Worldwide experience in teaching foreign languages. Key words

1.5 There is no technical language for the description of L2 classroom interaction

It has frequently been noted that L2 teaching is lacking in technical language for the description of what actually takes place in the classroom:

Research in classrooms has been limited by not having an agreed-upon set of activity types..., so little comparison was possible among studies.... Moreover, while the pedagogical literature on language abounds with various proposals for communicative language activities, it appears to have avoided a concise taxonomy of types. (Chaudron, 1988, p. 187)

An associated problem is that while we have an `argot' of activity types, it frequently turns out in practice that teachers use the identical term to mean different things. This is well illustrated by Mitchell (1988), who found that Scottish secondary school teachers of French tended to view the activity type of `role play' in two different ways:

... disagreement began when teachers started to describe the procedure for the activity itself. Broadly speaking they fell into two groups: those who saw the point of role play being to give pupils an opprtunity for improvisation and for creative FL use, and those who saw it as a dramatic production complete with pre-scripted `lines' to be reproduced. (Mitchell, 1988, pp. 26- 27)

Breen's (1989) conception of the three phases of a classroom task is relevant here. Breen proposes a temporal structure of task-as-workplan (before classroom implementation), task-in-process (what actually happens in the classroom) and task outcomes (the product of the classroom activity). The basic problem is that L2 teaching has been primarily concerned with the task-as-workplan. The evidence for this is the huge variety of resource books which have been published over recent years which catalogue an ever-increasing number and diversity of tasks-as-workplans. We have very little evidence of how these are translated into tasks-in-process: what kind of interaction do they actually produce in the classroom? What I am suggesting, then, is that L2 teaching will never be able to have a technical language or taxonomy of activity types by examining tasks-as-workplans: this will only be possible through analysis of classroom [-4-] interaction, which would be able to reveal the nature of the task-in-process. It may be, then, that the teaching process (as well as the learning process) can only be accurately described through description of L2 classroom interaction.