language immersion schools, and in
English-language mainstream schools, Irish is studied as a subject. In terms of social
classes, however, the group that includes the elite now makes educational decisions
that involve the adoption of a strategy that increasingly does not include higher-level
Irish or any Irish at all. In Riagáin’s view, it is the changes in Irish society, particu-
larly since 1960, which have brought this about. The new economic policy elaborated
over the 1970s and 1980s “placed emphasis on export markets and foreign industrial
investment” (p. 207), changing from the predominantly agricultural small businesses
where the requirement of a knowledge of Irish for government employment and for
entry to the professions affected few people. As a consequence of the growth of tertiary
education this socioeconomic change required, in 1973 “Irish ceased to be a compul-
sory subject for examinations or a requirement for entry to the public service” (p. 207).
Even in the Gaeltacht where first-language Irish speakers predominate, employment
in agriculture dropped from nearly three fourths of males in 1961 to less than one
half in 1981 with the consequence being that the Irish-speaking networks diminished
in number and intensity. As a consequence of these societal changes, current gov-
ernment policy looks more toward institutional parallelism, the provision of certain
basic state services in and through Irish, than toward fully functional bilingualism—a
move toward language maintenance and away from language revival. It may well
be that the original ideological impulse for image planning, the need to establish the
independence of Ireland as a state and to counter the dominance of English, has been
modified in a number of ways. Ireland now no longer has need of its own language
to assert its own identity and to give itself a satisfactory self-image.
Catalan in Catalonia has generally been regarded as a success story in terms of
language maintenance and revival, with Catalan at Stage 1 of Fishman’s Graded
Intergeneration Disruption Scale (GIDS). Against this background, Strubell (2001)
notes that census data for 1996 shows that comprehension of Catalan is approaching
100%, with rises of 11.3 percentage points from 1986 in speaking, 11.9 points in reading,
and 14.4 points in writing. By age-group, in 1996, 90.4% of those aged 15 to 29 could
speak the language, whereas the percentage dropped to 61.9% for those over 64. For
those of school age, the rise was from 77.9% in 1986 to 83.6% in 1996. New arrivals,
too, are learning Catalan. The revival of Catalan has been a consistent policy of the
Generalitat, responsible for a series of Linguistic Acts culminating in 1998 with “a
message of the political will . . . to continue impelling the process of recovery and
presence of Catalan in all fields and all segments of social life and a commitment
on the part of the Catalan institutions to the language of the country” (p. 272). The
legislation contains quotas and sanctions.
Nonetheless, Strubell notes a need to relegitimize the policy, so it is legitimate to
ask whether the planning has really been a success. Opposition to it dates back to
1981 and was particularly virulent between 1993 and 1997. Replies by intellectuals
had little effect on public opinion and the organization committed to promoting the
language had been dissolved. Until recent times, the main motivating factor has been
past oppression (from the Franco regime), but this now has less and less explanatory
appeal. Social pressure for the integration of newcomers (more than 90% of whom
are Spanish-speaking) has been replaced by institutional pressure, and Strubel notes
1046 AGER

passivity and lack of interest that both political leaders and the Catalan community
display toward the future of the language and change in linguistic habits. Such a
significant change is the language attitudes of the young, where there seems to be
a perception that Catalan is fostered by those in power, favoring a minority simply
because Catalan is its family language. Catalan is not the clearest sign of identity
among young people who fully identify themselves as Catalans. Another, even more
significant, change is the increasing bilingualization of the population, where most
Catalans nowadays speak Spanish with little or no accent, thus even leading to con-
versations between Catalan-speaking strangers often taking place in Spanish (Strubel,
2001, p. 266). Perhaps too much stress has been laid on changing identity through leg-
islation, and not enough on the required image change!
Spolsky and Shohamy (2001) analyzed the position of Hebrew. They wondered
whether the unique case of the language is really one of RLS, given the 1,000-year
history of language maintenance through religious education and retained, active,
literacy. Revival as a spoken language was closely tied to secularized and seculariz-
ing Zionism, which concentrated on a Hebrew nation, for Hebrews, and rejected at
once the ways of the goyim (gentiles) and their languages and of the Jews (yidn)
and their language, Yiddish. The ideological principle was to use Hebrew in public
and to ensure intergenerational transmission in the kibbutzim. The consequence has
been success for Hebrew, but at the cost of replacing the Arabic introduced into the
region 1,000 years earlier, which itself had displaced Aramaic, which had replaced
Hebrew and the 40 or more languages brought in by Jewish immigrants. Spolsky and
Shohamy see the revitalization of Hebrew as a matter probably best explained as oc-
curring in three areas of language practice (of speaking and teaching Hebrew among
secular Jews in particular around 1890 to 1913); of language ideology (of the Zionist
movement), and of language policy (of the British Mandate government of the inter-
war years, which accepted Hebrew as the educational language for that community
and its schools). Planning has covered all four of our areas: identity, image, language
status, and language prestige. The result has been a confirmation of a new identity
and a new status for the language, a case of success for Hebrew through the practical
elimination of contenders.
Certainly in relation to these four examples, and possibly more widely in RLS, there
seems to be a contrast between those who see LPP as a matter of adding functionality,
particularly in the public language and in education, and those who aim at total social
change through planning a new image for a language. Image as a method is different
for each group. In the first case (Quebec French), the main method is revolution, or
as near to it as planners can get. These planners are only interested in language if
it acts as a symbol and a point around which the troops can rally, and only care for
corpus change if it strengthens the political case. The language is a battle flag. Image
planning in Quebec, rooted in economic and social planning and aiming, not at a new
sociocultural environment, but at an improved position for French speakers within
the existing one, has been successful for the language, while the aims for autonomy
and independence have been very nearly achieved. In the second case (Irish), meth-
ods involve increased visibility for the language, making sure it is hauled out of the
museum and placed on the street. Corpus change is fundamental. Catalan has had
considerable success as far as the original image manipulation plans of the activists
are concerned, even if the eventual result may now present different problems arising
from this very success. It, too, aimed at total change in the sociocultural environment.
Finally, Hebrew is a complete success story of language image planning, resulting in
the creation of a new nation. Although Ireland, too, has had a successful experience of
image planning in the political sphere, and the national political entity has achieved
both internal and external recognition and acceptance, and society has thus changed
completely, language planning as a method has been much less successful.
 56. PRESTIGE AND IMAGE PLANNING 1047

One must nonetheless conclude that Fishman’s hope for peaceful coexistence and
an acceptance of pluralism on the part of language activists may be difficult to achieve,
given the conflictual nature of all four of these situations. The image planning that
has worked has done so when territorial, political, and economic independence were
also involved, in Ireland and Israel. In the same two countries there has been a strong
association between ethnicity and language, too. In the case of Quebec, although the
ethnic French Québeckers may be convinced, other parts of the population are less
so (aboriginals, immigrants) and Quebec has not yet cut itself off from its Federation.
In Catalonia, peaceful coexistence with Castilian speakers is not a complete reality,
despite Pujol’s definition of a Catalan as someone who lives in Catalonia. In all these
situations, image manipulation as a method of ensuring change has worked among the
ethnic group. The problems lie in extending this image manipulation outside the ethnic
group. However, as the next section indicates, LPP for internal image change is by no
means restricted to minority groups or to the powerless within society: far from it.

Major Standard Languages. The continuing effort put into ensuring a positive
image for major standard languages provides another set of examples. In such cases,
the language is promoted in order to maintain, confirm, or defend the identity as
seen by the planners. France is well known as a country where significant internal
language planning of the defensive type has been in operation for centuries (Ager,
1999). Much of this planning was implemented in a fairly brutal way, through oppres-
sion, condemnation, or punishment. Policy and planning at the time of the Revolution
concentrated on banning the regional languages, not for reasons of image, but as a
political need to destroy regional power and the power of those forces such as the
Church, which supported regionalism. Most of the image construction since that time,
whether internal or external, has rested on the idea of the superiority of French as the
language of the center. But associated with this idea is the ideology of superiority
under attack: The language of culture, in which Paris, alone in the world, represents
the idea of high culture; the language of democracy, which alone can represent true
political ideals; and the language of universality, which alone can fight for human
rights for all mankind. Language ideology has used the analogy of a military cam-
paign waged against the barbarians at the gates. It is for this reason that education has
been the principal arena in which image manipulation was conducted, although from
time to time, there have been changes in deciding who exactly the enemy was. At
the time of the French Revolution, the enemy was the regional languages, kept out of
the school grounds. During the 19th century, it was low-prestige social varieties, kept
out by the use of the written language and a very closely circumscribed definition of
culture. In more recent times, the enemy has been American English, associated with
free trade and globalization when these are done by other than French companies,
whether private or owned by the state. José Bové’s symbolic (and practical) attacks
on McDonalds restaurants strike a sympathetic chord among the French at all levels
of society, although one rather doubts whether similar attacks on croissanteries in the
Far East would be quite so well received. Certainly attacks on France’s and Europe’s
farm policy by the African farmers who are ruined by it are rarely mentioned by Bové.
The Toubon Law of 1994 strengthened the idea of education as the bastion and of the
French Academy as the guardian of the French language. And because of the inse-
curity associated with the need to protect this impossible ideal of perfection, French
government after French government has poured money into protecting the image of
the French language.
Britain, too, has in recent years shifted from implicit language policy where the
issue was simply not raised because it was so self-evident that the language of Shake-
speare was infinitely superior to all others, to a point where explicit defense of standard
English seemed necessary. As the language of an island and then of an empire, English
1048 AGER

had no need of protection—effortless superiority was and remained the ideology. Re-
gional languages were curios, of interest to specialists, but it was clearly to the benefit
of the inhabitants of those outlandish regions that for their own good they should
acquire and use English as quickly as possible (Grillo, 1989). The same approach was
good for Africans, who clearly needed civilization, in English, which would enable
them to improve their own lot. By contrast to the French, the ideologizing motive
was not one of opposition to the languages of regions, of social classes, or of con-
quered nations—indeed, considerable effort and money was expended in preserving,
recording, and protecting these. But the thought never entered anyone’s head that the
higher public domains could use anything other than English, that education could
use any language other than English, or that training in English as the language of the
elite (Public School English) should not receive the highest prestige. The self-image
was one of effortless superiority, and the image held by others, too, confirmed and
still confirms this attitude toward the international language of diplomacy and com-
merce. Explicit British language policy has only arrived in the late 20th century as
attacks on this self-image have come from two directions. The great standard English
debate of the late 1980s pointed to the enemy within, made up of politically motivated
teachers, regionalists, and migrants whose collective opposition to good English in
the schools would apparently destroy the language and the country with it (Honey,
1997; Marenbon, 1987). The other source of attacks on English and its image come
from Phillipson in Linguistic Imperialism (1992), Pennycook in The Cultural Politics of
English as an International Language (1994) and others who attack the neocolonialism
of English language teaching or the global triumphalism of Crystal in English as a
Global Language (1997). Crystal, of course, hotly rejects this accusation and deplores it
as ideologically fueled.

Fossilization. There is another group of examples in which the self-image of a

community is of importance and where the issue of domains of use becomes even
more salient. Some languages and language varieties have become so associated with
particular domains, of cultural importance to the relevant community, that change is
unthinkable. Any modernization of the language or script involved in the Classical
Arabic used for holy writings in Islam has become impossible. Not merely is the Koran
the word of God, but so is the language in which it is written. Indeed the methods of
learning are also, for some, sacrosanct. There have been, and still are, difficulties asso-
ciated with the use of recent translations of the Bible in various Christian groups, too.
Even in Britain many Anglicans appear to believe that the King James Prayer Book of
1622 is the only acceptable form in which prayers may be offered, whereas priests who
reject hymns like Jerusalem because of the nationalism of the words—quite inappro-
priate in today’s world—are regarded as mavericks by some but hotly defended by
others. Linguistic differences, and differences of script, underline or reflect differences
of religion. In Northern Ireland, Catholic politicians from Sinn Fein use a different di-
alect and pronunciation (of English) from Protestant politicians (McCafferty, 2001).
Indeed, Schiffman (1996, pp. 64–67) lists 13 examples of areas of the world where
religious differences are mirrored by language and language policy differences, from
Belgium to India, from Korea to Sri Lanka. The same approach to language planning
is noticeable among the cultural nationalists of Wales. Here, the language is an un-
touchable museum piece. Any attempt to modernize, to encourage slang, to tolerate
borrowings, or to represent changing social realities is rejected out of hand. Folklore
reigns supreme. In such cases, the self-image of the community is fixed in the use
of the particular language variety, but the importance and centrality of religion and
other key, core values of the relevant community are such that there is no question
of any change to identity. Image is a method for ensuring the confirmation of that
identity, and preserving it unchanged.
 56. PRESTIGE AND IMAGE PLANNING 1049

Promoting a Language to Influence Its Image and That of Its Speakers

Diplomacy Through Language. Two obvious examples of diplomacy through lan-
guage are the languages of nations defeated in World War II: German and Japanese
(Ager, 2001, pp. 57–66). In both cases the nations concerned saw a need to modify
the attitudes toward themselves that other societies held, and saw that one way in
which a more positive view might be achieved would be to encourage an under-
standing of both the artistic and cultural achievements of their own societies and of
their languages, seen as cultural systems and mechanisms enabling access to the so-
cieties. The approach, fired by the wish to ensure a positive approach for the country,
was to encourage the teaching and learning of German or Japanese outside Germany
and Japan. To do this, resource policy was extensively called on. The Goethe Institut
and the Japan Foundation are both well-endowed organizations, using governmental
money and plans to provide language teaching directly or to foster it, together with
cultural appreciation, in many parts of the world. The former has 135 branches in
76 countries; the latter concentrates on activities like international exchanges and the
fostering of academic studies of Japan in schools and universities abroad.

Encouraging Language Spread. Promotion of language is by no means restricted

to these two examples: indeed, most countries try hard to manipulate the image oth-
ers have of them through their language policy for the external world. The United
Kingdom’s British Council recently commissioned a report on the likely future for
English and for its own activities in language teaching (Graddol, 1997). Graddol’s
report was not well received by opponents like Phillipson or Pennycook, and accu-
sations of triumphalism concentrated on the conclusions where Graddol pointed to
the effect of small forces, strategically placed . . . careful strategic planning, far-sighted
management, thoughtful preparation, and focused action now could indeed help se-
cure a position for British English language services in the 21st century (p. 62). This
was seized on as proof positive of the deviousness, manipulation, and craftiness of
the British Council, and its intention to keep the superior position of English. Not that
the British Council, and its parent organization, the British Government, were the
only language with such policies. For Kibbee (2001, p. 71), writing in a special issue of
Terminogramme on Geostrategies for Languages, you can see a similar concern among
French planners trying to maintain the domination of French in the national education
systems of (France’s) former colonies, particularly in sub-saharan Africa, and its even
more threatened situation in international agencies and organizations (UNO, Euro-
pean Union, Olympic Games, and so forth). Kibbee accuses both the British and the
French of racing for market share above all, with both of them fostering languages and
policies that can only lead to the destruction of smaller and less powerful languages.
Kibbee states, however, that both are deliberately placing themselves among the op-
pressed and marginalized on the grounds that they are defending linguistic diversity
or might themselves be crushed by changing military or economic forces. Kibbee’s
comment was that such fears were hardly credible. He had equally harsh words for
the ecolinguists whose only concern with disappearing languages was that this re-
duction in linguistic diversity and the concomitant disappearance of peoples would
lead to the disappearance of their own research grants, not to mention that defending
minority languages in certain situations in the Third World was the equivalent of
asking people to risk the economic future of their children.

IMAGE AS MOTIVE

What drives planners to plan, and why is it that the people whose behavior is sup-
posed to be changed should be willing to submit themselves to such manipulation?
1050 AGER

The question—Why?—is slightly more complicated than Cooper’s—for what ends?

If we simply consider the ends of planning, then we could stop at the point of not-
ing that planners intend to use language in Parliament or to teach it in Grade 4. But
why these particular decisions at this particular point in time? With what purpose are
these ends chosen? Ager (2001) has considered this issue in some detail and found that
motivation for the planning of language behavior is, in fact, best analyzed as a three-
part psychological and social phenomenon, involving not merely ends, purposes, or
goals, but also people’s attitudes toward them and a more general category of psy-
chological impulses associated with identity. A particular planning or policy decision
does not depend solely on the aims and goals planners set themselves, nor solely on
their attitudinal structure, necessarily reflecting that of the sociopolitical environment
within which they work. In addition to these, it also depends on the self-image plan-
ners have of themselves on the identity they think relevant for themselves, and for
the group whose behavior they intend to influence. A particular planning decision
can often be traced back to a particular point in the process of identity creation and
defense. This third element has long been hinted at and even openly examined: it
has to do with the nature of the self and particularly on how this self is created and
defended.
Most work on motives for planning mentions a number of general psychological
motives such as identity or insecurity. Thus, for example, Tšrnquist-Plewa (in Barbour
& Carmichael, 2000) states, “The democratic developments initiated in Poland, Hun-
gary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia after 1989 gave them a chance of build-
ing national identities where the state and institutions play an important integrat-
ing part . . . language and ethnic origin are today crucial for national identification”
(p. 218). Thus, too, Greece and Turkey demonstrate how language and national iden-
tity are becoming ever more closely related in much of Europe (Trudgill in Barbour &
Carmichael, 2000, p. 263). Many of these motives, particularly those labeled identity,
have a somewhat dubious history in political movements like Fascism and its more
modern development toward extreme nationalism: In the Balkans as elsewhere in Eu-
rope, it is possible to see the profoundly anti-democratic consequences of the politics
of narrow constructions of identity, which privilege the single common denomina-
tor of statist ethnicity over region, religion, human rights, shared histories, and even
shared languages (Carmichael in Barbour & Carmichael, 2000, p. 239). But again, to
declare that such a process of identity construction or defense is itself the motive is
insufficient without the two other, more precise, elements of goals and attitudes.
Motivation, for us, is first, a process of dynamic identity construction within which
image development can be a phase. We propose successive phases of construction as
(the discovery of) identity, (the use of political) ideology (as a component part), (the
manipulation of) image, insecurity, the defense or maintenance of identity, the main-
tenance or correction of social inequality, integration (with a contiguous language),
instrumentalism and, in the worst cases, possible despair (at the lack of a future for
that particular identity and language). What is more, this list of basic motives seems
applicable to all three levels of actor involved in the planning process: the individ-
ual, powerless communities, and states, even though it has normally been applied to
groups and has given rise to social identity theory. To this extent, we make no dis-
tinction between individuals and groups, regarding all such organisms as sharing the
process of identity construction and defense as outlined. This development of social
identity theory, outlined in Ager (2001), takes into account these major axioms:

1. That identity develops through stages of social categorization, identity creation,

social comparison, and psychological distinctiveness.
2. That it is created by awareness of membership of an ingroup and non-
membership of an outgroup; the concomitant distinctiveness of such groups.
 56. PRESTIGE AND IMAGE PLANNING 1051

3. That social comparison is a prime factor in attitudes toward others.

4. That those creating their social identity move toward the positive and high status
rather than toward the negative, low status groups.

It also responds to the main criticism of social identity theory, that it is static, by
stressing the dynamic and constantly developing process of creating and recreating
group identity (Chambers, 1995, pp. 250–253).
The picture then needs to be further clarified by also considering this issue of the
ends of language planning. These seem to vary greatly in their precision: in addi-
tion to the great and grandiose (make Wales bilingual, eliminate Americanisms from
French), there are the concrete (teach Corsican, incorporate Breton-language schools
into the state system) and the downright detailed (include the spelling of which in the
National Curriculum in England at age 5). At the very least, these ends of language
planning can be categorized into three types in a taxonomy, similar to the vision, mis-
sion, and targets of quality planning: the general ideal, the concrete objective, and the
precise target. It is possible to distinguish between the type of ideal that seemed partic-
ularly important to individuals from those that seemed so for powerless communities
and again for powerful, or autonomous, states. For individuals, the frequency with
which there occurred superordinate ideals of coherence of identity, or of cooperation,
sometimes leading to compromise were identified. For powerless communities, the
importance of ideals of conflict, but also of cooperation and compromise were noted.
For states, ideals of social cohesion, elitism or social mosaicity, on the internal level,
are matched by competition or even conflict on the external level. Such superordi-
nate ideals have often been labeled social mobility, affiliation, or assimilation when
weak or soft group boundaries are involved, or, at the other extreme, social com-
petition, vitality, rejection, or autonomy when rigid or hard group boundaries are
noted.
Ager (2001) looked at how to assess how strong the three aspects of motivation
were. Neither for motives nor for goals was it possible to discover precise measures
of strength that could be used to compare one with another: rather, the measurement
process was limited to one of categorization. It is perfectly possible to measure the
strength of policies or planning decisions themselves by assuming that declared and
overt policies are stronger than undeclared and covert ones. Declared and overt poli-
cies are visible because they are enshrined in legal texts, formal decisions, or court
judgments; covert ones are represented simply by what people do or the attitudes they
adopt. It is on this basis that British government sources can claim that Britain has
no language policy. But a policy of rejection or discrimination is nonetheless real al-
though not openly stated, and language shift or the adoption of a new communicative
mechanism is likewise a fact.
This analysis of motivation is still not enough. It might account for some types of
real planning for status: the acceptance of a language in a high-prestige domain. It does
not account for image planning: for encouraging non-French speakers in Quebec or
non-Welsh speakers in Wales to learn the language. In order to understand motivation
fully, the picture needs to be developed further by looking at people’s attitudes and
their attitudinal structure. The attitudinal structure of the actors with reference to both
their first language (L1) and any relevant second language (L2) or other language
needs exploration, so the total language ecology of the relevant society is a factor.
Ager (2001) was particularly interested to measure language attitudes in such a way
that they could be summarized meaningfully. This was done by establishing four
measurement scales of excellence, vitality, attractiveness, and readiness for action,
and allocating markers of strength (1 to 3) to each according to the findings of opinion
polls or interviews, sometimes assessing attitudes from what society’s leaders have
said or what representative figures have put forward.
 TABLE 56.2
Language Policies Pursued by Powerless Communities and Powerful
Autonomous States
Motivation of Powerless Communities (1) and Powerful States (2)

Attitudinal Structure

Identity Excel Vitality Attract Action Goals:

sequence L1 L2 L1 L2 L1 L2 L1 L2 Ideal, objective, target

*Identity
(personal)
*Identity
(social)
Algeria 1 3 1 1 1 3 1 3 Cohesion/accept L1
Spoken spoken, promote L2
Classical Classical
Arabic (2)
*Ideology
UK (2) 3 1 3 1 3 1 3 1 Elitism/ignore
diversity
France (2) 3 1 3 1 3 1 3 3 Cohesion/repress
diversity
*Image Competition/foster
Germany (2) 3 1 3 1 3 1 3 1 German
Japan (2) 3 1 3 1 3 1 3 1 Competition/seek
favorable image
*Insecurity
Neologism in
French (2) 1 3 1 3 2 1 3 3 Conflict/xenophobia
*Maintain Conflict/seek equal
identity rights with English;
Welsh (1) 3 3 1 3 3 2 2 1 archaic purism
*Defend
identity Conflict/defend L1 by
Catalan (1) 3 1 3 2 3 1 3 1 attacking L
*Maintain
inequality
anti-Roma (2) 3 1 3 1 3 1 3 1 Conflict/repress Roma
*Correct
inequality
Australia (2) 3 3 3 1 3 3 3 3 Moasic/multilingualism
*Integrate
Koreans in Compromise/shift
Japan (1) 1 3 1 3 1 3 1 3 from L1 to L2
*Improve
instrumentality Conflict/reformist
Québec (2) 1 3 1 3 3 3 3 3 purism
*Despair Compromise/shift
Ainu (1) 1 3 1 3 1 3 1 3 from L1 to L2

Note. ∗ = Motives and attitudinal structures

3 = Strong positive attitude; value language highly; prepared to act
1 = Indifferent attitude toward language and its eventual disappearance
Adapted from table in Ager, D. (2001). Motivation in Language Planning and Language Policy (p. 135), Cleve-
don, UK: Multilingual Matters.

1052
 56. PRESTIGE AND IMAGE PLANNING 1053

This provided three elements of motivation: the psychological, the attitudinal, and
the practical, and each of these three “elements” of motivation has distinct and in some
cases measurable stages, levels, or scales of strength. By examining the variations of
these, it is possible to identify different types of motivation and pinpoint how the
manipulation of image fits into an overall scheme.
This discussion led to a representation and comparison of motives graphically in
presentations like that of Table 56.2, where the examples relate to language policies
pursued by powerless communities and powerful, autonomous states.
Language planners, whether individuals, communities and groups, or politically
autonomous governments, have a variety of motives and rarely make these fully
explicit. Aims are rarely unique; most language planning activities and policies have
mixed aims. Nor are language planning aims divorced from general aims for society.
All language planning and policy is an attempt to influence social behavior in realms
other than language alone.
But, as Haarmann (1990) points out, language planners do not plan for failure.
They hope for success in influencing individuals and societies. To be successful means
following the identity sequence, exploring the point at which the idea of the prestige
of a communication system will be most effective, and planning to capture that point.
Promoting a language or language variety, trying to confirm or improve its status in
society and, hence, the prestige in which it is held, means regarding it as in some
way superior to other languages and language varieties. This may be done either
so that the identity or self-image of those who speak the language is enhanced and
some advantage may thus accrue to them; or so that the image others have of the
language and its users is positively influenced, again for the benefit of those who use
the language.

REFERENCES

Ager, D. E. (1999). Identity, insecurity and image. France and language. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Ager, D. E. (2001). Motivation in language planning and language policy. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Barbour, S., & Carmichael, C. (Eds.). (2000). Language and nationalism in Europe. Oxford, UK: Oxford Uni-
versity Press
Bourhis, R. (2001). Reversing language shift in Québec. In J. A. Fishman (Ed.), Can threatened languages be
saved? (pp. 101–141). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Chambers, J. K., (1995). Sociolinguistic theory. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Cooper, R. (1989). Language planning and social change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Crystal, D. (1997). English as a global language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Ferguson, C. A. (1959). Diglossia. Word, 15, 325–340
Fishman, J. A. (1991). Reversing language shift: The theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened
languages. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Fishman, J. A. (2001). Can threatened languages be saved? Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Graddol, D. (1997). The future of English? London: The English Company.
Grillo, R. D. (1989). Dominant languages. Language and hierarchy in Britain and France. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Haarmann, H. (1990). Language planning in the light of a general theory of language: A methodological
framework. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 86, 103–126.
Honey, J. (1997). Language is power. The story of standard English and its enemies. London: Faber & Faber.
Jernudd, B. H., & Neustupny, J. V. (1987). Language planning for whom? In L. Laforge (Ed.), Proceedings
of the international colloquium on language planning (pp. 71–84). Québec: Les Presses de L’Université
Laval.
Kaplan, R. B., & Baldauf, R. B., Jr. (1997). Language planning from practice to theory. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual
Matters.
Kibbee, D. A. (2001). Les géostratégies des langues et la théorie linguistique. In J. Maurais & M. A. Morris
(Eds), Géostratégies des Langues [Geostrategies for Languages]. Special issue of Terminogramme, 99–100,
69–80.
Marenbon, J. (1987). English, our English: The new orthodoxy examined. London: Centre for Policy Studies.
McCafferty, K. (2001). Ethnicity and language change. English in (London) Derry, Northern Ireland. Amsterdam:
Benjamins.
1054 AGER

Omar, A. H. (1998). Language planning and image building: The case of Malay in Malaysia. International
Journal of the Sociology of Language, 130, 49–65.
Pennycook, A. (1994). The cultural politics of English as an international language. London: Longman.
Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Riagáin, P. O. (2001). Irish language production and reproduction 1981–1996. In J. A. Fishman (Ed.), Can
threatened languages be saved? (pp. 195–214). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Schiffmann, H. F. (1996). Linguistic culture and language policy. London: Routledge.
Spolsky, B., & Shohamy, E. (2001). Hebrew after a century of RLS efforts. In J. A. Fishman (Ed.), Can threatened
languages be saved? (pp. 350–363). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Strubell, M. (2001). Catalan a decade later. In J. A. Fishman (Ed.), Can threatened languages be saved? (pp.
260–283). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Welsh Language Board. (1996). Promoting and facilitating the use of Welsh. A strategy for the Welsh language.
Cardiff, Wales: Author. Available from www.bwrdd-yr-iaith.org.uk
Welsh Language Board. (2000). State of Welsh language research report. March/April 2000. Cardiff, Wales Author.
57

Language Policy and Minority

Language Rights
Stephen May
University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

INTRODUCTION

This chapter explores the interconnections between language policy and planning
(LPP)1 and minority language rights (MLR), also referred to in the literature as lin-
guistic human rights (LHR). MLR, which for the purposes of this chapter also in-
clude LHR, may be described as the linguistic and wider social and political rights
attributable to speakers of minority languages, usually, but not exclusively, within
the context of nation-states. This definition is, in turn, based on the usual distinction
between so-called minority and majority languages employed in the language rights
literature; a distinction that is based not on numerical size, but on clearly observable
differences among language varieties in relation to power, status, and entitlement.2
The particular focus of the chapter is on the often complex and contested history
surrounding the individual trajectories of LPP and MLR and how these trajectories
have intersected over time, beginning with the development of LPP as an identi-
fiable field of research and policy in the early 1960s. This focus will also highlight
the importance of adopting a wider sociohistorical, sociocultural, and sociopolitical
analysis of LPP, particularly in relation to ongoing questions surrounding the status,
use, and power of minority languages in the modern world, along with the material
implications of these questions for those who continue to speak such languages.
A key reason why such a broader sociohistorical, sociopolitical research approach
is necessary is because for much of its history, linguistics as an academic discipline
has been preoccupied with idealist, abstracted approaches to the study of language—
with the synchronic at the expense of the diachronic, with langue at the expense of
parole. In short, language has too often been examined in isolation from the social
and political conditions in which it is used. As Pierre Bourdieu (1991), the French
sociologist and social anthropologist, comments ironically of this process: “bracketing
out the social . . . allows language or any other symbolic object to be treated like an
end in itself, [this] contributed considerably to the success of structural linguistics, for
it endowed the ‘pure’ exercises that characterise a purely internal and formal analysis
with the charm of a game devoid of consequences” (p. 34). Or as Jacob Mey (1985)
1055
1056 MAY

observes, “linguistic models, no matter how innocent and theoretical they may seem
to be, not only have distinct economical, social and political presuppositions, but
also consequences. . . . Linguistic (and other) inequalities don’t cease to exist simply
because their . . . causes are swept under the linguistic rug” (p. 26).
This ahistorical, apolitical approach to language has also been a feature of soci-
olinguistics, albeit to a lesser extent, and, surprisingly perhaps, of many discussions
of LPP as well. The last is particularly surprising exactly because one might have
reasonably expected any analysis of language policies and practices to engage crit-
ically with the wider social and political conditions—and, crucially, their historical
antecedents—that have shaped them.

EARLY LANGUAGE POLICY AND PLANNING

The tendency toward this presentist approach (May, 2002) to language policy was most
evident in the early phase of LPP (1960s–1970s). During this period, LPP was seen by
its proponents as a nonpolitical, nonideological, pragmatic, even technicist, paradigm
(for a useful overview, see Ricento, 2000). Its apparently simple and straightforward
aim was to solve the immediate language problems of newly emergent postcolonial
states in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Status language concerns at this time, thus,
focused in particular on establishing stable diglossic language contexts in which ma-
jority languages (usually, ex-colonial languages, and most often English and French)
were promoted as public languages of wider communication. If promoted at all, lo-
cal languages—minority languages, in effect—were seen as being limited to private,
familial language domains.3 Although concern was often expressed for the ongoing
maintenance of minority languages, the principal emphasis of LPP at this time was
on the establishment and promotion of “unifying” national languages in postcolonial
contexts, along the lines of those in Western, developed contexts (see, for example,
Fishman, 1968a, 1968b, 1968c; Fox, 1975; Rubin & Jernudd, 1971).
What was not addressed by these early efforts at LPP were the wider historical,
social, and political issues attendant on these processes, and the particular ideologies
underpinning them. As Luke, McHoul, and Mey (1990) observe, while maintaining a
“veneer of scientific objectivity” (something of great concern to early language plan-
ners), LPP “tended to avoid directly addressing social and political matters within
which language change, use and development, and indeed language planning itself,
are embedded” (pp. 26–27).
This omission was problematic for a number of reasons. First, it did not question or
critique the very specific historical processes that had led to the hierarchizing of ma-
jority and minority languages in the first place. These processes are deeply imbricated
with the politics of modern nationalism and its emphasis on the establishment of na-
tional languages and public linguistic homogeneity as central, even essential, tenets of
both modernization and Westernization (see section on Nationalism, minoritization,
and historical construction(ism)). Consequently, the normative ascendancy of national
languages was simply assumed, even championed, by early advocates of LPP, and all
other languages were compared in relation to them. This is highlighted by the various
language typologies developed at the time, such as Kloss (1968), which attempted to
rank languages in relation to their relative “suitability” for national development.
Bourdieu (1991) observes of this tendency within linguistics more broadly:

To speak of the language, without further specification, as linguists do, is tacitly to accept
the official definition of the official language of a political unit. This language is the one
which, within the territorial limits of that unit, imposes itself on the whole population as
the only legitimate language . . . The official language is bound up with the state, both in
its genesis and its social uses . . . this state language becomes the theoretical norm against
which all linguistic practices are objectively measured. (p. 45; emphases in original)
 57. MINORITY LANGUAGE RIGHTS 1057

Second, the notion of linguistic complementarity, so central to early language plan-

ning attempts at establishing “stable diglossia,” was itself highly problematic. Linguis-
tic complementarity, as understood by early language planners, implied at least some
degree of mutuality and reciprocity, along with a certain demarcation and bounded-
ness between the majority and minority languages involved. Situations of so-called
stable diglossia, however, are precisely not complementary in these respects. Rather,
the normative ascendancy of national languages—and by extension, international
languages such as English—specifically militates against the ongoing use, and even
existence, of minority languages. As Dua (1994) observes of the influence of English
in India, for example, “the complementarity of English with indigenous languages
tends to go up in favour of English partly because it is dynamic and cumulative in
nature and scope, partly because it is sustained by socio-economic and market forces
and partly because the educational system reproduces and legitimatizes the relations
of power and knowledge implicated with English” (p. 132).
In other words, if majority languages are consistently constructed as languages of
“wider communication”; whereas minority languages are viewed as (merely) carriers
of “tradition” or “historical identity,” it is not hard to see what might become of the
latter. Minority languages will inevitably come to be viewed as delimited, perhaps
even actively unhelpful languages—not only by others, but also often by the speakers
of minority languages themselves. This helps to explain why speakers of minority
languages have increasingly dispensed with their first language(s) in favor of speaking
a majority language—a process of language shift or replacement that is a prominent
concern of current sociolinguistic analysis (see following section, Language shift and
loss).
It is these wider concerns with the pejorative “positioning” of minority languages,
and their speakers, that have led to the subsequent development of minority language
rights. Advocacy of minority language rights has been principally expressed to date
via two broad, although closely interrelated research paradigms: language ecology
and linguistic human rights. In what follows, I will outline the key concerns of minority
language rights’ advocates and discuss these concerns in relation to the language
ecology and linguistic human rights paradigms.

LANGUAGE SHIFT AND LOSS

Advocacy of minority language rights arises out of three principal concerns. The first
has to do with the consequent exponential decline and loss of many of the world’s lan-
guages. Indeed, of the estimated 6,800 languages spoken in the world today (Grimes,
2000), it is predicted on present trends that between 20% and 50% will “die” by the
end of the 21st century (Krauss, 1992, 1995).4 As has already been suggested, language
decline and loss occur most often in bilingual or multilingual contexts in which a ma-
jority language—that is, a language with greater political power, privilege, and social
prestige—comes to replace the range and functions of a minority language. The in-
evitable result is that speakers of the minority language “shift” over time to speaking
the majority language.
The process of language shift described here usually involves three broad stages.
The first stage sees increasing pressure on minority language speakers to speak the
majority language, particularly in formal language domains, as seen most commonly
in the “diglossic” language contexts discussed earlier. This stage is often precipitated
and facilitated by the introduction of education in the majority language, itself often a
central feature of the language-in-education planning dimension of LPP (see Baldauf
& Kaplan, chap. 55, this volume). It leads to the eventual decrease in the functions
of the minority language, with the public or official functions of that language be-
ing the first to be replaced by the majority language. The second stage sees a period
1058 MAY

of bilingualism, in which both languages continue to be spoken concurrently. How-

ever, this stage is usually characterized by a decreasing number of minority language
speakers, especially among the younger generation, along with a decrease in the flu-
ency of speakers, as the minority language is spoken less and employed in fewer and
fewer language domains. The third and final stage—which may occur over the course
of two or three generations, and sometimes less—sees the replacement of the minority
language with the majority language. The minority language may be remembered by
a residual group of language speakers, but it is no longer spoken as a wider language
of communication (Baker & Prys Jones, 1998).
A well-known alternative formulation of this process, which also usefully charts a
minority language’s private and public functions in relation to the nation-state (see
section on Nationalism, minoritization, and historical construction(ism)), is found in
Joshua Fishman’s “Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale” (see 1991, pp. 81–121).
In this 8-point scale, Stage 1 is seen as the most secure position for a minority lan-
guage (with the proviso that intergenerational family transmission continues to occur),
whereas Stage 8 is seen as the least secure. The various stages may be paraphrased
as:

r Stage 1: Some use of the minority language (ML) in higher level educational,
occupational, governmental, and media realms.
r Stage 2: ML used in lower governmental and media spheres.
r Stage 3: Use of the ML in the work sphere, involving (informal) interaction be-
tween ML and other language speakers.
r Stage 4: ML use as medium of instruction in education.
r Stage 5: Informal maintenance of literacy in the home, school, and community.
r Stage 6: Intergenerational family transmission of the ML.
r Stage 7: Although the ML continues to be spoken, most speakers of the ML are
beyond childbearing age.
r Stage 8: Remaining speakers of a ML are old and usually vestigial users.

Of course, such language loss and language shift have always occurred—languages
have risen and fallen, become obsolete, died, or adapted to changing circumstances
in order to survive—throughout the course of human history. But never to this extent,
and never before at such an exponential rate. Some sociolinguistic commentators
have even described it as a form of linguistic genocide (Day, 1985; Skutnabb-Kangas,
2000). Such claims may seem overwrought and/or alarmist, but they are supported by
hard data. For example, a survey by the U.S. based Summer Institute of Linguistics,
published in 1999, found that there were 51 languages with only one speaker left,
500 languages with fewer than 100 speakers, 1,500 languages with fewer than a 1,000
speakers, and more than 3,000 languages with fewer than 10,000 speakers. The survey
went on to reveal that as many as 5,000 of the world’s 6,000 languages were spoken
by fewer than 100,000 speakers each. It concluded, even more starkly, that 96% of the
world’s languages were spoken by only 4% of its people (Crystal, 1999a, 1999b).
These figures graphically reinforce an earlier suggestion made by Michael Krauss
(1992, 1995) that, in addition to the 50% of languages that may die within the next
century, a further 40% of languages are threatened or endangered. Given the processes
of language shift and decline just outlined, and the current parlous state of many
minority languages, it is not hard to see why. Even some majority languages are no
longer immune to such processes, not least because of the rise of English as a global
language (Crystal, 1997a, 1997b). Thus, if Krauss is to be believed, as few as 600
languages (10%) will survive in the longer term—perhaps, he suggests, even as few
as 300.
 57. MINORITY LANGUAGE RIGHTS 1059

LANGUAGE ECOLOGY

In response, proponents of MLR often adopt a language ecology perspective. Language

ecologists (see, for example, Harmon, 1995; Maffi, 2000, 2001; Mühlhäusler, 1990, 1996,
2000; Nettle & Romaine, 2000) argue that the current parlous state of many of the
world’s languages is analogous to processes of biological/ecological endangerment
and extinction; indeed, is far greater than the threat of extinction facing animal and
plant species. Unless this process of language loss is seriously and urgently addressed,
they argue, the world’s linguistic “gene pool,” along with the cultural knowledge
associated with these languages, will be irremediably diminished. The parallels that
are drawn by language ecologists between linguistic diversity and biodiversity have
their merits, particularly in the clear resonances between the two processes. Thus,
Steven Pinker (1995) observes that “the wide-scale extinction of languages [currently
underway] is reminiscent of the current (though less severe) wide-scale extinction of
plant or animal species” (p. 259). Likewise, James Crawford (1994) argues that each
“fall[s] victim to predators, changing environments, or more successful competitors,”
each is encroached on by “modern cultures abetted by new technologies,” and each is
threatened by “destruction of lands and livelihoods; the spread of consumerism and
other Western values . . . ” (p. 5). Conversely, some commentators have observed that
when biodiversity is high, so too are cultural and linguistic diversity (see Harmon,
1995; Maffi, 2000, 2001).
But despite the usefulness of these parallels, there are significant limitations to
language ecology arguments as well. One is an obvious tendency to present a preser-
vationist and romanticist account of minority languages and their loss—amounting, in
effect, to an overly Utopian view of language and language change (for recent cri-
tiques along these lines, see Blommaert, 2001; Brutt-Griffler, 2002; May, 2004). The
usual response to this perceived Utopianism is what might best be described as
resigned language realism—that as much as we might not like the process of language
shift and loss, there is little, if anything we can do about it. Edwards (1984, 1985,
1994, 2001) perhaps best exemplifies this latter position within current sociolinguistic
commentary (see also Bentahila & Davies, 1993; Coulmas, 1992; Eastman, 1984).
Another limitation is that the language ecology paradigm actually reinforces, albeit
unwittingly, the inevitability of the evolutionary change that it is protesting about.
This is because although biological/ecological metaphors are useful in highlighting
the scale and seriousness of the potential loss of languages to the world, they also
contribute, ironically, to the equanimity with which potential language loss on such a
scale is usually greeted. In effect, such metaphors reinforce, by implication, a widely
held view that language loss is an inevitable part of the cycle of social and linguistic
evolution. Thus, one could view the loss or death of a language as simply a failure on
its part, or its speakers, to compete adequately in the modern world where, of course,
only the fittest languages can (and should) survive (see, for example, Ladefoged, 1992).
As a result, what tends to be lost from sight are the wider political power rela-
tions that underlie language loss—or linguistic genocide, as Skutnabb-Kangas (2000)
would have it5 —and the wider processes of social, cultural, and political displace-
ment of which it inevitably forms a part. Language loss is not only, perhaps not even
primarily, a linguistic issue—it has much more to do with power, prejudice, (unequal)
competition, and, in many cases, overt discrimination and subordination. As Noam
Chomsky (1979) asserts, “Questions of language are basically questions of power”
(p. 191). Thus, it should come as no surprise that the vast majority of today’s threat-
ened languages are spoken by socially and politically marginalized and/or subordi-
nated groups. These groups have been variously estimated at between 5,000 and 8,000
(Stavenhagen, 1992) and include within them the 250 to 300 million members of the
world’s indigenous peoples (Davis, 1999; Tully, 1995), perhaps the most marginalized
1060 MAY

of all people groups. As Crawford (1994) notes, language death seldom occurs in
communities of wealth and privilege, but rather to the dispossessed and disempow-
ered. Moreover, linguistic dislocation for a particular community of speakers seldom,
if ever, occurs in isolation from sociocultural and socioeconomic dislocation as well
(Fishman, 1995). The loss of a minority language almost always forms part of a wider
process of social, cultural, and political displacement.

NATIONALISM, MINORITIZATION, AND

HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTION(ISM)

This brings us to the second principal concern that underlies the advocacy of MLR—
why certain languages, and their speakers, have come to be minoritized in the first
place. Advocates of MLR argue that the establishment of majority/minority language
hierarchies is neither a natural process nor primarily even a linguistic one. Rather, it is
a historically, socially, and politically constructed process (Hamel, 1997a, 1997b; May,
2000a, 2001, 2002, 2003), and one that is deeply imbued in wider (unequal) power
relations. Following from this, if languages, and the status attached to them, are the
product of wider historical, social, and political forces, we can discount the process of
natural selection that a biological account would seem to imply. There is, thus, nothing
“natural” about the status and prestige attributed to particular majority languages
and, conversely, the stigma that is often attached to minority languages, or to dialects.
There are two specific points at issue here. The first concerns what actually distin-
guishes a majority language from a minority language or a dialect. This distinction
is not as straightforward as many assume. For example, the same language may be
regarded as both a majority and a minority language, depending on the context. Thus,
Spanish is a majority language in Spain and many Latin American states, but a minor-
ity language in the United States. Even the term language itself indicates this process
of construction, because what actually constitutes a language, as opposed to a dialect
for example, remains controversial (see Mühlhäusler, 1996; Romaine, 2000). Certainly,
we cannot always distinguish easily between a language and a dialect on linguistic
grounds, because some languages are mutually intelligible, while some dialects of
the same language are not. The example often employed here is that of Norwegian,
because it was regarded as a dialect of Danish until the end of Danish rule in 1814.
However, it was only with the advent of Norwegian independence from Sweden in
1905 that Norwegian actually acquired the status of a separate language, albeit one
that has since remained mutually intelligible with both Danish and Swedish. Contem-
porary examples can be seen in the former Czechoslovakia, with the (re)emergence
in the early 1990s of distinct Czech and Slovak varieties in place of a previously
common state language. While in the former Yugoslavia, we are currently seeing
the (re)development of separate Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian language varieties in
place of Serbo-Croat, itself the artificial language product of the post-Second World
War Yugoslav Communist Federation under Tito.
What these latter examples clearly demonstrate is that languages are “created”
out of the politics of state-making, not—as we often assume—the other way around
(Billig, 1995). Independence for Norway and the breakup of the former Czechoslo-
vakia and Yugoslavia have precipitated linguistic change, creating separate languages
where previously none existed. The pivotal role of political context, particularly as it
is outworked at the level of the nation-state, might also help to explain the scale of
the projected language loss discussed earlier. One only has to look at the number of
nation-states in the world today, at approximately 200, and the perhaps 300 or so lan-
guages that are projected to survive long term, to make the connection. That many of
these languages are already recognized as either national or regional languages, or are
 57. MINORITY LANGUAGE RIGHTS 1061

currently spoken by groups who wish them to become so, serves only to strengthen
this connection further (see Gellner, 1983, pp. 43–50). Such is the narrow concentra-
tion of “officially recognized” languages that around 120 nation-states have actually
adopted either English, French, Spanish, or Arabic as their official language, while
another 50 have a local language as the language of the state (Williams, 1996). In addi-
tion, Mackey (1991) notes that there are 45 languages that are accorded regional status.
In short, currently less than 1.5% of the world’s languages are recognized officially by
nation-states.
And this brings us to the second key point at issue here: the central and ongoing
influence of nation-state organization, and the politics of nationalism, to processes
of national (and international) language formation and validation, along with the
linguistic hierarchies attendant on them. In this respect, the model of the linguisti-
cally homogeneous nation-state—the “ideal” linguistic model adopted in early LPP
efforts—is actually only a relatively recent historical phenomenon, arising from the
French Revolution of 1789 and the subsequent development of European nationalism.6
Previous forms of political organization had not required this degree of linguistic
uniformity. For example, empires were quite happy for the most part to leave unmo-
lested the plethora of cultures and languages subsumed within them—as long as taxes
were paid, all was well. The Greek and Roman Empires are obvious examples here,
while New World examples include the Aztec and Inca Empires of Central and South
America respectively. More recent historical examples include the Austro-Hungarian
Empire’s overtly multilingual policy. But perhaps the clearest example is that of the
Ottoman Empire, which actually established a formal system of millets (nations) in or-
der to accommodate the cultural and linguistic diversity of peoples within its borders
(see Dorian, 1998). Nonetheless, in the subsequent politics of European nationalism
(which, of course, was also to spread throughout the world), the idea of a single, com-
mon, national language (sometimes, albeit rarely, a number of national languages)
quickly became the leitmotif of modern social and political organization.
How was this accomplished? Principally via the political machinery of these newly
emergent European states, with mass education playing a central role (Anderson,
1991; Gellner, 1983). The process of selecting and establishing a common national
language usually involved two key aspects: legitimation and institutionalization (May,
2001; Nelde, Strubell & Williams, 1996). Legitimation is understood to mean here
the formal recognition accorded to the language by the nation-state—usually by the
constitutional and/or legislative benediction of official status. Institutionalization,
perhaps the more important dimension, refers to the process by which the language
comes to be accepted, or taken for granted in a wide range of social, cultural, and
linguistic domains or contexts, both formal and informal. Both elements, in com-
bination, achieved not only the central requirement of nation-states—cultural and
linguistic homogeneity—but also the allied and, seemingly necessary, banishment of
“minority” languages and dialects to the private domain.
If the establishment, often retrospectively, of chosen “national” languages was,
therefore, a deliberate and deliberative political act, it follows that so, too, was the pro-
cess by which other language varieties were subsequently “minoritized” or “dialec-
talized” by and within these same nation-states. These latter language varieties were,
in effect, positioned by these newly formed states as languages of lesser political worth
and value. Consequently, national languages came to be associated with modernity
and progress, while their less fortunate counterparts were associated (conveniently)
with tradition and obsolescence. More often than not, the latter were also specifically
constructed as obstacles to the political project of nation-building—as threats to the
unity of the state—thus, providing the raison d’être for the consistent derogation,
diminution, and proscription of minority languages that have characterized the last 3
centuries of nationalism (see May, 2001, for a full overview; see also Wright, 2000). As
1062 MAY

Nancy Dorian (1998) summarizes it: “it is the concept of the nation-state coupled with
its official standard language . . . that has in modern times posed the keenest threat to
both the identities and the languages of small [minority] communities” (p. 18). Florian
Coulmas (1998) observes, even more succinctly, that “the nation-state as it has evolved
since the French Revolution is the natural enemy of minorities” (p. 67).
Proponents of MLR argue that the emphasis on cultural and linguistic homogeneity
within nation-states, and the attendant hierarchizing of languages, are thus neither in-
evitable nor inviolate—particularly in light of the historical recency of nation-states,
and the related, often arbitrary and contrived, processes by which particular lan-
guages have been accorded “national” or “minority” status respectively. These argu-
ments about the historical and geopolitical situatedness of national languages also
apply at the supranational level. In particular, a number of prominent sociolinguistic
commentators have argued that the burgeoning reach and influence of English as the
current world language, or lingua mundi, is the result of an equally constructed histor-
ical process. First, there was the initial preeminence of Britain and the British Empire
in establishing English as a key language of trade across the globe. Second, there has
been the subsequent sociopolitical and socioeconomic dominance of the United States,
along with its current preeminent position in the areas of science, technology, media,
and academia (see Ammon, 1998, 2000). And third, there have been recent geopolit-
ical events such as the collapse of the former Soviet Union, and much of communist
Central and Eastern Europe along with it, which have further bolstered the reach and
influence of English (see Holborow, 1999; Maurais & Morris, 2003; Pennycook, 1994,
1998a, 1998b, 2000; Phillipson, 1992, 1998, 2003).
As with the construction of national languages, the current ascendancy of En-
glish is also invariably linked with modernity and modernization, and the associated
benefits that accrue to those who speak it. The result, MLR proponents argue, is to
position other languages as having less “value” and “use” and by extension, and
more problematically, to delimit and delegitimize the social, cultural, and linguistic
capital ascribed to “non-English speakers”—the phrase itself reflecting the normative
ascendancy of English. The usual corollary to this position is that the social mobility
of the minority language speakers will be further enhanced if they dispense with any
other (minority) languages.

LANGUAGE REPLACEMENT AND SOCIAL MOBILITY

Research in support of MLR highlights that the promotion of national languages

and/or English is, because of the social and political processes just outlined, almost
always couched in terms of language replacement—that one should/must learn these
languages at the expense of one’s first language. Consequently, the promotion of cultural
and linguistic homogeneity at the collective/public level has come to be associated
with, and expressed by, individual monolingualism. This amounts to a form of lin-
guistic social Darwinism and also helps to explain why language shift/loss/decline
has become so prominent.
Central to these language replacement arguments is the idea that the individual
social mobility of minority language speakers will be enhanced as a result. Relatedly,
minority language advocates are consistently criticized for consigning, or ghettoizing
minority language communities within the confines of a language that does not have
a wider use, thus, actively constraining their social mobility (see, for example, Barry,
2000; Edwards, 1994; Schlesinger, 1992). Little wonder, such critics observe, that many
within the linguistic minority itself choose to ignore the pleas of minority language
activists and instead “exit” the linguistic group by learning another (invariably, more
dominant) language. It is one thing, after all, to proclaim the merits of retaining a
 57. MINORITY LANGUAGE RIGHTS 1063

particular language for identity purposes, quite another to have to live a life delim-
ited by it—foreclosing the opportunity for mobility in the process. We can broadly
summarize the logic of this argument as follows:
r Majority languages are lauded for their instrumental value, whereas minority
languages are accorded sentimental value, but are broadly constructed as obstacles
to social mobility and progress.
r Learning a majority language will, thus, provide individuals with greater eco-
nomic and social mobility.
r Learning a minority language, although (possibly) important for reasons of cul-
tural continuity, delimits an individual’s mobility; in its strongest terms, this
might amount to actual ghettoization.
r If minority language speakers are sensible they will opt for mobility and moder-
nity via the majority language.
r Whatever decision is made, the choice between opting for a majority or minority
language is constructed as oppositional, even mutually exclusive.

These arguments appear to be highly persuasive. In response, however, MLR pro-

ponents argue that the presumptions and assumptions that equate linguistic mobility
solely with majority languages are themselves extremely problematic. For a start, this
position separates the instrumental and identity aspects of language. Under this view,
minority languages may be important for identity but have no instrumental value,
whereas majority languages are construed as primarily instrumental with little or
no identity value. We see this in the allied notions, evident in early LPP attempts,
of majority languages as vehicles of modernity, and minority languages as (merely)
carriers of identity. However, it is clear that all language(s) embody and accomplish
both identity and instrumental functions for those who speak them. Where particular
languages—especially majority/minority languages—differ is in the degree to which
they can accomplish each of these functions, and this, in turn, is dependent on the so-
cial and political (not linguistic) constraints in which they operate (Carens, 2000; May,
2003, 2004). Thus, in the case of minority languages, their instrumental value is often
constrained by wider social and political processes that have resulted in the privileging
of other language varieties in the public realm. Meanwhile, for majority languages,
the identity characteristics of the language are clearly important for their speakers,
but often become subsumed within and normalized by the instrumental functions
that these languages fulfill. This is particularly apparent with respect to monolingual
speakers of English, given the position of English as the current world language.
On this basis, MLR advocates argue that the limited instrumentality of particular
minority languages at any given time need not always remain so. Indeed, if the minor-
ity position of a language is the specific product of wider historical and contemporary
social and political relationships, changing these wider relationships positively with
respect to a minority language should bring about both enhanced instrumentality
for the language in question and increased mobility for its speakers. We can see this
occurring currently, for example, in Wales and Catalonia, with the emergence of these
formerly subjugated languages into the public domain—particularly via, but by no
means limited to, education (May, 2000b, 2002).
Likewise, when majority language speakers are made to realize that their own
languages fulfill important identity functions for them, both as individuals and as
a group, they may be slightly more reluctant to require minority language speakers
to dispense with theirs. Or to put it another way, if majority languages do provide
their speakers with particular and often significant individual and collective forms of
linguistic identity, as they clearly do, it seems unjust to deny these same benefits, out
of court, to minority language speakers.
1064 MAY

And this brings us to the final principal concern of MLR—the legal protections that
can potentially be developed in order to enhance the mobility of minority language
speakers while at the same time protecting their right to continue to speak a minority
language, if they so choose. It is here that the influence of the linguistic human rights
(LHR) paradigm is most prominent.

LINGUISTIC HUMAN RIGHTS

The linguistic human rights research paradigm argues that minority languages, and
their speakers, should be accorded at least some of the protections and institutional
support that majority languages already enjoy (see, for example, Kontra, Skutnabb-
Kangas, Phillipson, & Várady 1999; Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, 1995; Skutnabb-
Kangas, 1998, 2000, 2002). These arguments are also echoed in much of the academic
legal discourse that has developed in recent years with respect to minority group
rights more broadly, (see Capotorti, 1979; de Varennes, 1996a, 1996b; Thornberry,
1991a, 1991b, 2002). A central distinction in both discourses is one made between na-
tional minority groups and indigenous peoples on the one hand, and ethnic minority
groups on the other. The former may be regarded as groups that are historically as-
sociated with a particular territory (i.e., they have not migrated to the territory from
elsewhere) but because of conquest, confederation, or colonization are now regarded
as minorities within that territory. The latter may be regarded as voluntary migrants
and (involuntary) refugees living in a new national context (see Kymlicka, 1995; May,
2001 for further discussion).
Three key tenets of international law can be applied to the further development
of linguistic human rights in relation to these two broad minority groupings. The
first principle, which is widely accepted, is that it is not unreasonable to expect from
national members some knowledge of the common public language(s) of the state.
This is, of course, the central tenet underpinning the current public linguistic ho-
mogeneity of modern nation-states. However, LHR advocates assert that it is also
possible to argue, on this basis, for the legitimation and institutionalization of the lan-
guages of national minorities within nation-states, according to them at least some of
the benefits that national languages currently enjoy. LHR proponents qualify this by
making it clear that the advocacy of such minority language rights is not the language
replacement ideology in reverse—of replacing a majority language with a minority
one. Rather, it is about questioning and contesting why the promotion of a majority
(national) language should necessarily be at the expense of all others. By this, they
argue, the linguistic exclusivity attendant on the nationalist principle of cultural and
linguistic homogeneity can be effectively challenged and contested.
A second principle is that in order to avoid language discrimination, it is important
that where there is a sufficient number of other language speakers, these speakers
should be allowed to use that language as part of the exercise of their individual
rights as citizens. That is, they should have the opportunity to use their first language
if they so choose. As Fernand de Varennes (1996a) argues, “the respect of the lan-
guage principles of individuals, where appropriate and reasonable [italics added], flows
from a fundamental right and is not some special concession or privileged treatment.
Simply put, it is the right to be treated equally without discrimination, to which ev-
eryone is entitled” (p. 117). Again, this principle can clearly be applied to minority
language speakers within particular nation-states. Ostensibly, this can also be applied
to majority language speakers on the same grounds. However, a crucial caveat needs
to be added here. The formal promotion of a minority language does not preclude
the ongoing use of the majority language, given that it is most often dominant any-
way in all key language domains. Thus, what is being promoted is, again, not a new
 57. MINORITY LANGUAGE RIGHTS 1065

monolingualism in the minority language—indeed, this is usually neither politically

nor practically sustainable—but the possibility of bilingualism or multilingualism. In
other words, the majority language is not generally being precluded from the public
realm here, nor proscribed at the individual level, nor are majority language speakers
actually penalized for speaking their language.7 Rather, monolingual majority lan-
guage speakers are being asked to accommodate to the ongoing presence of a minority
language and to recognize its status as an additional language of the state—a process
that has elsewhere been described as mutual accommodation (May, 2001).
The third principle arises directly from the previous one—how to determine ex-
actly what is “appropriate and reasonable” with regard to individual language pref-
erences. Following the prominent political theorist, Will Kymlicka (1995), May (2001)
has argued, for example, that only national minorities can demand as of right formal
inclusion of their languages and cultures in the civic realm. However, this need not
and should not preclude other ethnic minorities from being allowed at the very least to
cultivate and pursue unhindered their own historic cultural and linguistic practices
in the private domain (for a dissenting view see Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000).8

TOLERANCE- AND PROMOTION-ORIENTED LANGUAGE RIGHTS

In relation to language, this last principle has been articulated by Kloss (1977) as the
distinction between tolerance-oriented and promotion-oriented rights. Tolerance-oriented
language rights ensure the right to preserve one’s language in the private, nongovern-
mental sphere of national life. These rights may be narrowly or broadly defined. They
include the right of individuals to use their first language at home and in public, free-
dom of assembly and organization, the right to establish private cultural, economic,
and social institutions wherein the first language may be used, and the right to foster
one’s first language in private schools. The key principle of such rights is that the
state does “not interfere with efforts on the parts of the minority to make use of [their
language] in the private domain” (Kloss, 1977, p. 2).
Promotion-oriented rights regulate the extent to which minority language rights are
recognized within the public domain, or civic realm of the nation-state. As such, they in-
volve “public authorities [in] trying to promote a minority [language] by having it used
in public institutions—legislative, administrative and educational, including the pub-
lic schools” (Kloss, 1977, p. 2). Again, such rights may be narrowly or widely applied.
At their narrowest, promotion-oriented rights might simply involve the publishing
of public documents in minority languages. At their broadest, promotion-oriented
rights could involve recognition of a minority language in all formal domains within
the nation-state, thus allowing the minority language group “to care for its inter-
nal affairs through its own public organs, which amounts to the [state] allowing self
government for the minority group” (1977, p. 24).9
What tolerance- and promotion-oriented rights usefully highlight is that one can
still distinguish effectively between the linguistic entitlements of different minority
groups, while maintaining a broad commitment to the extension of linguistic human
rights to all minority language groups. In other words, distinguishing between the
rights of national and ethnic minorities still affords the latter far greater linguistic
protection than many such groups currently enjoy—that is, active linguistic protection
by the state for the unhindered maintenance of their first languages. This protection is
applicable at the very least in the private domain and, “where numbers warrant,” a
principle again drawn from international law, potentially in the public domain as well.
Extending greater ethnolinguistic democracy to minority language groups, via LHR,
does not thus amount to an argument for ethnolinguistic equality for all such groups.
Similarly, a call for greater ethnolinguistic democracy clearly does not amount to
1066 MAY

asserting linguistic equivalence, in all domains, with dominant, majority languages.

Majority languages will continue to dominate in most, if not all, language domains,
because, as should be clear by now, that is the nature of their privileged sociohistori-
cal, sociopolitical position(ing). Conversely, arguing that only national minorities can
claim minority language rights, as of right, is not an argument for simply ignoring the
claims of other ethnic groups (see May, 2001, 2003 for an extended discussion).

Developments in International and National Law

As a result of LHR arguments, and the wider debates about minority rights of which
they form a part, a more accommodative approach to the language rights of minorities
has begun to emerge in both international and national law, particularly since the end
of the Cold War. At the supranational level, a number of key examples of recent leg-
islation demonstrate this. One is the Draft Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights
(1996) accepted in Barcelona in June 1996 (after many years of preparation and nu-
merous previous drafts) and since handed over to UNESCO for further deliberation.
In the draft Declaration it is argued that explicit legal guarantees be provided for the
linguistic rights of individuals, language communities (in effect, national minorities
and indigenous peoples), and language groups (other minority ethnic groups). This
includes the right of the individual “to the use of one’s language both in private and
in public” (Article 3.1). It also includes the right of linguistic communities to have the
necessary resources at their disposal “to ensure that their language is present to the
extent they desire at all levels of education within their territory: properly trained
teachers, appropriate teaching methods, text books, finance, building and equipment,
traditional and innovative technology” (Article 25). What is not clear, or at least not
yet, is the extent to which nation-states will be obliged to act on these statements of
general intent once the Declaration is finally adopted and ratified. Given the pattern of
qualified “discretion” for nation-states, evident in most other international legislation,
the answer must be that the Draft is likely to be revised along these more ambiguous
lines before being finally accepted (see also Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000, pp. 543–549).
Another example where exactly the same question applies can be found in the (1993)
United Nations Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The Draft
Declaration was formulated during a 10-year period by the Working Group on In-
digenous Populations (WGIP), in turn a part of the United Nation’s Sub-Commission
on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. It amounts to a
strong assertion of indigenous rights, including promotion-oriented language rights.
Article 15 states, for example, that “all indigenous peoples have . . . the right to es-
tablish and control their educational systems and institutions providing education in
their own languages, in a manner appropriate to their cultural methods of teaching
and learning.” However, the Draft has since been subject to a formal review by the
U.N. Commission on Human Rights Working Group (CHR), prior to its adoption and
ratification—a process that began in November 1995 and is still ongoing at the time
of writing. Given the many substantive objections raised by states in the process of
this review (see Barsh, 1996; Feldman, 2001; Thornberry, 2002), the Draft Declaration
is also likely to be considerably amended by the time it reaches its final form, almost
certainly toward the dilution of its tenets rather than their enforcement.
Recent pan-European law also reflects these competing tensions between, on the
one hand, a greater accommodation of promotion-oriented minority language rights,
and on the other, the ongoing reticence of nation-states to accept such a view. The
(1992) European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages is one such example. It
provides a sliding scale of educational provision for national and regional minority
languages that ranges from a minimal entitlement for smaller groups—preschool pro-
vision only, for example—through to more generous rights for larger minority groups
 57. MINORITY LANGUAGE RIGHTS 1067

such as primary and secondary language education. Again, however, nation-states

have discretion in what they provide, on the basis of both local considerations and
the size of the group concerned. These European nation-states also retain consider-
able scope and flexibility over which articles of the Charter they actually choose to
accept in the first place. In this respect, they are only required to accede to 35 out of 68
articles, although 3 of the 35 articles must refer to education. A similar pattern can be
detected in the (1994) Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minori-
ties, which was adopted by the Council of Europe in November 1994 and finally came
into force in February 1998. The Framework Convention allows for a wide range of
tolerance-based rights toward national minorities, including language rights. It also
asserts at a more general level that contributing states should “promote the conditions
necessary for persons belonging to national minorities to maintain and develop their
culture, and to preserve the essential elements of their identity, namely their religion,
language, traditions and cultural heritage” (Article 2.1). That said, the specific provi-
sions for language and education remain sufficiently qualified for most states to avoid
them if they so choose (Thornberry, 1997, Troebst, 1998).
These generally positive developments have also been paralleled, at least to some
extent, within the laws of (some) nation-states. Let us take just two examples here, both
related to indigenous peoples. In Brazil the adoption in 1988 of a new constitution
recognized for the first time the indigenous Indians’ social organization, customs,
languages, beliefs, and traditions, along with the right of native title to their lands
(Constituição Chapter VIII, Art. 231; Brasil, 1996; see also Hornberger, 1997). Norway
also moved in 1988 to revise its constitution in order to grant greater autonomy for the
indigenous Sámi, after a century of enforcing a stringent ‘Norwegianization’ (read as-
similationist) policy toward them. As the amendment to the Norwegian Constitution
stated: “It is incumbent on the governmental authorities to take the necessary steps to
enable the Sámi population to safeguard and develop their language, their culture and
their social life” (cited in Magga, 1996, p. 76). The effects of this new amendment are
most apparent in the regional area of Finnmark, in the northernmost part of Norway,
where the largest percentage of the Sámi live. The formal recognition accorded to the
Sámi has led to the subsequent establishment of a Sámi Parliament in Finnmark (in
1989), while the Sámi Language Act, passed in 1992, recognized Northern Sámi as its
official regional language (see Corson, 1995; Huss, 1999; Magga, 1995, 1996; Magga &
Skutnabb-Kangas, 2001; Todal, 1999).
These national developments in legislating for LHR are clearly significant although,
as with parallel developments in international law, they are still largely dependent
on the largesse of the individual nation-states involved. Although there may be no
watertight legal guarantees here, there is nonetheless an increasing recognition within
international and national law that significant minorities within the nation-state have
a reasonable expectation to some form of state support along these lines (de Varennes,
1996a). In other words, whereas it would be unreasonable for nation-states to be re-
quired to fund language and education services, for example, for all minorities, it is
increasingly accepted that where a language is spoken by a significant number within
the nation-state, it would also be unreasonable not to provide some level of state ser-
vices and activity in that language. Certainly, the long-held practice of states making
no accommodations to minority language demands is not so readily defensible in
today’s social and political climate. Ignoring such demands is also unlikely to quell or
abate the question of minority language rights, as it might once have done. Indeed, it
is much more likely to escalate them. Under these circumstances, “any policy favour-
ing a single language to the exclusion of all others can be extremely risky . . . because
it is then a factor promoting division rather than unification. Instead of integration,
an ill-advised and inappropriate state language policy may have the opposite effect
and cause a levée de bouclier [general outcry]” (de Varennes, 1996a, p. 91).
1068 MAY

CONCLUSIONS AND CAVEATS

These theoretical, policy, and legislative developments with respect to minority lan-
guage rights have brought us a considerable way from early debates surrounding
the formulation and implementation of LPP. The subsequent development of the lan-
guage ecology and linguistic human rights paradigms has redirected attention to the
underlying, often highly discriminatory, processes that stigmatize and undermine
minority languages and their speakers—not only linguistically, but also culturally,
socially, economically, and politically. Accordingly, even when language rights are
not the principal focus of attention, more recent research and policy in LPP is increas-
ingly having to address these concerns (see, for example, Kaplan & Baldauf, 1999).
Certainly, as Ricento (2000) observes, much of the cutting edge research in LPP now
deals directly with its limitations (May, 2001; Schiffman, 1996), as well as its potential
for promoting social change (Freeman, 1998; Hornberger, 1998; May, 2001, 2003).
In both instances, the nationalist principle of cultural and linguistic homogeneity,
and the language replacement ideology invariably attendant on it, have been brought
increasingly into question. The principal challenge that emerges from this critique
is the need to rethink nation-states in more linguistically plural and inclusive ways.
As we have seen, advocates of minority language rights argue that a key means by
which this can be achieved is via the extension of tolerance-oriented language rights
and, where appropriate, promotion-oriented language rights for minority language
groups. Such a process allows for the prospect of more representational multinational
and multilingual states by directly contesting the historical inequalities that have seen
minority languages, and their speakers, relegated to the social and political margins.
As James Tollefson (1991) has observed of these developments:

the struggle to adopt minority languages within dominant institutions such as education,
the law, and government, as well as the struggle over language rights, constitute efforts
to legitimise the minority group itself and to alter its relationship to the state. Thus while
language planning reflects relationships of power, it can also be used to transform them.
(p. 202)

For Tollefson and other advocates of MLR, changing the language preferences of
the state and civil society, or at least broadening them, would better reflect the cultural
and linguistic demographics of most of today’s multinational and multilingual states.
Not only this, it could significantly improve the life chances of those minority lan-
guage individuals and groups who are presently disadvantaged in their access to, and
participation in public services, employment, and education, because linguistic con-
sequences cannot be separated from socioeconomic and sociopolitical consequences,
and vice versa. Likewise, changing “the rules of the game” that automatically pre-
sume an exclusive relationship among dominant languages, modernity, and mobility
should make the process of maintaining minority languages a little easier.
Even so, it should also be clear that achieving a greater recognition and acceptance
of minority languages, and their speakers, remains a formidable task, not least because
of the extent of minority language shift and loss already in train. The challenge for
LPP, and its academic analysis, is accordingly to dispense with the largely ahistorical,
apolitical, and synchronic or presentist approach that so dominated its origins in order
to engage directly and critically with the wider social and political conditions—and,
crucially, their historical antecedents—that have invariably framed and shaped such
policies. As Jan Blommaert (1999) argues, a synchronic analysis to LPP takes no ac-
count of human agency, political intervention, power, and authority in the formation
of particular (national) language ideologies. Nor, by definition, is it able to identify the
establishment and maintenance of majority languages as a specific “form of practice,
 57. MINORITY LANGUAGE RIGHTS 1069

historically contingent and socially embedded” (p. 7). And yet, as advocates of mi-
nority language rights quite clearly highlight, it is exactly these contingent, socially
embedded, and often highly unequal practices, that have so disadvantaged minority
languages, and their speakers, in the first place.
These MLR arguments resonate closely with important related research on the ide-
ological influences of language policy (Blommaert, 1999; May, 2001; Ricento, 2000;
Schiffman, 1996; Schmid, 2001; Woolard, 1998). As a result of this combination of re-
search influences, more recent LPP scholarship (see, for example, Baldauf & Kaplan,
2003) is increasingly addressing the overtly political and ideological aspects of lan-
guage policy and planning, along with its often deleterious consequences for minority
language speakers. Whether this new academic direction for LPP is sustained and,
more important perhaps, whether the long-standing pejorative position (and posi-
tioning) of minority language speakers will improve, remains to be seen.

NOTES

1. Language policy usually refers to the development of policy; language planning refers to its implemen-
tation. However, the two are often used interchangeably in the literature (see Baldauf, chap. 52, this
volume), and I will follow this latter convention in this chapter.
2. That said, such a distinction needs to be treated with some caution because the dichotomy inevitably
understates the complex situatedness of particular language varieties with respect to power relations (see
Coulmas, 1998; Pennycook, 1998a, 2000).
3. Even when certain local languages, such as Malay or Indonesian, were selected as national languages,
this simply created an additional diglossic layer. In effect, these newly promoted minority languages
quickly coming to dominate remaining local languages in much the same way as majority, colonial
languages (see Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997; Baldauf & Kaplan, 2003).
4. Obviously, language death, or the extinction of a language, occurs when the last speaker of that language
dies. But, in effect, once a language ceases to be spoken by a community of speakers, it has effectively
already perished (see Baker & Prys Jones, 1998, p. 150).
5. The term linguistic genocide is often viewed as highly problematic by skeptics of minority language
rights—as too emotive and conspiratorial. Skutnabb-Kangas argues, in response, that terms such as
language death and language loss, which many of these skeptics prefer, have significant problems of their
own—not least the notable absence of agency or responsibility. Language “loss” or “death” does not just
happen, nor is it natural and/or inevitable. Rather, it is always socially, culturally, and politically situated
within a wider nexus of (often highly unequal) power relations between, and within, language groups
(see also Section on Nationalism, minoritization, and historical construction(ism)).
6. A precursor to the rise of European nationalism in this respect can also be found in the colonialism of the
16th and 17th centuries, particularly in the privileging of, for example, English, Portuguese, and Spanish
in the Americas by their respective colonial powers (see Blaut, 1993; Mignolo, 1995).
7. The examples where this has occurred as the result of a minority language policy remain extremely rare.
The post-Soviet language policies of Latvia and Estonia, however, may be said to fall into this category.
This is because the significant majority Russian-speaking population in these areas have been denied
citizenship rights since independence unless they can demonstrate a conversational ability in Latvian
or Estonian (see de Varennes, 1996a).
8. Skutnabb-Kangas is generally more skeptical of the national/ethnic minority distinction, particularly
given its potential to delimit the language entitlements of the latter.
9. Kloss’s distinction between tolerance- and promotion-oriented language rights is also broadly compa-
rable to one drawn by Churchill (1986), in his typology of minority language policy approaches within
the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, between the maintenance of languages
for private use versus the widespread institutional recognition of languages (for an extended discus-
sion, see May, 2001, chap. 5). Another comparable distinction is that made by Coulombe (1993) between
laissez-faire and sustaining language policies.

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1074
Author Index

Numbers in italics indicate pages with complete bibliographic information.

A Akamatsu, N., 903, 904, 908, 945, 946, 948

Alanen, R., 442, 448, 677, 678, 679, 687
Aarts, J., 399, 405 Alderson, J., 109, 112, 567, 572, 577, 608, 610,
Abbate, J., 16, 24 716, 726, 791, 793, 799, 811, 818, 819, 822,
Abelar, Y., 519, 523 827, 829, 834, 836, 846, 847, 848, 849, 851,
Abraham, R. G., 767, 771 854, 861, 867
Abrahamsson, N., 420, 434, 447, Aleksandrowicz-Pedich, L., 923, 926
451 Alexander, L., 979, 980, 991
Abram, P. L., 706, 709 Alexander-Kasparik, R., 19, 23
Abu-Akhel, A., 513, 523 Aljaafreh, A., 338, 339, 345, 350, 351, 723,
Achiba, M., 325, 330 726
Ackerman, P. L., 446, 448 Al-Khatib, M., 616, 621, 625
Adams, H., 245, 254 Allen, B. M., 10, 21
Adams, R. J., 839, 853 Allen, J. P. B., 245, 252
Adamson, H. D., 695, 702, 708 Allen, L., 185, 189, 358, 371, 718, 726,
Adelstein, A., 420, 433 Allington, R., 574, 577
Adelsward, V., 131, 131 Allison, D., 90, 98, 108, 112
Adger, C. T., 58, 60 Allison, R., 164, 167
Aebersold, J., 576, 577 Allum, P., 746, 754
Afflerbach, P., 566, 579 Allwood, J., 513, 519, 523
Agar, M., 118, 123, 131, 923, 926 Allwright, D., 225, 238, 245, 246, 250, 252
Ager, D., 962, 968, 972, 974, 975, 982, 986, 989, Alsagoff, L., 287, 298
998, 1009, 1035, 1047, 1049, 1050, 1051, Altarriba, J., 514, 523
1052, 1053 Altenberg, B., 397, 405
Agnello, F., 460, 467 Alvarez, H., 35, 41
Agnihotri, R. K. J., 74, 77, 83 Alvarez-Torres, M. J., 676, 681, 686, 688
Aguilera, G. M., 922, 928 Amanti, C., 37, 38, 41, 42
Ainscough, V., 147, 148, 151 Ammon, U., 982, 989, 1062, 1069
Akahane-Yamada, R., 505, 525 Anastasi, A., 798, 811, 834, 835, 849

1075
1076 AUTHOR INDEX

Andersen, R., 459, 466, 467 Auerbach, E., 78, 82, 130, 132, 139, 150, 204,
Anderson, A., 245, 253 206, 247, 248, 252, 535, 541, 931, 941, 944,
Anderson, B., 1061, 1070 945, 946
Anderson, G., 118, 133 August, D., 19, 21, 30, 33, 34, 40
Anderson, J., 203, 206, 666, 667, 669 Austin, J. L., 317, 330, 385, 389
Anderson, L. W., 827, 829 Ayoun, D., 674, 685, 687
Anderson, M., 489, 499 Ayto, J., 998, 1009
Anderson, N. J., 576, 577, 758, 761, 762, 765, Azar, B. S., 546, 555, 559
766, 767, 769, 844, 849
Anderson-Hsieh, J., 492, 499 B
Andrade, J., 447, 449
Andrzewski, B. W., 996, 1009 Babbie, E., 327, 330
Angeles, P. A., 795, 811 Bachman, L., 776, 778, 779, 793, 797, 799, 800,
Angelil-Carter, S., 899, 906 811, 815, 816, 817, 818, 819, 821, 822, 829,
Aniero, S., 520, 523 834, 835, 836, 837, 838, 840, 844, 849, 854,
Annamalai, E., 959, 968, 995, 996, 997, 1009 858, 859, 867, 871, 874, 887
Anshen, F., 210, 219 Bachu, P., 123, 135
Antunez, B., 33, 40 Baddeley, A., 447, 449, 523
Anwar, K., 1002, 1009 Baddeley, S., 998, 1009
Appel, G., 335, 351 Badger, R., 103, 113
Applebaum, S. D., 57, 62 Bae, J., 835, 849
Appleton, J., 144, 153 Bahri, D., 932, 946
Arbex, M., 921, 926 Baik, J. M., 1029, 1033
Archibald, J., 161, 167, 440, 454, 491, 492, Baik, M. J., 158, 167
499 Bailey, A. L., 702, 703, 705, 706, 708, 709
Ard, J., 265, 278 Bailey, F., 35, 42
Arens, K., 227, 232, 240 Bailey, K. B., 203, 206, 206
Arevart, 587, 594 Bailey, K. M., 91, 95, 96, 232, 237, 238, 239,
Argyris, C., 241, 250, 252 246, 250, 252, 816, 829, 840, 850, 608, 610
Arias, M. B., 8, 21 Bailey, N., 161, 167
Arievitch, I., 478, 482 Baker, C., 7, 12, 14, 21, 530, 531, 540, 541, 976,
Armstrong, G. K., 913, 926 990, 1058, 1069, 1070
Arnaud, J., 247, 252, 944, 945, 946 Baker, E., 783, 793, 833, 853, 871, 872, 885,
Arndt, H., 378, 390 888
Arndt, V., 616, 625 Baker, R., 835, 838, 849, 855
Arnold, J., 138, 150 Baker, S., 9, 22
Arrouays, M., 979, 986, 990 Baker, V., 19, 21
Arteagoitia, I., 677, 679, 688 Bakhtin, M., 27, 40, 378, 389, 644, 649, 895, 907
Artigal, J., 10, 21 Bako, M., 76, 82
Arvizu, S., 19, 24, 185, 193 Baldauf, R. B., Jr., 571, 578, 957, 958, 959, 960,
Asher, J., 229, 238, 422, 433, 662, 668, 961, 962, 963, 964, 965, 968, 968, 969, 986,
669 990, 993, 994, 999, 1001, 1002, 1009, 1010,
Assmann, A., 441, 451 1013, 1015, 1016, 1019, 1032, 1033, 1034,
Aston, G., 394, 400, 402, 405, 406, 407 1040, 1053, 1068, 1069, 1070, 1071
Athanases, S. Z., 184, 187, 189 Balin, J., 513, 525
Atkinson, D., 94, 95, 185, 186, 188, 189, 310, Ball, A. F., 341, 350
313, 315, 335, 340, 341, 342, 350, 610, 613, Ball, M., 129, 131, 132
896, 906, 914, 926 Ballard, B., 87, 96
Atkinson, J. M., 182, 189, 371, 730, 739 Ballenger, C., 32, 38, 40, 43
Atkinson, P., 120, 121, 132, 179, 181, 183, 187, Baltova, I., 509, 523
189, 191 Bamford, J., 149, 151, 572, 578, 587, 595
Au, K. H., 37, 40, 185, 193 Bamford, R., 793, 793
Au, S. Y., 897, 906 Bamgbose, A., 157, 163, 167, 287, 297, 993,
Auer, P., 122, 131, 132, 505, 523 1009
 AUTHOR INDEX 1077

Bamiro, E. O., 159, 163, 167 Beebe, V. N., 16, 23

Banerjee, J., 834, 840, 841, 849, 849 Beeman, M., 34, 37, 41
Banjo, A., 157, 167 Begay, S., 13, 21
Baquedano-Lopez, P., 35, 41 Beglar, D., 835, 850
Barahona, B., 944, 945, 946 Behar, R., 181, 189
Baratz, J. C., 296, 297 Belcher, D., 701, 709, 934, 945, 947, 602, 603,
Barbour, S., 1050, 1053 610
Bardovi-Harlig, K., 318, 320, 323, 325, 326, Belfiore, M., 118, 119, 123, 126, 128, 132
328, 330, 332, 333, 546, 551, 556, 557, 559, Bell, J., 126, 128, 132
672, 687, 735, 739 Bell, L., 162, 168, 270, 278
Barfield, T., 180, 189 Bellack, A. S., 797, 811
Barkhuizen, G. P., 140, 150, 914, 926 Belz, J., 337, 351, 749, 754, 922, 926
Barks, D., 104, 114 Benesch, S., 86, 88, 96, 108, 112, 571, 577, 597,
Barnes, D., 479, 481 598, 602, 610, 695, 704, 709, 931, 933, 934,
Barnes, G., 91, 98 947
Barnes, H., 144, 153 Benke, G., 295, 299
Barnes, J., 144, 153 Bennett, M. J., 919, 926
Barnhardt, S., 760, 769 Benseman, J., 119, 128, 132
Barr, D., 513, 525 Benson, M., 92, 96, 139, 150, 185, 186, 187, 189,
Barr, R., 566, 578 518, 523
Barratt-Pugh, C. B., 848, 850 Bensoussan, M., 567, 577
Barro, A., 185, 193, 913, 914, 926, 929 Bentahila, A., 959, 968, 1059, 1070
Barry, B., 1062, 1070 Benton, C., 922, 927
Barsh, R., 1066, 1070 Benton, R. A., 13, 21
Bartelt, G., 187, 189 Berdan, R., 80, 84, 897, 907
Bartolome, L. I., 185, 193 Berducci, D., 274, 279, 474, 482, 900, 909
Barton, D., 119, 132, 184, 189, 533, 541 Bereiter, C., 604, 610
Basham, C., 616, 620, 625 Beretta, A., 109, 112, 229, 239
Basturkmen, H., 103, 112, 672, 673, 674, 675, Berg, E. C., 1022, 1033
676, 688, 725, 727, 729, 740 Bergentoft, R., 986, 990
Bates, E., 199, 207, 423, 434, 437, 450 Berger, P. L., 242, 252
Bateson, G., 204, 206 Berkenkotter, C., 381, 389, 599, 600, 602, 610
Batliwala, S., 241, 252 Berko Gleason, J., 302, 315
Bauer, L., 591, 594 Berlin, J., 597, 604, 610
Baugh, J., 531, 541 Berliner, D., 518, 524, 531, 539, 541
Baumgardner, R. J., 158, 164, 167, 168 Berman, R., 382, 389
Bausch, K.-R., 978, 990 Bernard, H. R., 181, 190, 328, 331
Bautista, M. L. S., 157, 158, 164, 168 Bernardini, S., 402, 405
Bavelier, D., 447, 452 Bernhardt, E., 385, 389, 567, 572, 577, 578
Bayer, E., 588, 595 Berns, M., 167, 168, 639, 647, 649
Bayley, R., 37, 42, 56, 60, 302, 315, 497, 499, Bernstein, B., 27, 40
895, 909 Berquist, B., 447, 449
Baynham, M., 533, 534, 541 Berretta, A., 147, 150, 150
Bazerman, C., 94, 96 Berry, J., 996, 1009
Bazin, L., 996, 997, 1009 Berry, V., 843, 847, 850
Be, N., 140, 143, 150 Bersick, M., 526
Beasley, B., 234, 235, 239 Bersoff, D., 793, 793
Beaton, A., 585, 595 Bertaccini, F., 402, 406
Beck, I., 32, 42, 50, 60 Berwick, R., 781, 793, 842, 854
Beck, M.-L., 439, 440, 449 Best, C., 505, 523
Becker, J., 440, 449 Betancourt, Z. S., 106, 113
Bedell, D. A., 141, 150 Betebenner, D., 783, 793
Bedford, R., 75, 83 Bhabha, H., 942, 946, 947
Beebe, L., 319, 327, 334, 495, 499 Bhatia, T., 158, 161, 164, 168, 172, 226, 239
1078 AUTHOR INDEX

Bhatia, V. J., 601, 610 Blunkett, D., 67, 82

Bhatia, V. K., 86, 92, 94, 96, 105, 112, 120, 122, Bochner, S., 919, 930
132, 158, 168, 639, 645, 649 Bock, K., 477, 481
Bhatt, R. M., 158, 161, 168, 491, 493, 501 Boden, D., 120, 132
Bialystok, E., 200, 206, 319, 331, 422, 425, 426, Bodman, J. W., 320, 326, 327, 331
427, 429, 431, 433, 441, 444, 446, 449, 465, Boers, F., 105, 112, 921, 926
467, 488, 499 Boersma, P., 505, 524
Biber, D., 87, 90, 92, 94, 96, 394, 395, 396, 397, Bogdan, R., 183, 184, 187, 190, 241, 252
398, 399, 401, 405, 406, 546, 547, 548, 549, Bohn, O.-S., 426, 433, 491, 500
550, 559, 560, 586, 594, 622, 623, 625, 745, Bokamba, E., 157, 168
754 Boldt, H., 807, 811
Bibler, V., 644, 649 Boldt, R. F., 837, 850
Bickerton, D., 286, 292, 297 Bond, T. G., 835, 839, 850
Bickner, R., 387, 389 Bond, Z., 510, 523, 524
Biddle, B. J., 531, 541 Bongaerts, T., 425, 428, 433, 488, 499, 976, 977,
Bigelow, M., 475, 481, 482, 675, 679, 681, 683, 979, 991
688, 700, 709 Borg, S., 720, 726
Biklen, S. K., 183, 184, 190, 241, 252 Borker, R., 900, 908
Billig, M., 1060, 1070 Borras, I., 752, 754
Billmyer, K., 275, 279, 322, 323, 328, 331 Bosher, S., 106, 112, 766, 769
Bilmes, J., 510, 523 Botley, S. P., 402, 406
Birch, B., 566, 578 Bourdieu, P., 250, 251, 252, 895, 899, 902, 907,
Birch, S., 144, 153 942, 947, 1055, 1056, 1070
Bird, N., 582, 594 Bourgoyne, J., 120, 134
Birdsong, D., 422, 425, 426, 427, 433, 446, 449, Bourhis, R., 1044, 1053
459,464, 465, 467 Boustagui, E., 199, 200, 201, 207, 425, 431, 434,
Birkhill, W., 429, 433 468
Birnbaum, R., 161, 171 Bouton, L., 322, 323, 328, 331, 621, 626
Bissex, G., 244, 252 Bowers, C. A., 744, 746, 754
Bizzell, P., 934, 947 Bowyers, R., 111, 112
Bjorklund, S., 14, 21 Boxer, D., 329, 331
Black, P., 870, 887, 887 Boyd, M., 74, 82
Blackledge, A., 902, 907 Boyd, S., 1022, 1024, 1025, 1033
Blais, J. G., 836, 850 Boydell, J., 120, 134
Blake, R., 751, 754 Boyle, W. F., 48, 62
Blakely, R., 695, 709 Boyson, B., 677, 678, 681, 688
Blake-Ward, M., 275, 279 Bracey, G. W., 531, 541
Blanton, L. L., 187, 190 Bradac, J. J., 495, 500
Blaut, J. M., 1069, 1070 Bradford, M., 465, 469
Bley-Vroman, R., 271, 275, 278, 279, 420, 424, Bradshaw, J., 847, 850
432, 433, 439, 446, 449, 465, 468, 676, 682, Braidi, S., 674, 685, 687
689, 715, 719, 726, 727 Braine, G., 87, 90, 96, 103, 112, 602, 610, 665,
Bliesener, U., 978, 990 667, 669, 701, 709, 903, 907
Bloch, B., 292, 298 Brammerts, H., 644, 649
Block, D., 143, 150, 237, 239, 938, 947 Bransford, J., 513, 523
Block, E., 765, 769 Brauer, G., 598, 610
Blom, J. P., 290, 297 Brazil, D., 507, 513, 523
Blommaert, J., 1059, 1068, 1069, 1070 Bredella, L., 636, 650
Bloom, A., 378, 389 Breen, M., 148, 151, 245, 246, 252, 253, 481,
Bloome, D., 119, 123, 133, 184, 191 657, 669, 848, 850, 877, 878, 887, 964, 968
Bloomer, A., 213, 220, 222 Breivik, L., 398, 406
Blue, G., 85, 96 Brekke, N., 513, 527
Blum-Kulka, S., 124, 132, 162, 168, 171, 319, Bremer, K., 118, 132, 199, 206, 514, 519, 522,
320, 327, 331, 735, 741 523
 AUTHOR INDEX 1079

Brennan, R. L., 835, 850 Bruner, J., 204, 206

Brennan, S. E., 506, 523 Bruton, C., 123, 132
Brenzinger, M., 285, 286, 297 Brutt-Griffler, J., 12, 21, 289, 297, 903, 907,
Brett, P., 105, 112 1059, 1070
Breugnot, J., 922, 926 Bruzzeze, G., 460, 468
Brewer, J. D., 179, 180, 181, 190 Bryant, P., 1014, 1034
Brice, C., 602, 613 Bryden, P., 420, 433
Bridgeman, B., 87, 90, 96, 97 Buchheit, L., 275, 279
Briere, E., 455, 468 Buck, G., 514, 515, 523, 817, 829, 837, 844, 850,
Brierley, C., 125, 130, 132 862, 867
Brighman, C. C., 541 Buckby, M., 983, 990
Bright, C., 809, 811 Bullock, R., 244, 252
Bright, J., 666, 669 Bunch, G. C., 706, 709
Brindley, G., 66, 77, 81, 82, 125, 132, 245, 253, Bunting, J., 212, 220
267, 280, 667, 669, 818, 829, 847, 850, 876, Bunyi, G., 10, 14, 21
887, 977, 979, 990 Burden, R. L., 146, 153
Brinton, D., 49, 63, 86, 96, 98, 554, 561, 693, Burke, D., 507, 525
694, 695, 696, 709, 711 Burn, B., 913, 927
Briscoe, T., 526 Burnaby, B., 119, 126, 128, 130, 132, 134, 540,
Brisk, M., 162, 168 542
Brisk, M. E., 9, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 24 Burnard, L., 394, 402, 405, 406
Brislin, R. W., 919, 927 Burnett, J., 185, 186, 188, 190
Brock, C., 228, 239 Burns, A., 66, 82, 150, 151, 241, 246, 247, 248,
Broeder, P., 118, 132, 199, 206, 514, 519, 522, 253, 556, 560, 745, 754
523, 982, 991 Burns, E., 790, 793
Broner, M., 339, 351, 490, 499 Burrough-Boenisch, J., 387, 389
Bronfenbrenner, U., 205, 206, 206, 251, 253 Burrows, C., 77, 82
Brooke, R., 938, 947 Burry-Stock, J. A., 760, 770
Brooks, F., 346, 352, 723, 728 Burt, M., 161, 168, 229, 239, 266, 278, 404, 406
Brooks, N., 917, 926 Burton, J., 245, 253
Broselow, E., 491, 499, 500 Butler, C., 210, 219, 221
Brosnan, D., 119, 121, 123, 130, 132, 134 Butler, F. A., 702, 703, 705, 706, 708, 709, 711
Brousseau, K., 249, 253 Butler, J., 161, 171
Brown, A., 27, 40, 288, 297, 588, 595, 823, 829, Butler, S., 164, 168, 288, 297
836, 838, 839, 843, 845, 847, 848, 849, 850, Butler, Y., 621, 626
851, 852, 853, 858, 868, 873, 887 Butler, Y. G., 47, 55, 61, 200, 207, 736, 739
Brown, C., 527 Butterworth, G., 202, 207
Brown, G., 245, 253, 486, 493, 494, 496, 500, Bycina, D., 693, 709
506, 523 Bygate, M., 553, 560, 687, 723, 724, 726,
Brown, Gillain, 513, 517, 518, 523 Byram, M., 139, 151, 185, 193, 642, 643, 649,
Brown, H. D., 763, 769, 897, 898, 907 912, 913, 914, 915, 916, 917, 918, 920, 923,
Brown, J. D., 99, 110, 112, 210, 219, 221, 326, 926, 927, 929
327, 328, 330, 331, 332, 816, 817, 818, 819, Byrd, P., 87, 92, 94, 96, 399, 406, 546, 560, 600,
829, 829, 834, 836, 840, 841, 850, 872, 880, 610
887 Byrne, J., 495, 500
Brown, J. S., 744, 754 Byrne, M., 122, 132
Brown, K., 158, 165, 166, 168 Byron, J., 999, 1009
Brown, P., 123, 132, 317, 331, 378, 389
Brown, R. H., 797, 811 C
Bruce, B. C., 744, 745, 754
Bruce, N., 106, 112 Cabau-Lampa, B., 1024, 1025, 1033
Bruder, M. N., 441, 452 Cadierno, T., 679, 691
Brumfit, C., 249, 253, 657, 662, 668, 669, 731, Cai, G., 618, 626
739 Cain, A., 139, 151, 912, 915, 917, 926, 929
1080 AUTHOR INDEX

Calderon, M., 17, 22, 34, 40 Carroll, J., 414, 417, 445, 449, 816, 820, 821, 829
Calfee, R., 609, 610 Carroll, S., 336, 351, 439, 449, 522, 523, 678,
California Department of Education, 78, 82 687, 719, 726
Callaghan, M., 70, 82 Carroll, T., 1019, 1020, 1033
Callen, B., 921, 927 Carson, J., 87, 88, 89, 96, 97, 185, 186, 187, 192,
Cameron, D., 120, 132, 900, 907, 938, 947 601, 603, 612, 613
Cameron, R., 673, 675, 679, 683, 690 Carter, R., 140, 151, 395, 397, 398, 400, 401,
Camilli, G., 787, 793 406, 408, 737, 739, 741
Campbell, C., 695, 710 Carter, T., 17, 21
Campbell, D. T., 837, 850 Casanave, C. P., 935, 947
Campbell, M., 185, 186, 188, 191 Casanova, U., 8, 21
Campbell, W. J., 70, 72, 82 Case, R., 50, 60
Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture, 75, 82 Cassidy, F. G., 292, 297
Canadian Language Benchmarks, 78, 82 Castanos, F., 245, 254
Canagarajah, S., 88, 96, 140, 151, 167, 168, 185, Castellon-Wellington, M., 703,706, 711
186, 187, 188, 190, 602, 610, 666, 667, 669, Cauldwell, R., 506, 523
903, 904, 906, 907, 914, 927, 931, 932, 933, Cazabon, M., 16, 18, 22
934, 935, 936, 937, 938, 940, 941, 942, 943, Cazden, C., 29, 41, 184, 190
945, 946, 947 Celce-Murcia, M., 440, 449, 551, 554, 560,
Canale, M., 52, 60, 637, 639, 640, 646, 649, 657, 653, 665, 668, 669, 672, 687, 694, 708,
662, 667, 669, 731, 739, 791, 793, 821, 829 709, 730, 731, 732, 733, 735, 736, 737,
Candlin, C., 105, 112, 119, 123, 132, 245, 246, 739, 740, 741
248, 252, 253, 310, 315, 400, 407, 636, 649 Cenoz, J., 8, 11, 22
Candlin, S., 310, 315 Chafe, W., 507, 513, 523
Cantor, G., 441, 452 Chalhoub-Deville, M., 810, 811, 815, 821, 822,
Caplan, D., 443, 447, 448, 449, 454 823, 828, 829, 830, 838, 850
Capotorti, F., 1064, 1070 Chambers, J. K., 1051, 1053
Capra, F., 204, 207 Chamot, A., 31, 32, 41, 49, 61, 276, 279, 515,
Carel, S., 915, 927 526, 704, 709, 758, 759, 760, 763, 764, 766,
Carens, J., 1063, 1070 769, 770
Carey, D., 31, 42 Chan, C. Y.-H., 440, 451
Carioni, L., 588, 595 Chan, T., 538, 539, 542
Carkin, S., 87, 91, 93, 96 Chandler, C., 247, 252
Carlisle, J., 34, 37, 41 Chandler, P., 248, 253
Carlisle, R. S., 492, 493, 500 Chang, G-C., 1029, 1030, 1033, 1033
Carlo, M., 34, 40 Chang, Y.-Y., 622, 626
Carlson, J., 913, 927 Chang-Wells, G. L., 251, 256
Carlson, R., 441, 450 Chanier, T., 751, 753, 754, 755
Carlson, S., 87, 90, 96, 616, 618, 620, 625, Channell, J., 397, 406
626 Chapelle, C., 404, 406, 747, 748, 749, 750, 751,
Carmichael, C., 1050, 1053 752, 754, 755, 781, 793, 797, 801, 803, 810,
Caroll, S., 370, 371 811, 813, 861, 867
Carpay, J. A. M., 339, 351 Charteris-Black, J., 105, 112
Carpenter, P., 447, 449, 451 Chase, N., 89, 96
Carr, T., 570, 578 Chastain, K., 414, 417, 917, 927
Carr, W., 234, 239, 241, 242, 244, 246, 253 Chater, N., 442, 452
Carranza, I., 17, 22 Chatfield, M., 17, 21
Carrasquillo, A. L., 48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 60, 708, Chatwin, J., 120, 133
709 Chaudron, C., 87, 90, 96, 227, 231, 232, 239,
Carrell, P., 319, 331, 567, 568, 577, 578, 765, 509, 523, 748, 754
769 Checkland, P., 205, 206, 207
Carrier, K., 520, 523 Chen, S.-I., 491, 499
Carro, G., 58, 62 Chen, T., 616, 618, 628
Carroll, B. J., 818, 827, 829 Chen, Y-Y., 75, 83
 AUTHOR INDEX 1081

Cheng, C. H., 764, 769 Clark, J. D., 818, 830, 842, 851, 977, 979, 980,
Cheng, L., 646, 649, 846, 851 990
Cheng, W., 403, 406 Clark, M., 323, 328, 331
Cheshire, J., 164, 168 Clark, R., 204, 207, 598, 611
Cheung, C., 146, 151 Clark, U., 387, 389
Chiang, S. Y., 607, 611 Clark, V., 96
Chick, K., 937, 938, 947 Clarke, M., 566, 576, 578, 579, 763, 769, 898,
Chidambaram, M., 1002, 1009 907
Chien, C. N., 764, 769 Clarke, S., 875, 876, 880, 887
Chien Ching, L., 105, 112 Clear, J., 396, 406
Chimbganda, A. B., 104, 112 Cleeremans, A., 442, 450
Chiswick, B. R., 74, 82 Clegg, J., 48, 49, 61
Chiu, M., 35, 41 Cleghorn, A., 186, 190
Chmilar, P., 34, 42 Clifford, J., 181, 190
Cho, K.-S., 572, 578 Clifford, R., 823, 830
Choi, I. C., 837, 849 Cloud, N., 52, 61, 708, 709
Choi, Y., 616, 618, 621, 622, 626 Clyne, M., 119, 124, 129, 131, 132, 163, 168,
Chomsky, N., 162, 168, 264, 278, 382, 389, 424, 285, 297, 616, 617, 626, 961, 968
433, 438, 449, 637, 649, 658, 665, 669, 730, Cmejrkova, S., 617, 626
740, 820, 821, 830, 1059, 1070 Coady, J., 91, 96, 567, 578, 636, 649
Chopra, Priti, 945, 947 Coates, J., 294, 297, 398, 406
Chowdhury, N., 403, 408 Cobb, P., 345, 351
Christ, H., 976, 978, 979, 980, 983, 985, 986, Cobb, T., 402, 406
987, 990 Cochran, B. P., 446, 449
Christian, D., 10, 17, 18, 22, 48, 61, 537, 540, Cochran-Smith, M., 119, 132, 246, 253
541, 544 Coe, R. M., 108, 112
Christiansen, M. H., 447, 452 Coelho, E., 52, 61
Christie, F., 49, 61, 108, 114 Coffey, A., 179, 181, 183, 187, 189
Christison, M. A., 237, 239 Coffin, C., 745, 754
Christopher, E., 158, 172, 622, 626 Cohen, A., 209, 220, 320, 322, 323, 326, 327,
Christopher, E. R., 103, 113 329, 330, 331, 333, 608, 611, 758, 760, 761,
Chun, D., 506, 523, 747, 749, 753, 754, 755 762, 763, 764, 767, 769, 771, 818, 830, 844,
Chunok, L., 621, 628 849, 851, 872, 887
Church, K., 396, 406 Cohen, Y., 74, 82
Churchill, S., 1069, 1070 Cole, K., 56, 61
Churchland, P., 513, 514, 524 Cole, M., 184, 193, 342, 343, 351, 352, 533, 534,
Cichocki, W., 491, 500 535, 543
Cicourel, A., 120, 129, 132, 182, 190, 242, Cole, N., 781, 794
253 Cole, S., 922, 928
Ciliberti, B. S., 532, 544 Coleman, H., 120, 132, 138, 151
Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 67, 82 Coleman, J., 147, 148, 151, 913, 914, 927
Clahsen, H., 268, 269, 278, 279, 430, 433 Collier, J., 242, 253
Claire, S., 77, 82 Collier, V., 9, 23, 30, 37, 41, 42, 47, 49, 61,
Clanchy, J., 87, 96 62
Clandinin, D. J., 203, 206, 207, 245, 253 Collins, H., 402, 406
Clapham, C., 593, 595, 608, 610, 716, 726, 791, Collins, S., 120, 133
793, 810, 811, 818, 819, 829, 836, 838, 847, Columbi, M. C., 600, 613
849, 849, 851, 854, 860, 862, 867, 867 Comings, J., 80, 84
Clapham, P., 849, 849 Comrie, B., 162, 171
Clark, A., 342, 351 Condon, W., 607, 608, 609, 611, 841, 851
Clark, C. H., 585, 595 Congdon, P., 806, 812, 839, 851
Clark, E., 471, 481 Coniam, D., 863, 867
Clark, G., 988, 990 Conlin, S. M., 244, 256
Clark, H., 318, 331, 471, 481 Connelly, F. M., 203, 206, 207, 245, 253
1082 AUTHOR INDEX

Connor, U., 105, 114, 375, 386, 390, 599, 607, Crandall, J., 49, 61, 67, 68, 82, 694, 696, 700,
608, 611, 620, 626, 739, 740, 935, 945, 708, 709
947 Crawford, J., 15, 21, 22, 29, 41, 531, 541, 1059,
Conrad, A., 974, 990 1060, 1070
Conrad, S., 87, 92, 94, 96, 394, 395, 396, 397, Crawshaw, R., 921, 927
398, 399, 401, 405, 406, 546, 548, 549, 550, Crismore, A., 378, 390
560, 606, 611, 623, 625, 745, 754 Cronbach, L., 446, 449, 779, 783, 793, 810, 811
Constituicao da Republica Federativa do Crook, C., 203, 207
Brasil, 1067, 1070 Crookes, G., 241, 243, 246, 248, 250, 253, 553,
Cook, G., 149, 151, 400, 401, 406, 490, 500 554, 561, 671, 689, 721, 722, 723, 726, 727
Cook, H., 319, 331, 672, 687 Crosling, G., 105, 112
Cook, V., 268, 278, 489, 490, 494, 497, 498, 500, Cross, A. n. E. J., 13, 23
939, 947 Crouse, J., 792, 793
Cooke, T., 119, 126, 134 Crozet, C., 322, 323, 332, 912, 928
Cook-Gumperz, J., 122, 132, 184, 190, 534, Crystal, D., 160, 168, 512, 524, 665, 669, 744,
535, 541, 600, 611 754, 903, 907, 1048, 1053, 1058, 1070
Cooper, C. R., 598, 611 Crystal, T., 506, 524
Cooper, R., 961, 968, 993, 994, 995, 996, 1001, Csizer, K., 920, 927
1009, 1013, 1033, 1039, 1053 Cullity, M., 120, 132
Cope, B., 27, 41, 119, 121, 123, 132, 184, 190, Cumings, B., 1029, 1033
533, 541, 940, 947 Cumming, A., 209, 212, 218, 220, 477, 481,
Coppieters, R., 423, 425, 433 598, 607, 608, 611, 781, 785, 793, 799, 800,
Corbett, J., 915, 916, 927 811, 844, 845, 851, 860, 867
Corcos, R., 106, 114 Cummings, M. C., 695, 710
Corder, S. P., 265, 273, 278, 459, 468, 660, 664, Cummins, J., 7, 10, 13, 18, 22, 30, 41, 47, 52, 61,
666, 669 487, 500, 566, 578, 702, 704, 709, 744, 754,
Corey, S., 242, 243, 253 821, 830, 941, 947
Corina, D., 447, 452 Cuningsworth, A., 143, 151
Cormier, M. C., 962, 968 Curme, G., 656, 668, 669
Cormier, P., 33, 41 Curnow, T. J., 1006, 1010
Corno, L., 446, 449 Curriculum Corporation, 883, 884, 886, 887
Corrie, C., 922, 928 Curtis, A., 203, 206, 206
Corson, D., 7, 10, 22, 583, 588, 594, 791, Curtiss, S., 420, 433
793, 964, 968, 976, 991, 1013, 1033, Cushing Weigle, S., 620, 622, 628, 807, 811
1067, 1070 Cushman, E., 540, 541
Cortazzi, M., 144, 151, 180, 190, 921, 927 Cushner, K., 919, 927
Coughlan, P., 346, 351, 723, 726 Cutler, A., 505, 524, 526
Coulmas, F., 997, 1009, 1015, 1033, 1059, 1062,
1069, 1070 D
Coulombe, P., 1069, 1070
Coulthard, M., 309, 316, 370, 373, 616, 626, D’Souza, J., 164, 168
737, 740 Dagenais, D., 185, 186, 187, 188, 190
Couper-Kuhlen, E., 505, 511, 523, 524 Dahal, B. M., 995, 996, 997, 1009
Coupland, J., 496, 499, 501, 842, 851 Dahlen, T., 919, 927
Coupland, N., 204, 207, 496, 499, 501, 842, Dalby, D., 995, 1009
851 Dalley, P., 185, 186, 188, 191
Courtright, M. S., 158, 164, 168 Dam, L., 246, 253
Cowan, N., 516, 524 Damen, L., 643, 649, 911, 913, 914, 918, 927
Cowie, N., 248, 253 Daneman, M., 447, 449
Coxhead, A., 91, 96, 397, 399, 406, 583, 586, Daoud, M., 965, 968, 985, 990, 1032, 1033
594 Darnell, R., 180, 181, 190
Craik, F., 429, 433, 435, 447, 453, 475, 481, 683, Dasenbrock, R. W., 159, 169
687 Dat, B., 138, 140, 142, 145, 147, 148,
Crain, S., 438, 449 151, 153
 AUTHOR INDEX 1083

Davidson, A. L., 47, 62, 183, 185, 190, 192 Department of Employment and Education,
Davidson, F., 156, 168, 792, 793, 817, 830, 837, 877, 879, 880, 886, 887, 888
849 Department of Employment, Education and
Davidson, J., 356, 371 Training, 79, 83, 128, 130, 132
Davies, A., 145, 147, 150, 150, 151, 776, 778, Derewianka, H., 848, 850
791, 793, 799, 800, 812, 817, 818, 830, 849, DeRidder, I., 747, 748, 754
851, 859, 860, 861, 862, 866, 867, 868, 903, Derwing, T., 57, 58, 61, 493, 494, 500, 501
907, 963, 968 Desmarais, C., 425, 435
Davies, E., 119, 122, 123, 124, 134, 519, 526, Desmarais, L., 748, 754
959, 968, 1059, 1070 Detmer, E., 326, 328, 330, 332
Davis, C., 149, 151 Deville, C., 821, 830
Davis, J., 90, 96 Devine, J., 577, 578
Davis, K. A., 179, 182, 187, 189, 190 Devlin, B., 13, 20, 22
Davis, W., 1059, 1070 DeVries, J., 74, 82
Davison, C., 48, 49, 61, 62, 68, 79, 83, 162, 171, Deweerdt, J., 588, 595
693, 694, 696, 704, 709, 710 Dewey, G., 441, 450
Dawson, A., 181, 192 Dewey, J., 242, 253
Day, D., 131, 132 Dhesi, S., 125, 130, 132
Day, E., 185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 682, 687, 718, di Luzio, A., 122, 132
720, 726 Diaz-Santos, G., 104, 112
Day, R., 149, 151, 572, 576, 578, 587, 595, 1058, Dickerson, L., 495, 500
1070 Dickerson, W., 495, 500
de Beaugrande, R., 106, 112, 401, 406, 616, 626 Diesch, E., 505, 525
de Bot, K., 275, 278, 477, 481, 492, 500, 677, Dietrich, R., 201, 207
678, 683, 687, 984, 988, 990 Dillon, S., 554, 560
de Graaff, R., 442, 449 Dirven, R., 1006, 1009
de Groot, A. M. B., 439, 449 DiSessa, A. A., 40, 41
De Jong, E., 8, 9, 15, 18, 20, 22 Dissanayake, W., 159, 163, 168
de Jong, J. H. A. L., 839, 851 Di Vesta, F., 517, 524
de Jonge, C. E., 491, 500 Dixon, R., 429, 434
de la Fuente, M. J., 675, 679, 683, 684, 686, Djite, P. G., 965, 966, 968, 1032, 1034
687 Dobson, A., 987, 990
de Riva O’Phelan, 73, 83 Dobson, B., 576, 579
de Silva Joyce, H., 246, 253 Dole, J., 119, 135
de Varennes, F., 1064, 1067, 1069, 1070 Dollerup, C., 844, 851
Deakin, R., 125, 135 Donato, 656
Deary, I. J., 445, 449 Donato, R., 17, 23, 236, 239, 336, 339, 346, 351,
DeCarrico, J., 90, 96, 617, 623, 627 478, 481, 656
DeChicchis, J., 1020, 1033 Donley, K., 402, 406, 698, 709
Decorby, E., 57, 58, 61 Dorian, N., 1061, 1062, 1070
Deegan, M. J., 180, 183, 187, 190 Dorian, N. C., 182, 190
deGraff, R., 264, 278 Dornyei, Z., 328, 330, 446, 450, 668, 669, 672,
deGuerrero, M. C. M., 336, 351 687, 731, 740, 759, 760, 765, 769, 770, 920,
DeKeyser, R., 264, 276, 278, 427, 432, 433, 441, 927
442, 444, 445, 446, 447, 449, 459, 468, 678, Dorsey-Gaines, C., 540, 544
687, 736, 740, 913, 927 Doughty, C., 234, 239, 264, 270, 275, 276, 278,
Delamont, S., 179, 181, 183, 187, 189 324, 331, 440, 442, 450, 466, 468, 474, 481,
Delaney, P. F., 441, 450 509, 522, 526, 551, 552, 553, 554, 556, 557,
Delgado-Gaitan, C., 37, 41, 535, 542 558, 559, 560, 668, 670, 671, 672, 673, 674,
Delpit, L., 302, 315, 936, 947 675, 677, 678, 679, 680, 681, 682, 683, 685,
Demecheleer, M., 921, 926 687, 688, 722, 724, 726, 728, 729, 735, 740,
Denzin, N. K., 187, 190, 242, 253 747, 754
Department for Education and Skills, 70, 83, Douglas, D., 457, 470, 822, 826, 828, 830, 845,
877, 885, 887 851, 857, 858, 859, 860, 861, 864, 867, 868
1084 AUTHOR INDEX

Downes, S., 921, 927 Edge, J., 187, 190, 246, 253
Doye, P., 918, 927 Ediger, A., 210, 211, 214, 220
Dragosavljevic, A., 994, 997, 1009 Edmondson, W., 319, 331
Drecher, M., 119, 135 Edwards, D., 27, 41
Dressler, W., 616, 626 Edwards, J., 358, 371, 1059, 1062, 1070
Drew, P., 120, 132, 310, 315, 356, 371 Egan, K., 206, 207
Dreyer, C., 762, 770 Egbokhare, F. O., 286, 298
Dry, H. A., 547, 560 Eggington, W., 962, 965, 966, 968, 969
Du Bois, J., 358, 371 Eggly, S., 864, 868
Dua, H., 1057, 1070 Egi, T., 448, 452
Dubreuil, S., 922, 928 Ehrlich, S., 900, 907
Dudley-Evans, T., 85, 86, 87, 90, 96, 99, 102, Ehrman, M., 762, 770
107, 109, 111, 112, 113, 601, 611, 612 Eignor, D., 746, 755, 788, 794
Duff, A., 636, 650 Eisenstein, M., 320, 326, 327, 331
Duff, P., 9, 22, 47, 49, 50, 55, 56, 57, 61, 110, El Tigi, M., 199, 200, 201, 207, 425, 431, 434
112, 124, 129, 132, 184, 185, 186, 188, 190, Elbow, P., 604, 608, 611
306, 307, 308, 310, 311, 313, 314, 315, 346, Elder, C., 799, 804, 806, 812, 837, 838, 844, 847,
351, 520, 524, 703, 709, 722, 723, 726 851, 852, 858, 860, 868
Duffield, N., 440, 450 Elder, E., 849, 851
Duffy, S. A., 514, 526 El-Dinary, P. B., 760, 769
DuFon, M. A., 319, 321, 329, 330, 331 Elley, W., 91, 96, 149, 150, 151, 572, 578, 585,
Dufour, R., 439, 448, 452 595
Duguid, P., 744, 754 Elliot, J., 241, 253
Dulany, D., 441, 450 Elliott, J., 243, 253
Dulay, H., 161, 168, 229, 239, 266, 278, 404, 406 Ellis, N., 276, 278, 440, 442, 447, 450, 459, 468,
Dunbar, S. B., 833, 853, 871, 872, 885, 888 497, 498, 499, 500, 573, 578, 585, 595, 678,
Dunkel, P., 90, 96, 518, 519, 524 681, 687, 714, 726
Dunn, M., 998, 1009 Ellis, R., 40, 41, 143, 145, 151, 212, 220, 228,
Dunn, W. E., 336, 351 234, 239, 251, 253, 265, 268, 275, 278, 325,
Duquette, G., 138, 151 331, 335, 338, 340, 341, 344, 346, 351, 438,
Duquette, L., 748, 754 442, 450, 456, 457, 458, 459, 468, 474, 476,
Duran, R., 17, 22 481, 497, 500, 509, 511, 518, 522, 524, 551,
Duranti, A., 183, 190 553, 554, 556, 557, 560, 585, 595, 641, 649,
Durgunoglu, A., 33, 41 660, 665, 668, 669, 672, 673, 674, 675, 676,
Durie, A., 13, 22 677, 678, 681, 683, 684, 685, 687, 688, 689,
Dwyer, S., 86, 98 691, 714, 715, 717, 718, 723, 724, 725, 726,
Dyson, P., 913, 927 727, 728, 729, 740, 749, 750, 754, 766, 770,
821, 827, 830
E Elman, J. L., 389, 390, 437, 446, 450
Elsen, A., 644, 651
Eades, D., 131, 133 Ely, R., 302, 315
Eagleson, R. D., 1004, 1009 Emerson, R. M., 182, 183, 193
Earles, J. L., 447, 451 Emig, J., 604, 611
Early, M., 124, 129, 132, 306, 307, 308, 311, 313, Engestrom, Y., 204, 206, 207, 351
314, 315, 704, 709 English, K., 915, 927
Eastman, C., 994, 995, 996, 1006, 1009, 1059, Enkvist, N. E., 375, 377, 386, 390
1070 Ennis, T., 105, 112
Ebbutt, D., 241, 253 Er, E., 75, 83
Echevarria, J., 50, 51, 61, 708, 709 Erickson, F., 122, 123, 133, 184, 190, 532, 537,
Eckert, P., 47, 61, 900, 907 542
Eckman, F., 162, 168, 264, 270, 278, 491, 492, Ericsson, K. A., 329, 331, 844, 845, 851
493, 500 Erlam, R., 718, 727
Edelsky, C., 34, 41, 185, 186, 190, 535, 542, 621, Ernst, G., 184, 185, 186, 190
626 Ernst-Slavin, G., 36, 41
 AUTHOR INDEX 1085

Esarte-Sarries, V., 920, 926 Fiebach, C. J., 447, 450

Eschevarria, J., 32, 41 Field, D., 50, 62
Escudero, P., 505, 524 Field, L., 120, 125, 134
Eskey, D., 577, 578 Field, M., 576, 577
Eslinger, C. E., 763, 770 Field, Y., 620, 622, 626
Estell, D. W., 13, 21 Fillmore, L. W., 200, 202, 207
Estell, J., 13, 21 Filson, A., 49, 61
Etling, K., 513, 527 Fine, M., 185, 194
Eubank, L., 421, 433, 439, 450 Finegan, E., 394, 397, 398, 405, 406, 548, 549,
EURYDICE, 985, 990 560, 623, 625, 745, 754
Evans, J., 276, 280, 556, 561, 675, 679, Finger, A., 91, 98
681, 691 Finocchiaro, M., 818, 830
Evans, R., 49, 61 Firth, A., 120, 121, 133, 212, 220, 357, 371, 478,
Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 181, 190 481, 489, 502
Extra, G., 976, 977, 979, 982, 991 Firth, J. R., 393, 406, 636, 649
Eyring, J., 739, 740 Fischer, M., 181, 192
Fish, S., 519, 524
F Fisher, S., 120, 133
Fishman, J., 182, 184, 190, 284, 295, 298, 958,
Faerch, C., 326, 331, 488, 489, 500, 822, 830, 959, 966, 967, 969, 974, 990, 1000, 1001,
841, 844, 851 1009, 1010, 1043, 1044, 1053, 1056, 1058,
Fairclough, N., 27, 41, 88, 96, 121, 133, 204, 1060, 1071
207, 313, 315, 602, 611, 639, 649, 730, 740, Fishman, P., 900, 907
933, 947 Fiske, D. W., 837, 850
Faletti, J., 622, 624, 626 FitzGerald, H., 122, 132, 921, 927
Falodun, J., 275, 280 Fitzgerald, N., 72, 81, 83, 84
Fals Borda, O., 244, 253 Fiumara, G. C., 109, 113
Faltis, C., 10, 22, 47, 61 Flege, J., 421, 425, 426, 427, 428, 431, 433, 435,
Faludon, J., 676, 685, 690 440, 454, 491, 492, 500, 507, 524
Fanshel, D., 120, 134 Fleming, M., 915, 926, 927
Fantini, A. E., 912, 918, 927 Fletcher, J. M., 565, 579
Farhady, H., 210, 211, 220, 221 Fletcher, M., 67, 83
Farrell, L., 121, 126, 128, 133 Fletcher, P., 210, 220, 221
Fashola, O. S., 17, 22 Fligelstone, S., 402, 409
Fasold, R., 292, 297 Flores, B. C., 492, 500
Favreau, M., 567, 578 Florez, M. C., 75, 83
Feak, C., 103, 105, 112, 863, 868 Flower, L., 604, 611, 733, 740
Fearnow, S., 475, 482, 681, 683, 688 Flowerdew, J., 86, 87, 90, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97,
Feetz, S., 69, 70, 71, 83 185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 506, 514, 524, 701,
Fein, D., 425, 434 710, 903, 907
Feldman, A., 1066, 1070 Flowerdew, L., 138, 144, 151, 403, 406, 407,
Felix, S., 271, 278, 424, 433 620, 622, 625, 626
Felkins, G., 761, 771 Floyd-Tenery, A. R., 38, 41
Fellman, J., 1000, 1009 Flynn, S., 161, 168, 458, 468
Feng, A. W., 917, 923, 927 Fodor, J., 342, 351, 437, 438, 443, 450, 451
Fenner, A., 917, 927 Foertsch, J., 511, 524
Ferguson, C., 284, 298, 959, 968, 998, 1010, Foley, D. E., 185, 192
1040, 1053 Ford, G., 118, 133
Ferguson, G., 106, 113, 399, 406 Forman, M. L., 157, 172
Ferguson, P., 251, 253 Forsythe, W. J., 514, 523
Fernandez-Garcia, M., 676, 681, 686, 688 Fortkamp, M. B. M., 448, 450
Ferris, D., 87, 91, 96, 555, 560, 598, 600, 603, Foster, G. M., 898, 907
604, 605, 606, 608, 609, 611, 624, 626 Foster, P., 441, 450, 453, 676, 680, 684, 685,
Feuerstein, T., 736, 741 688, 690
1086 AUTHOR INDEX

Fotos, S., 234, 239, 653, 657, 665, 666, 669, Fulcher, G., 793, 793, 799, 802, 812, 837, 843,
678, 681, 688, 715, 717, 718, 727, 736, 851, 859, 860, 861, 862, 867, 868
740 Furnham, A., 919, 930
Foucault, M., 27, 41, 108, 113, 639, 649, 898, Furstenberg, G., 915, 927
907 Fussell, S., 513, 525
Foucou, P., 402, 407
Fowler, R., 933, 947 G
Fowler, S. M., 919, 927
Fox, B., 358, 371 Gabrielsen, G., 246, 253
Fox, C. M., 835, 839, 850 Gajdusek, L., 577, 578
Fox, M. J., 958, 969, 1056, 1071 Gal, S., 183, 184, 188, 190, 900, 901,
Fradd, S., 32, 41, 817, 818, 830 907
Francis, G., 398, 401, 407 Gal’perin, P. I., 339, 351
Francis, N., 182, 190 Galbally, F., 72, 83
Francis, W. N., 581, 582, 595 Gallimore, R., 184, 193
Frank, F., 119, 126, 134 Gamoran, A., 203, 207
Frank, R., 106, 113 Gao, Y., 100, 103, 113, 917, 928
Franson, C., 48, 55, 62 Garcia, C., 326, 331
Frase, L., 622, 624, 626 Garcia, G., 18, 22, 34, 41, 870, 871, 888
Fraser, B., 317, 331 Garcia, R., 422, 433
Frauenfelder, U., 524 Gardner, R. C., 897, 907, 920, 927
Frawley, W., 335, 351, 478, 481 Gardner, S., 848, 854, 879, 888
Frederici, A., 504, 524 Garfinkel, H., 182, 190, 370, 371
Freedle, R., 515, 524 Garnes, S., 510, 524
Freedman, A., 108, 113, 602, 611 Garvey, G., 490, 500
Freeman, D., 19, 22, 246, 250, 254 Garvin, P. L., 1006, 1010
Freeman, R., 20, 22, 56, 61, 184, 186, 190, 294, Gaskill, W., 356, 371
298, 1068, 1071 Gass, S., 209, 212, 220, 265, 270, 274, 278, 326,
Freeman, Y. S., 19, 22 330, 331, 332, 367, 371, 382, 390, 439, 440,
Freire, P., 108, 113, 242, 244, 254, 535, 542, 450, 464, 469, 472, 474, 481, 522, 524, 665,
602, 611 669, 676, 681, 684, 685, 686, 688, 689, 690,
French, R. M., 442, 450 747, 754, 761, 770, 900, 907
French-American International School of Gatbonton, E., 495, 500
Boston, 10, 22 Gattullo, F., 848, 851
Frenck, S., 158, 169 Gavioli, L., 400, 402, 407
Frensch, P. A., 441, 451 Gazy, S., 76, 82
Fridman, B., 677, 679, 688 Gebhard, J., 246, 254
Frieda, A., 421, 425, 426, 428, 431, 433 Gebhard, M., 185, 190
Frieda, E. M., 491, 500 Gee, J., 27, 40, 41, 118, 121, 126, 133, 313, 315,
Friederici, A. D., 447, 450, 454 530, 533, 534, 535, 537, 542, 543, 565, 571,
Friedman, J., 906, 907 578, 600, 611, 933, 948
Friere, P., 121, 133, 565, 578 Geertz, C., 181, 191, 601, 611
Fries, C., 563, 578 Geffert, T., 697, 712
Frith, H., 313, 315 Geisler, C., 93, 97
Frohlich, M., 232, 239, 245, 252, 758, 770, 848, Gellner, E., 1061, 1071
854 Genesee, F., 8, 10, 11, 18, 22, 52, 61, 186, 190,
Frota, S., 198, 199, 208, 274, 275, 277, 278, 280, 425, 435, 552, 560, 697, 708, 709, 711, 720,
329, 334, 474, 482 727, 818, 820, 830, 871, 888
Fry, E., 567, 578 Genung, P. B., 346, 352
Fu, D. L., 145, 146, 151 Gernsbacher, M., 504, 511, 524
Fuji, A., 448, 452 Gersten, B. F., 249, 254
Fujiwara, M., 475, 482, 681, 683, 688 Gersten, R., 9, 22
Fukuya, Y., 323, 328, 331 Geva, E., 33, 41, 43, 567, 578
Fulbright, R. K., 565, 579 Ghahremani-Ghajar, S., 35, 42
 AUTHOR INDEX 1087

Gianelli, M. C., 695, 710 Goodwin, J., 75, 83

Gibbons, J., 10, 13, 16, 22, 120, 131, 133 Goody, J., 534, 542
Gibbons, P., 203, 207, 703, 710 Gopinathan, S., 286, 298
Gibson, E., 438, 450 Gordon, D. A., 181, 189
Gibson, H., 9, 10, 22 Gordon, T., 184, 185, 191
Gibson, M. A., 184, 191 Gore, J. C., 565, 579
Gibson, R., 919, 927 Gore, J. M., 246, 254
Gibson, S., 89, 96 Gorsuch, G., 666, 669
Giddens, A., 120, 133 Gorter, D., 14, 22
Gifford, R. T., 842, 851 Goswami, D., 244, 254
Gilbert, P., 566, 578 Goto, S. T., 185, 191
Giles, H., 495, 496, 499, 500, 501, 842, 851, Gottlieb, M., 706, 710
896, 907 Gough, K., 534, 542
Gill, S. K., 163, 169 Gould, G., 792, 793
Gillett, G., 206, 207 Gould, S. J., 536, 542
Gillette, S., 86, 98 Grabe, W., 49, 63, 90, 97, 375, 378, 384, 385,
Gilmore, P., 183, 184, 191 390, 600, 602, 603, 604, 605, 611, 616, 617,
Gimenez, J. C., 105, 113 626, 695, 697, 701, 708, 710, 711, 733, 740
Ginther, A., 622, 624, 626 Graddol, D., 284, 298, 745, 754, 901, 903, 907,
Gipps, C., 799, 806, 812, 870, 871, 872, 873, 940, 948, 973, 990, 1049, 1053
875, 876, 880, 887, 888 Graf, P., 476, 481
Giroux, H. A., 931, 942, 943, 948 Graff, H. J., 533, 538, 542
Gish, A., 128, 134 Graham, C. R., 897, 907
Glahn, E., 844, 851 Granger, S., 394, 403, 407, 622, 623, 624, 626
Glas, C. A. W., 839, 851 Grant, L., 622, 624, 626
Glaser, B. G., 183, 191 Graves, B., 621, 627
Glatthorn, A. A., 183, 184, 191 Graves, M. F., 589, 595
Gledhill, C., 104, 113, 399, 407 Gray, J., 938, 943, 948
Glenn, C. L., 8, 9, 15, 20, 22 Gray, S., 517, 524
Gnutzmann, C., 973, 990 Green, A., 802, 812, 844, 851, 865, 868
Goffman, E., 120, 133, 182, 191, 305, 315 Green, C., 103, 113, 622, 626
Goh, C., 764, 770 Green, J., 119, 123, 133, 184, 191, 244, 256,
Gohard-Radenkovic, A., 922, 927 762, 770
Golato, A., 325, 328, 332 Green, P., 444, 450
Gold, E. M., 438, 450 Greenbaum, S., 159, 164, 169, 172, 397, 398,
Golden, R., 514, 524 407, 408, 546, 561, 745, 755
Goldowsky, B. N., 447, 450 Greenberg, E., 538, 539, 542
Goldschmidt, W., 179, 180, 181, 191 Greenberg, J., 37, 42
Goldstein, L., 606, 611, 695, 710 Greenfield, P. M., 20, 24
Goldstein, T., 56, 62, 119, 126, 128, 130, 131, Greeno, J. G., 203, 207
133, 182, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191, 900, 907 Gregg, K., 421, 433, 438, 443, 450, 496, 501
Gomes, B. A., 185, 186, 187, 191 Grice, H. P., 123, 133, 162, 169
Gomez-Gonzalez, M. A., 398, 407 Griffin, P., 342, 352
Gonzales, P., 358, 372 Griffiths, R., 506, 524
Gonzalez, A., 999, 1002, 1008, 1010, 1014, Grillo, R., 535, 542, 902, 907, 1048, 1053
1034 Grimes, B., 1057, 1071
Gonzalez, N., 37, 38, 41, 42, 185, 191 Grimshaw, G., 420, 433
Gonzalez, R., 38, 41 Gronlund, N. E., 820, 830
Gonzalez-Bueno, M., 622, 626 Grosjean, F., 7, 22, 162, 169, 524
Goodfellow, R., 753, 755 Grotjahn, R., 210, 220, 232, 239, 242, 254
Goodluck, H., 394, 407 Grove, E., 858, 868
Goodman, D., 797, 811 Gruba, P., 844, 851
Goodman, K. S., 564, 578 Gruber-Miller, J., 922, 927
Goodwin, C., 356, 358, 371 Grundy, P., 912, 927
1088 AUTHOR INDEX

Gubrium, J. F., 183, 191, 329, 332 Halliday, M. A. K., 69, 83, 86, 97, 104, 108, 113,
Gudykunst, W., 520, 524, 912, 927 122, 133, 195, 198, 207, 546, 560, 601, 611,
Guerra, J., 185, 186, 187, 191 616, 617, 626, 636, 649, 730, 740, 861, 862,
Guerrero, M., 803, 812 867, 868
Guest, M., 146, 151 Halsey, A. H., 241, 254
Guilherme, M., 916, 928 Hamayan, E., 52, 61, 708, 709
Guilloton, N., 962, 968 Hambleton, R. K., 829, 831, 838, 851
Gullberg, M., 358, 371 Hamel, R., 1060, 1071
Gumperz, J., 122, 123, 131, 132, 133, 164, Hamilton, J., 838, 851
169, 182, 184, 191, 290, 297, 519, 520, Hamilton, M., 119, 132, 533, 541
524, 896, 907 Hamilton-Jenkins, A., 586, 595
Gunderson, L., 47, 57, 61 Hammersley, M., 183, 187, 191
Gunn, M., 76, 82 Hamp-Lyons, L., 86, 97, 209, 220, 607, 608,
Gunter, T. C., 447, 454 609, 611, 620, 622, 626, 791, 793, 802,
Gunthner, S., 901, 907 806, 811, 812, 838, 841, 846, 848, 849,
Gupta, P., 505, 517, 524 851, 861, 868
Guth, G. J. A., 68, 84 Han, Z-H., 457, 458, 459, 463, 464, 466, 467,
Guthrie, G. P., 185, 186, 191, 193 468
Gutierrez, K., 35, 41 Hancin-Bhatt, B., 33, 41, 491, 493, 501
Gynan, S. N., 1032, 1034 Hancock, M., 290, 298
Haney, W., 19, 22
H Hanks, P., 396, 406
Hanks, W., 27, 41, 131, 133, 349, 351
Haakenson, G., 269, 280 Hanley, M. L., 292, 298
Haarmann, H., 959, 962, 969, 1035, 1040, 1053, Hannas, W. C., 1033, 1034
1053 Hannerz, U., 185, 191
Haas, M., 535, 542 Hansen, C., 861, 868
Haas, W., 994, 1010 Hansen, C. R., 844, 851
Habermas, J., 242, 244, 254, 635, 636, 649 Hansen, J. G., 605, 612, 905, 908
Haertel, E., 810, 812, 873, 888 Hanson, F. A., 779, 793
Hagege, C., 994, 996, 1010 Haramis, M., 244, 256
Hagen, E. P., 816, 831 Harbon, L. A., 922, 928
Hagstrom, C. L., 964, 965, 969, 970 Harding, S., 944, 946, 948
Hahne, A., 447, 450, 504, 524 Harklau, L., 51, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 185,
Haider, H., 441, 451 186, 187, 188, 191, 306, 307, 308, 313, 315,
Haiman, J., 1007, 1010 601, 612
Hajer, M., 698, 706, 710, 712 Harley, B., 276, 278, 420, 432, 434, 445, 446,
Hak, T., 129, 133 451, 552, 560, 672, 682, 688, 718, 720, 727,
Hakuta, K., 19, 21, 30, 33, 40, 47, 55, 61, 162, 731, 740
169, 200, 201, 206, 207, 426, 429, 431, 433, Harman, D., 532, 537, 542, 1059, 1071
446, 449, 451, 465, 467, 531, 542, 621, 626 Harper, H., 128, 130, 134
Hale, G., 87, 97, 861, 868 Harre, R., 206, 207
Hale, K., 541, 542 Harrington, M., 429, 434, 443, 447, 451, 749,
Halimah, A. M., 104, 113 754
Hall, B. L., 243, 254 Harris, D. P., 817, 818, 830
Hall, C., 448, 451 Harris, K., 404, 408
Hall, E., 898, 907 Harris, M., 181, 191
Hall, G., 16, 18, 22 Harris, R., 524, 542, 902, 903, 908
Hall, J., 325, 332 Harris, S., 13, 20, 22
Hall, J. K., 962, 969 Harsch, K., 761, 767, 771
Hall, K., 902, 908 Hart, D., 432, 434, 445, 446, 451
Hall, P. J., 818, 829 Hartford, B., 318, 325, 330, 332
Hall, S., 131, 133 Hartman, B., 58, 62
Halleck, G. B., 843, 855 Hartman, P., 901, 908
 AUTHOR INDEX 1089

Harvey, P., 144, 151, 900, 908 Herzfeld, M., 180, 181, 191
Hasan, R., 616, 626, 730, 740 Heubert, J., 783, 793
Hassall, T. J., 319, 326, 332 Heugh, K., 965, 966, 969
Hatch, E., 199, 200, 201, 202, 207, 210, 211, 214, Hewings, A., 106, 113
220, 221, 265, 267, 278, 739, 740, 849, 852 Hewings, M., 99, 100, 101, 102, 106, 111, 113
Hatim, B., 618, 626 Heyden, T., 698, 710
Haugen, E., 959, 961, 969, 993, 994, 995, 999, Higgs, T., 823, 830
1006, 1010 Hill, C., 834, 852
Hauser, R., 783, 793 Hill, D. A., 144, 153
Havelock, E. A., 534, 542 Hill, D. R., 587, 595
Hawkins, B., 708, 710 Hill, J., 900, 908, 912, 928
Hawkins, M., 26, 27, 38, 40, 41 Hill, K., 739, 741, 802, 812, 839, 840, 841,
Hawkins, R., 164, 169, 439, 440, 451, 458, 468, 842, 847, 849, 850, 851, 852, 853, 858,
718, 727 868, 912, 928
Hawthorne, L., 128, 133, 784, 793, 802, 812 Hill, T., 320, 332
Haynes, M., 567, 570, 578 Hilles, S., 424, 430, 434, 736, 740
He, A. W., 304, 306, 315, 357, 371, 842, 843, Hinds, J., 387, 390, 513, 524, 618, 621, 626, 627
852, 855 Hinkel, E., 89, 97, 328, 332, 556, 560, 599, 612,
He, T. H., 765, 770 616, 617, 620, 621, 622, 623, 625, 627, 653,
He, X., 476, 481, 585, 595, 683, 684, 688 665, 669, 736, 740, 891, 893
Heap, J. L., 313, 315 Hinkel, R., 923, 928
Heath, C., 120, 121, 132, 133, 358, 371 Hinnenkamp, Volker, 520, 524
Heath, S. B., 29, 37, 41, 184, 187, 189, 302, 315, Hinton, L., 541, 542
534, 535, 542, 565, 566, 578 Hirakata, F., 1016, 1034
Heaton, J. B., 817, 818, 830 Hird, B., 146, 151
Hecht, K., 444, 450 Hirsch, E. D., 533, 542
Hedgcock, J., 458, 469, 598, 600, 603, 604, 605, Hirsch, J., 447, 451
606, 608, 609, 611, 612 Hirvela, A., 603, 610
Hegelheimer, V., 748, 752, 754 Hitchcock, G., 250, 254
Heimbach, R., 509, 524, 585, 595, 683, 684, 688 Ho, E., 75, 83
Heimbecker, C., 13, 23 Hockey, J., 181, 192
Heinze, H.-J., 439, 453 Hodgkinson, H. L., 243, 254
Heller, M., 123, 132, 185, 186, 188, 191, Hoey, M., 617, 627, 730, 740
204, 207, 896, 898, 901, 902, 903, 908, Hoffman, C., 10, 11, 23
938, 941, 948 Hoffman, D. M., 917, 928
Helt, M., 87, 92, 94, 96, 399, 406 Hoffman, E., 904, 908
Hemais, B., 105, 113 Hofstede, G., 643, 650, 919, 928
Henley, N., 899, 910 Hofstra Social Studies Educators, 50, 63
Hennecke, M. E., 512, 527 Hogan, M. P., 744, 745, 754
Henning, G., 210, 220, 818, 819, 830, 835, 838, Holborow, M., 1062, 1071
839, 852 Holden, K. T., 492, 501
Hennoste, T., 394, 407 Holec, H., 636, 650
Henry, A., 105, 113 Holland, C., 119, 126, 134
Hensley, D., 524 Holland, D. C., 185, 192
Henze, R., 17, 23 Holland, J., 184, 185, 191
Heredia, A. H., 922, 928 Holland, P. W., 838, 852
Heritage, J., 120, 132, 133, 182, 189, 310, 315, Hollaway, M. E., 761, 771
355, 358, 361, 371, 730, 739 Holliday, A., 138, 140, 147, 151, 185, 186, 191,
Herman, J., 75, 83 914, 928, 936, 940, 948
Hermans, R., 461, 470 Holliday, L., 274, 279, 280, 473, 474, 476, 482,
Hernandez, H., 52, 62 675, 684, 690, 900, 909
Herron, C., 459, 470, 922, 928 Holmes, J., 124, 134, 396, 407, 900, 908
Herschensohn, J. R., 161, 169 Holmes, V. L., 186, 187, 191
Hersen, M., 797, 811 Holstein, J. A., 183, 191, 329, 332
1090 AUTHOR INDEX

Holten, C. A., 693, 695, 709 Hulstijn, J., 444, 451, 459, 468, 508, 525, 585,
Holzman, L., 337, 338, 339, 341, 347, 352 595, 673, 675, 679, 683, 688
Homburg, T. J., 844, 852 Hulstijn, W., 444, 451
Honey, J., 1048, 1053 Hult, F. M., 1022, 1033
Hood, S., 75, 83, 246, 247, 253, 667, 669 Hultsch, D., 429, 434
hooks, bell, 943, 944, 948 Hunston, S., 394, 398, 407, 550, 560
Hooper, J., 440, 448, 452 Hunt, A., 835, 850
Hopper, P., 348, 349, 351 Hunt, E., 445, 451
Hornberger, N., 13, 23, 182, 183, 184, 191, Hunter, A., 106, 113
282, 298, 959, 969, 1014, 1034, 1067, Hunter, C., 532, 537, 542
1068, 1071 Hunter, S., 659, 665, 669
Horowitz, D., 87, 89, 90, 97 Huot, B. A., 841, 852
Hosenfeld, C., 758, 770 Hurley, S. R., 817, 830
Houck, N., 326, 331 Huss, L., 1067, 1071
House, A., 491, 500, 506, 524 Huss-Keeler, R., 185, 186, 187, 191
House, C., 848, 850 Hutchinson, C., 839, 853
House, J., 124, 132, 162, 168, 319, 322, 323, Hwang, K., 91, 97
326, 331, 332 Hyland, F., 606, 612
Housen, A., 11, 23 Hyland, K., 86, 91, 93, 94, 97, 104, 113, 403,
Houston, C., 513, 527 407, 600, 602, 612, 622, 627, 730, 740
Hoven, D., 517, 525 Hyltenstam, K., 270, 278, 420, 421, 423, 425,
Howard, E. R., 540, 541 434, 447, 451, 462, 468
Howatt, A., 653, 657, 658, 659, 660, 661, 662, Hymes, D., 119, 134, 182, 183, 184, 190, 191,
663, 664, 666, 668, 669 519, 525, 635, 637, 650, 653, 662, 665, 668,
Howe, S., 146, 151 669, 730, 740, 820, 821, 830, 912, 928
Hruska, B., 39, 41 Hyon, S., 94, 97, 103, 108, 113, 600, 612
Hsiao, T. Y., 760, 762, 770 Hyte, H. D., 768, 770
Hsu, J., 158, 169, 749, 755
Hsu, Y. P., 622, 626 I
Hu, G., 445, 451
Hu, M., 587, 595 Iancu, M., 695, 710
Hu, W. Z., 917, 928 Ibrahim, A., 902, 908
Huang, J., 267, 278 Ibrahim, A. E. K., 185, 186, 188, 192
Huberman, A. M., 196, 205, 207 Ibrahim, Y., 106, 113
Huckin, T., 90, 91, 96, 98, 381, 389, 567, 578, Ichikawa, J., 57, 58, 61
599, 600, 602, 610, 636, 649 Icke, V., 86, 98
Hudelson, S., 621, 627 Iedema, R., 121, 134
Hudicourt-Barnes, J., 32, 43 Imart, G., 996, 1010
Hudson, G., 654, 655, 666, 667, 669 Inagaki, S., 274, 279, 370, 372, 607, 613, 674,
Hudson, T., 109, 110, 113, 326, 328, 330, 332, 685, 689
566, 578, 818, 819, 829, 829, 838, 839, 841, Indrasuta, C., 617, 627
848, 850, 852, 872, 880, 887 Inglis, C., 75, 83
Huebner, T., 199, 200, 201, 207 Ingram, D., 921, 928, 961, 968, 969, 1014, 1034
Huerta-Macias, A., 870, 871, 872, 888 Inoue, A., 443, 451
Huey, E. B., 564, 578 International Language Testing Association,
Hughes, A., 210, 220, 221, 817, 818, 830 791, 793
Hughes, D., 250, 254 Intrator, S. M., 565, 578
Hughes, R., 397, 401, 406, 407 Ioup, G., 199, 200, 201, 207, 271, 278, 421, 424,
Huh, D-C., 1029, 1034 425, 430, 431, 433, 434, 468, 491, 501
Huizinga, J., 490, 501 Ip, D., 75, 83
Hull, D., 118, 133 Irujo, S., 36, 41
Hull, G., 118, 119, 120, 121, 125, 126, 127, 129, Islam, C., 148, 151
133, 134, 534, 535, 542 Isserlis, J., 75, 83
Hulme, C., 506, 523 Itoh, H., 200, 201, 207
 AUTHOR INDEX 1091

Ivanic, R., 119, 132, 204, 207, 533, 541, 598, Johns, T., 401, 402, 407, 736, 740
611, 612 Johnson, D., 195, 205, 207, 211, 220, 221
Iverson, G., 493, 500 Johnson, J., 421, 422, 423, 424, 426, 427, 434,
Iverson, P., 505, 525 446, 451, 465, 468
Iwashita, N., 474, 481, 837, 838, 843, 844, 845, Johnson, K., 467, 468, 731, 739, 657, 662, 668,
847, 850, 852, 858, 868 669, 681, 688, 720, 727
Izumi, S., 475, 476, 477, 481, 482, 675, 679, 681, Johnson, M., 437, 450, 513, 523, 823, 825, 826,
683, 688, 722, 727 827, 830, 842, 852
Johnson, N., 513, 525
J Johnson, P., 442, 452, 495, 500, 616, 620, 627,
896, 907
Jackendoff, R. S., 437, 438, 439, 451 Johnson, R., 492, 499
Jackson, J., 106, 113 Johnson, R. J., 928
Jacobs, H. H., 698, 710 Johnson, R. K., 9, 10, 12, 23, 24
Jacobs, K. T. A., 13, 23 Johnston, B., 328, 332
Jacobson, R., 19, 23 Johnston, M., 267, 268, 280
Jacoby, S., 355, 358, 370, 372, 373, 777, 778, Johnston, S., 576, 579
826, 830, 859, 868 Johnstone, T., 442, 453
Jae, J.-S., 1029, 1031, 1033, 1034 Joiner, E., 607, 613
Jain, M., 459, 468 Jones, R., 402, 407
Jakobovits, L., 635, 650 Jones, S., 530, 531, 540, 541, 865, 868
James, A., 181, 192, 491, 495, 501 Jordan, R., 86, 97, 102, 110, 113, 701, 710
Jamieson, J., 746, 751, 755, 788, 794, 865, 868 Jordan, S., 185, 193, 913, 914, 921, 926, 928, 929
Jamieson, K., 57, 58, 61 Jorgengen, K., 697, 712
Jang, S., 426, 433, 491, 500 Joseph, J. E., 545, 560
Janney, R., 378, 390 Jourdenais, R., 677, 678, 681, 688
Janssen-van Dieten, A.-M., 976, 977, 979, 991 Judd, E., 901, 908
Janzen, J., 765, 770 Juffs, A., 429, 434, 439, 443, 444, 447, 450, 451
Jarvis, G., 245, 249, 254 Jule-Lemke, A., 185, 186, 193
Jarvis, S., 466, 469 Julian, M. A., 275, 279
Jefferson, G., 356, 368, 373, 730, 741 Jung, K., 169
Jenkins, J., 167, 169, 491, 494, 495, 501 Jungeblut, A., 532, 539, 542
Jenkins, L., 539, 542 Jupp, T., 119, 122, 123, 124, 133, 134, 519, 526
Jenkins, S., 621, 627 Jurasek, R., 913, 928
Jenner, A. R., 565, 579 Jusczyk, P., 506, 525
Jensen, C., 105, 112, 861, 868 Jussawalla, F., 159, 169
Jernudd, B., 958, 962, 963, 969, 970, 999, 1000, Just, M. A., 447, 449, 451
1003, 1010, 1011, 1038, 1053, 1056, 1072
Jezzard, P., 447, 452 K
Jiang, W., 923, 928
Jimenez, R., 34, 41 Kachru, B. B., 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 162,
Jin, K-A., 848, 852 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 284, 286,
Jin, L., 144, 151 298, 638, 650, 903, 908, 939, 948
Jo, H-Y., 921, 928 Kachru, Y., 145, 151, 157, 158, 159, 162, 163,
Joe, A., 594, 595, 683, 688 164, 170
Joe, S. G., 765, 766, 771 Kachur, A., 203, 207
Jogan, M. K., 922, 928 Kaestle, C., 537, 544
Johansson, S., 394, 397, 398, 405, 406, 407, 548, Kaftandjieva, F., 839, 854
549, 560, 623, 625, 745, 754 Kager, R., 505, 525
John, V., 184, 190 Kalantzis, M., 27, 41, 130, 134, 184, 190, 533,
Johns, A., 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 92, 94, 97, 99, 107, 541, 940, 947
109, 111, 113, 599, 600, 601, 602, 612, 617, Kalmar, T. M., 534, 542
620, 622, 625, 626, 627, 701, 704, 710, 734, Kaltenbacher, E., 492, 501
739, 740 Kamhi-Stein, L. D., 696, 711, 746, 755
1092 AUTHOR INDEX

Kamil, M. L., 385, 389, 565, 566, 567, 578 Kendon, A., 358, 371
Kamusikiri, S., 609, 613 Kennedy, G., 394, 396, 397, 407, 724, 728
Kamwangamalu, N., 158, 170, 171 Kenny, B., 146, 151
Kamwangamalu, N. M., 966, 969, 1032, 1034 Kenyon, D. M., 836, 854
Kanagy, R., 275, 280, 304, 305, 310, 315, 676, Kephardt, R., 997, 1010
685, 690 Kerans, M. E., 698, 710
Kane, M., 828, 830 Kerekes, J., 319, 326, 332
Kanno, Y., 57, 62 Kern, R., 203, 208, 577, 579
Kantor, R., 87, 97, 607, 608, 611, 844, 845, Kersten, A. W., 447, 451
851 Kett, J. F., 533, 542
Kao, L. H., 764, 769 Ketterman, A., 505, 525
Kaplan, R. B., 375, 378, 380, 381, 383, 384, 386, Keysar, B., 513, 525
387, 388, 389, 390, 391, 536, 542, 571, 578, Khalil, A., 620, 627
599, 600, 602, 603, 604, 605, 611, 612, 613, Khanna, A. L., 74, 77, 83
615, 617, 626, 627, 935, 948, 957, 958, 959, Kibbee, D. A., 966, 969, 1049, 1053
960, 962, 963, 964, 965, 968, 969, 970, 986, Kibby, M., 119, 135
990, 993, 994, 999, 1001, 1002, 1010, 1013, Kightley, S., 75, 83
1015, 1016, 1017, 1019, 1021, 1032, 1033, Kilgarriff, A., 394, 407
1034, 1040, 1053, 1068, 1069, 1070, 1071 Kim, C., 444, 454
Karavas-Doukas, K., 138, 140, 143, 151 Kim, H. S., 565, 578
Karmiloff-Smith, A., 437, 450 Kim, I.-O., 318, 320, 332
Karpova, S. N., 339, 351 Kim, K. H. S., 447, 451
Kasper, G., 124, 132, 162, 168, 171, 312, 315, Kim, S. I., 1027, 1028, 1034
318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 326, 327, Kim, Y. Y., 912, 927, 607, 613
328, 330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 341, 351, 355, Kinajil, T., 1006, 1010
357, 368, 371, 488, 489, 500, 501, 523, 525, Kincheloe, J., 244, 254
672, 688, 735, 736, 741, 822, 830, 841, Kinder, A., 441, 451
844, 851 King, K. A., 1022, 1033
Kasper, L. F., 110, 113, 694, 710 Kinginger, C., 336, 351, 645, 648, 650
Kassin, S., 441, 452 Kinloch, A. M., 491, 500
Katona, L., 843, 852 Kinsella, K., 695, 704, 710
Katz, A., 19, 23 Kintsch, W., 513, 514, 525, 385, 390
Katz, M., 119, 126, 128, 134, 186, 188, 192, 310, Kirkness, A., 1003, 1010
315 Kirkpatrick, A., 599, 612
Katz, S. R., 185, 186, 187, 192 Kirsch, I. S., 532, 539, 542, 746, 755, 788, 794,
Kauffmann, N., 913, 928 865, 868
Kaufman, D., 696, 699, 709, 710 Kirschner, M., 104, 114
Kazzazi, K., 281, 298 Kitsuse, J. I., 242, 253
Keating, E., 182, 184, 188, 192 Kitzinger, C., 313, 315
Keating, T., 9, 22 Klassen, C., 540, 542
Keenan, E., 162, 171 Kleibard, E., 139, 151
Keller, T., 447, 451 Klein, W., 199, 200, 201, 207, 459, 462, 464,
Keller-Cohen, D., 535, 541 468, 469
Kellerman, E., 200, 207, 382, 390, 427, 434, Kleinsasser, R., 646, 650, 667, 670
440, 451, 455, 458, 459, 461, 462, 466, 467, Kliebard, H. M., 532, 536, 543
468, 470, 488, 501 Kloss, H., 531, 543, 1056, 1065, 1071
Kellerman, S., 358, 371 Knight, J. M., 919, 928
Kelly, L., 653, 658, 659, 660, 661, 662, 664, 665, Knight, S. L., 765, 770
666, 667, 668, 669 Knoble, M., 535, 543
Kelson, S., 33, 41 Knowles, G., 402, 409
Kember, D., 241, 254 Kobayashi, Y., 901, 908
Kemmis, S., 150, 151, 234, 239, 241, 242, 243, Koda, K., 570, 579
244, 246, 247, 248, 253, 254 Koehler, K., 492, 499
Kendall, J., 34, 42 Kohler, D. B., 768, 770
 AUTHOR INDEX 1093

Kohls, L. R., 919, 928 Kussmaul, P., 517, 525

Kohonen, T., 525 Kwachka, P., 616, 620, 625
Koike, D. A., 319, 320, 332 Kymlicka,W., 1064, 1065, 1071
Koit, M., 394, 407
Kolstad, A., 539, 542 L
Komarova, L., 339, 351
Kon, C. K., 748, 755 Labov, W., 120, 134, 293, 294, 298, 326, 332,
Konishi, K., 488, 489, 501 547, 561
Kontra, M., 1064, 1071 Lacerda, F., 505, 525
Koole, T., 698, 706, 710, 712 Lackstrom, J., 86, 97
Koshik, I., 355, 370, 373 Ladefoged, P., 1059, 1071
Kostin, I., 515, 524 Lado, R., 264, 279, 492, 501, 642, 650, 796, 798,
Kotter, M., 922, 928 812, 842, 852
Kover, P., 47, 57, 62 Lado, R. L., 815, 817, 818, 820, 821, 830
Kowal, M., 478, 482 Lafayette, R. C., 752, 754
Kozulin, A., 341, 351 LaFramenta, C., 703, 705, 709
Kramer, J., 922, 928 Lahelma, E., 184, 185, 191
Kramsch, C., 149, 151, 236, 239, 478, 482, Lahuerta, A., 104, 113
525, 643, 644, 650, 824, 825, 830, 906, Lainio, J., 1022, 1023, 1034
908, 912, 917, 922, 924, 928, 935, 941, LaJeunesse, G., 34, 42
945, 946, 948 Lakoff, R., 294, 298, 520, 525, 899, 900, 908
Krashen, S., 25, 42, 161, 167, 171, 229, 239, Lakshmanan, U., 457, 459, 461, 464, 466,
266, 273, 275, 279, 358, 361, 371, 427, 434, 470
441, 444, 452, 472, 482, 531, 543, 551, 555, Lalitha Eapen, R., 247, 254
556, 560, 563, 572, 578, 579, 731, 732, 741 Lam, J., 622, 626
766, 770 Lam, P., 144, 151
Krathwohl, D., 827, 829 Lam, W. S. E., 184, 187, 192, 745, 755, 935, 940,
Krauss, M., 1057, 1058, 1071 945, 946, 948
Krauss, R., 513, 525 Lamb, C., 255
Kress, G., 27, 40, 42, 533, 543, 933, 947 Lamb, M., 146, 151
Kroll, B., 87, 97, 600, 604, 605, 607, 608, 609, Lambert, R., 972, 974, 976, 978, 979, 986, 987,
611, 612, 613, 620, 626 988, 990
Kroll, J., 439, 448, 452 Lambert, W. E., 9, 16, 18, 22, 23, 472, 482, 897,
Krueger, M., 694, 710 907, 920, 927
Kubanyiova, M., 142, 151 Lamendella, J., 457, 459, 462, 464, 467, 470
Kubler, N., 402, 407 Lameta-Tufuga, E. U., 589, 595
Kubota, M., 323, 332 Lamie, J., 666, 667, 669
Kubota, R., 599, 612, 895, 903, 908, 933, Lampert, M. D., 358, 371
936, 948 Lamy, M-N., 753, 755
Kucera, H., 581, 582, 595 Landau, S. I., 1006, 1007, 1010
Kuha, M., 328, 332 Lane, D. M., 565, 578
Kuhl, P., 505, 525 Langacker, R., 736, 741
Kumaravadivelu, B., 933, 939, 948 Lankshear, C., 118, 121, 126, 133, 535, 543
Kumatani, A., 996, 1010 Lantolf, J. P., 197, 207, 235, 239, 335, 336,
Kunnan, A. J., 781, 787, 791, 793, 793, 799, 337, 338, 339, 343, 345, 346, 349, 350,
802, 806, 812, 817, 830, 835, 837, 852 351, 352, 478, 480, 481, 482, 514, 525,
Kuper, A., 180, 192 723, 726, 895, 898, 904, 908, 919, 921,
Kupermintz, H., 446, 449 923, 925, 928, 929
Kupferberg, I., 678, 688 Lapkin, C., 236, 240
Kupper, L., 515, 526 Lapkin, S., 336, 337, 338, 353, 472, 474, 477,
Kurath, J., 292, 298 478, 479, 483, 552, 561, 675, 678, 679, 690,
Kurzet, R., 404, 407 691, 699, 710, 711, 724, 728, 732, 741
Kurzweil, R., 744, 755 Laporte, N., 678, 687
Kusano Hubbell, K., 649, 650 Lardiere, D., 431, 434, 460, 461, 464, 469
1094 AUTHOR INDEX

Larsen-Freeman, D., 161, 171, 204, 207, 234, Leontiev, A. A., 341, 352
239, 245, 254, 265, 279, 546, 548, 561, 653, Leontiev, D., 352
664, 665, 670, 694, 710, 731, 733, 735, 740, Leopold, W. F., 265, 279
741, 764, 766, 770, 866, 868 Leow, R., 442, 452, 506, 525, 677, 678, 681,
Larson, D. N., 898, 908 688
Larson-Hall, J., 442, 446, 447, 449 Lerner, G. H., 356, 372
Lasimbang, R., 1006, 1010 Leu, S., 35, 42
Lastra, Y., 1006, 1010 Leung, C., 48, 49, 54, 55, 62, 162, 171, 693, 696,
Lather, P., 181, 192 704, 710, 847, 848, 852, 854, 876, 877, 878,
Latomaa, S., 986, 990, 1032, 1034 881, 882, 888, 902, 903, 908
Laufer, B., 508, 525, 567, 577, 594, 595, 675, Leutner, D., 749, 753, 755
679, 688 Levelt, W., 723, 727
Laurier, M., 748, 754, 836, 850 Levelt, W. J. M., 477, 482
Lave, J., 27, 42, 56, 62, 341, 352, 597, 600, 612, Levet, S., 915, 927
887, 888 Levine, K., 535, 543
Lavendra, B. R., 160, 171 Levinson, B. A., 185, 192
Lavine, R. L., 761, 771 Levinson, S., 123, 132, 134, 317, 331, 378, 389
Law, V., 654, 656, 657, 658, 670 Levy, E. T., 358, 372
Lawless, D., 358, 373 Levy, M., 749, 750, 753, 754, 755
Lawson, A., 396, 407 Lewin, K., 204, 207, 242, 254
Lay, N. D. S., 58, 62 Lewis, D. L., 965, 970
Lazar, I., 923, 926 Lewis, E. G., 11, 12, 15, 23, 1001, 1010
Lazaraton, A., 187, 188, 192, 209, 210, 211, Lewis, I., 164, 171
214, 219, 220, 221, 246, 254, 357, 358, 371, Lewis, M., 145, 151
372, 842, 843, 849, 852 Lewis, N., 274, 279, 280, 473, 474, 476, 482,
Le Page, R. B., 895, 908 675, 687, 684, 690, 900, 909
Leather, J., 123, 132, 491, 492, 493, 501 Lewis, R., 141, 151, 525
Leaver, B. L., 694, 711, 763, 770 Lewis, S., 441, 452
Lee, C. D., 29, 42 Lewis, T., 914, 928
Lee, D., 524 Lewkowicz, J., 847, 852
Lee, J., 678, 691 Li, S. -M. F., 105, 113
Lee, J. H., 139, 152 Li, C. L., 158, 171
Lee, K.-M., 447, 451 Li, D., 123, 124, 134, 184, 186, 187, 192, 310,
Lee, O., 32, 41 311, 316
Lee, S. J., 185, 192 Li, D. F., 666, 667, 670
Leech, G., 159, 172, 317, 332, 394, 397, 398, Li, L., 100, 103, 113
400, 402, 405, 406, 407, 408, 546, 548, 549, Li, P., 423, 434
560, 561, 622, 623, 625, 627, 745, 754, 755 Li, T. Y., 758, 769
Leeman, J., 551, 553, 558, 561, 677, 679, 688, Li, X., 381, 390, 846, 852
724, 727 Li, X-M., 935, 948
Lefkowitz, N., 605, 612 Li, Y., 622, 627
Legareta, D., 227, 239 Liang, X., 57, 62
Legler, L., 38, 41 Liaw, M-L., 928
Legutke, M., 237, 238, 239 Liberto, J. C., 765, 769
Leibowitz, A. H., 78, 83 Lichtenstein, B. M., 242, 254
Leki, I., 88, 97, 375, 390, 597, 598, 599, 600, Lick, H. C., 287, 298
601, 602, 603, 607, 609, 612, 613, 619, 627, Liddicoat, A. J., 322, 323, 332, 912, 928, 999,
766, 770, 936, 937, 948 1002, 1006, 1007, 1010, 1014, 1034
Lemann, N., 792, 793, 833, 852 Lidgard, J., 75, 83
Lemke, J., 27, 42 Liebman-Kline, J., 187, 192
Lenkeit, R. E., 179, 180, 181, 182, 192 Lightbown, P., 265, 266, 274, 276, 279, 280,
Lenneberg, E., 419, 434, 456, 465, 469 335, 336, 352, 370, 372, 466, 469, 504, 526,
Lenzuen, R., 246, 252 551, 553, 555, 557, 558, 561, 640, 646, 650,
Leon, G. F., 340, 352 674, 676, 678, 679, 681, 685, 686, 688, 689,
Leong, S., 58, 62 690, 715, 724, 726, 727, 728, 731, 733, 741
 AUTHOR INDEX 1095

Lillo-Martin, D., 438, 449 Lorenz, F., 87, 98

Lin, A., 903, 904, 908, 945, 946, 948 Lorenz, G., 622, 623, 627
Lin, A. M. Y., 185, 186, 188, 192 Loschky, L., 275, 279, 676, 682, 683, 689, 715,
Lin, Y.-H., 458, 469, 499, 501 727
Linacre, J. M., 839, 852, 853 Losey, K., 55, 58, 59, 61, 185, 186, 187, 192,
Lincoln, Y. S., 187, 190, 242, 253 601, 612, 900, 908
Lindblom, B., 505, 525 Lotan, R. A., 706, 709
Lindemann, S., 104, 113, 399, 408, 701, 712 Louden, W., 142, 152
Lindenfeld, J., 912, 928 Louhiala-Salminen, L., 105, 113
Lindholm, K., 17, 22 Louw, B., 397, 402, 408
Lindholm-Leary, K., 9, 23, 45, 46, 48, 62 Love, A., 93, 97
Linell, P., 520, 525 Love, N., 545, 560
Linn, R., 783, 793, 820, 830, 833, 853, 871, 872, Low, M., 55, 62
885, 888 Lowenberg, P., 156, 157, 171, 289, 298, 639,
Linnell, J., 477, 482 650, 1001, 1010
Liou, H.-C., 187, 192 Lowman, G. S., 292, 298
Lippi-Green, R., 531, 543, 793, 793 Lu, J., 100, 103, 113
Lister, A. C., 491, 500 Lu, M-Z., 934, 940, 948
Littlejohn, A., 148, 151 Lucas, T., 17, 19, 23
Littlewood, W., 602, 612, 667, 670 Luce, P. A., 507, 509, 525
Liu, D., 142, 152, 555, 561 Luchich, O., 76, 82
Liu, E. T. K., 624, 625, 628 Lucka, B., 394, 399, 408
Liu, G., 357, 374 Luckman, T., 242, 252
Liu, H., 421, 423, 426, 434, 435 Luke, A., 535, 543, 730, 741, 966, 969, 994,
Liu, J., 605, 612, 903, 905, 908 1010, 1056, 1071
Liu, N. F., 667, 670 Lukes, M., 531, 544
Liu, S., 425, 426, 427, 428, 431, 433 Lukmani, Y., 897, 908
Llamazon, T., 171 Lumley, T., 836, 839, 843, 844, 845, 847, 848,
Lo Bianco, J., 912, 928, 986, 990, 1008, 849, 850, 851, 853, 858, 859, 861, 868
1010 Luoma, S., 834, 840, 841, 849
Lo, W. A., 618, 627 Luria, A. R., 341, 343, 352
LoCastro, V., 139, 140, 144, 152, 321, 332 Lustgarten, K. E., 19, 23
Lockhart, C., 246, 255 Lutz, W. D., 609, 613
Lockhart, R., 475, 481 Lybeck, K., 496, 501
Loeb, M. I., 540, 541 Lynberg, L., 809, 812
Loewen, S., 476, 477, 482, 673, 674, 675, 676, Lynch, B., 109, 113, 776, 778, 778, 792, 793,
688, 725, 727, 729, 740 797, 799, 800, 801, 802, 812, 815, 816, 817,
Lofland, J., 179, 181, 183, 187, 189, 192 830, 834, 840, 845, 847, 848, 849, 853, 871,
Lofland, L., 179, 181, 183, 187, 189 874, 880, 888
Lofton, J., 900, 908 Lynch, T., 522, 525
Lohman, D. F., 446, 449 Lyster, R., 275, 279, 322, 323, 324, 330, 332,
Lomax, P., 244, 256 370, 372, 476, 477, 482, 522, 525, 558, 561,
Long, D., 511, 514, 525 674, 675, 684, 685, 689, 698, 710, 718, 720,
Long, M., 25, 42, 161, 171, 212, 220, 230, 232, 724, 727
239, 245, 254, 264, 265, 269, 273, 274, 276, Lytle, S., 119, 132, 246, 253
279, 358, 361, 370, 372, 420, 421, 422, 424,
434, 442, 452, 455, 459, 463, 464, 465, 467, M
469, 472, 477, 482, 496, 501, 551, 552, 553,
554, 558, 561, 665, 668, 670, 671, 672, 674, Mac Giolla Chriost, D., 964, 969
676, 682, 685, 689, 689, 714, 716, 721, 722, MacDonald, J. W., 512, 526
727, 729, 731, 733, 735, 741, 747, 748, 751, Macdonald, M., 103, 113, 447, 452
754, 755, 924, 928 Macedo, D., 535, 542, 565, 578, 602, 611
Lopes, M., 838, 851 Mace-Matluck, B., 19, 23
Lopez, L. E., 13, 23 MacGinitie, R., 49, 62
Lorenz, E. B., 699, 710 MacGinitie, W., 49, 62
1096 AUTHOR INDEX

Macias, R. F., 531, 532, 533, 538, 539, 542, 543 Martin, A., 66, 83
Mack, M., 421, 434 Martin, J. R., 49, 62, 108, 114, 601, 611, 612,
Mack, R., 514, 526 913, 928
Mackay, R., 107, 109, 113 Martin, L., 185, 186, 187, 191
Mackey, A., 274, 279, 330, 332, 448, 452, 464, Martin, P., 938, 948
469, 473, 476, 481, 482, 675, 676, 681, 684, Martinez, I., 104, 114
685, 686, 688, 689, 761, 770 Martin-Jones, M., 204, 207, 902, 903, 908, 938,
Mackey, W., 7, 9, 16, 23, 653, 654, 656, 657, 941, 948
659, 662, 663, 665, 670, 1061, 1071 Martyn, E., 230, 239
MacKinnon, G., 420, 433 Mascias, R., 465, 470
Maclean, J., 106, 113 Masny, D., 35, 42
Macrory, G., 444, 452 Mason, D., 9, 10, 22
MacWhinney, B., 199, 207, 439, 443, 452, 504, Mason, M., 840, 849
505, 517, 524, 526 Massaro, D., 505, 507, 512, 525
Madden, C., 161, 167, 472, 481 Master, P., 99, 101, 106, 108, 109, 111, 114, 555,
Madsen, H. S., 817, 818, 819, 830 561
Maeshiba, N., 320, 327, 332 Masters, G. N., 835, 839, 855
Maffi, L., 1059, 1071 Masuhara, H., 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 148,
Magga, O., 1067, 1071 152, 153
Magliano, J., 514, 527 Matalene, C., 618, 627
Maguire, M., 621, 627 Mathew, R., 247, 249, 254
Maher, J., 1020, 1034 Mathews, J., 539, 543
Maillet, K., 915, 927 Mathias, S. P., 607, 611, 838, 851
Maingay, P., 139, 152 Matsuda, P. K., 603, 612
Mairs, J. L., 492, 501 Matsui, M., 901, 908
Major, R. C., 491, 492, 493, 495, 499, 501 Matsumura, S., 309, 312, 316, 318, 328, 332
Malczewski, B., 399, 409 Matsuo, N., 203, 208
Maley, A., 636, 650 Matthews, A., 143, 152
Malmkjaer, K., 496, 500, 518, 523 Maturana, H. R., 207
Maltz, D., 900, 908 Maurais, J., 958, 969, 1062, 1071
Manchon-Ruiz, R., 604, 612 Mauranen, A., 104, 113, 382, 390, 399, 400,
Mandinach, E. B., 446, 449 408, 616, 620, 627
Mandler, G., 467, 469 Mavor, S., 103, 114
Mandler, J., 513, 525 Mawer, G., 73, 83, 118, 119, 120, 123, 125, 127,
Mangubhai, F., 572, 578 128, 129, 130, 134
Mann, W., 730, 741 May, L., 739, 741, 802, 812, 840, 841, 842, 853
Manning, E., 398, 407 May, S., 183, 192, 902, 908, 958, 969, 1056,
Manyak, P., 35, 42 1059, 1060, 1061, 1063, 1064, 1065, 1066,
Manzo, A., 514, 525 1068, 1069, 1071, 1072
Manzo, U., 514, 525 Mayberry, R., 421, 434
Marco, M. J. L., 92, 97, 106, 114 Mayer, R. E., 749, 753, 755
Marcus, G. E., 181, 190, 192 Maynard, D., 120, 134, 358, 372
Marcus, R. B., 796, 812 Maynard, S., 521, 525
Marenbon, J., 1048, 1053 Mbaye, A., 607, 608, 611, 739, 740
Margalef-Boada, T., 327, 332 McArthr, E. K., 538, 543
Marinova-Todd, S., 427, 431, 434, 465, 469 McArthur, T., 158, 160, 167, 171
Markee, N., 248, 254, 355, 357, 358, 359, 368, McCafferty, K., 1048, 1053
370, 372 McCafferty, S. G., 358, 372
Markova, A. K., 339, 347, 352 McCarthy, M., 91, 98, 246, 254, 394, 395, 397,
Marlaire, C., 358, 372 398, 400, 401, 406, 407, 408, 737, 739, 741
Marrow, A., 242, 254 McCarty, T., 9, 13, 21, 23
Marshall, D., 427, 431, 434 McClelland, J., 503, 526
Marslen-Wilson, W., 507, 508, 525 McConnell-Ginet, S., 900, 907
Marthohardjono, G., 161, 171 McCook, F., 145, 151
 AUTHOR INDEX 1097

McCormick, S., 566, 572, 579 Meara, K., 829, 831

McDonald, J. L., 446, 449 Meddleton, I. G., 586, 595
McDonald, M., 901, 908 Medgyes, P., 903, 909, 923, 928
McDonough, J., 140, 143, 145, 152, 213, 220, Medway, P., 108, 113, 602, 611
222 Mehan, H., 120, 134, 184, 192, 309, 316, 356,
McDonough, K., 464, 469, 476, 477, 478, 482, 370, 372
686, 689 Mehnert, U., 441, 452, 676, 680, 689
McDonough, S., 213, 220, 222, 766, 770 Mei, J. L. K., 103, 113
McElhinny, B., 294, 298 Meiron, B. E., 845, 853
McEnery, T., 394, 402, 406, 408, 409 Meisel, J., 268, 279, 430, 434
McEwan, H., 206, 207 Mencken, A. L., 157, 171
McFarland, K. P., 566, 579 Mendis, D., 399, 408
McGee, P. L., 817, 818, 830 Merkx, G., 981, 989, 990
McGinnis, S., 541, 543 Merriam, S. B., 196, 205, 207
McGrath, I., 143, 152 Merrow, J., 203, 207
McGregor, A., 123, 134 Messick, S., 647, 650, 776, 778, 780, 793,
McGregor, L., 901, 908 798, 799, 800, 812, 828, 831, 833, 840,
McGroarty, M., 739, 741, 995, 1010 853, 859, 868
McGurk, H., 512, 526 Mesthrie, R., 167, 171
McHoul, A., 356, 357, 372, 966, 969, 994, 1010, Met, M., 19, 23, 696, 697, 699, 710, 711
1056, 1071 Metsala, J., 504, 526
McIlvenny, P., 358, 372 Meunier, F., 623, 624, 627
McIntosh, A., 86, 97 Mey, J., 966, 969, 994, 1010, 1055, 1056, 1071,
McKay, L. J., 19, 23 1072
McKay, P., 705, 706, 710, 884, 888 Meyer, C., 394, 400, 408
McKay, S. L., 57, 62, 79, 83, 138, 143, 150, 152, Meyer, D., 87, 98
185, 186, 188, 192, 282, 298, 739, 741, 899, Miall, D., 513, 526
908 Michael, E., 439, 448, 452
McKean, R., 49, 62 Michaels, S., 29, 32, 37, 42
McKeown, M., 32, 42, 50, 60 Mickan, P., 247, 255
McKernan, J., 243, 244, 254 Midy, J., 944, 945, 946
McLaren, P., 531, 543 Miettinen, R., 351
McLaughlin, B., 274, 276, 279 Mignolo, W. D., 1069, 1072
McLaughlin, J., 526 Mikula, M., 1003, 1010
McLaughlin, S., 961, 969, 1014, 1034 Mikulecky, B., 576, 579
McLean, L., 245, 254 Mikulecky, L., 119, 120, 134, 135, 532, 543
McLeod, B., 185, 192, 913, 928 Milanovic, M., 802, 812, 842, 843, 855
McMahill, C., 906, 909 Miles, M. B., 196, 205, 207
McNamara, T., 125, 131, 134, 739, 741, 780, Miles, P., 329, 333
782, 792, 793, 794, 798, 802, 803, 806, 810, Miller, B., 422, 425, 426, 427, 429, 433
812, 816, 817, 818, 820, 823, 826, 828, 830, Miller, C., 107, 114
833, 834, 835, 837, 838, 839, 840, 841, 842, Miller, D. C., 328, 333
843, 844, 845, 847, 848, 849, 850, 851, 852, Miller, G., 517, 518, 526
853, 858, 859, 861, 864, 867, 868, 873, 881, Miller, J., 56, 62, 921, 924, 928
888, 898, 909 Miller, L., 185, 186, 187, 188, 190
McNaughton, B., 503, 526 Miller, P. W., 74, 82
McNeill, D., 358, 372 Mills, D., 401, 408
McNiff, J., 242, 251, 254 Mills, J., 921, 928
McPherson, P., 69, 75, 83, 249, 255, 556, 560 Milroy, J., 293, 298, 995, 998, 1010
McQueen, J., 526, 839, 851 Milroy, L., 293, 298, 496, 501, 912, 928, 995,
McTaggart, R., 150, 151, 242, 243, 244, 248, 998, 1010
254, 255 Milton, J., 403, 407, 408, 622, 627
McWhorter, J., 291, 298 Min, S., 158, 169
Mead, K., 105, 113 Minaya-Rowe, L., 16, 24
1098 AUTHOR INDEX

Mingucci, M., 150, 152 Mulamba, N. G., 937, 948

Minick, N., 348, 352 Muller, F., 505, 523
Mishler, E., 250, 255 Mumfort, M. G., 919, 927
Mishra, S., 518, 524 Munby, J., 824, 831
Mitchell, C. J., 326, 333 Munro, M. J., 491, 493, 494, 500, 501
Mitchell, R., 139, 152, 161, 171, 249, 253, 335, Munte, T., 439, 453
338, 339, 344, 348, 352, 440, 448, 452, 545, Muranoi, H., 685, 689
561, 720, 727 Murphey, T., 490, 501, 696, 710
Miyake, A., 447, 452 Murphy, J. M., 694, 711
Mobius, P., 444, 454 Murphy, P., 877, 888
Modiano, N., 13, 23 Murphy-Lejeune, E., 913, 929
Mohamed, N., 718, 727 Murray, D., 381, 390, 746, 755
Mohan, B., 49, 51, 55, 62, 162, 171, 618, 627, Murunoi, H., 718, 727
693, 694, 696, 704, 710 Musial, J., 864, 868
Mokhtari, K., 760, 765, 770, 771 Musumeci, D., 684, 689
Molis, M., 425, 427, 433, 465, 467 Muthiah, S., 164, 171
Moll, L., 37, 38, 41, 42, 185, 191 Muysken, P., 430, 433
Monroe, M., 425, 427, 433 Myers, G., 93, 97, 937, 948
Montano-Harmon, M., 618, 627 Myers, M., 734, 741
Montone, C., 17, 22 Myers, R., 826, 830
Montrul, S., 439, 440, 452 Myers-Scotton, C., 290, 298
Moon, R., 397, 408 Myles, F., 144, 145, 152, 161, 171, 335, 338, 339,
Moon, S., 901, 909 344, 348, 352, 440, 448, 452, 545, 561
Moore, H., 68, 83, 806, 812
Moore, L. C., 186, 187, 188, 189, 192, 305, 306, N
308, 310, 316
Moore, R., 126, 134 Nagy, W., 33, 41
Moore, T., 104, 114 Nahir, M., 959, 969
Moran, P., 912, 928 Naiman, N., 758, 770
Moravcsik, E. A., 270, 278 Nakaone, T., 357, 372
Morgan, B., 903, 909, 933, 948 Nakuma, C., 464, 469
Morgan, C., 912, 917, 929 Nandy, A., 945, 948
Morgan, M., 72, 84, 227, 232, 240 Nassaji, H., 338, 352, 673, 678, 681, 689, 723,
Morgenthaler, L., 274, 280, 473, 474, 476, 482, 727
675, 684, 690 Nastasi, B. K., 180, 182, 183, 192
Mori, J., 357, 372 Nation, I. S. P., 90, 91, 97, 98, 508, 509, 526,
Morita, N., 56, 62, 185, 186, 187, 192 549, 561, 584, 586, 587, 588, 591, 593, 594,
Morley, J., 922, 929 595, 835, 853
Morris, M., 958, 969, 1062, 1071 National Center for Educational Statistics, 71,
Morris, P., 647, 650 83
Morrow, C., 322, 323, 333 National Clearinghouse for Bilingual
Morton, J., 507, 526, 806, 812 Education, 18, 23
Moselle, M., 199, 200, 201, 207, 425, 431, 434, National Client Satisfaction Survey Report,
468 73, 83
Mosenthal, P., 566, 578, 865, 868 National Council for Measurement in
Moss, P. A., 799, 812, 833, 853 Education, 806, 811
Moulton, M. R., 186, 187, 191 National Institute for Literacy, 74, 83
Moyer, A., 428, 434 National Language Research Institute, 1016,
Muchiri, M. N., 937, 948 1034
Muhlhausler, P., 958, 969, 994, 996, 1000, 1011, National Reporting System for Adult
1059, 1060, 1069, 1072 Education, 77, 83
Mui, L., 322, 323, 328, 330, 334 Nattinger, J., 90, 96, 617, 623, 627
Mukattash, L., 458, 469 Nawwab, I. I., 387, 390
Mulac, A., 495, 500 Ndoloi, D. B., 937, 948
 AUTHOR INDEX 1099

Neff, D., 37, 42 North, B., 822, 827, 829, 831

Negretti, R., 751, 755 Northcott, J., 105, 114, 186, 187, 192
Negueruela, E., 340, 352 Norton, B., 186, 187, 188, 192, 199, 203, 204,
Neil, D., 119, 121, 123, 132 207, 321, 333, 378, 381, 390, 598, 602, 612,
Nekvapil, J., 958, 963, 969 898, 899, 901, 903, 909, 923, 929
Nelde, P., 1061, 1072 Nosellt, T., 439, 453
Nelms, P., 19, 23 Novak Lukanovic, S., 10, 23
Nelson D., 162, 168 Novoa, L., 425, 434
Nelson, C., 156, 157, 158, 159, 170, 171, 172, Noy, S., 73, 76, 83
901, 909, 946, 948 Noyau, C., 201, 207
Nelson, D., 270, 278 Nozawa, T., 421, 425, 426, 428, 431,
Nelson, G., 144, 152, 164, 169, 171, 185, 186, 433
187, 192, 398, 407 Nuffield Foundation, 981, 986, 988, 989,
Nemser, W., 455, 469, 495, 501 991
Nettle, D., 1059, 1072 Nunan, D., 70, 72, 83, 87, 95, 98, 140, 151, 152,
Neu, J., 358, 372 185, 186, 192, 203, 205, 206, 206, 207, 211,
Neuman, S. B., 566, 572, 579 220, 221, 225, 226, 229, 233, 237, 239, 245,
Neuner, G., 644, 650, 926, 929 246, 250, 252, 255, 739, 741, 758, 763, 770,
Neustupny, J. V., 958, 959, 962, 963, 969, 1015, 945, 948, 1005, 1011
1034, 1038, 1053 Nunnally, J. C., 414, 417
Neville, H. J., 447, 452, 454 Nuolijarvi, P., 986, 990, 1032, 1034
Newell, A., 441, 452 Nuttall, C., 576, 579
Newman, A. J., 447, 452 Nuwer, H., 1022, 1023, 1024, 1034
Newman, D., 342, 352 Nwoye, O. G., 164, 171
Newman, F., 337, 338, 339, 341, 347, 352 Nystrand, M., 203, 207, 734, 741
Newman, J., 274, 279, 474, 482, 900, 909
Newport, E., 420, 421, 422, 423, 424, 426, 427, O
434, 465, 468
Newport, E. L., 446, 447, 450, 451 O’Barr, W. M., 294, 298
Newton, J., 585, 586, 594, 595, 722, 724, 727, O’Dell, F., 401, 408
728 O’Grady, W., 437, 452
Ng, C., 322, 323, 324, 327, 330, 333 O’Hagan, S., 843, 845, 850
Nguyen, H. T., 357, 374 O’Hara, L., 127, 135
Nicholas, H., 370, 372, 674, 685, 686, 689, 724, O’Keeffe, J., 249, 255
728 O’Loughlin, K., 799, 802, 812, 836, 843, 853,
Nichols, P., 291, 298 858, 868
Nicholson, M., 212, 220 O’Malley, J. M., 49, 61, 276, 279, 515, 526, 704,
Nicol, J., 504, 510, 526 709, 758, 759, 760, 764, 766, 770
Nicolary, S., 275, 279 O’Malley, M., 31, 32, 41, 759, 760, 769
Nielsen, S., 312, 316 O’Neil, S., 128, 134
Niemann, T., 58, 62 O’Neil, W., 161, 168, 458, 468
Nieto, S., 8, 19, 21, 23, 916, 929 O’Neill, M., 442, 453, 677, 678, 690
Niezgoda, K., 321, 328, 333 O’Neill, S., 921, 928
Nik Safiah, K., 1002, 1011 O’Reilly, R., 503, 526
Nishida, T., 524 O’Sullivan, B., 843, 844, 853, 864, 865,
Nissim-Amitai, F., 737, 741 868
Nitko, A. J., 817, 820, 831 Obler, L., 425, 434
Nobuyoshi, J., 685, 689, 724, 728 Obondo, M. A., 9, 10, 14, 23
Nocon, H., 915, 929 Ochs, E., 27, 42, 56, 62, 184, 193, 301, 302,
Noel, E., 243, 255 312, 313, 314, 316, 358, 368, 372, 730,
Norris, D., 526 741, 895, 909
Norris, J., 276, 279, 442, 452, 466, 469, 551, Odell, L., 598, 611
561, 665, 670, 678, 689, 714, 715, 716, Odlin, T., 378, 390, 458, 469, 655, 660, 667, 670,
728 983, 991, 1006, 1011
1100 AUTHOR INDEX

Office of Vocational and Adult Education, 71, P

83
Ogbu, J. U., 184, 191, 192 Pacteau, C., 441, 452
Ogonowski, M., 32, 43 Padron, Y. N., 765, 770
Ogulnick, K. L., 162, 171 Padwad, A., 138, 152
Ohmann, R., 931, 948 Paek, T., 513, 525
Ohta, A. S., 236, 239, 304, 309, 312, 316, 324, Pakir, A., 157, 161, 163, 164, 169, 171
325, 333, 336, 339, 345, 350, 352, 357, 372, Palincsar, A. S., 588, 595
686, 689 Pallant, A., 864, 865, 868
Oi, Y. L. M., 620, 622, 626 Pally, M., 694, 698, 711
Oikennon, S., 718, 728 Palmer, A. S., 818, 821, 822, 829, 834, 849, 858,
Oikkenon, S., 275, 280 859, 867, 874, 887
Okamura, A., 103, 114 Palmer, F., 393, 408
Oksefjell, S., 397, 407 Palmeri, T. J., 441, 452
Oliver, R., 274, 279, 370, 372, 675, 684, 686, Paltridge, B., 103, 114, 601, 612
689 Pan, Y., 919, 929
Olk, H. M., 921, 929 Pandey, A., 158, 171
Oller, J., Jr., 457, 459, 464, 470, 821, 831 Panetta, C. G., 386, 391, 599, 612
Olsher, D., 355, 370, 373 Papajohn, D., 861, 868
Olshtain, E., 319, 320, 322, 323, 326, 327, 330, Parasher, S. V., 289, 298
331, 333, 678, 688, 730, 736, 737, 739, 740, Paratore, J. R., 19, 23
741, 761, 764, 769 Parault, S. J., 446, 449
Olson, D. H., 514, 526 Paribakht, T., 488, 502
Olson, D. R., 534, 543, 733, 741 Parisi, D., 437, 450
Olson, L., 90, 98, 185, 192 Park, H.-B., 491, 500
Oltman, P. K., 837, 850 Park, Y. M., 618, 620, 628
Omaggio, A. C., 818, 822, 823, 831 Parkinson, J., 105, 114
Omar, A. H., 1035, 1037, 1054 Parry, K., 834, 852
Ong, C., 703,705, 709 Partington, A., 394, 402, 408
Ong, W. J., 534, 543, 733, 741, 1007, 1011 Passeron, J., 899, 907, 942, 947
Open Doors, 101, 114 Patel, S., 241, 252
Orsoni, J-L., 921, 929 Patkowski, M., 421, 422, 423, 435
Ortega, L., 274, 276, 279, 370, 372, 441, Patrick, D., 185, 186, 188, 191
442, 452, 466, 469, 551, 561, 665, 670, Patterson, O., 219, 220
674, 676, 678, 680, 685, 689, 714, 715, Paulston, C. B., 441, 452, 637, 650, 913, 929
716, 723, 728 961, 969, 1014, 1034
Osborn, T. A., 916, 929 Paulus, T., 766, 771
Oskarsson, M., 442, 453 Pauwels, A., 119, 121, 123, 132, 134, 1003,
Osterhout, L., 504, 510, 526 1011
Ostermann, A. C., 104, 114 Pavesi, M., 715, 728
Ostler, S., 387, 390, 618, 622, 627 Pavlenko, A., 162, 172, 197, 207, 335, 337, 352,
Oswalt, W. H., 917, 929 466, 469, 900, 901, 902, 903, 904, 907, 909,
Ota, M., 677, 678, 681, 688 910, 921, 924, 925, 929
Oud-de Glas, M., 979, 980, 981, 983, 985, Peacock, M., 86, 97, 701, 710
991 Pearson, L., 323, 333
Ovando, C., 9, 23, 49, 62, 531, 543 Pearson, P., 34, 41, 566, 578, 870, 871, 888
Ovens, J., 394, 399, 408 Pease-Alvarez, L., 186, 194
Overstreet, M., 677, 689 Peck, S., 490, 502
Owen, C., 398, 400, 401, 408 Peddler, M., 120, 134
Owolabi, K., 163, 171 Pedersen, P. B., 919, 928
Oxford, R. L., 141, 150, 152, 237, 239, 660, Peirce, B. N., 891, 893, 931, 940, 943, 944, 945,
666, 670, 758, 760, 761, 762, 763, 770, 771, 948
844, 853, 900, 909 Pellettieri, J., 751, 755
Oyama, S., 421, 422, 434 Pengelly, M., 751, 754
Ozog, C. K., 965, 969 Pennington, M., 245, 255, 493, 502, 936, 948
 AUTHOR INDEX 1101

Pennycook, A., 88, 98, 108, 114, 139, 152, 160, Pisoni, D. B., 507, 509, 525
162, 172, 204, 208, 212, 220, 312, 315, 316, Pita, M. D., 906, 909
597, 602, 603, 612, 613, 638, 650, 667, 670, Pitoniak, M., 790, 794
730, 741, 776, 778, 800, 813, 896, 898, 903, Planken, B., 425, 428, 433
906, 909, 926, 929, 931, 933, 935, 937, 939, Plass, J. L., 523, 747, 749, 753, 754, 755
944, 948, 949, 958, 966, 970, 1048, 1054, Platt, E., 346, 352, 723, 728
1062, 1069, 1072 Platt, J., 164, 172
Perakyla, A., 120, 134, 325, 333 Plaza, G. L., 19, 23
Percsich, R., 834, 849 Plunkett, K., 437, 450
Perdue, C., 129, 134, 144, 152, 199, 200, Pluut, E., 491, 502
201, 207, 440, 451, 458, 459, 469, 923, 929 Polio, C., 684, 690
Peregoy, S. F., 48, 62 Pollitt, A., 518, 523, 838, 839, 853
Perez, L. C., 622, 626 Pollner, M., 182, 183, 193
Perfumo, P., 609, 610 Pomerantz, A., 356, 372, 373
Perkins, D. N., 414, 417 Pon, G., 56, 62
Perkins, K., 844, 849 Pon, P., 444, 452
Perkins, M. R., 440, 444, 454 Poole, D., 304, 309, 316, 375, 386, 391
Perrett, G., 842, 853 Poot, R., 439, 449
Perruchet, P., 441, 452 Poplack, S., 290, 298
Petch-Tyson, S., 403, 408 Pornpibul, N., 473, 482
Peterson, J., 158, 165, 166, 168 Porreca, K., 901, 909
Peterson, P. W., 699, 711 Porte, G. K., 213, 220, 222
Peyasantiwong, P., 387, 389 Porter, D., 827, 831
Peyton, J., 58, 60, 68, 80, 82, 541, 543 Porter, P., 668, 670
Pezone, S., 606, 611 Porter, R. P., 8, 13, 23
Pharis, B. G., 765, 769 Portes, A., 18, 23
Phelan, G., 118, 133 Porteus, A. W., 446, 449
Phelan, P., 47, 62, 185, 192 Potter, J., 27, 41
Philip, J., 448, 452 Poulisse, N., 488, 499, 502
Philips, S. U., 37, 42 Powers, D. E., 607, 608, 611, 836, 844, 845, 851,
Phillips, D., 977, 979, 987, 988, 991 854
Phillips, S., 302, 316 Prabhu, N. S., 721, 728, 939, 949
Phillipson, R., 139, 152, 160, 172, 286, 298, Pransky, K., 35, 42
571, 579, 902, 903, 909, 926, 929, 931, 940, Pratt, M. L., 938, 949
942, 949, 966, 970, 974, 991, 1048, 1054, Prendergast, C., 203, 207, 932, 946, 949
1062, 1064, 1071, 1072 Prenger, J., 698, 706, 712
Philp, J., 681, 685, 689 Pressley, M., 566, 579
Pialorsi, F., 91, 96 Preston, D., 162, 172, 358, 373, 459, 469, 497,
Pica, T., 91, 98, 266, 274, 275, 279, 280, 498, 499, 502
473, 474, 476, 482, 509, 520, 522, 526, Price-Machado, D., 739, 740
668, 670, 675, 676, 684, 685, 686, 689, Prior, P., 935, 944, 949
690, 713, 715, 722, 728, 747, 751, 755, Prime Minister’s Commission on Japan’s
900, 909 Goals in the 21st Century, The, 1016, 1034
Pienemann, M., 200, 208, 267, 268, 269, 279, Pritchett, B. L., 443, 452
280, 339, 352, 715, 728 Prodromou, L., 400, 408
Piepho, H. E., 636, 650 ProTrain, 125, 134
Pierce, B., 128, 130, 134 Pryor, J., 848, 854, 878, 879, 888
Pierce, B. N., 71, 78, 83 Prys Jones, S., 7, 12, 14, 21, 976, 990, 1058,
Piirainen-Marsh, A., 326, 333 1069, 1070
Pike, K., 180, 183, 193 Psathas, G., 325, 333, 355, 356, 361, 373
Piller, I., 900, 901, 903, 909 Pugh, K. R., 565, 579
Pinker, S., 199, 208, 437, 452, 564, 579, 1059, Pulvermuller, F., 459, 469
1072 Punamaki, R-L., 351
Pinto dos Santos, V. B. M., 105, 114 Purpura, J. E., 837, 854
Piper, T., 146, 152 Purves, A., 607, 613
1102 AUTHOR INDEX

Q Reichelt, M., 602, 613

Reichle, E. D., 447, 449
Qiang, W., 248, 255 Reid, J., 89, 98, 147, 152, 600, 607, 610, 613,
Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, 618, 619, 620, 622, 625, 628, 660, 666, 670
870, 871, 876, 887, 888 Reid, W. A., 243, 255
Queen, R., 19, 23 Reinhart, S. M., 105, 112
Quesada-Inces, R., 647, 650 Relkin, N. R., 447, 451
Quezada, M. S., 536, 543 Rendon, P., 38, 41
Quintanilha, T., 588, 595 Renie, D., 748, 753, 754, 755
Quirk, R., 159, 172, 289, 298, 397, 408, 546, Renou, J. M., 444, 453
561, 745, 755 Renouf, A., 396, 402, 408, 622, 628
Quiroz, B., 20, 24 Reppen, R., 87, 92, 94, 96, 394, 395, 396, 399,
401, 402, 403, 406, 408, 548, 560, 698, 709
R Resnick, D. P., 531, 532, 543
Resnick, L. B., 531, 532, 543
Rabinowitz, J., 429, 435 Resnik, M. C., 937, 949
Radencich, M. C., 19, 23 Reynolds, S., 654, 655, 656, 657, 658, 668,
Radnofsky, M. L., 185, 186, 188, 193 670
Rafiqzad, K., 158, 172 Rhee, M.-J., 1016, 1034
Rahman, T., 164, 172 Rhodes, D., 538, 539, 542
Raimes, A., 598, 599, 605, 609, 610, 613 Rhodes, N., 702, 711
Raj, J., 938, 949 Rhydwen, M., 1008, 1010
Rajagopalan, K., 942, 949 Riagain, P. O., 1044, 1045, 1054
Ramanathan, V., 185, 186, 188, 189, 193, 381, Riazi, A. M., 903, 904, 908, 945, 946,
391, 602, 610, 613, 914, 926 948
Ramirez, D., 536, 543 Ricento, T., 906, 909, 958, 970, 1056, 1068,
Rampton, B., 185, 186, 193, 209, 220, 490, 496, 1069, 1072
502, 902, 903, 908, 909, 938, 949 Richard-Amato, P. A., 694, 711
Ranard, D. A., 541, 543 Richards, J., 87, 90, 96, 139, 152, 245, 246, 249,
Randazza, L. A., 491, 500 254, 255, 265, 280, 551, 561, 645, 650, 653,
Ranney, S., 700, 709 654, 657, 661, 663, 664, 665, 670, 694, 711
Ranta, L., 274, 280, 370, 372, 445, 446, 452, Richards, K., 187, 190, 246, 253
453, 476, 482, 522, 525, 558, 561, 674, 675, Richardson, L., 904, 909
684, 685, 689, 698, 710, 720, 724, 727 Rickard, T. C., 441, 453
Rao, G. S., 164, 172 Rickford, J., 291, 295, 296, 298
Rao, Z., 645, 650, 667, 670, 921, 929 Ridge, S. G., 903, 909
Rapoport, R. N., 241, 255 Riggenbach, H., 210, 211, 214, 220
Rassool, N., 744, 745, 755 Riley, G., 568, 579
Ravem, R., 267, 280 Riley, L. D., 761, 767, 771
Raymond, P. M., 577, 579 Riney, T., 427, 428, 431, 435
Rayson, P., 548, 561, 622, 623, 626, 627 Ringbom, H., 403, 408, 622, 623, 625, 628
Read, J., 508, 526, 594, 595, 784, 794, 803, 813, Rintell, E., 317, 326, 331, 333
817, 831 Riordan, L., 234, 235, 239
Read, V., 118, 133 Risager, K., 916, 927
Rea-Dickins, P., 821, 831, 848, 854, 870, 873, Rist, R., 187, 193
879, 888 Ritchie, W. C., 158, 161, 168, 172, 226, 239
Reagan, T. G., 916, 929 Ritter, F. E., 441, 450
Reason, P., 242, 255 Rivera, A., 38, 41
Reber, A., 441, 452 Rivera, C., 19, 24
Red, D. L., 385, 391 Rivera, K., 75, 84
Reder, L. M., 203, 206, 441, 450 Rivers, W., 976, 978, 991
Reder, S., 404, 408 Rivers, W. P., 187, 193
Redington, M., 442, 452 Robb, T. N., 572, 579
Reed, J. M., 442, 452 Robbins, J., 760, 769
Rees-Miller, J., 763, 771 Robbins, M., 440, 454
 AUTHOR INDEX 1103

Roberts, C., 118, 119, 122, 123, 124, 131, 132, Rost, M., 507, 508, 512, 514, 515, 526
133, 134, 135, 185, 193, 199, 206, 301, 310, Roth, W.-M., 358, 373
313, 314, 316, 358, 373, 514, 519, 522, 523, Rothery, J., 70, 82, 108, 114
526, 913, 914, 926, 929 Rothstein-Fisch, C., 20, 24
Roberts, J., 247, 255, 845, 855 Rott, S., 673, 675, 679, 683, 690
Roberts, M., 464, 469 Rotte, M., 439, 453
Robertson, J., 161, 171 Rounds, P., 91, 98
Robins, R., 654, 655, 656, 657, 658, 668, 670 Rowley-Jolivet, E., 104, 114
Robinson, G., 601, 613 Royer, J., 790, 794
Robinson, K., 666, 670 Rubal-Lopez, A., 974, 990
Robinson, M. A., 329, 330, 333 Rubdy, R., 142, 148, 153
Robinson, P., 276, 279, 280, 367, 373, 442, Rubin, D., 514, 526
445, 446, 447, 448, 452, 453, 475, 482, Rubin, J., 148, 152, 758, 760, 763, 769, 771, 958,
551, 552, 558, 561, 674, 676, 677, 678, 959, 962, 968, 970, 999, 1011, 1056, 1072
689, 690, 751, 755 Rulon, K., 722, 726
Robinson, R., 680, 690 Rumbaut, R. G., 18, 23
Robinson-Pant, A., 946, 949 Rumelhart, D. E., 513, 514, 524, 526, 565, 579,
Robinson-Stuart, G., 915, 929 733, 741
Robson, P., 118, 133 Rushdie, S., 639, 650
Rockhill, K., 901, 909 Russo, R., 515, 526
Rodgers, T., 139, 146, 152, 645, 650, 653, 654, Rutherford, W., 162, 172, 276, 280, 402, 408,
657, 661, 663, 664, 665, 670, 694, 711 653, 665, 670, 717, 728
Rodriguez, R., 13, 24 Ryan, F., 694, 710
Rodriguez, V., 48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 60, 708, 709 Ryan, K., 837, 838, 849, 854
Rodriguez-Fornells, A., 439, 453 Ryan, P. M., 182, 190
Roebuck, R., 236, 239, 346, 352 Rymes, B., 184, 193, 304, 306, 308, 313, 316
Roessingh, H., 47, 49, 50, 57, 62, 63
Roever, C., 318, 319, 321, 328, 329, 330, 333, S
746, 755
Rogers, C., 242, 255 Sa’adeddin, M. A., 387, 391, 618, 628
Rogers, H. J., 838, 851 Sacks, H., 356, 368, 373, 730, 741
Rogoff, B., 27, 42 Said, E., 896, 909
Rohl, M., 848, 850, 879, 888 Sajavaara, K., 986, 991
Rohrbach, R., 922, 929 Sako, S., 818, 830
Roithmeier, W., 651 Salaberry, R., 746, 749, 755
Romaine, S., 7, 24, 1059, 1060, 1072 Salager-Meyer, F., 94, 98
Roosmaa, T., 394, 407 Saleh, S., 761, 771
Rosa, E., 442, 453, 677, 678, 690 Salehzadeh, J., 103, 112, 863, 868
Rosaldo, M., 891, 893 Salkind, N. J., 328, 333
Rosaldo, R., 905, 909 Salomon, G., 343, 352
Rose, E., 743, 755 Salsbury, T., 320, 326, 333
Rose, K., 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 326, Saluveer, M., 394, 407
327, 330, 332, 333, 523, 525 Salzman, P. C., 179, 180, 181, 193
Rose, M., 90, 98 Samimy, K., 903, 907
Rose, R., 736, 741 Samraj, B., 104, 114
Roseberry, R. L., 105, 113 Samuda, V., 665, 670, 676, 690, 724, 728
Rosebery, A., 32, 43 Sanders, P., 621, 628
Rosen, N., 576, 579 Santos, T., 87, 98
Rosenbloom, P. S., 441, 452 Sanz, C., 275, 280, 679, 691
Rosenthal, J. W., 708, 711 Saphonova, V., 643, 644, 650
Ross, J., 840, 850 Sarangi, S., 121, 131, 134, 135, 204, 208, 310,
Ross, S., 320, 327, 328, 332, 507, 508, 515, 526, 316, 519, 522, 526
748, 755, 842, 843, 854 Saravia-Shore, M., 19, 24, 185, 193
Rosser, C., 695, 711 Sasaki, M., 837, 854
Rossi-Le, L., 758, 771 Sato, C., 200, 202, 208
1104 AUTHOR INDEX

Sato, K., 646, 650, 667, 670 Scholfield, P., 213, 220, 221
Saussure, F., 665, 670 Schon, D., 241, 243, 245, 250, 252, 255
Savage, W., 146, 151 Schonell, F. J., 586, 595
Savignon, S. J., 167, 172, 635, 636, 637, 638, Schouten, E., 458, 459, 463, 469
639, 640, 643, 644, 645, 646, 647, 649, 650, Schrauf, R., 514, 526
651, 657, 662, 665, 667, 670 Schriefers, H., 447, 454
Saville, N., 844, 853 Schroder, K., 978, 990
Saville-Troike, M., 343, 350, 352 Schuchalter, J., 383, 391
Sawyer, M., 326, 333, 446, 447, 451, 453 Schultz, J., 123, 133
Sawyer, R. K., 348, 352 Schultz, K., 534, 535, 542
Scarcella, R., 52, 62, 326, 333, 621, 628 Schulz, R., 921, 929
Scardamalia, M., 604, 610 Schumann, J., 198, 199, 201, 208, 320, 334, 427,
Schachter, J., 107, 114, 439, 443, 453, 458, 459, 435, 457, 458, 459, 466, 467, 469, 496, 502,
466, 469 557, 561, 897, 910
Schacter, D., 476, 481 Schutz, A., 242, 255
Schacter, J., 424, 435 Schwab, J., 243, 255
Schaefer, R. P., 286, 298 Schwartz, A., 641, 651
Schaie, K., 429, 433, 435 Schwartz, B., 275, 280, 430, 435, 440, 437, 438,
Schalkwijk, E., 644, 651 439, 453, 714, 728
Schcolnik, M., 736, 741 Scialdone, L., 19, 24
Schecter, S., 37, 42, 56, 60, 62, 302, 315, 895, 909 Scollon, R., 188, 193, 209, 220, 310, 316, 513,
Schedl, M., 835, 836, 852, 854 522, 526, 599, 613, 618, 628, 917, 919, 929
Scheeres, H., 121, 134 Scollon, S. W., 310, 316, 513, 526, 917, 919, 929
Schegloff, E. A., 27, 42, 355, 356, 358, 368, 370, Scott, J. C., 937, 949
373, 730, 741 Scott, K., 761, 769
Schellekens, P., 121, 135 Scott, M., 75, 84, 588, 595
Schenke, A., 937, 943, 949 Scott, V. M., 442, 453
Scheper-Hughes, N., 181, 193 Scovel, T., 145, 152, 401, 408, 423, 435, 459,
Scherer, G., 227, 239 465, 469, 494, 502
Schieffelin, B. B., 56, 62, 184, 193, 301, 312, Scribner, S., 184, 193, 344, 352, 533, 534, 535,
313, 314, 316 543
Schiffman, H., 14, 24, 998, 1003, 1011, 1068, Seaman, M., 607, 613
1069, 1072 Searle, C., 535, 543
Schiffmann, H. F., 1048, 1054 Searle, J. R., 385, 391
Schiffrin, D., 326, 333, 370, 373, 546, 561 Secada, W., 31, 42
Schils, E., 425, 428, 433 Secretary’s Commission on Achieving
Schinke-Llano, L., 335, 352 Necessary Skills, 77, 84
Schleppegrell, M., 600, 613, 620, 625, 628, 703, Seedhouse, P., 357, 373, 685, 690, 719, 728
711 Seeley, C., 997, 1011
Schlesewsky, M., 447, 450 Sefton, R., 125, 127, 135
Schlesinger, A., 1062, 1072 Segalowitz, A., 508, 526
Schmid, C., 1069, 1072 Segalowitz, N., 446, 453, 504, 508, 526, 567,
Schmidt, N., 509, 526 578, 579
Schmidt, R., 195, 198, 199, 200, 201, 208, 264, Segalowitz, S., 567, 579
274, 277, 280, 318, 319, 320, 324, 329, 333, Seidlhofer, S., 402, 408
334, 367, 373, 382, 391, 402, 408, 420, 430, Seixas, P., 50, 63
435, 441, 453, 466, 469, 474, 475, 482, 504, Self, J., 751, 754
526, 531, 543, 671, 677, 680, 681, 690, 724, Seliger, H., 421, 435, 459, 465, 469
728, 747, 752, 755 Seliger, H. W., 211, 220, 221
Schmitt, D., 593, 595 Selinker, L., 40, 42, 86, 97, 159, 172, 265, 273,
Schmitt, N., 91, 98, 593, 595 278, 280, 439, 440, 450, 455, 456, 457, 458,
Schneiderman, E., 425, 435 459, 460, 461, 462, 464, 465, 466, 467, 468,
Schoen, L., 524 469, 470, 486, 502, 861, 868
Schoepfler, G., 130, 135 Sells Dick, G., 13, 21
 AUTHOR INDEX 1105

Sells, A., 13, 21 Siegal, M., 55, 58, 59, 61, 186, 187, 188, 193,
Sente, A., 979, 991 321, 329, 330, 334, 601, 612
Sercu, L., 142, 152, 514, 527, 923, 925, 929 Silberstein, S., 576, 579
Setz, W., 644, 651 Silva, T., 88, 98, 597, 598, 599, 600, 602, 603,
Setzler, K., 404, 408 613, 619, 621, 622, 628
Sfard, A., 925, 929 Silverman, D., 183, 193, 329, 334
Shah, P., 447, 452 Simard, D., 675, 677, 678, 690, 691
Shamin, F., 144, 152 Simkin, K., 74, 82
Shaney, M., 567, 578 Simo-Bobda, A., 164, 172
Shanks, D. R., 442, 453 Simon, H., 203, 206, 329, 331, 413, 417, 844,
Shannon, P., 565, 579, 644, 651 845, 851
Shannon, S., 36, 39, 42, 186, 194 Simonot, M., 118, 132, 199, 206, 514, 519,
Shapira, R. G., 200, 208 522, 523
Shapson, L., 34, 42 Simpson, R., 104, 114, 393, 394, 399, 408
Shapson, S., 34, 42, 682, 687, 718, 720, 726 Sinclair, J., 309, 316, 370, 373, 395, 396, 397,
Shardakova, M., 901, 910 398, 401, 407, 408, 550, 561, 622, 628
Sharkey, M., 19, 24 Singapore Wala, D. A., 144, 152
Sharwood Smith, M., 276, 280, 324, 334, Singer, J., 50, 63
440, 451, 459, 470, 664, 670, 766, 771, Singer, P., 793, 794
822, 831 Singh, R., 290, 298, 939, 949
Shastri, S. V., 288, 298 Sinha, S. K., 74, 77, 83
Shavelson, R. J., 109, 114, 835, 840, 854 Sinsheimer, A., 105, 112
Shaw, B. A., 586, 595 Sizer, T., 18, 24
Shaw, C., 143, 152 Skehan, P., 231, 239, 441, 446, 450, 453, 466,
Shaw, P., 103, 114, 186, 187, 193, 624, 625, 628 470, 553, 560, 665, 670, 671, 676, 680, 685,
Shaywitz, B. A., 565, 579 688, 690, 693, 712, 721, 722, 728, 747, 753,
Shaywitz, S. E., 565, 579 755, 759, 767, 770, 771, 824, 831, 844, 854
Sheen, R., 721, 728 Skelton, L., 425, 427, 433
Shehadeh, A., 473, 474, 482, 675, 676, 684, 690 Skierso, A., 143, 152, 553, 561
Sheldon, A., 491, 502 Skutnabb-Kangas, T., 13, 24, 530, 540, 544,
Shen, W. W., 921, 927 702, 711, 941, 943, 949, 966, 970, 974, 991,
Sheorey, R., 760, 765, 770, 771 1058, 1059, 1064, 1065, 1066, 1067, 1071,
Shepard, L., 787, 793, 828, 831 1072
Sheridan, E., 838, 851 Slade, D., 119, 121, 123, 132
Shi, L., 106, 114 Slaght, J., 864, 865, 868
Shibatani, M., 1020, 1034 Slaouti, D., 103, 114
Shiffrin, R., 504, 527 Slatyer, H., 77, 82
Shih, M., 666, 670 Slavin, R. E., 17, 22
Shillcock, R., 245, 253 Slembrouck, S., 121, 135, 148, 152
Shim, R. J., 1029, 1033 SLEP Test Manual, 55, 63
Shim, Rosa J., 158, 164, 172 Sless, D., 1004, 1011
Shimamura, K., 328, 334 Slobin, D., 199, 208, 269, 280, 347, 352, 382,
Shimaoka, T., 1016, 1018, 1020, 1034 389, 466, 470
Shlesinger, M., 504, 524 Smagorinsky, P., 330, 334, 479, 480, 482
Shohamy, E., 211, 220, 221, 573, 579, 647, 651, Smalkowski, K., 106, 112
776, 778, 780, 782, 785, 794, 800, 802, 813, Small, A., 9, 10, 22
816, 818, 831, 834, 841, 846, 854, 972, 974, Smalley, W. A., 898, 908
979, 986, 991, 1032, 1034, 1046, 1054 Smith, C., 119, 135
Short, D., 32, 41, 49, 50, 51, 55, 61, 63, 695, 702, Smith, D., 77, 84
703, 707, 708, 709, 711 Smith, F., 564, 569, 570, 579, 600, 613
Shulman, J. H., 203, 208 Smith, L. E., 157, 158, 164, 167, 170, 172
Shulman, L. S., 197, 208 Smith, L. M., 196, 208
Shuman, A., 533, 544 Smith, R., 923, 929
Siebert, C., 505, 525 Smith, S., 807, 813
1106 AUTHOR INDEX

Smith, W. A., 342, 352 Stansfield, C., 19, 24, 791, 794, 836, 854, 866,
Smoke, T., 603, 613 868
Smolensky, P., 505, 527 Starfield, S., 899, 910
Smulowitz, J., 864, 868 Starkey, H., 922, 929
Snow, C., 427, 431, 434, 465, 469, 470, 694, Staszewski, J. J., 441, 450
700, 712 Stauble, A., 459, 470
Snow, D., 913, 927 Stauffer, S., 677, 678, 681, 688
Snow, M., 86, 96, 98, 554, 561, 693, 694, 695, Stavenhagen, R., 1059, 1072
696, 697, 701, 708, 709, 711, 739, 741 Steel, D., 716, 726
So’o, A. M., 998, 1011 Steiner, G., 383, 391
Sohmer, R., 32, 42 Stempleski, S., 918, 929
Sokal, A., 571, 579 Stenhouse, L., 243, 255, 726, 728
Sole, Y., 901, 910 Stern, H., 653, 654, 665, 668, 670, 758, 771
Soler, V., 104, 114 Stetsenko, A., 341, 353, 478, 482
Solomon, J., 702, 711 Stevens, G., 425, 426, 428, 431, 435, 900, 910
Solsken, J., 37, 38, 43 Stevens, K., 505, 525
Sommer, B., 965, 970 Stevens, R., 703, 706, 709, 711
Song, M., 765, 771 Stevenson, D. K., 791, 794
Sorace, A., 423, 435, 439, 453 Stevick, E., 568, 579
Souaiaia, J., 965, 966, 970 Stewart, G., 71, 78, 83
Spaan, M. C., 844, 852 Stewart, M. A., 186, 187, 188, 193
Spack, R., 89, 98, 110, 115, 600, 613, 701, 712, Stewart, W. A., 296, 298
903, 905, 910 Stewner-Manzanares, G., 515, 526
Spada, N., 232, 239, 245, 252, 265, 274, 279, Stickler, U., 914, 928
280, 335, 336, 352, 370, 372, 442, 453, 553, Stillman, J., 244, 254
557, 561, 640, 646, 650, 671, 673, 674, 676, Stockman, I. J., 491, 502
678, 679, 681, 685, 686, 689, 690, 715, 724, Stoller, F., 49, 63, 90, 97, 576, 579, 694, 695,
728, 731, 733, 741, 848, 854 697, 701, 708, 710, 711
Spector-Cohen, E., 104, 114 Stone, M. H., 835, 839, 855
Spedding, A., 900, 910 Stone, V., 444, 452
Spener, D., 530, 535, 544 Stoneman, B., 847, 853
Sperber, D., 513, 527 Storch, N., 476, 478, 482, 483
Spielman Davidson, S., 478, 482 Storey, A., 106, 114
Spielmann, G., 185, 186, 188, 193 Stork, D. G., 512, 527
Spindler, G. D., 183, 184, 187, 193 Strange, W., 491, 502, 527
Spiro, R. J., 513, 527 Strauss, A. L., 183, 191
Spolsky, B., 779, 780, 782, 784, 791, 794, 800, Streeck, J., 358, 373
813, 833, 854, 961, 970, 972, 974, 979, 986, Street, B., 119, 135, 184, 185, 193, 533, 534, 535,
991, 1032, 1034, 1046, 1054 544, 565, 579, 913, 914, 929, 935, 943, 949
Spradley, J., 125, 135 Strevens, P., 86, 97, 99, 114
Spratt, M., 140, 152 Strickland, D., 246, 255
Sprouse, R., 439, 440, 453 Strodt-Lopez, B., 90, 98
Sridhar, K. K., 10, 14, 24, 157, 158, 159, 162, Stromback, T., 74, 84
172, 285, 298 Strubell, M., 1045, 1046, 1054, 1061, 1072
Sridhar, S. N., 145, 152 156, 158, 159, 162, 163, Stryker, S. B., 694, 711
172, 285, 298, 941, 949 Stubbs, M., 139, 152, 356, 373, 393, 396, 397,
Srole, C., 47, 63 400, 408, 409, 550, 545, 561, 622, 623, 628
St. John, M., 85, 86, 87, 96, 102, 112, 601, Stuckey, J. E., 535, 544
611 Suarez-Orozco, C., 18, 19, 24
Staggs, L., 442, 453 Suarez-Orozco, M. M., 18, 19, 24
Stahl, S. A., 585, 595 Sujung, M., 169
Stake, R. E., 196, 205, 206, 208 Sullivan, J., 275, 279
Stanovich, K. E., 565, 567, 579, 733, 741 Sullivan, P., 236, 240
Stansell, J. C., 566, 579 Sum, A., 537, 544
 AUTHOR INDEX 1107

Sunderland, J., 901, 910 Tarone, E., 58, 62, 86, 98, 203, 208, 209, 212,
Suomi, B. K., 835, 852 219, 220, 339, 351, 357, 374, 438, 453, 457,
Supot, 587, 594 470, 486, 487, 488, 489, 490, 494, 495, 497,
Susser, B., 572, 579, 750, 755 501, 502, 861, 867, 868
Svartvik, J., 159, 172, 397, 408, 546, 561, 745, Tarone, M., 490, 499
755 Tateyama, Y., 322, 323, 326, 328, 330, 334
Swaffar, J., 227, 232, 240, 753, 755 Tatsumi, T., 448, 452
Swain, M., 9, 10, 12, 23, 24, 52, 60, 230, 236, Tatsuoka, L., 862, 867
240, 274, 275, 276, 280, 336, 337, 338, 340, Tauroza, S., 87, 90, 93, 97, 98
352, 353, 358, 361, 370, 371, 373, 471, 472, Tawake, S. K., 157, 158, 164, 172
474, 477, 478, 479, 480, 482, 483, 522, 523, Tay, H.-M., 322, 323, 328, 330, 334
552, 553, 560, 561, 637, 640, 646, 649, 657, Tay, M. W. J., 159, 172, 286, 298
662, 666, 667, 668, 669, 670, 672, 675, 678, Taylor, C., 87, 97, 746, 755, 788, 794, 865, 868
679, 681, 682, 687, 689, 690, 691, 698, 699, Taylor, D., 534, 535, 540, 544
711, 719, 720, 722, 723, 724, 726, 727, 728, Taylor, G., 616, 618, 628
731, 732, 739, 741, 799, 813, 821, 825, 826, Taylor, M., 107, 114
829, 831, 843, 854 Taylor, S., 187, 190, 193, 920, 926
Swales, J., 86, 92, 94, 95, 98, 100, 104, 107, 108, Taylor, T. J., 545, 560
114, 393, 399, 408, 409, 599, 601, 613, 616, Teasdale, A., 847, 848, 852, 854, 877, 881, 888
620, 628, 701, 712, 730, 741, 1002, 1008, 1011 Teasdale, T., 876, 881, 888
Swaminathan, H., 838, 851 Tedick, D. J., 697, 712
Swan, J., 965, 970 Tedlock, B., 181, 193
Swann, J., 901, 907 Tejada, C., 35, 41
Sweet, H., 654, 663, 666, 670 Tella, S., 187, 193
Swigart, L., 900, 910 Templin, E., 576, 579
Sysoyev, P., 643, 644, 651 Tennant, S., 146, 153
Szabo, G., 834, 849 Terdal, M. S., 185, 186, 193
Szwed, J. F., 184, 193 Terrell, T., 25, 42, 229, 239, 556, 561, 657, 660,
662, 665, 669
T Tesar, B., 505, 527
TESOL, 45, 51, 63, 698, 705, 706, 712, 870,
Taba, H., 243, 255 888
Tabouret-Keller, A., 895, 908 Thananart, O., 322, 323, 328, 330, 334
Tade, C., 606, 611 Tharp, R. G., 184, 193
Tagg, T., 87, 91, 96 Thep-Ackrapong, T., 458, 463, 470
Taiwo, O., 159, 172 Thomas, A., 157, 167
Tajfel, H., 896, 910 Thomas, G., 1003, 1011
Takagaki, Y., 923, 929 Thomas, J., 124, 135, 317, 318, 334
Takahashi, S., 19, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 327, Thomas, M., 213, 220
328, 330, 334, 672, 678, 691 Thomas, W., 30, 42
Takala, S., 839, 854, 979, 986, 991 Thomborson, B., 807, 813
Takashima, H., 187, 193, 685, 691, 724, 727 Thompson, I., 148, 152, 421, 425, 435
Talbert, J. E., 446, 449 Thompson, S. A., 27, 42, 326, 334, 730, 741
Talburt, S., 186, 187, 188, 193 Thornberry, P., 1064, 1066, 1067, 1072
Talyzina, N., 339, 353 Thornbury, S., 671, 679, 682, 691
Tanaka, J., 476, 483 Thorndike, R., 816, 820, 831
Tanaka, S., 1015, 1034 Thorne, B., 899, 910
Tanaka, Y., 585, 595, 683, 684, 688 Thorne, C., 248, 255
Tang, G., 704, 712 Thorne, S. L. 346, 349, 352, 353
Tannacito, D. J., 603, 613 Thumboo, E., 157, 158, 159, 172
Tannen, D., 298, 900, 910 Thurrell, S., 668, 669, 672, 687, 731, 740
Tannock, S., 130, 135 Tien, S., 58, 62
Tansomboon, A., 430, 434 Tigi, M., 468
Tao, H., 326, 334 Timmis, I., 144, 153
1108 AUTHOR INDEX

Tin, T. B., 141, 153 Trumball, E., 20, 24

Tinajero, J. V., 817, 830 Truscott, J., 606, 613, 719, 728
Ting-Toomey, S., 520, 524 Truscott, S., 922, 929
Tinker Sachs, G., 247, 249, 250, 255 Trusheim, D., 792, 793
Tinti, S., 606, 611 Tse, L., 531, 544
Titone, R., 654, 666, 670 Tsui, A., 227, 228, 240, 248, 255, 521, 527
Tlusty, N., 249, 254 Tucker, G. R., 9, 16, 18, 23, 472, 482
Tocalli-Beller, A., 479, 483 Tudor, I., 138, 153, 245, 255
Todal, J., 1067, 1072 Tuin, D., 986, 991
Todd, A., 120, 133 Tulloh, R., 846, 854
Todesco, A., 758, 770 Tully, J., 1059, 1073
Tognini-Bonelli, E., 393, 396, 397, 409 Tulving, E., 447, 453, 683, 687
Tohkura, Y., 506, 527 Tulviste, P., 341, 342, 353
Tokowicz, N., 439, 448, 452 Tuman, M. C., 936, 949
Tokuda, M., 321, 334 Turner, C., 810, 811
Tokura, Y., 505, 525 Turner, J., 838, 839, 852
Tollefson, J., 78, 84, 130, 135, 902, 910, 958, Tusting, K., 921, 927
966, 967, 970, 1068, 1073 Twidale, M., 751, 754
Tomalin, B., 918, 929 Twine, N., 1015, 1020, 1034
Tomasello, M., 337, 353, 459, 470 Tyler, A., 520, 527, 842, 852
Tomic, A., 917, 929 Tyler, L., 798, 801, 813
Tomlin, R., 475, 483
Tomlinson, B., 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, U
147, 148, 149, 150, 153, 1006, 1011
Tongan, C., 76, 82 Ullman, C., 69, 84
Tono, Y., 404, 409 Ullman, M. T., 447, 453
Toohey, K., 39, 40, 42, 46, 53, 54, 63, 185, 186, Underhill, N., 817, 831
187, 188, 193, 378, 381, 390 UNESCO, 13, 24
Topuzova, K., 915, 929 Unger, J. M., 995, 997, 1011, 1016, 1034
Torrance, H., 848, 854, 878, 879, 888 Upshur, J. A., 818, 820, 830, 871, 888
Torres-Guzman, M. E., 16, 24 Upton, T., 105, 114
Touchstone, E. E., 964, 965, 969, 970 Ur, P., 734, 741
Toukomaa, P., 702, 711 Urdinavia-English, C., 38, 42
Towell, R., 718, 727 Urmston, A. W., 142, 153
Trabasso, T., 514, 527 Urquhart, A., 576, 579, 861, 867
Trauth, G., 281, 298 Useem, J., 913, 927
Trayner, B., 103, 114 Utakis, S., 906, 909
Trefil, J., 533, 542
Tribble, C., 622, 626, 628 V
Trim, J., 979, 987, 991
Trimble, L., 86, 95, 97, 98, 1008, 1011 Valdes, G., 37, 43, 57, 59, 63, 185, 186, 188,
Trlin, A., 73, 84 194, 540, 541, 544, 621, 628, 706, 709
Troebst, S., 1067, 1073 Valdes, J., 643, 651
Troemel-Ploetz, S., 294, 299 Valdez, G., 20, 24
Troike, R., 107, 114 Valentine, T. M., 157, 164, 173
Tromel-Plotz, S., 900, 910 Valette, R. M., 817, 818, 831
Trompenaar, S. F., 919, 929 Valsecchi, M. I., 807, 811
Tropf, H., 491, 502 Valsiner, J., 204, 208, 336, 353
Trosborg, A., 319, 326, 334 Van den Braden, K., 473, 483
Trosset, C. S., 186, 188, 193 Van den Branden, K., 684, 685, 686, 691
Trott, K., 213, 220, 222 Van der Avoird, T., 982, 991
Trudgill, P., 294, 296, 299 van der Veer, R., 204, 208, 336, 353
Trueba, E. T., 185, 193 van Dijk, T., 385, 391, 513, 525, 616, 628
Trueba, H. T., 185, 193, 535, 542 Van Duzer, C., 80, 84
 AUTHOR INDEX 1109

van Eerde, D., 698, 706, 712 Von Randow, J., 804, 812
Van Ek, J., 636, 651, 731, 741, 979, 980, 991 vonWright, G. H., 920, 929
van Els, T., 966, 970, 972, 974, 975, 976, 977, Vos, S. H., 447, 454
979, 985, 986, 987, 988, 990, 991 Vygotsky, L., 26, 27, 43, 204, 208, 336, 337, 341,
van Esch, K., 644, 651 343, 344, 353, 479, 483, 895, 910
Van Hest, E., 979, 980, 981, 985, 986, 991
Van Leeuwen, T., 27, 40, 42 W
van Lier, L., 184, 194, 200, 203, 204, 205, 208,
225, 240, 245, 248, 251, 255, 312, 316, 357, Wada, M., 646, 651
374, 478, 483, 842, 854, 882, 888 Wade-Woolley, L., 33, 43, 567, 578
Van Maanen, J., 181, 194 Wagner, D. A., 532, 544
van Manen, M., 243, 256 Wagner, J., 121, 131, 135, 212, 220, 357, 371,
Van Oers, B., 342, 353 478, 481, 489, 502
Van Os, C., 976, 977, 979, 991 Wainer, H., 829, 831, 838, 852
van Summeren, C., 425, 428, 433 Wajnryb, R., 509, 527, 589, 595
van, Wuijtswinkel, K., 427, 435 Waletsky, J., 547, 561
Vande Kopple, W., 378, 390 Walker, C., 276, 279
Vandergrift, L., 506, 508, 515, 527, 761, 764, Wall, D., 608, 610, 791, 793, 809, 813, 818, 819,
766, 769, 771 829, 846, 847, 848, 849, 849, 854
Vandrick, S., 602, 613, 935, 947 Wallace, M., 245, 246, 247, 250, 256
Vann, R., 87, 98, 767, 771 Wallace, R., 659, 665, 669
VanPatten, B., 275, 280, 509, 511, 527, 676, 677, Wallat, C., 184, 191, 244, 256
678, 679, 680, 681, 686, 691, 718, 728 Wallerstein, N., 130, 132
Vaquerano, F., 944, 945, 946 Walley, A. C., 491, 500
Varady, T., 1064, 1071 Wallman, S., 123, 135
Varela, E., 275, 276, 278, 553, 554, 556, 558, Walqui, A., 52, 63, 704, 712
559, 560, 673, 674, 675, 685, 687, 724, 726 Walsh, C. E., 535, 544
Varela, F. J., 207 Walter, J., 96
Varghese, M., 328, 331 Walters, J., 317, 320, 331, 334
Varma, S., 447, 451 Wang, C., 491, 499, 638, 647, 648, 651
Varonis, E., 274, 278, 474, 481, 684, 686, 688, Wang, K., 587, 595
900, 907 Wang, W., 420, 434, 647, 651, 903, 904, 908,
Vasquez, O. A., 186, 194 945, 946, 948
Vasseur, M., 118, 132, 199, 206, 514, 519, Ward, C., 919, 930
522, 523 Ward, I., 105, 112
Vassileva, I., 103, 115 Ward, J., 104, 115
Vaughan, C., 844, 854 Wardhaugh, R., 281, 299, 564, 579, 999, 1011
Vavrus, F. K., 165, 173 Waring, R., 508, 526
Venezky, R. L., 532, 537, 544 Warren, B., 32, 43
Verdoodt, A., 979, 991 Warren, M., 403, 406
Verhoeven, L., 33, 41, 43, 202, 208, 536, Warschauer, M., 185, 186, 194, 203, 208, 744,
544 745, 755
Verity, D., 236, 240 Washburn, G., 458, 463, 470
Verma, M. K., 74, 77, 83 Watanabe, Y., 748, 755
Verschueren, J., 519, 527 Waterhouse, P., 125, 135
Vigil, N., 457, 459, 464, 470 Waters, A., 87, 95, 98
Vignola, M.-J., 552, 561 Waters, G. S., 443, 447, 448, 449, 454
Villa, V., 475, 483 Waterstone, B., 185, 186, 193
Virtanen, T., 403, 409 Watkin, K., 460, 470
Vocate, D. R., 342, 353 Watson-Gegeo, K. A., 184, 185, 187, 188, 189,
Vogt, M., 32, 41, 50, 51, 61, 708, 709 194, 304, 305, 306, 308, 310, 312, 313, 316
Vollmer, G., 185, 186, 188, 194 Watt, D., 57, 63
Vološinov, V. N., 349, 353 Watt, I., 534, 542
von Elek, T., 442, 453 Watts, N., 73, 84
1110 AUTHOR INDEX

Waxman, H. G., 765, 770 Whitehead, J., 244, 256

Way, D., 607, 613 Wichmann, A., 402, 409
Weaver, H., 913, 928 Widdowson, H., 108, 115, 166, 173, 289, 299,
Weaver, J., 913, 928 399, 400, 401, 409, 713, 728, 731, 741, 862,
Weaver, S., 758, 760, 769, 771 867, 868, 903, 910
Webb, N. M., 835, 840, 854 Widjaja, C. S., 330, 334
Weber, H., 164, 172 Wiebe, G., 494, 500
Weber, J., 402, 409 Wieder, L., 183, 188, 194
Weber-Fox, C. M., 447, 454 Wierzbicka, A., 923, 930, 1007, 1011
Wegerif, R., 203, 208 Wigglesworth, G., 77, 84, 844, 855
Weigle, S. C., 606, 607, 608, 609, 613, 839, 844, Wildner-Bassett, M., 322, 323, 324, 326, 334
848, 854 Wilen, D. K., 817, 818, 830
Weinberg, M., 536, 544 Wiley, T. G., 530, 531, 532, 535, 536, 537, 538,
Weinberger, S., 491, 501, 571, 579 539, 540, 541, 543, 544, 906, 909
Weinreich, U., 455, 470 Wiliam, D., 870, 871, 874, 875, 880, 885, 887,
Weinstein, G., 75, 84, 186, 194 887, 888
Weinstein-Shr, G., 535, 540, 544 Wilkes-Gibbs, D., 489, 502
Weir, C., 845, 855, 858, 863, 868 Wilkins, D., 731, 741
Weir, C. J., 576, 579, 844, 845, 853, 854, 865, 868 Willett, J., 37, 38, 39, 43, 184, 185, 186, 194,
Weir, C. W., 818, 831 304, 305, 306, 308, 309, 313, 316
Weir, R., 490, 502 Willey, B., 489, 502
Weis, L., 185, 194 Williams, A., 49, 61, 694, 695, 709
Weisbrod, U., 978, 990 Williams, C., 968, 970, 1061, 1073
Weitzman, M., 398, 407 Williams, G., 399, 402, 409, 896, 910, 1061,
Wekker, H., 461, 470 1072
Welaratna, U., 75, 84 Williams, J., 234, 239, 276, 278, 280, 324, 331,
Wells, G., 251, 256, 342, 353, 479, 483 440, 442, 444, 450, 454, 466, 468, 474, 481,
Welsh Language Board, 1035, 1036, 1054 496, 500, 518, 523, 551, 552, 553, 556, 557,
Wendel, J., 723, 728 560, 561, 671, 672, 673, 674, 675, 676, 678,
Wenden, A. L., 141, 153, 758, 767, 771 679, 680, 681, 683, 684, 685, 686, 687, 690,
Wenger, E., 56, 62, 63, 597, 600, 612, 887, 888 691, 729, 735, 740, 747, 754
Wengraf, T., 329, 334 Williams, K., 505, 525
Werner, O., 130, 135 Williams, M., 146, 153, 506, 523
Wertheimer, M., 227, 239 Williams, R., 123, 134, 931, 949
Wertsch, J. V., 27, 43, 342, 343, 344, 345, 353, Willing, K., 75, 76, 84, 119, 124, 129, 135, 237,
478, 483 240
Wesche, M., 86, 96, 445, 454, 552, 561, 693, Willingham, W., 781, 794
694, 695, 696, 701, 709, 712 Willinsky, J., 534, 544, 896, 910
West, C., 120, 135, 900, 910 Willis, J., 402, 409
West, M., 582, 595 Willis, S., 429, 435
West, R., 87, 98 Wilson, A., 394, 402, 406, 408, 548, 561, 622,
Westhoff, G., 986, 991 623, 627
Westney, P., 1006, 1011 Wilson, D., 513, 527
Westwood, S., 123, 135 Wilson, S., 836, 854
Wexler, C., 104, 114 Wilson, T., 513, 527
Wexler, K., 438, 450 Wilson-Keenan, J., 37, 38, 43
White, C., 73, 84 Wingrore, B., 118, 133
White, E. M., 607, 608, 609, 613 Winiger, E., 922, 929
White, G., 103, 113 Winsa, B., 1021, 1022, 1024, 1034
White, J., 678, 691 Winter, G., 797, 813
White, L., 161, 173, 271, 274, 280, 425, 435, Winter, R., 250, 256
440, 450, 459, 470, 678, 682, 691 Wirth, J. R., 270, 278
White, R., 713, 728 Wise, T., 577, 578
White, S., 326, 334 Wishnoff, J. R., 322, 334
 AUTHOR INDEX 1111

Witt, D., 47, 55, 61, 200, 207, 621, 626 Yanez-Prieto, M.-C., 343, 352
Wittrock, M., 683, 691 Yang, R-L., 520, 527
Wodak, R., 121, 135, 295, 299, 976, 991 Yano, Y., 748, 755
Wode, H., 428, 435 Yaroshevsky, M., 337, 353
Wolcott, H. F., 180, 187, 194, 195, 208 Yates, V., 125, 130, 132
Wolf, D., 572, 579 Yeni-Komshian, G., 421, 425, 426, 427, 428,
Wolfe-Quintero, K., 437, 454, 607, 613 431, 433, 435, 440, 454
Wolfersberger, M., 762, 771 Yin, R. K., 196, 197, 205, 208
Wolff, J., 645, 651 Ying, L. P., 144, 153
Wolfram, W., 537, 544 Yip, V., 443, 453
Wonacott, M., 125, 135 Yoshida, M., 201, 208
Wong Fillmore, L., 31, 43, 430, 435, 694, 700, Yoshida-Morise, Y., 843, 855
712, 758, 771 Yoshikawa, M., 379, 391
Wong, P., 124, 129, 132, 311, 314, 315 Yoshimi, D. R., 309, 312, 316, 322, 323, 334
Wong, S. C., 899, 908 Yoshimitsu, K., 964, 970
Wong, S-L. C., 57, 62, 185, 186, 188, 192 Yoshinaga, N., 320, 327, 332
Wong, W., 144, 153, 675, 677, 678, 679, 681, Yoshitake, S. S., 326, 328, 330, 334
690, 691 You, Y. L., 765, 766, 771
Wood, A., 508, 526, 567, 579 Young, M. A., 72, 84
Wood, D., 444, 454 Young, R., 357, 374, 509, 522, 526, 668, 670,
Wooden, M., 74, 84 739, 741, 825, 826, 831, 842, 843, 855
Woods, A., 210, 220, 221, 838, 855 Young-Scholten, M., 424, 435, 440, 454
Woods, D., 246, 247, 256 Yu, H. C., 47, 62, 185, 192
Woods, J. D., 994, 1011 Yu, L., 666, 667, 670
Woods, S., 846, 855 Yuan, F., 723, 728
Woodward, K., 917, 930 Yule, G., 245, 253, 486, 487, 488, 489, 493, 494,
Woolard, K., 186, 188, 194, 900, 910, 1069, 1073 500, 502
Workplace Investment Act of 1998, 69, 84 Yun, M., 638, 651
Wortham, S., 206, 208
Wray, A., 213, 220, 222, 398, 409, 440, 444, 454 Z
Wright, B., 835, 839, 852, 855
Wright, M. W., 937, 945, 949 Zach, T., 74, 82
Wright, S., 1061, 1073 Zaki, H., 683, 691
Wright, W., 536, 544 Zambrano, A., 247, 252, 944, 945, 946
Wrigley, H. S., 68, 84 Zamel, V., 89, 98, 110, 115, 602, 604, 613, 701,
Wu, C-T., 75, 83 712, 942, 949
Wu, Y., 844, 855 Zanatta, M., 588, 595
Wu, W.-P., 866, 868 Zanettin, F., 402, 409
Wyse, L., 122, 135 Zarate, G., 922, 930
Zeichner, K. M., 246, 254
X Zentella, A. C., 182, 194
Zephir, F., 250, 256
Xue, G., 91, 98 Zhang, W., 839, 844, 848, 855
Zhao, Y., 46, 63
Y Zhou, M., 14, 24
Zimmerman, C. B., 577, 579
Yachmowicz, D., 913, 927 Zimmerman, D., 900, 910
Yakhontova, T., 104, 115, 923, 930 Zipf, G., 581, 595
Yamada, R., 506, 527 Zobl, H., 267, 280, 459, 470
Yamada, Y., 1015, 1019, 1034 Zorzi, D., 402, 409
Yamashita, S. O., 326, 328, 330, 334 Zuengler, J., 56, 61, 495, 499
Yamazaki, A., 585, 595, 683, 684, 688 Zukowski/Faust, J., 91, 96, 576, 579
Yancey, K. B., 608, 613 Zwann, R., 527
1112
Subject Index

A Action research (AR)

classroom research controversies,
AAVE, see African American Vernacular 234–235
English critical pedagogy, 945
Ability-based construct definition, critiques, 249–250
820–822 ELT/applied linguistics, 245–246
Aborigines, 20 models, 66
Academic achievement, 17, 18, see also origins, 242
Bilingual education shifts in conceptualizations,
Academic genres, 92–94 243–244
Academic language, 32, 89 Activity frame, 520, see also L2 listening
Academic lectures, 90, 92–93 Activity theory, 204, 345–348
Academic literacy, see also Literacy ADA, see Americans with Disabilities Act
EAP and CPI, 695–700 Adequate yearly progress (AYP), 783
model, 700–702 Adult ESL language and literacy instruction,
necessity conditions, 688–695 78, 82
Academic prestige, 249 Adult ESOL Core Curriculum, The, 70, 71,
Academic skills, 89 75, 82
Academic tests, 865–866, see also Tests Adult Learning Resource Center, 77, 82
Academic textbooks, 87, 90–91, 93–94, see also Adult education, ESL, see English as a Second
Textbooks Language, adult education
Academic Word List (AWL), 91, 583 Adult ESOL Core Curriculum, 67, 70,
Accent reduction courses, 493 73
Access policy, 1017, 1022, 1027–1028 Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP), 66,
ACCESS test, 784 70, 72
Accessibility Hierarchy, 162 Advanced-learner approach, 462,
Accountability, 76, 782 464
Acculturation model, 198, 320 Affective involvement, 520
Accuracy, 551–552, 676, 680, 722, Affective issues, 56–57
732 Affective strategies, 762
Achievement, 17, 18, 846 Affixes, 591, see also Vocabulary
Acquisition metaphor, 925 Africa, 10, 14, see also Bilingual education
Acquisition onset (AO), 419–420, 422 African American Vernacular English
Acrolect, 286 (AAVE), 295–296
Acrolectal form, 157 Age
ACTFL, see American Council on the discourse-based approaches to L2
Teaching of Foreign Languages teaching/learning, 736
guidelines L2 learning, 446–447

1113
1114 SUBJECT INDEX

L2 development Attitude(s)
case study, 430–432 English as a global language, 638
critical period and L1 acquisition, image/identity, 1042
420–421 language planning, 1051, 1052, 1053
maturation and accessibility of prestige planning, 1040
universal grammar, 424–430 procedures in EFL, 141, 142–143
multiple definitions of critical period Audio input, 863
hypothesis, 421–424 Audiolingualism, 227, 664
Age of arrival (AOA), 464 Auditory learner, 758
Ainu, 995, 1020 Aural cues, 512, see also L2 listening
Alexander of Villedieu, 657 Aural decoding, 505, see also L2 listening
Alphabetic scripts, 995, see also Scripts Aus Tin project, 127, 128
Alternative assessment, 870 Australia
Alveolar stops, 270 adult education, 66
AMEP, see Adult Migrant English Program bilingual education, 13
American Educational Research Association, EFL, 140
780, 793, 806, 811 English in the workplace, 122, 124, 128
American Psychological Association, 806, 811 immigrants, 924
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign teacher assessment, 875–876, 878
Languages (ACTFL) guidelines, testing and language assessment, 783–784
822–823 Australian Migrant English Program, 245
American English, 492, 498, see also English Authentic assessment, 870, see also
American Sign Language (ASL), 420, 421 Assessment
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 790 Authentic communication, 684, see also
Analytical–nomological paradigm, 232 Communication
Anticipatory it, 106 Authentic discourse, 325–326
AO, see Acquisition onset Authentic language, 735–736
AOA, see Age of arrival Authentic materials, 734
Aphasia, 419 Automaticity, 568, 569
Action research, 245–246 Automatization, 440–441, 444
Classroom research, 226 Autonomy, 943
Computer-assisted language learning, 753 Awareness, 273
role of technology, 744 AWL, see Academic Word List
Applied science model, 245 AYP, see Adequate yearly progress
Appolonius Dyscolus, 655–656
Apprenticeship model, 128, 129 B
Aptitude, 431–432, 445–446
AR, see Action research Backchanneling, 326, 519, 521
Arabic, 618, 1048 Background knowledge, 566, 569–570,
Aristotle, 654 571
Articulation, 723, 988 Backsliding, 457
Articulatory causes, 505 Backwash, 864
ASL, see American Sign Language Bacon, Francis, 659
Assessment Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills
domains of literacy, 532 (BICS), 30, 52
EAP, 86–88 Basic literacy, 532, see also Literacy
in adult education, 76–78, 80 Basilect, 286
languages for specific purposes, 864 Basilectal forms, 158
learners in secondary school, 54–55 Berlitz schools, 663
L2 writing, 606–609 Bias
Assessment scales, 883–885 comprehension processes, 513
Assimilationist model, 897 identity, 898
Assimilationist policy, 1016 language testing, 806, 838, 839
Attention, 273, 274–275, 318, 504, 684 literacy, 530, 538
 SUBJECT INDEX 1115

BICS, see Basic Interpersonal Communication reading, 566, 572–573

Skills SLA
Bidialectal teaching, 1019–1020 history, 199–200
Bilingual communities, 10 Case study hypotheses, 804–809
Bilingual dictionary, 1007, see also CAT, see Communication Accommodation
Dictionaries Theory
Bilingual education Catalan, 1043, 1045–1046
definition, 8 CBI, see Content-Based Instruction
implementing programs, 16–20 CCR, see Classroom-Centered Research
models, 8–11 CDA, see Critical Discourse Analysis
Bilingual programs, 48 Center for Applied Linguistics, 9, 12,
Bilingual subsets, 645 22
Bilingualism Certificates in Spoken and Written English
gender and identity, 900 (CSEW), 69, 72, 82
language shift/loss stages, 1058 Charter of the French Language,
language-in-education planning, 1024, 1044
1025 CHILDES, 556
prestige/image planning, 1036 China, 14, 103, 140, 142, 997
World Englishes, 160, 165 Chinese
Bottom-up model, 564, 565, see also Reading counter–factual conditional and
Bottom-up process contrastive rhetoric, 378
corpus planning processes, 1002 critical period hypothesis, 426, 429, 431
L2 listening, 503, 507, 508 L2 discourse and text macro features, 617,
teaching/learning, 733, 736, 737 618
Britain, 1047–1048 second language socialization, 304,
British English, 638 311–312
Building block methods, 731, 732 Chinese students
Business English (BE) classes, 105 critical period, 422
EFL, 138, 141, 144
C UG accessibility, 424
Christianity, 656
CA, see Conversational Analysis Chunking, 517, 518, 557, 568
CACODE corpus, 400 CLA, see Communicative Language Ability
CAHSEE, see California High School Exit Clarification strategies, 758
Examination Classic literature, 656
California High School Exit Examination Classical period, 654–657
(CAHSEE), 786 Classroom
CALL, see Computer-Assisted Language assessment, 870
Learning Communicative Language Teaching,
CALLA, see Cognitive Academic Language 635–637, 642
Learning Approach Computer-Assisted Language Learning,
CALP, see Cognitive Academic Language 750
Proficiency corpus linguistics, 401–403
Canada explicit instruction, 763
English in the workplace, 122, ethnographic methods, 847–848
126 reading, 574
adult education, 66–67, 71, 77, second language socialization, 303
78, 79 Classroom-based research, 225–235, 237–238,
CASAS, see Comprehensive Adult Student 325, 328
Assessment System Classroom-based teacher assessment,
Case study 871–885
critical period, 430–432 Classroom-centered action research, 566,
cultural anthropology, 180 see also Action research
language testing, 804 Classroom-centered research (CCR), 245–246
1116 SUBJECT INDEX

CLIL, see Content and Language Integrated Contrastive Rhetoric, 381

Learning discourse analysis, 730, 734
CALL, see Computer-Assisted Language ethnography, 119, 127, 182, 184
Learning FonF, 676, 677
CLT, see Communicative Learning Technique grammar, 546, 547, 559
CM, see Competition Model language policy and planning, 1057
CMC, see Computer-Mediated status planning, 972
Communication World Englishes, 159, 164
COBUILD dictionary project, 398 Communication Accommodation Theory
Code mixing, 289–290 (CAT), 496
Code of Fair Testing Practices in Education, Communication strategies (CSs), 488–490,
790 758, 762
Code-related strategies, 488 Communicative competence
Code-switching, 36, 283, 289–290, 896, 941 communicative language teaching, 635,
Codification 636, 643
corpus planning processes, 994–999 discourse, 731
Cognition, L2 learning grammar translation methods, 667
individual differences, 445–448 Internet, 745
resources for use, 443–445 interactional competence, 825
sources of knowledge, 438–442 L2 learning in workplace, 119, 120
Cognitive Academic Language Learning language-in-education policy, 1028
Approach (CALLA), 758, 759 needs research, 979
Cognitive academic language proficiency Communicative Language Ability (CLA),
(CALP), 30, 52, 487 821, 822
Cognitive principles of learning, 272 Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)
Cognitive processes classroom, 635–637
discourse, 733–734 content-based instruction, 687
FonF taxonomy, 680–681, 682 discourse competence, 638–639
fossilization, definition, 457–458 SLA, 551, 553
pragmatics, 324 sociocultural competence, 642–645
Cognitive resources, 504 sociocultural contexts, 639–640
Cognitive sociology, 182 teacher education, 645–648
Cognitive strategies, 576, 762 tests, 640–641
Cohesion devices, 620 variation, 641–642
Collaboration, 247–248, see also Action Communicative Orientation of Language
research Teaching (COLT), 232–233, 848
Collaborative dialogue, 478–479, 723 Communicative styles, culturally-embedded,
Collaborative theory, 489 32
Collective story technique, 901–905 Community policy, 1024
College transitions, 58–59 Community practice, 875–877
Collins COBUILD English Grammar, 398, Competency
406 ability-based, 820
Collocation, 396 academic, 88–89
Colonial languages, 13 action research, 246
Colonial period, 974 communicative, see Communicative
Colonialism, 903 competency
Colonization, 13 fossilization, 457
Colorblind representation, 307 interaction, 125
COLT, see Communicative Orientation of L2 learning, 977, 978
Language Teaching learner identity, 79
Comenius, Jan, 659 multilingualism/bilingualism, 285
Commission for Racial Inequality (CRE), 125 pragmatics, 317–322
Communication SLA research, 904
code-switching, 941 speaking, 496–498
 SUBJECT INDEX 1117

syntactic parsing, 510 Contestation issues, 942–944, see also Critical

universal processing, 443 pedagogy
Competition Model (CM), 199, 443 Context
Composition theory, 604, 619, 622 culture teaching, 912
Comprehensible input hypothesis, L2 writing, 599–602
229–230 vocabulary, 585, 589–590
Comprehension Contextualization cues, 122
cognitive processes, 273–276 Contiguous utterances, 369
fossilization, 466 Contrastive (error) analysis, 615
inference, 514–515 Contrastive analysis, 264, 492
listening, 508–510 Contrastive analysis hypothesis, 229
speech rate, 506 Contrastive approach, 660
memory, 515–519 Contrastive Rhetoric (CR), 378–383,
salient information, 512–513 617
schemata, 513–514 academic literacy, 935–936
Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment L2 text, 615–616
System (CASAS), 72, 82 L2 writing, 599
Computer-adaptive tests, 838 text-conditioned interaction, 383–386
Computer-Assisted Language Learning Conventional literacy, 532, see also Literacy
(CALL) Convergent features, 495–496
ESP, 102 Conversation Method, 663
evaluation, 750–753 Conversation Analysis (CA), 294, 508, 521,
L2 strategy, 768 732
pedagogy, 746–750 discourse analysis, 842
Computer-Mediated Communication L2 learning
(CMC), 203, 346, 644–645 ethnographic research, 182
Concordances, 395 pragmatics, 324
Concordancing, 402–403, 747 workplace, 120–121
Concurrent validity, 799, see also L2 socialization, 313
Validity/validation second language acquisition
Conjunctions, 620, 654 methodology, 357–359
Conscious language learning, 229 transcription conventions,
Consciousness, 274–275 369–370
Consciousness raising, 234 transactional discourse, 489
tasks, 717, 718, 719 Conversational discourse, 546
Consequential validity, 798, 800, see also Conversational patterns, 900
Validity/validation Coordinate construction, 618
Construct-referenced assessment, 875, Coordination patterns, 618
880 Core grammar, 271, 272, see also
Construct validity, 608, 800, 837, see also Grammar
Validity/validation Corpus, use, 394
Content and Language Integrated Learning Corpus linguistics
(CLIL), 973 grammar, 545
Content-based instruction (CBI) L2 teaching
definitions, 687 language use, 396–401
grammar translation methods, 657 learner language, 403–404
indirect intervention, 720 classroom, 401–403
secondary school, 48 Corpus planning
status planning, 973 framework, 959, 961
Content-related bias, 787, see also Bias syllabus/materials development,
Content representativeness, 787 994–1008
Content schemata, 508 Corrective-feedback, 462–463, 464, see also
Content validity, 799, 800, see also Feedback
Validity/validation Computer-based tests, Cost, 788
1118 SUBJECT INDEX

Costa Rica, 646–647 Cultural knowledge, 34, 47

Counterfactual conditional, 378 Cultural literacy, 533, see also Literacy
CP, see Critical Pedagogy Cultural schemata, 508
CPH, see Critical Period Hypothesis Cultural symbols, 181
CR, see Contrastive Rhetoric Cultural variability, 149
CRE, see Commission for Racial Inequality Culture
Credibility, 464, 872 bilingual education, 8, 19
CREDIF materials, 637 comprehension, 514
Creole, 291 corpus linguistics, 402
Criterion-based assessment, see Assessment identity, 897
Criterion-referenced assessment, language variation, 295
874–875 learning, 920, 921
Criterion-related validity, 835, see also World Englishes, 164
Validity/validation training, 918–919
Critical academic literacy, 933–936, see also Culture teaching
Literacy context and language, 912
Critical discourse analysis (CDA), 121, see ethnography, 914
also Discourse analysis native speakers, 923
Critical ethnography, 945, see also Curriculum
Ethnography Action Research, 243
Critical literacy, 565, 571, see also Literacy Communicative Language Teaching, 635,
Critical pedagogy (CP), 933–944 636
Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) discourse-based teaching/learning, 735,
age, 419, 446 738
evidence, 422–424 teacher assessment, 876
fossilization, 465, 466 adult education, 66, 68–71
L1 acquisition and age, 420–421 policy, language-in-education
L2 listening, 503 Japan, 1017–1018
L2 development North Korea, 1028–1029
questioning and age, 425–427 Sweden, 1023
exceptions, maturation, and UG reform, 646–647
accessibility link, 424–425 standardized assessment, 55
multiple definitions, 421–424 Czech, 617
Critical research, 944–946
Cross-cultural training, 918 D
Cross-linguistic transfer, 983
Cross-sectional studies, 321, 327–328 Data-driven learning, 401–402
CSEW, see Certificates in Spoken and Written Data sets, 536, see also Literacy
English DCTs, see Discourse completion tasks
CSs, see Communication strategies Deaf children, 10, 420
Cultivation planning, language-in-education Deafness, 420
Japan, 1019–1021 DEAR, see Drop Everything and Read
North Korea, 1030–1031 Decoding
Sweden, 1024–1025 attention, 504
Cultural anthropology, 179–181 literacy/biliteracy, 534
Cultural awareness, 118 perception, 505–507
Cultural capital, 899 reading, 565, 566, 567, 568
Cultural competence, 139, see also word recognition, 507–508
Competence Deficit framework, 899–900
Cultural context, 785–787, see also Context DELNA, see Diagnostic English Language
Cultural differences, 131, 138, 619 Needs Assessment
Cultural diversity, 916 Deschooling literacy, 535, see also Literacy
Cultural ecology, 185 Design
Cultural identity, 496, 996, see also Identity assessment tools, 607
 SUBJECT INDEX 1119

corpus, 394 Discourse competence, 638–639, 731, 821,

corpus planning, 1005–1006 see also Competence
Diagnostic English Language Needs Discourse completion tasks (DCTs),
Assessment (DELNA), 804–809 327–328
Dialects Discourse markers, 511
African American Vernacular English, Discourse pragmatics, 378
295–296 Discourse structuring, 618–619
corpus planning processes, 994 Discrete-point testing, 820–821
critical pedagogy, 940, 941 Document literacy, 538, see also Literacy
language-in-education planning, 1015, Dominance Theory, 842, 900
1019–1020 Doodles diagram, 386, 387–388
literacy acquisition, 536 Double translation books, 658
regional variation, 292 Drop Everything and Read (DEAR), 575
register distinction, 860 Drop-out rates, 57–58
Dialogic process, 916–917 DSI, see Designated subgroup of interest
Dialogic tasks, 722, 723 Dual Immersion Programs, 540
Diaries, 329 Due process challenge, 789
Diaspora, 156–157, see also World Englishes Dutch students, 425, 461
Dictation, 658, 783–784
Dictionaries E
corpus planning, 999, 1006
grammar translation, 658 EAL, see English as an Additional Language
Large-coverage, 1007 EAP, see English for Academic Purposes
Macquanie, 288 EBE, see English for Business and Economics
Monolingual, 1007 Echoic memory, 517
Oxford English, 1007 Economic mobility, 1063
vocabulary, 592–593 Educational assessment, 870
reading, 588 Educational contexts, 91–92, 785–787, see also
word cards, 590 Context
World Englishes, 164 Educational Testing Services (ETS), 87–88,
Dictogloss, 509, 589, 682 92
Differential Item Functioning (DIF) Effect-of-instruction research, 324, 678
analysis, 838, 839–840 EFL, see English as a Foreign Language
Digital Divide, 203 EGAP, see English for General Academic
Diglossia, 284, 1057, 1058 Purposes
Direct intervention, L2 learning, EGP, see English for General Purposes
714–720 EI, see Elicited imitation
Direct measures, 536, see also Literacy EIL, see English as an International Language
Direct Method, 662–663 Ekavian norm, 994
Direct/indirect objects, 270 Elaboration
Disabled test-takers, 789 corpus planning processes, 999–1004
Disciplinary contexts, 263–265, see also ELEC, see English Language Education
Contexts Council
Discourse analysis Elementary school, 26–39, 303–306, 878
ESP, 99, 100 ELFA, 400
L2 text, 615, 802, 841, 842–844 Elicited conversation, 326
Discourse, 729–730 Elicited imitation (EI), 517
Discourse-based approach Elite literacy, 532–533, see also Literacy
grammar, 546, 547 Ellis Island representation, 308
current methodology, 730–731 ELLs, see English language learners
implementation, 734–738 ELT, see English Language Teaching
Discovery-based instruction, 717 Eye gaze behavior, 367, 368
Discourse Blocs, 615 Emergent grammar, 348–349, see also
Discourse community, 385 Grammar
1120 SUBJECT INDEX

Emergentist model, 199 L2 writing research and pedagogy,

EMP, see English for Medical Purposes 600–602
Empirical processes, 457, see also Fossilization output hypothesis, 475
Encarta World English Dictionary, 164, 168 pragmatics in L2 learning, 318
Endangered languages, 13, 540–541 secondary education, 45–54
England, 877–878, 879, see also Britain second language socialization, 304,
English 306–307
Communicative Language Teaching, SORS and strategy research, 765
638–639, 647–648 transactional discourse and speaking,
critical pedagogy, 940 487
Contrastive Rhetoric, 376–378 validation and language testing, 802
elementary schools, 29 World Englishes, 165
elite bilingual education, 12 ZPD and sociocultural research, 338
grammar translation, 658 English as a Second or Other Language
image of speakers, 1047–1048, 1049 (ESOL), 935, 936
L2 discourse, 617 English as an Additional Language (EAL),
language-in-education, 1016–1019 804, 876
lexicogrammatical relationships, 549 English as an International Language (EIL),
National Adult Literacy Survey, 539 494
national policy, 984–985 English dictation test, 784
prestige/image planning, 1036, 1037–1038 English for Academic Legal Purposes
proficiency, 8 (EALP), 106
status planning, 973 English for Academic Purposes (EAP)
teacher assessment corpus linguistics, 397, 399, 402
listening and speaking, 881 English for Specific Purposes, 103–104
literacy, 883, 886–887 genres, 92–94
writing, 882–883 history, 86–87
World Englishes, 155 listening, 90
English Competence Examination, 784 literacies, 88–89
English as a Foreign Language (EFL) needs analysis, 87–88
cultural differences, 138 reading/vocabulary, 90–91
Communicative Language Teaching, 646 speaking, 91–92
grammar instruction, 555 testing, 835
grammar translation, 663–668 writing, 89–90, 600–602
pragmatics, 318, 321 English for Business and Economics (EBE),
strategy, 766 105–106
writing, 607 English for General Academic Purposes
social contexts, 137–138 (EGAP), 85
World Englishes, 165 ESAP, see English for Specific Academic
English as a Second Language (ESL) Purposes
adult education, 66–81 English for General Purposes (EGP), 99
Conversation Analysis for SLA, English for Medical Purposes (EMP),
358–359 106
corpus-based descriptions, 401 English for Occupational Purposes (EOP),
corpus linguistics, 396, 404 85
techniques, 402 English for Occupational/Professional
critical pedagogy, 936, 937, 938, 939 Purposes (EOP/EPP), 105
discourse, 736–737 English for Science and Technology (EST), 86,
elementary education, 26–39 104–105
grammar, 555 English for Specific Academic Purposes
identity, 901, 902 (ESAP), 85
L2 discourse, 617 English for Specific Purposes (ESP), 99–111,
L2 text, 621 600, 601
L2 writing instruction, 604, 607 English in the workplace, 118–131
 SUBJECT INDEX 1121

English Language Education Council linguistic anthropology/

(ELEC), 1018 sociolinguistics, 182–183
English Language Learners (ELLs), 33, 50, workplace, 119
56–57, 59, 903 literacy, 533
English Language Teaching (ELT) Ethnolinguistic democracy, 1065
action research, 241, 245–246 ETS, see Educational Testing Services
current debates, 246–249 Etymology, English vocabulary, 582–583
characteristics of pronunciation, 494–495 EU, see European Union
critical pedagogy, 936, 938, 939 Europe, 14–15, 636
historical background, 931–932 European Charter for Regional or Minority
research domain of English for specific Languages, 1066–1067
purposes, 99 European Union (EU), 644–645, 982, 1024
English proficiency test, 1018–1019 Evaluation
Englishization, 158 Communicative Language Teaching,
English-Only Movement, 15 640–641
EOP, see English for occupational purposes Computer-Assisted Language Learning,
EOP/EPP, see English for occupational/ 750–753
professional purposes English in the workplace, 128–129
Erasmus, 659 program, 71–74
ERP, see Event-related potentials Event-related potentials (ERP), 447
Error feedback, 605–606 Expanding Circle, 155, 156, 159, 165
Error treatment, 228 Expectations, 137, 140, 377, 531
Errors Explicit instruction
aural/listening, 510 FonF, 678
critical period, 423–424 L2 teaching/learning
FonF taxonomy, 675, 685 effectiveness/intervention, 716–717,
fossilization, 461 718, 719
interlanguage, 265–266, 267 language learning strategies, 763
language testing, 834 Explicit knowledge, 444–445
linguistic universals, 272 Explicit learning, 440–441, 442, 553
pronunciation, 491 Explicit teaching, 323, 324
tolerance, 87 Explicitness, 536
writing, 615, 622, 624 Exploratory–interpretative paradigm, 232
ESOL, see English as a second or other Exploratory teaching, 246, see also Action
language research
ESP, see English for Specific Purposes Extended assessment, 309–310
EST, see English for Science and Technology Extensive FonF, 673, 677, see also Focus on
Ethnic minorities, 124, 973, 1065 form
Ethnicity, 295–296, 896, 901–903 Extensive reading, 572, 587
Ethnocentrism, 599, 918 External languages, 982
Ethnographic methods Eye gaze behavior, 370
intercultural competence, 912–915
language testing, 841, 845–848 F
reading research, 566
Ethnographic research/studies Face validity, 608, 799, 861, see also
academic literacy, 935 Validity/validation
Contrastive Rhetoric, 387 Face-saving strategies, 520–521
English in the workplace, 123, 126–128, Face-threat, 521
130 Face-to-face interaction, 182
L2 socialization, 312 FACETS program, 839
L2 teaching/learning, 183–185 Feedback
additional language, 185–188 cognitive processes, 275
cultural anthropology/sociology, FonF, 675, 683–686
179–181 hypothesis testing, 476–477
1122 SUBJECT INDEX

language testing, 847 learning, 1020, 1025, 1028, 1030

listening, 519 research, 920–921
writing, 605 teaching, 921–923
Feminist movement, 899, 934–935 Foreign norms, 160, see also World Englishes
Feral language, 420 Form
FFEs, see Focus on Form Episodes focused exercises, 640
FFI, see Form-Focused Instruction knowing a word, 583, 584
First language (L1) Form-Focused Instruction (FFI)
critical pedagogy, 941 direct intervention
critical period, 420–421, 428, 429 different types, 716
errors, 615 grammar, 714
grammar translation, 658, 666 FonF taxonomy
L2 writing, 623 locus of responsibility, 679–680
reading, 563–564 obstrusiveness, 676–679
SLA research, 264, 265, 266 planning, 675–676, 677
socialization research, 301–302 problematicity, 673–675
translations and vocabulary, 591 IL acquisition, stages, 681–683
UG , 438–442 task, 680–681
Five-stage teaching–learning cycle, 70 fossilization, 466
Fixed code theory, 348–349 feedback, 683–686
FLA, see Foreign Language Acquisition Form-oriented learning, 939
Fluency Formal instruction, 233–234
bilingual education, 7, 8–9, 10, 11–12 Formative assessment, 870, see also
instructed grammar, 551–552 Assessment
task-based research, 722 Formative feedback, 605–606, see also
vocabulary learning Feedback
listening, 586 Formulaic expressions, 200
reading, 587, 588 Formulaic language, 398
speaking, 587 Formulaic utterances, 440
word cards, 590 Fossilization
writing, 589 object of empirical study, 460–464
Fluency-focused activity, 585 SLA theories, 465–467
fMRI, see Functional magnetic resonance theoretical construct, 456–459
imaging self-image of speakers, 1048
Focus on Form (FonF) sequences, 201
instructed grammar Fossilized interlanguage varieties, 273
focus on formS, 552–553 Four Skills Exam (FSE), 803
learning/teaching Framework Convention for the Protection of
communication, 735 National Minorities, 1067
indirect intervention, 724, 725 France, 1047
direct intervention, 716, 717, 718 Free Voluntary Reading (FVR), 575
syntactic parsing, 511 Freirean approach, 68–69
Focus on Form Episodes (FFEs), 477 French
Focus-on-formS, 716, 717, 718 classrooms, 305
Focus-on-formS instruction, 720 Communicative Language Teaching, 636
FonF, see Focus on form contextual variation, 139
Foreign Language Acquisition (FLA), 264, immersion programs, 12, 16, 552
271 national policy, 985
Foreign language prestige/image planning in Quebec, 1038
accent, 428 self-image of speakers, 1047
books, 658 French as a Second Language (FSL), 472
context, 767–768 Frequency studies, 548
culture, 644 Frustration level, 567
education, 541, 916 FSE, see Four Skills Exam
 SUBJECT INDEX 1123

FSL, see French as a Second Language Graduate Record Exam (GRE), 786
Function, 441 Grammar
Functional–analytical teaching, 324 Communicative Language Teaching, 640
Functional literacy, 532, see also Literacy Computer-Assisted Language Learning,
Functional magnetic resonance imaging 745
(fMRI), 447 instructed
Functional production practice, 718, 719 classroom teachers, 554–556
Fundamental difference hypotheses, 432 second language acquisition, 551
Fuzzy Logic model, 507 task-based instruction, 553–554
FVR, see Free Voluntary Reading L2 teaching/learning
academic literacy, 933–934
G discourse-based approaches, 735, 736
instruction and direct intervention,
Games, 637 714–716
Gatekeeping, 118, 119, 120, 125, 522, corpus linguistics, 397–398
783–785 linguistic varieties and sociolinguistics,
GDP, see Gross Domestic Product 286, 287
Gender, 101–102, 294–295, 899–901 materials development and corpus
Gender inclusive language, 1003–1004 planning, 1006
Gender marking, 429 reading, 567–568
Gender-neutral forms, 1003–1004 rules, 655, 717, 718, 998–999
General purposes tests, 858, 860 Grammar translation methods (GTM)
Generalizability Theory (G-Theory), 840 classical period (500 BC to 300 AD),
Generation 1.5 students, 58 654–657
Genetic method, 344–345 Communicative Language Teaching
Genre-based instruction, 107–108 EFL, 665–668
Genre studies early 1900s, 662–664
Contrastive Rhetoric, 378, 380–381 middle ages (C300 AD through late
text-conditioned interaction model, 1400s), 657–657
383, 384, 386 20th century, 664–665
writing research, 600–602 reform movement, 662
German, 268, 985, 1049 Renaissance, 659–660
German speakers, 661 1600s and 1700s, 660–661
Germanic languages, 582 Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae, 660
Germany, 636 Grammatical competence, 637, 821
Gesture, 365–366 Grammatical development, 265
Ghettoization, 1063 Grammatical innovation, 288–289
GIDS, see Graded Intergeneration Disruption Grammatical knowledge, 510
Scale Grammatical structures, 200, 201
Globalization, 12, 939–940, 941 Grammatical subsets, 548
Goals Grammaticality, 272, 423, 427, 429–430
accountability and NCLB, 783 Grammatikos, 654
bilingual education, 8, 10, 11, 18 Grammatization, 998–999
communicative language teaching, 635, Graphization, 995–998
640, 645 GRE, see Graduate Record Examination
instructed learning, 322 Great Britain, 67, see also England
language planning, 959, 961–962 Greece, 654–656
language-in-education policy and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 1019, 1030
planning, 1014 Group dynamics, 242, see also Action
SSBI and L2 learning, 758 Research
tests and language assessment, 781 Group identity, 1050–1051, see also Identity
writing strategy, 765 Group membership, 896–897, see also Identity
Graded Intergeneration Disruption Scale G-Theory, see Generalizability Theory
(GIDS), 1058, 1045 GTM, see Grammar translation methods
1124 SUBJECT INDEX

Guessing, 589–590 Ideology-driven approach, 925

GUME project, 442 Idiom principle, 398, 550
IELTS, see International English Language
H Testing System
Ijekavian norm, 994
H variety, 284–285 Image
Handwritten text, 622 method relationship, 1043–1049
Hangul, 1026, 1028, 1030 motive, 1049–1053
Hebrew, 319, 1043–1044, 1046 prestige/image planning, 1039–1043
Hedges/hedging, 378 self-image of speakers, 1043, 1044–1045
Hemispheric lateralization, 419 Imitation authentic materials, 734
Heritage language (HL), 9, 541 Imitation, 337–338, 342
High frequency words, 581–582, 585, see also Immediate serial recall (ISR), 517
Words Immersion, 644
Higher education, 86 Immersion education, 472
High-status language, 1040 Immersion programs, 12, 540, 720
Hispanics, 34 Immigrant languages, 973
Historical background, Immigrants
language-in-education bilingual education, 13
Japan, 1015 English competency, 79
North Korea, 1025–1027 adult education, 66, 67, 68
quantitative research, 210 secondary schools, 45–46
Sweden, 1021–1022 literacy/biliteracy, 530
Historical constructionism, 1060–1062 language-in-education planning, 1021,
HL, see Heritage language 1024
Home/school connections, 37–38 tutored/untutored learning, 923
Hong Kong, 146, 228, 646–647, see also China; Immigration, 67, 783–785
Chinese students Immigration and Naturalization Service
Hybrid languages, 941–942 (INS), 785
Hybridity, 35, 37–38 Implicit instruction, 323, 733, 716–717, 733
Hypermedia, 748 Implicit knowledge, 444–445
Hypothesis testing, 476–478 Implicit learning, 441–442, 553
Hypothetical questions, 515 Incomplete understanding, 684
India, 14, 310
I Indigenous language, 286
Indirect intervention, 713, 720–725
IDEA, see Individuals with Disabilities Individual behavior, 571–572
Educational Act Individual differences, 320–321, 445–448
IDEA Proficiency Test, 55 Individual needs, 977
Ideal native speaker, 637 Individual practice, 877–879
Identity Individuals with Disabilities Educational Act
classroom, 938 (IDEA), 790
Communicative Language Teaching, 641 Indonesia, 142–143, 147, 319, 1001, 1002
ethnographic studies, 126 Inductive approach, 323, 324
group and image, 1041 Inductive techniques, 660, 663
image and language planning, Inevitable adaptation, 143–144
1039–1043 Inferences, 514–515, 859
language acquisition, 924 Inflections, 658, see also Morphology
language education, 916 Informal assessment, 870, see also Assessment
language loss, 921 Informal compact, 383, 385
minority language, 1063 Informal language planning, 965
self-image of speakers, 1048 Informal socialization, 310–311
SLA research, 896–905 Information processing theory, 276, 480
Ideology, 78–79, 160–161, 744, 901 Initiation–response–evaluation (IRE), 309
 SUBJECT INDEX 1125

Initiation–Response–Feedback (IRF), 309, 881 Interaction-based construct, 824–827

Inner Circle, 155, 156, 158, 160, 165 Interaction hypothesis, 722
Input Interaction theory, 751–753
cognitive processes, 273–276 Interactional competence, 824–827
Computer-Assisted Language Learning, Interactional data, 325–326
748, 749, 752 Interactional routines, 304–305, 307
pragmatic competence, 317 Interactional sociolinguistics, 122, 124,
Input factors, 227–229 125–126, 182–183
Input hypothesis, 472 Interactive models, 565
Input metaphor, 340–344 Interactive reading, 588
Input processing, 678–679, 682, 718, Intercultural communication, 124, see also
719 Communication
INS, see Immigration and Naturalization Intercultural competence
Service critical approaches, 915–918
Insecurity, 294, 1050 culture teaching
Insiders’ paradox, 962, 966 context, 912
Institute for Research in Language Teaching training, 918–919
(IRLT), 1018 ethnographic approaches, 912–915
Institutional discourse, 325 research, 919–925
Institutional practice, 875–877 Intercultural interactions, 912
Institutional racism, 130 Intercultural sensitivity model, 918
Institutional talk, 356 Interlanguage (IL)
Instructed language learning/task-based FonF taxonomy
teaching locus of responsibility, 679, 680
direct intervention, 714–720 problematicity, 673, 674
indirect intervention, 720–725 acquisition stages, 681–683
Instructed learning, 322–324 cognitive processing, 680
Instruction fossilization, 457, 462, 463–464, 465
bilingual education, 19 grammars, 269, 724
classroom research, 233–234 intervention, 714, 718
direct intervention, 716–719 SLA research, 265–269
elite literacy, 532 speaking, 486
elementary schools, 30–31 Interlanguage Hypothesis, 456
writing, 603–609 Interlanguage (IL) phonology, 489, 490–491,
texts, 618 492, 495
Instrumental motivation, 897, 920 Internal consistency, 809, 872, see also
Instrumental value, 1063 Validity/validation
Integration, 19, 48–50 Internal context, 912, see also Context
Integrative motivation, 897, 920 Internal languages, 982
Integrative processing, 475–476 Internalization
Integrative testing, 820–821 metalinguistic function, 478
Intellectual development, 913 sociocultural research, 340–344
Intelligence tests, 784 ZPD, 339–340
Intelligibility, 157, 158, 164, 493–495 International Corpus of English (ICE) project,
Intensive FonF, 673, 677, see also Focus on 164
Form International Corpus of Learner English,
Intensive/extensive reading, 574–575, 587, 623
588 International English Language Testing
Interaction System (IELTS), 786, 846, 864, 1019
cognitive processes, 273–276 International law, 1064, 1066–1067
Computer-Assisted Language Learning, International Teaching Assistants (ITAs), 91
749–750 Internet, 744, 761, 915, 922, 940–941
enhancement, 685 Interpretation, 400–401
order, 120 Interpretation processes, 519–523
1126 SUBJECT INDEX

Interpretative analysis, 395–396 Japanese Language Research Institute, 1016

Interpretative community, 519–521 Japanese students
Interpretivist approach, 181, 797 age effects and critical period, 428
Intertranslatability, 1000 collecting data on pragmatic
Intervals within/between utterances, 369 development, 330
Intervention, 323–324, 943 corpus linguistics, 404
Interview-based studies, 326 EFL
Interview context, 877–878, see also Context contextual variation, 141
Interview test performance, 843 pragmatics
Interviewer style, 843 individual differences, 321
Interviewing, 180 instructed learning, 323–324
Interviews, 125, 847–848, 915 scaffolded performance and sociocultural
Intonation, 492, 512, 513 research, 339
Introspection, 515, 802, 841, 844–845 sociocultural research, 345
Intuition, 395, 400–401 transfer of learning strategies, 762–763
Involved communication, 546, 547, see also JET, see Japan Exchange and Teaching
Communication program
IRE see Initiation–response–evaluation JFL, see Japanese as a Foreign Language
IRF, see Initiation–response–feedback Joint Committee on Testing Practices, 790, 793
Irish, 1043, 1044–1045, 1046 Joseph Conrad Phenomenon, 494
IRLT, see Institute for Research in Language
Teaching K
IRT, see Item Response Theory
Isoglosses, 293 Kanji, 997
Isophones, 293 Keyboarding skills, 788
ISR, see Immediate serial recall Keyword technique, 591
Italian immigrants, 422, see also Immigrants Kim Il Sung, 1027, 1028
Italian students, 347 Kindergarten, 303–306
ITAs, see International Teaching Assistants Kinesthetic learner, 758
Item bias, see Differential Item Functioning Kokugo, see National Language
Item response theory (IRT), 838–840 Korean, 617, 618
Korean students, 140, 164, 271, 320–321,
J 422
Korean/English bilinguals, 421
JACET, see Japanese Association of College Krashen’s i + 1 theory
English Teachers reading in a second language, 567
JALT, see Japanese Association of Language SLA theory, 472
Teachers ZPD and sociocultural research,
Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) program, 336–340
646, 1017 Kwara’ae students, 305
Japan, 201, 646, 997, 1015–1017 Kyosi, 1027
Japanese
critical period, 430 L
L2 discourse, 617, 618
learning and L2 socialization L variety, 284–285
kindergarten, 304 L1, see First language
post-secondary settings, 309 L2, see Second language
promoting a language and image, 1049 LAD, see Language Acquisition Device
Japanese as a Foreign Language (JFL), 319, Language
326 corpus linguistics use
Japanese Association of College English descriptions, 396–401
Teachers (JACET), 1018 patterns, 395–396
Japanese Association of Language Teachers culture teaching, 912
(JALT), 1018 discourse analysis, 730
 SUBJECT INDEX 1127

extinction, 286 Language Instruction for Newcomers to

inseparability of culture, 918 Canada (LINC), 66–67
learning and identity, 897 Language intellectualization, 1008
local versus English interaction and Language interdependence hypothesis, 566
research, 158 Language learning strategies, 760, 920, 921
sociology of, 182 Language learning theory, 402, 723
sociolinguistics, 281 Language loss, 285, 1057–1058, 1060
specific purposes, 398–399 Language maintenance, 1019–1020, 1024,
understanding spoken, see Second 1030
language (L2) listening Language management, 958, 1038
Language Acquisition Device (LAD), 337, 456 Language minority, 529, 536, 539–540, see also
Language acquisition, 235–236, 264–265, 573, Immigrants
see also Second language acquisition Language of instruction, 33, 34, 36, 972, 973
Language assessment Language planning, 958–962, 964–966, 1005
educational, social, and cultural context, Language planning models, 958
785–787 Language planning, formal, 965
legal and ethical context, 789–791 Language planning and policy (LPP)
political and economic context, 781–785 critiques, 966–967
technology and infrastructure context, early background and minority language
787–788 rights, 1056–1057
test validity and fairness, 780–781 framework, 958–962
Language attitudes, 283 image and identity, 1039–1040
Language behavior, 1050 levels of, 963–964
Language change, 286–289, 745 management framework, 962–963
Language choices, 126, 401 models, 958
Language competence theory, 722 overt and covert, 964–966
Language/content (L&C) integration, 48–50, Language play, 490
51 Language policy, 637, 982, 1051, 1052, 1053
Language development, 204–205 Language preferences, 1065
Language discrimination, 1064 Language production model, 477–478
Language displacement, 286 Language program evaluations, 845
Language dissemination, 1013 Language reacquisition, 1020, 1024–1025,
Language distance, 982–983 1031
Language-diverse groups, 12–15 Language replacement, 1058, 1062–1064
Language ecology, 962, 1059–1060 Language rights, 962
Language experience approach, 69 Language shift, 1020–1021, 1025, 1031,
Language for Specific Purposes (LSP), 100, 1057–1058
636, 862–866 Language socialization
Language ideology, 1047 educational settings, 303–310
Language-in-education issues and future directions, 312–314
cultivation planning research, 301–303, 598
Japan, 1019–1021 workplace, 310–312
North Korea, 1030–1031 Language-specific devices, 377
Sweden, 1024–1025 Language spread, 155, 1049
policy and planning Language testers
Japan, 1015–1017 definition of measurement, 815–816
North Korea, 1025–1027 general measurement, 820
Sweden, 1021–1022 language construct, 820–827
policy test scores, 827–829
Japan, 1017–1019 Language testing, research methods
North Korea, 1027–1030 qualitative approaches, 840–848
Sweden, 1022–1024 quantitative methods, 834–840
Language-in-education planning, 959, 961, Language testing textbooks, 816–820
1037, see also Language-in-education Language Testing Centre, 811, 812
1128 SUBJECT INDEX

Language universals theory, 269–271 Length of residence (LOR), 422, 427, 463,
Language variation 464
ethnicity, 295–296 Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL),
gender, 294–295 985
geographical region and sociolinguistics, Lexical development, 999–1001
292–293 Lexical differences, 292–293
social class, 292–296 Lexical dimensions, 378
Language variety, 787 Lexical innovation, 287–288
Languages of Lower Communication (LWC), Lexical semantics, 421
163, 166, see also World Englishes Lexical variation, 623
Languages Other Than English (LOTE), 381, Lexicalist–Functional Grammar, 269, see also
986 Grammar
Latent language structure, 456, see also Lexico–grammatical associations, 398
Fossilization Lexicon, 438, 439, 1030
Latent psychological structure, 456, see also LFC, see Lingua Franca Core
Fossilization LHR, see Linguistic Human Rights
Latin, 583, 656, 657 Liberal Democratic Party, 1016
Latino students, 202 (see also Hispanics) Life history method, 904
L&C, see Language/content integration Likert scale, 494
LCTL, see Less commonly taught languages Lilly’s Grammar, 660, see also Grammar
Learner LINC, Language Instruction for Newcomers
classroom research, 229–231 to Canada
EFL, 137–138, 140–142, 148 Lingua franca, 283–284, 972
ESL in adult education, 66, 69–70, 71, Lingua Franca Core (LFC), 494
74–76 Linguistic accuracy, 607 (see also Accuracy)
FonF taxonomy, 679–680 Linguistic competence, see also Competence
grammar instruction, 556 discourse-based approaches to L2
identification of context clues, 912 teaching/learning, 731
language studies and corpus linguistics, specific purposes, 862–866
403–404 tandem learning, 922
needs and EAP, 87 Linguistic complementarity, 1057
pragmatics in L2 learning, 321 Linguistic dislocation, 1060
speech, see Speech, learner Linguistic factors, status planning, 982–983
Learner-centered curriculum, 245, see also Linguistic form, 440–441, 724, 752–753
Curriculum Linguistic gene pool, 1059
Learner writing and publishing approach, 69 Linguistic genocide, 1058, 1059
Learning Linguistic human rights (LHR), 1064–1065
content area, 31–33 Linguistic imperialism, 286
difficulty, 984 Linguistic policy, 635–637
disabilities, 790 Linguistic processes, research, 269–272
ethnographies, 183–185 Linguistic purism, 1000
L2 listening, 504 Linguistic repertoire, 902
outcomes and Form-Focused Instruction, Linguistic universals, 271–272
714 Linked skills activity, 589
special needs learners, 75 Listener response, 521–523
processes, 936–939 Listening, 90, 585–586, 764, 881, 885–886
status planning, 976 Listening comprehension test, 893
strategies, 588 Literacy
styles, 141–142, 767 adult education, 68, 79
vocabulary/word frequency, 581–582 bilingual education, 18
World Englishes, 163–166 biliteracy
Lecture discourse, 90 assessing and measuring societal,
Legal context, 789–791, see also Context 536–540
Legitimatization, language, 902, 1057, 1061 background, 529–531
 SUBJECT INDEX 1129

definition, 531–533 Macromarkers, 90

promotion, 540–541 Mainstreaming, 47, 48, 58
scholarly orientations, 533–535 Mainstream learning, 56–57
Contrastive Rhetoric, 375, 379 Maintenance programs, 540
corpus planning products, 1005, 1007, Major standard languages, 1047–1048
1008 Majority language, 1056
demands and L2 writer, 598 Malay language, 1037
EAP, 86, 88–89 Malaysia, 14, 1037–1038
events, reading/writing, and research, Management framework, 962–963
35 Mann Whitney procedure, 838
historical background and MANOVA, see Multiple analysis of variance
language-in-education planning, Mantel–Haenszel procedure, 838
1021 Manuals of rhetoric, 1008
instruction and college transitions, 59 Manuals of style, 1008
multiple and framework for Maori, 13
understanding, 27 Marginalization, 935
practices, 533, 935 Markedness, 269–270, 271, 492–493
research and elementary school, 33–35 Markedness Differential Hypothesis (MDH),
research, 33–35 492–493
teacher assessment, 883, 886–887 Markedness model, 290
test, 68 MARSI, see Metacognitive awareness of
workplace, 119 reading strategies inventory
Literacy campaign, 1020, 1026, 1027 Marxist/Leninist principles, 1028
Literatures, 158, see also World Englishes Materialization, 339–340
Live-based testing, 802, see also Testing Materials, 138, 747, 1029
Local context, 797–798, see also Context Materials development, 1005–1008
Locus of responsibility, 679–680 Materials policy, 1018, 1023
Logic, 59, 795 Mathematics, 31, 49
Logical connectors, 202 Maturation, 424–430
Logistic regression techniques, 805 Maturational constraint, 422–425,
Logographic symbols, 995 465–466
Longitudinal method, 460–461, 464 Maturation constraint hypothesis, 422
Longitudinal studies, 321, 344–345 MC, see Multiple choice
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary McQuirk effect, 512
English, 396, 408 MDH, see Markedness Differential
Long-term assessment, 884 Hypothesis
Long-term memory (LTM), 515, 568, Meaning
590 communicative language teaching, 636,
LOR, see Length of residence 642
Loss, 904 Computer-Assisted Language Learning,
LOTE, see Languages other than English 751–752
Low-status language, 1040 discourse-based approaches, 735
LPP, see Language planning and policy FonF taxonomy, 677
LSP, see Language for specific purposes guessing from context and vocabulary
LTM, see Long-term memory strategies, 589–590
Ludic discourse, 486, 490 L2 listening, 504, 509
LWC, see Languages of wider communication task-based research and indirect
intervention, 722
M potential and specific purposes language,
861, 862
Macquarie Dictionary, 164, 171, 288, see also vocabulary, 583, 584, 590
Dictionaries words and reading in a second language,
Macro features, 617–619 568–569
Macro-level policy, 963 Meaning-centered activities, 724
1130 SUBJECT INDEX

Meaning-focused exercises, 640 Minoritization, 1060–1062

Meaning-focused input, 585, 586, 587, 590 Minority language (ML), 1019, 1056, 1057,
Meaning-focused instruction, 657 1058,
Meaning-focused output, 590 Minority language rights (MLR)
Meaning-focused tasks, 747 early LPP, 1056–1057
Meaning-focused use, 585 language ecology, 1059–1060
Meänkieli/Finnish, 1025 language replacement and social mobility,
Measurement, 815–816, 820, 834 1062–1064
Mediation, 874–875, 916 language shift and loss, 1057–1058
Medical communication, 106, see also linguistic human rights, 1064–1065
Communication nationalism, minoritization, and historical
Meiji Restoration, 1015 constructionism, 1060–1062
Memorization rules, 661 tolerance- and promotion-oriented
Memorization strategies, 758 language rights, 1065–1067
Memory, 515–519, 588 Minority language speakers, 1057
Memory construction, 512–513 Misfitting items, 839
Memory trace, 475 Mishearing, 510
Mesolect, 286 Misperceptions, 531
Mesolectal forms, 158 Misunderstanding, intercultural
Meso-level policy, 963 communication, 912
Mesopotamia, 11 ML, see Minority language
Message comprehensibility, 684 MLR, see Minority language rights
Messages, 229 MLAT, see Modern Language Aptitude Test
Metacognition, 766–767 Mnemonic tricks, 591, 592
Metacognitive awareness of reading Modal verbs, 384, 620
strategies inventory (MARSI), 761 Model for intercultural communication,
Metacognitive strategies, 515, 516, 576–577, 915–916
762 Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT),
Metalinguistic (reflective) function, 478–480 445
Metalinguistic content, 916 Modern Languages Programme of the
Metalinguistic judgment, 715 Council of Europe, 979
Metapragmatic treatments, 521, 522 Modiatrae, 658
Metatalk, 275 Modified interaction, 230, 231
Method–image relationship, 1043–1049 Modularity, 438
Methodology Monitor Theory, 275–276
ethnographies, 180, 186–187 Monitoring strategies, 758
difficulties and linguistic universals, 272 Monolingual dictionary, 1007, see also
EFL, 138, 145 Dictionaries
issues, 231–233 Monolingual English language ideology, 531
policy and language-in-education, 1018, Monolingual writers, 598
1023, 1029 Monolingualism, 160, 1031
quantitative research, 213–218 Monologic tasks, 722, 723
Methods comparison studies, 227 Mood concept, 655
Metrical cadence, 505–507 Moral education, 1016
Mexican American Legal Defense and Morpheme accuracy order, 266–267 (see also
Educational Fund, 783 Accuracy)
Micro features, 619–621 Morpheme order studies, 229, 233–234
Microgenesis, 344 Morphological Unity Principle, 424
Micro-level policy, 963 Morphology, 655
Middles ages, 657–659 Morphosyntax, 439, 440
Migration, 156 Mother tongue instruction (MTI), 1022, 1023,
Minimal literacy, 532, see also Literacy 1024, 1025
Minimalism, 438 Motivation, 566, 575, 897, 977
Minorities, 937 Motive, 713, 1038, 1049–1053
 SUBJECT INDEX 1131

Movement for Total Ideological Mobilization National Law, 1066–1067

for Founding the Nation, 1026 National Literacy Act, 69, see also Literacy
MTI, see Mother tongue instruction National literacy assessments, 536, 537, 538,
Multidimensional analysis, 546 see also Literacy
Multidimensional model, 268 National Literacy Strategy, 71, see also
Multidimensionality, 602–603 Literacy
Multifaceted Rasch measurement, 839 National policy, 984
Multifunctional words, 397 National Reading Panel, The, 573–574
Multilingual contexts, 1057, see also Contexts National standards, 70
Multilingual workplaces, 124 Nationalism, 1037, 1038, 1060–1062
Multilingualism, 283–285, 737, 941–942, Nationhood, 1043–1044
1022 Nation–state, 1058, 1060–1061, 1066
Multilinguals, 158 Native language (NL), 466, 492, 494, 505
Multiliteracies, 533, see also Literacy Native speaker fallacy, 940
Multimedia Adult ESOL Learner Corpus, Native speakers (NSs)
404 academic literacies and competency,
Multiple analysis of variance (MANOVA), 89
218, 837 academic writing compared to L2 texts,
Multiple choice (MC), 328 622
Multiple effects principle, 461 characteristics of pronunciation, 493–494
Multi-Step Graphic Scaling diagram, critical period, 428
166 foreign language teaching, 922–923
Munhwae Period, 1026, 1027, 1028, identity in SLA research, 903–905
1031 interpretation process and L2 listening,
Mutual accommodation, 1065 520
Mutual meaning, 513, see also Meaning listener response and interpretation
processes, 522
N pragmatics of L2 learning, 321
Nativelike accent, 493–495
NAACP, see National Association for the Nativelike performance, 425
Advancement of Colored People Nativization, 158, 1000
NAE, see National Agency for Education Natural Approach, 229
NALS, see National Adult Literacy Survey Natural Method, 663
Narratives, 546, 738 Natural route, 714
Nation, status planning, 975 Naturalistic learning, 713
National Action Programme on Foreign Naturalistic setting, 913–914, see also
Languages, 986 Ethnography
National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS), Naturalistic tradition, 232
539–540 Naturalization, 68
National Agency for Education (NAE), 1023, Nature of the input, 863
1024 NCLB, see No Child Left Behind Act of
National Association for the Advancement of 2001
Colored People (NAACP), 783 NCLE, see National Center for ESL Literacy
National Association of Bilingual Education, Education
783 Near-native speakers, 462, 464
National Center for ESL Literacy Education Needs analysis, 87–88, 974–975, 976–983
(NCLE), 68 Needs patterns, 984
National Client Satisfaction Survey, 73 Needs research, 978–981
National identity, 996, 1050, see also Identity Needs research methods, 981
National Institute of Child Health and Negative feedback, 719, 724, see also Feedback
Human Development (NICHD), Negative washback, 647, see also Washback
573–574 Negotiating meaning, 274, 472–473, see also
National Language movement, 1015, 1016, Meaning
1019 Negotiation, 683–686
1132 SUBJECT INDEX

Negotiation studies, 585 Noticing the hole, 682, 683

Neighborhood density, 509 Noticing/triggering function, 474–476
Neighboring countries, 982 Notional-functional concepts, 636
Neo-Marxism, 181, 183 Noun phase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH),
Netherlands, 14, 986 270
Netspeak, 744 Nouns, 548, 584, 654
Neural plasticity, 419 NPAH, see Noun phase accessibility
Neurological processes, 503, see also Second hierarchy
language (L2) listening NSs, see Native speakers
New orthodoxy, 555–556 Nuffield Languages Inquiry, The, 981, 986,
New validity, see Old/new validity 988
New Zealand, 67, 73, 784 Numeracy training, 69–70
1999 Standards, 780–781, 787, 790
NICHD, see National Institute of Child O
Health and Human Development
NNSs, see Non-Native Speakers Obligatory questions, 986–988
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, Observation, 848
15–16, 702, 711, 782 Observational data, 325–327
Nomenclature, 529–530, see also Literacy Obstrusiveness, 676–679
Non-age factors, 426 Occupational English Test (OET), 864
Nondiscriminatory language, 1003–1004 OET, see Occupational English Test
Nonliterary, 530, see also Literacy Offensive content, 787
Non-native Speakers (NNSs) Official language, 1056, see also Language
EAP, 86 policy and planning
EIL and characteristics of pronunciation, Old information first, 376–377
494 Old/new validity, 801, see also Validity/
identity in SLA research, 903–905 validation
interpretation process and L2 listening, OM, see Ontogeny Model
520 One-parameter item response model, see
L2 text, 615, 616 Rasch measurement
listener response and interpretation, Online planning, 723
522 Ontological difficulty, 384
Non-native English Speakers (NNESs), 46, Ontogeny Model (OM), 493
103, 120 Open-choice principle, 550
native speaker Open role-play, 326, 327
computer analysis of e-mail messages, Operationalization, see Language
622 construct/operationalization
critical period, 423–424 Operations to elicit behavior, 817,
output hypothesis, 473 818
text comparison of micro features, OPI, see Oral Proficiency Interview
620 Opinion polls, 783
Nonobligatory questions, 987–988 Opinions collection, 981
Nonreciprocal tasks, 517 Opposition, critical pedagogy, 943
Norms, 137, 146–147, 519–521, 994 Optimality Theory, 493, 505
North Korea, 996, 1025, 1027–1030 Oral approach, 1018
Norway, 1067 Oral English, 50
Norwegianization, 1067 Oral interview, 842, 843
Notebooks, 591, see also Vocabulary Oral language, 531, see also Literacy
Note-taking, 517–519 Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI), 825, 836,
Noticing, 318–319 842
Noticing hypothesis, 504, 747–748 Ordinary conversation, 356, see also
Noticing model, 382–383 Conversation
Noticing the gap, 474, 682, 683 Origins, action research, 242
 SUBJECT INDEX 1133

Orthographic conventions, 995, 996 discourse analysis and language testing,

Orthography, 570 843
Othering, 903 L2 learning
Outer Circle countries direct intervention, 714
English, 155, 156 improving and strategies, 757
acrolectal form, 157–158 needs research methods and status
multilingualism/bilingualism and planning, 981
sociolinguistics, 284 questioning the critical period
World Englishes, 157, 159, 165 hypothesis, 426
Output, 230, 275, 472, 473, 732 universal processing strategies as
Output hypothesis resources for use, 443, 444
formulation, 471–474 literacy/biliteracy, 532
functions, 474–480 Strategy Inventory for Language
future directions, 480–481 Learning, 760
Overgeneralization, 149, 341, 343–344 validity/reliability of assessment,
Overt language planning, 964–966 607
Overt response, 519 Performance-based assessment, 839
Oxford English Dictionary, 1007, see also Performance-based construct definition,
Dictionaries 823–824
Personal narrative method, 904
P Personal references, 621
Personality, 847
Pantomime, 663 Personnel policy, 1017, 1022, 1028
Paper-and-pencil tests, 788, see also Tests Persuasion, 124, 125, 1036
Paragraph movements, 387–388 Phonemes, 491, 505
Paralinguistic cues, 511–512 Phonemic awareness, 33
Parallel construction, 618 Phonetic distinctions, 506–507
Parallel processing model, 503 Phonetic features detectors, 505
Paraphrase, 658 Phonolexical system, 505
Parisian French, 1038, see also French Phonological awareness, 33
Participant observation, 180 Phonological rehearsal loop, 505
Participation metaphor, 925 Phonology
Participatory approach, see Freirean approach critical period, 421
Patriarchy, 901 grammar translation methods, 654
Pattern analysis, 395 maturation and UG accessibility link to
Patterns, interlanguage, 266 age, 424
Pause unit, 506, 513 reading in a second language, 570
Pedagogical grammars, 660–661, see also UG, 438, 440
Grammars Phrasal negatives, 267
Pedagogy Phrasebooks, 658
computer-assisted language learning, Physical impairment, 790
746–750 Pidgin, 291, 939
L2 writing, 597–603 Pidginization, 201
Peer response, 605 Pidginlike language, 973
People-centered communication, 825, see also Pimsleur Language Aptitude Battery
Communication (PLAB), 445
Perceptions, 87, 140, 505–507 Pitch levels, 510
Performance PLAB, see Pimsleur Language Aptitude
ability, 379, 383, 384, 386 Battery
achieving fairness through test bias Plagiarism, 381
studies, 786–787 Plain English, 1004, see also English
competence for speaking in second Planning, 675–676, 677, 723, 1042
language, 496–497 Planning statements, 985
1134 SUBJECT INDEX

Policy, 959, 1017–1019, see also Language Preliteracy, 530, see also Literacy
planning and policy Preparation Period, 1026
Policymakers, 959, see also Language Presentist approach, 1056, see also Language
planning and policy policy and planning
Politeness rules, 378, 379 Prestige, 294
Politeness strategies, 520 Prestige/image planning, 972, 1040
Political context, 781–785, see also Context as motive, 1049–1053
Political education, 915–916 evolving framework and LPP, 959, 961
Political factors, Communicative Language identity, 1039–1043
Teaching, 644 language planners, 1041
Political identity, 996 Malaysia, 1037–1038
Political movements, 1050 method, 1043–1049
Political tools, language tests as, 841 Quebec, 1038–1039
Politicization, 782–783 Wales, 1035–1037
Polygenetic theories, 291 Preteaching, 509, 589
Polyglot dictionaries, 660, see also Prior knowledge strategies, 565, 758
Dictionaries Private schooling, 1024
Portuguese, 126 Proactive technique, 675
POS, see Poverty-of-the-stimulus effects Problem–solution texts, 403
Positive transfer, 505 Processibility model, 268–269
Postcolonial period, 974 Processibility theory, 200
Postcolonial states, 1056 Processing instruction, 511, 678, 679
Postmodern condition, 939 Processing load, 517
Postmodern critical theory, 648, 900, 901 Process-oriented styles, 936
Postmodern critiques, 966 Process-oriented writing, 604–605
Postmodernism, 181 Process–product discourse cycles, 93
Postsecondary setting, 308–310 Processing strategies, default, 718
Poverty-of-the-stimulus (POS) effects, 439 Productive knowledge, 584, 585, 591
Power differential, 379, 380 Productive Levels Test, 593
Powerful communities, 1051, 1052, 1053 Product-oriented learning, 938, 939
Powerless communities, 1051, 1052, 1053 Proficiency
Practical Oral Language Ability Model, bilingual education, 15, 17
825–826 language
Practical–deliberative approach, 243–244 critical period, 423
Practitioner involvement, 122 adult education, 74
Pragmalinguistic competence, 317–318, see immigration, 33, 34, 45
also Competence reading, 566–567
Pragmatic ethnography model, 914, see also language testing, 843
Ethnography learning, 319–320, 426, 762
Pragmatic failure, 162 testing for immigration/citizenship, 784
Pragmatic knowledge, 821 working memory, 447
Pragmatics Proficiency in English for Air Traffic Control,
discourse, 735 858
English in the workplace, 123, 124 Program evaluation, 71–74
collecting data, 324–330 Program Standards for Adult ESOL
competence, 317–322 Programs, 78, 84
instructed learning, 322–324 Project-based approaches, 205
Predictive power, 270 Promotion-oriented rights, 1065–1067
Predictive validity, 799, see also Pronouns, 655
Validity/validation Pronunciation
Preemptive FonF, 674, 675 characteristics, 490–495
Preferred response, 521 critical period, 422
Prefixes, 591 EAP, 91
Preliminary Peoples’ Committee, 1028 vocabulary, 591
 SUBJECT INDEX 1135

Proposition 203, 16 Reading

Prose literacy, 538, see also Literacy acquisition, 563
Prosodic cues, 123 case studies and protocols, 572–573
Protestant Reformation, 1021 classroom procedures, 577
Protocol analysis, see Verbal report Communicative Language Teaching, 645
analysis EAP, 90–91
Psychoacoustic effects, 505 elementary school, 33–35
Psycholinguistic criteria, 996 L1 research applications, 563–564
Psycholinguistic model, 497–498 programs, 575
Psycholinguistic process, 565, 566–567 protocols, 572–573
Psychological distance, 427 rate, 568–569
Psychological factors, status planning, research, 564–572
983 skills, 720
Psychology, 269 strategies, 765
Psychometric quality, 760 teaching, 573–577
Puberty, 419, 422, 446 words, 587–588
Public educational systems, 875–876 Reading in EST (REST) program, 109
Pull-out programs, 48 Reading span memory (RST), 447
Purism, 1003, 1021, 1028 Recall analysis, 514
Recall protocols, 513
Q Recasting
FonF taxonomy, 674, 675
QAC, see Question-Answer-Comment teacher/learner role, 679
Qualitative analysis, 395–396 instructed grammar, 558–559
Qualitative approach, testing, 840–848 negotiation/feedback and FonF
Qualitative methods, 616–617 instruction, 685–686
Qualitative/quantitative traditions, 232 task-based research and indirect
Quantitative analysis, 395–396, see also intervention, 724
Corpus linguistics Recasting technique, 553
Quantitative literacy, 538, see also Literacy Receiver, 383, 384, 385, 386, 520
Quantitative methods Receptive knowledge, 584, 585
language testing, 834–840 Receptive vocabulary, 589, see also Vocabulary
text analysis, 616–167 Recognition vocabulary, 509, see also
Quantitative research methods, Vocabulary
210–224 Recontextualization, 342–343
Quebec, 1038–1039, 1043, 1046 Recovery, 904, see also Identity
Queer theory, 901 Referential communication, 487, see also
Question formation, 267, 270 Communication
Question-Answer-Comment (QAC), Referential questions, 228
356–357 Reflective journals, 761
Question-based procedure, 659 Reflective model, 245–246
Questionnaires, 327–328, 846–847 Reform movement, 662
Reformist approach, 659
R Reframing, 519, see also Second language (L2)
listening
Racial exclusion, 783, 784 Refugee Language Teachers, 659
RAs, see Research articles Refugees, 19, 66, 67, 68
Rasch measurement, 838–840 Region, status planning, 975
Rater reliability, 819, 839 Regional languages, 1047
Raters, 845, 848 Regional variation, 292
Rating scales, 328 Regionalism, 1047
Reactive techniques, 675 Register, 860
Reader response paradigm, 513 Rehearsal loop, 517
Reader-responsible text, 618 Rehearsal strategies, 762
1136 SUBJECT INDEX

Rejection stage, 200, 201 Rote learning, 590

Related words, 591, see also Vocabulary RST, see Reading span memory
Relative clause formation, 270–271 Rule-based approach, 466
Relativization, 267–268, 270 Rule-based language, 440
Reliability Rule Space Model, 862
MARCI compared to SORS, 761 Rules/procedures for quantification, 817,
Strategy Inventory for Language 818, 819
Learning, 760 Russia, 998
teacher assessment, 871–872 Russian, 1028, 1031
testing, 796–797, 834 Russian students, 339, 425
writing instruction, 607–608 Russification of Soviet Union, 1001
Religion, 1048
Remedial programs, 48 S
Renaissance, 659–660
Renovation, 1002–1004 Sami language, 1025
Repair, 356–357, 361 Samoa, 998
Repetition, 201, 202, 587, 590, 747 Sampling, corpus, 394
Repetitive intuition-based approach, SAT, see Scholastic Aptitude Test
745 SBI, see Strategies-Based Instruction
Reproduction, 942 Scaffolding, 30, 35, 36, 723
Research Scaffolded performance, 339
adult education, 80–81 SCH, see Structural Conformity Hypothesis
case study, 195–196 Schema theory, 565
classroom, 234–235 Schemata, 513–514, see also Second language
Computer-Assisted Language Learning, (L2) listening
751 Schematic maps, 514
developments, 759–763 Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), 785
EFL, 150 School-based examinations, 536, see also
elementary school, 30–38 Literacy
English in the workplace, 122 SCLT, see Sustained-content and language
ESP, 102–106 teaching
instructed learning, 324 Scores, language testing
text analysis, 621–625 measure, 827–829
L2 writing, 597–603 quantitative methods, 835, 837
languages for specific purposes, validation, 803, 819
862–865 Scripts, 384, 995, 996–997
pragmatics, 321–322 SCT, see Sociocultural Theory
secondary school, 47 Second culture (C2), 644
World Englishes, 157 Second language (L2)
Research articles (RAs), 94 discourse, 617–619
Research—practice divide, 38 knowledge, 275–276, 438–442
Resourcing policy, 1019, 1024, 1030 learning, see Second language (L2)
Response-related bias, 787, see also Bias learning
REST, see Reading in EST listening, see Second language (L2)
Restricted literacy, 533, see also Literacy listening
Retranscribed data, 361–364 pedagogy, 293
Retrieval strategies, 761–762 resources for use, 442–445
Reversing language shift (RLS), socialization research, 302–303
1043–1047 socialization issues and future directions,
Rhetorical differences, 619 312–314
RLS, see Reversing language shift status planning, 972–976
Role play, 326–327, 637 strategy research, 764–768
Roman empire, 12, 656–657 writer, 598–599
Romanization of foreigns, 1026 writing and pedagogy
 SUBJECT INDEX 1137

disciplinary landscape, 597–603 Second language (L2) learning

instruction, 603–609 critical pedagogy, 932–933
Second language acquisition (SLA) ethnographies, 185–186
case study, 197–198 language-in-education, 1020, 1025, 1031
classroom research, 226 learning strategies
communication strategies, 488 methodologies, 758–759
Communicative Language Teaching, 641 research, 759–768
Computer-Assisted Language Learning, Output hypothesis, 471
746–747 metalinguistic (reflective) function, 478
conversation analysis, see Conversation sociocultural research, 343–344
Analysis (CA), second language ZPD, 336
acquisition Second language (L2) teaching
critical period hypothesis, 421–422 grammar translation, 665–668
fossilization definition, 456 language-in-education, 1023
theories, 465–467 syllabus development, 1005
grammar clusters, 556–557 L2/text
identity, 896–905 findings of analyses, 621–622
instructed grammar, 551 macro features, 617–619
learning principles, 138 micro features, 619– 621
morpheme order, 229 quantitative/qualitative analysis,
perceptions, 25 616–617
research written corpora, 622–623
cognitive processes, 272–276 Secondary Level English Proficiency (SLEP),
disciplinary contexts, 263–265 55
interlanguage development, 265–269 Secondary/high school, 306–308
linguistic processes, 269–272 Segments, pronunciation, 491–492
processes, 269 Selected/constrained constructed response,
speaking, 496–498 715
tutored/untutored learning, 923 Self-image, see Identity
UG, 439 Self-observations, 761
verbal report analysis, 841 Self-report, 328–329, 536–537, 761
World Englishes, 160–163 Self-reported data, 539–540
Second language (L2) listening Self-study diary, 329
African American Vernacular English, 296 SEM, see Structural Equation Modeling
comprehension processes Semantic prosody, 397
schemata, 513–514 Sensory store, 568
salient information, 512–513 Sentence processing studies, 443–444
inferencing, 514–515 Serbia, 994, 997
memory, 515–519 Set phrases, 550, 557
decoding processes 1700s, 660–661, see also Grammar translation
attention, 504 methods
perception, 505–507 Shadowing, 517
syntactic parsing, 510–511 Shared concepts, 513
word recognition, 507–508 Short-cut hypothesis, 566
interpretation processes Short-term assessment, 884, see also Teacher
pragmatic perspective, 519–521 assessment
listener response, 521–523 Short-term memory (STM)
Myers–Scotton theory, 290 L1 role and UG in sources of L2
paralinguistic cues in speech processing, knowledge, 440
511–512 L2 listening, 515, 518
regional variation, 293 reading, 568, 569
visual and aural cues integration, 512 working memory, 447, 448
vocabulary size and comprehension, Silent period, 343
508–510 Silent stage, 200, 201
1138 SUBJECT INDEX

SILL, see Strategy Inventory for Language Socioeconomic class, 293

Learning Socioeconomic status, 974
Simulated Test of Oral Proficiency (SOPI), Socioeducational contexts, 599–602, see also
836 Contexts
Simultaneous utterances, 369 Sociolinguistics
Singapore, 287, 288 definition, 281–283
Situated literacy, 533, see also Literacy language and variation, 292–293
Situational approach, 663 language contact
Situational code-switching, 290, see also change, 286–289
Code-switching new codes, 291–292
SLA, see Secondary language acquisition loss, 285–286
SLEP, see Secondary Level English language variation and social class,
Proficiency 293–296
Slips of the ear, 510 multilingualism/bilingualism, 283–285
Social change, 69 research, 296–297
Social class, 292–296 Sociolinguistic competence, 637, 720, 821,
Social context, 137–138, 785–787, 921, see also see also Competence
Context Sociolinguistic theories, 120
Social distance, 427, 897 Sociopolitical diglossia, 1021, see also
Social equality, 1027 Diglossia
Social identity theory, 896, 996, 1050–1051 Sociopragmatic competence, 317–318, see also
Social interactions, 27 Competence
Social mobility, 1062–1064 Sonority model, 491
Social practices orientation, 534–535 SOPI, see Simulated Test of Oral Proficiency
Social procedures, 522 SORS, see Survey of Reading Strategies
Social relationships, 923–924 Sound–symbol conventions, 997
Social studies, 32, 49, 50–51 South Africa, 140
Social value, 780, 997–998 South Korea, 996
Socialization factors, 644 Spain, 15
Socialization theories, 118–119 Spanish, 343–344, 618
Societal literacy, 536–540, see also Literacy Spanish immigrants, 426, 538
Socioconstructivist approach, 251 Spanish speakers, 429
Sociocultural approach, 733–734, 895–896 Spanish students
Sociocultural competence, 639–640, 642–645, critical period, 430
731, see also Competence learner differences, 141
Sociocultural identity, 160, see also World linguistic universals and SLA,
Englishes 271–272
Sociocultural patterns, 912–913 second language socialization, 308
Sociocultural research, L2 learning research ZPD and sociocultural research, 340
activity theory and task-based learning, SPEAK, see Speaking Proficiency in English
345–348 Assessment Kit
internalization, 340–344 Speaking Proficiency in English Assessment
longitudinal studies, 344–345 Kit (SPEAK), 864
theory of language, 348–349 Speaking, 349
ZPD, 336–340 educational contexts and EAP, 91–92
Sociocultural Theory (SCT) formal characteristics of learner speech,
Computer-Assisted Language Learning 490–498
pedagogy, 749–750 functions of learner speech, 486–490
discourse analysis, 842 rate, 507
language acquisition and classroom research overview, 485–486
research, 235–236 strategies, 764–765
output hypothesis, 480 teacher assessment, 881, 885–886
second language learning, 335, words, 586–587
348–349 Special Preparatory Program (SPP), 76
 SUBJECT INDEX 1139

Specific purpose language, 858–860 STEP tests, 784

Speculative Grammar, 657–658, see also Stereotypical knowledge, 917–918
Grammar STM, see Short-term memory
Speech Stories, listening, 585, 586
delivery, 369–370 Story grammar paradigm, 513
exchange systems, 356 Strategic competence, 731, 821, 822, see also
formal characteristics, 490–498 Competence
parts of and grammar translation Strategic discourse management, 753
methods, 655 Strategic planning, 723
processing, 511–512 Strategic power, 532, see also Literacy
production model, 722, 723 Strategies-Based Instruction (SBI), 758
rate, 505–507 Strategy document, 1035
teacher versus student and classroom Strategy Inventory for Language Learning
research, 228 (SILL), 759
Speech Accommodation Theory, 495, Structural Conformity Hypothesis (SCH),
842 493
Speech act theory, 120, 123, 385 Structural divergence, 618–619
Speech community, 283 Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), 836
Speech Learning Model, 428, 491, 492 Structuralist approach, 820
Speech of Prosody, 513 Structured input, 678, 679, 682–683, 717,
Speed-reading texts, 588 718
Spelling conventions, 997, 998 Structured setting, 914–915, see also
Spelling reform, 998 Ethnography
Spoken academic language, 92 Study-abroad programs, 913–914
Spoken interaction, 325–327 Style-based instruction, 758, see also Second
Spontaneous speech stage, 201 language learning
SPP, see Special Preparatory Program Styles and Strategies-Based Instruction
Sri Lanka, 140–141, 941–942 (SSBI), 758, 759, see also Second
SSBI, see Style and Strategies-Based language learning
Instruction Style manuals, 1008
SSR, see Sustained Silent Reading Style-stretching, 147
Standard form, English, see Acrolectal form Stylistic development, 1001–1002
Standard language, 160, see also Language; Stylistic repertoire, 621
World Englishes Stylistic simplification, 1004
Standard setting, 787, see also Bias Subconscious language acquisition, 229
Standardization process, 994–995 Subjacency, 271, 424, 429
Standardized testing, 55, 536, 782, 785–786, Subject matter knowledge, 107
871 Subject-specific dictionary, 1007, see also
Standards movement, 51–54 Dictionaries
State standards, 16, 67, 249, 536 Subject-specific reading, 838, see also Reading
Statistical literacy, 211, see also Literacy Subtractive bilingualism, 284
Status, 27 Suffixes, 591
Status planning Suggestopedia, 324
evolving framework and LPP, 959, 961 Sukarno, 1002
learning/teaching Summative writing assessment, 606
general aspects, 972–976 Suprasegmentals, 491–492
L2 needs, 976–983 Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS), 761, 765
national L2 learning and teaching Surveys, 846–847, 1036
policy, 984–986 Sustained content-based instruction, 688
specific aspects of actual decisions, Sustained-content and language teaching
986–988 (SCLT), 688
messages, 583 Sustained Silent Reading (SSR), 575
Status planning, Educational issues, 983 SW2, see Swedish as a Second Language
Statutory assessment, 870 Sweden, 131, 1021–1024
1140 SUBJECT INDEX

Swedification, 1021 assessment, see Classroom-based teacher

Swedish as Second language (SW2), assessment
1021–1022 bilingual education, 20
Swedish students, 423 classroom research, 227–229
Syllabaries, 995 Communicative Language Teaching,
Syllable marks, 506 640–641
Syllable structure, 440 Computer-Assisted Language Learning,
Syllables, 491–492, 656 745–746
Syllabus, 721, 1005 education, 203, 645–648
Symbolic power, 899 EFL, 137, 142–143, 146, 148
Syntactic anomalies, 510 ESL
Syntactic parsing, 510–511 adult education, 69, 70, 71, 77
Syntactic repertoire, 621 secondary school, 48, 55
Syntactic structure, 506 FonF taxonomy, 679–680
Syntax, 200, 377–378, 422, 655, 658 instructed grammar, 554–556
Systematic Functional Linguistics L2 writing, 606
framework, 842 language-in-education policy, 1017, 1018,
Systematic/functional model of language, 1022, 1028
122 materials development and corpus
Systems theory, 205 planning, 1006
success in school, 31
T workplace and ethnographies, 127–128
World Englishes, 164–165
Tactical difficulty, 384 Teaching
Taiwan, 29, 647–648 bilingual education, 19
Talk, 227–228 Computer-Assisted Language Learning,
Talk-in-interaction, 355 745–746
Tandem learning, 922 corpus-based descriptions, 399–401
Tape-based testing, 802 craft model and action research, 245
Tape-mediated tests, 788 ethnographies, 183–185
Target language (TL) instructed learning, 323–324
acquisition and social distance, 897 L2 text analyses, 621–622
critical pedagogy, 939–942 materials, 984
discourse, 732 reading, 573–577
ethnographic skills, 915 World Englishes, 163–166
FonF instruction, 678, 680, 685 Teaching English for Globalized
hypothesis testing function and output Communication (TEGCOM), 905
hypothesis, 478 Teaching English to speakers of other
identity, 897, 899 languages (TESOL), 78, 165, 166, 905
pragmatics, 322–323 Teaching of English for Educational Purposes
World Englishes, 159 (TEEP), 863–865
Target Language Use (TLU), 857, 863–864 Teaching to the test, 918
Task-based instruction, 553–554, 720–722 Team teaching, 107
Task-based learning, 345–348 Technical bias analysis, 806
Task-based research, 722–725 Technical–scientific approach, 243
Task framework, 844 Technology context, 787–788, see also Context
Task engagement, 723 Technology, 743–746
Tasks, 52, 553–554 TEEP, see Test of English for Educational
Taxonomy, FonF, see Form-focused People
instruction, FonF taxonomy TEGCOM, see Teaching English for
TBE, see Transitional bilingual education Globalized Communication
Teachability Hypothesis, 268, 715 Tertiary education, 87
Teacher TESOL, see Teaching English to speakers of
action research, 245 other languages
 SUBJECT INDEX 1141

Test accommodations, 790 Text-frames, 737

Test bias studies, 536, 786, see also Bias Text-pragmatics, 737
Test dimensionality, 836 Text-semantics, 737
Test of English as a Foreign Language Textbooks
(TOEFL) corpus planning products, 1008
inferencing and comprehension processes, critical pedagogy, 938, 940
515 language-in-education, 1015, 1018,
in secondary school, 55 1028
L2 writing instruction, 607 quantitative methods, 212–213
language assessment, 785 Textual enhancement, 678
language-in-education policy, 1019 Thai, 430
qualitative methods, 834–835, 848 Theory of language, 348–349
quantitative methods, 840 Theory of molecular language acquisition,
technology and language assessment, 426
788 Theoretical perspective, 321
testing languages for specific purposes, Think-aloud protocols, 477, 759, 761, 844, 845,
858, 865 see Verbal protocols
Test of English for International Three-Year Economic Rehabilitation and
Communication (TOEIC), 864, 1019 Development Plan, 1026
Test of Spoken English (TSE), Threshold level, 636, 738
835–837 Time axis, 980–981
Test of Written English (TWE), 607 Time constraint, 984
Test performance, 515 TL, see Target language
Test revision projects, 864 TLU, see Target Language Use
Test specificity, 798, see also TOEFL, see Test of English as a Foreign
Validity/validation Language
Test validation, 802 TOEIC, see Test of English for International
Testing Communication
bilingual education, 19 Tolerance-oriented rights, 1065–1067
Computer-Assisted Language Learning, Tone, pronunciation, 492
746 Top-down processing
Fairness, 780–781, 786–787, 806, 843 corpus planning, 1002
language and assessment, 779 discourse, 733, 736, 737
politicization of school-level, 782–783 L2 listening, 503
SBI and L2 learning, 758–759 reading, 564, 565
vocabulary, 593–594 word recognition and decoding, 507
Testing languages, specific purposes Topic-centered communication, 825
definition, 858–860 Total Physical Response (TPR), 229
specific purpose language, 860–861 Toubon Law of 1994, 1047
linguistic competence, 860–866 Toyo list, 997, 1016
Test-taker scripts, 806–809 TPR plus, 149
Test-taking strategies, 844 TPR, see Total Physical Response
Text TRACE model, 507
analysis and L2 text research, 122, 624 Training
Communicative Language Teaching, action research, 245
644 corpus linguistics techniques, 402
Contrastive Rhetoric, 599 in the workplace, 126–127
text-conditioned interaction model, 385 language-in-education, 1018
grammar translation, 654 raters and Rasch measurement, 839
structure and reading, 568 World Englishes, 164–165
vocabulary, 586 Transactional discourse, 486–490
Text-based approach, 69, 934 Transfer, 33–34, 320, 492–493, 762–763
Text-conditioned interaction model, Transfer-of-information, 684
383–386 Transformation, 942
1142 SUBJECT INDEX

Transformative effects, 519 Communicative Language Teaching, 636

Transition Period, 1026 English in the workplace, 122, 126, 127
Transitional bilingual education (TBE), 10, intelligence testing for
540 immigration/citizenship, 784
Transitional competence, 265, see also language assessment, 789–790
Competence language minorities and
Translation, 100, 402, 661, 666 literacy/biliteracy, 529
Transliteration, 996–997 Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights,
Triangulation, 180, 236–237 1066
Tribal languages, 10, 14 Universal Grammar (UG)
Trickle up testing, 873 characteristics of pronunciation of L2
Trilingual models, 10, 11 learners, 493
Truth value, 795, see also Validation/validity conditions, 139–140
TSE, see Test of Spoken English Contrastive Rhetoric, 382
Turkey, 996 critical period, 430
Tutored/untutored learning, 923 EFL, 144–145
TWE, see Test of Written English linguistic universals and SLA, 271, 272
Two-way collaborative tasks, 521, 522 maturation link to accessibility and age,
Two-way convergent tasks, 676 424–430
Two-way programs, see Dual immersion processing, 443–444
programs sources of L2 knowledge, 438–442
Typical-error approach, 460, 461–462, 463, World Englishes, 161
see also Errors Universal likings, 149
Typological universals, 270 Unlearning, 479
Typology, 531, see also Literacy Unplanned language planning, 965–966
Uptake, 521
U Use, knowing a word, 583, 584
Users as producers, 1006, see also Corpus
UG, see Universal grammar planning
Ultimate attainment, 419 U-shaped learning curve, 200
Unassisted learning, 586 Utterances, 510, see also Second language
Uncertainty management theory, listening
520
Unconventional literacy, 532–533, see also V
Literacy
UNESCO, see United Nations Educational, Validity
Scientific and Cultural Organization assessment of L2 writing instruction,
Unfamiliar words, 590, see also Words 607–608
Unfocused tasks, 724 classroom-based teacher assessment,
Unidirectional dictionary, 1007, see also 871–874
Dictionaries language testing
Unitary concept, 798–801 qualitative approach, 840, 841
United Kingdom quantitative methods, 835
adult education, 70, 74, 77, 79 Strategy Inventory for Language
change of image/identity, 1042 Learning, 760
interactional sociolinguistic studies of the tests and language assessment, 780–781
workplace, 125 Validity mosaic, 828
United Nations Draft Declaration on the Validity/validation, language testing
Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 1066 validation
United Nations Educational, Scientific and argument, 803
Cultural Organization (UNESCO), case study, 804
13 case study hypotheses, 804–805
United States limits, 809–810
adult education, 67–68, 69, 71, 72, 77, 79 scope, 802–803
 SUBJECT INDEX 1143

testing the hypotheses, 805–809 Vocabulary Levels Test, 835

way forward, 810–811 Vocational needs, 984
validity Vocational tests, 866
appeal to logic, 795–796 Voice stops, 270
claim of reliability, 796–797
local and universal, 797–798 W
unitary, 798–801
Value, Contrastive Rhetoric, 386–387 Wales, 14, 1035–1037, 1040
VARBRUL analysis, 492–493 Washback, 647, 785–786, 841, 846, 848
Verb negatives, 267 Weak continuity approach, 461
Verb tense, 549, 655 Weak interface position, see Interface position
Verbal protocols, 329–330 Weak performance hypothesis, 859
Verbal report analysis, 466 Weaknesses, ethnographies, 187–188, see also
Verbs, 439, 548, 654 Ethnography
Vernacular, 498 Webster’s dictionary, 998, see also
Vernacular literacy, 533, see also Literacy Dictionaries
Vernacular literacy materials, 1008 Welsh Language Board (WLB), 1035–1036
Video input, 863 Western classrooms, 138
Vietnam, 140, 142, 143, 145 wh phrases, 439
Vietnamese student, 202 White Australia Policy, 783–784
Virtual classrooms, 225 Whole language approach, 69
Visual aids, 658, 663 Wider context, 781–791, see also Context
Visual cues, 512 Winter Illiteracy Eradication Movement in
Visual impairment, 790 Rural Areas, 1026
Visual learner, 758 WLB, see Welsh Language Board
Vives, 659, 660 WM, see Working memory
Vocabulary Word cards, 590–591, see also Vocabulary
Communicative Language Teaching, Word counts, 624
636 Word decoding, 33
comprehension and autonomous Word frequencies, 394
orientation, 534 Word order, 268–269, 377, 658
corpus linguistics Word parts, 591–592
L2 teaching, 396–397 Word recognition, 507–508, 567
techniques in classroom, 402 Words
English for academic purposes, 90–91 corpus linguistics, 396
etymological nature of English grammar in use, 548
vocabulary, 582–583 grammar translation, 654–655, 656
grammar connections, 549 perception, 505
L2 listening, 508–510 ranked frequency, 581–582
listening, 585–586 Working memory (WM)
noticing hypothesis and explicit/implicit knowledge and
Computer-Assisted Language universal processing, 445
Learning, 747 learning, 447–448
reading, 567, 587–588 listening
repetition and L2 text analyses, 621 comprehension processes, 516, 517
sequences in SLA and case study, 201 decoding processes, 504, 507
speaking, 586–587 Workplace, 118, 310–312
statistical nature of English vocabulary, World Englishes, teaching and learning
581–582 ideology, 160–161
strategies, 589–593 interlanguage, 159–160
testing, 593–594 research, 157–159
transactional discourse, 489 SLA research, 161–163
using pictures, 659 varieties in diaspora, 156–157
writing, 588–589 Writer-responsible text, 618, see also Text
1144 SUBJECT INDEX

Writing teacher assessment, 882–883, 886

Communicative Language Teaching, 645 text-conditioned interaction model, 385
college transition, 59 validation of language testing, 806–807
discourse, 50, 375, 994–995, 1015 words, 588–589
English for academic purposes, 89–90 writer, 379–383
genre studies and ESP/EAP, 600
in elementary school, 33–35 Z
L1 versus L2 text comparisons, 620
portfolio assessment, 608–609 Zionism, 1043, 1046
process-oriented writing, 604–605 Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), 162,
strategy research, 765–766 336–340
system and LPP, 995, 1016 ZPD, see Zone of proximal development