critical pedagogy and second language education - Science Direct

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A major lacuna in second language education is its divorce from broader issues ... teacher not as an autonomous intellectual but as a classroom technician.
Syem, Primed

Vol. 18. No. 3. pp. 303-311, in Great Britain

CRITICAL

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0346-251x/90 $3.00 + 0.00 Pergamon Press plc

AND SECOND ALASTAIR

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PENNYCOOK

The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,

Toronto, Canada

A major lacuna in second language education is its divorce from broader issues in educational theory. While this same point was made last year in this journal by White [Curriculum studies and ELT. System 17, 83-93 (1989)], his work ironically also demonstrates a lack of understanding of some basic issues in curriculum philosophy. White misrepresents some key ideological aspects and is thus able to reject the work of many more radical educators, and to adopt Skilbeck’s limited model for curriculum development. The nature of second language education, however, requires us to understand our educational practice in broader social, cultural, and political terms, and it is to critical pedagogy that I think we could most profitably turn to extend our conception of what we are doing as language teachers.

If we were to ask a selection of language teachers and applied linguists to identify the questions of principal concern to them, I think we would arrive at a list something along the lines of the following: What is the relationship between conscious and subconscious learning, and which is more important? Is there a “logical problem” in second language acquisition that the outcome cannot be explained in terms of the input? What is the effect on learning of affective and cognitive factors? What is the relationship between input and acquisition? What is the best age at which to start learning a second language? What can one do to improve student motivation? Should we teach grammar and, if so, how? What is the relationship between form and function in language? How does one balance the needs for fluency and accuracy? What effect does error correction have on the learning process? How do different question types affect learning? Are certain learning or communicative strategies more effective than others? How can one best organize groupwork in the classroom? How can we balance process and product orientations in writing? Can we replace discrete-point tests with integrative tests? What uses do computers have for language learning? Editor’s note: this is a challenging and controversial article which will, we hope, arouse debate We would be very happy to see some response to the points raised by Alastair Pennycook! 303

in our readers.

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Disparate though they seem, I would suggest that these questions share a common ground, defined perhaps more by what they leave out than what they include. What they appear to share is a common instrumentalist and positivist orientation towards language and teaching. In this view, language becomes an objective system that can more or less be described by the theorists and transmitted by the practitioners, and teaching becomes a technical process prescribed by the experts and implemented by the teachers. These questions seem to derive on the one hand from researchers’ attempts to understand the language learning process according to the positivistic paradigms of the social sciences, or, on the other, from teachers’ struggles to relate this often inappropriate knowledge to the daily realities of classroom practice. What is sorely lacking here is a view of the social, cultural, political and historical context and implications of language teaching. Language is reduced to a system for transmitting messages rather than an ideational, signifying system that plays a central role in how we understand ourselves and the world. The social context of teaching and theorizing is not acknowledged and a harmful distinction is maintained between theory and practice that decontextualizes and makes inapplicable academic work and renders the teacher not as an autonomous intellectual but as a classroom technician. It does not concern itself with educational theory and its sociopolitical context and thus fails to make central the most fundamental pedagogical questions regarding student empowerment. I would like to suggest, then, that while these questions are useful enough within limited areas of second language education (SLE) concern, there are some far more fundamental questions that need to be raised. Before I state what I feel are the central issues in SLE, however, I would like to turn to a discussion first of the tendency in SLE to divorce itself from broader aspects of educational theory, and second of the need to look to critical pedagogy as the most provocative area of educational thought today. THE DIVORCE OF SLE FROM EDUCATIONAL

THEORY

Stern (1983: p. 518) suggests that of all the disciplines that inform language teaching, educational theory has been the least dealt with: “A more deliberate interpretation of language teaching in curriculum terms and, more broadly, in terms of educational theory is needed if we want to arrive at a more balanced and more comprehensive view of teaching”. What my introductory comments above and Stern’s remark suggest, then, is that language teaching has remained strangely isolated from educational theory and the sociopolitical questions that better educational theorists have been more inclined to raise. In trying to understand why this should be so, it is perhaps first worth considering the particular nature of the language class itself, i.e. that language is both the content and the medium of the class, a relationship which has perhaps led language teaching theory to look in on itself and become overly concerned with the inner workings of language and language learning at the expense of other issues. The move towards technical views of the curriculum earlier this century, the arrival of positivism in sociology, psychology, and educational theory in the 195Os, and the growing specialization of educational subdisciplines within a conceptual-empirical model, laid the ground for the growth of applied linguistics as a scientist discipline divorced from broader social, cultural, political or philosophical issues. The focus in SLE, as Allen (1984) and Richards (1985) have pointed out, has primarily been on the syllabus-the selection and sequencing of language items to be taught rather

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than on broader curricular concerns. It is the linguistic sciences and psycholinguistics that have been the principal informing disciplines for SLE, a position typified by Spolsky’s (1980: p. 72) model of the main contributing disciplines to educational linguistics. Arguing that a theory of language (linguistics) is insufficient, he adds theories of learning (psycholinguistics) and of language use (sociolinguistics), arriving at a model of SLE that nowhere includes educational theory. When one considers the predominance of structuralist paradigms in these areas (especially as adopted by applied linguists), with their claims to asocial, apolitical and ahistorical investigative procedures, it starts to become clearer how SLE’s isolation may have come about. It is also necessary to note the highly political nature of language itself and many issues around SLE. When the notion of a language is so politically based, standing in a difficult relationship to the questions of the status of dialects and standard forms, and intimately connected to the development and maintenance of the nation state, and when much SLE is tied to the contentious issues of bilingualism, minority education and internationalism, it is not surprising that, within an education system that has itself turned its back on political and cultural issues, there has been a reluctance to deal with the full array of social, political and cultural implications that arise within SLE. If we see education as a fundamentally political process, involved in the production and reproduction of social differences, and language learning as an equally contentious political issue, then the reluctance to deal with the fundamental but awkward social, cultural and political questions that surround SLE becomes on the one hand understandable but on the other reprehensible. Most work in SLE, then, tends to explore the kinds of questions outlined above, and where attempts have been made to relate SLE to educational and curricular theory, these have often been very limited in that they have looked only at the instrumentalist conceptualempirical models and thus, I would argue, failed once again to deal sufficiently with the social, cultural and political implications of education. While Stern (1983), for example, argues strongly for greater curricular input to SLE and discusses at length important aspects of curriculum theory (philosophy, components and processes), his model ultimately does little more than cross-tabulate content and objectives derived originally from the taxonomy developed by Bloom in the 1950s (Bloom, 1956). Stern argues that a “means-ends view of teaching is unavoidable in language pedagogy” (Stern, 1983: p. Sol), thus offering little help in going beyond the traditional means-ends views of curriculum that have for so long predominated. Similarly, while Richards (1985) argues that needs analysis, the setting of objectives, specification of method and content, and evaluation can be integrated in a curriculum model, he, like Stern, fails to consider philosophical and ideological issues and adopts a limited means-ends model that differs little from the classic models of Tyler (1949) and Taba (1962). These conceptual-empirical approaches, while still enjoying some favor in traditional views of the curriculum (e.g. McDiarmid, 1987), have received much criticism for their positivist views of knowledge (see Giroux et al., 1981). Views of education and curricula based on positivist views of knowledge tend to make strong claims to objectivity and the empirical verification of facts without questioning the nature of knowledge or truth, or the social, cultural or political interests of different claims to knowledge. We may, roughly speaking, divide curricular approaches into two main orientations, what Freire calls “banking” and Barnes “transmission” models on the one hand, and, on the

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other, process-oriented curricula that emphasize student exploration. For SLE, Tumposky (1984) points out the problems with the proficiency or behavioral objectives typical of the first type of curriculum: they mistakenly assume that language learning can be accomplished by mastering pre-specified, hierarchically arranged, discrete items; that it is possible to “master” a linguistic skill; that knowledge can be translated into observable behavior; that everything taught must be capable of post-instructional assessment; and that poor performance on the students’ part is the result of poor or inefficient management on the teacher’s part. Candlin (1984: p. 35) goes one step further and suggests that “there are major objections, ideological, social, psychological and pedagogical, against the imposition of a step-by-step programme on teachers and learners which all must follow”. Auerbach (1986), for example, has argued that competency-based curricula play an important role in socializing immigrants into the lowest socioeconomic stratum. There are very basic ideological and practical questions that need to be raised in the implementation of a meansends view of the curriculum. It is not sufficient merely to look to curricular theory for a model, if the ideological and educational implications of that model are not explored. More recently, White (1988, 1989) has also argued that English language teaching should pay greater attention to educational theory. Questioning the efficacy of both means-ends and process models, he suggests the adoption of Skilbeck’s (1984) “Situational Model”. Unfortunately, White’s arguments are based on a serious misunderstanding of curricular ideologies, thus undermining support for his adoption of Skilbeck. Since, therefore, White ironically typifies the lack of understanding of issues outside the narrow confines of applied linguistics so common amongst those working in SLE, and since his work was published in this journal (White, 1989), it is worth looking in more detail at White’s attempt to locate his work in a broader context. He suggests that there are three broad educational and philosophical orientations to curriculum design: classical humanism (transmission of an esteemed cultural heritage), progressivism (growth and self-realization of the individual), and reconstructionism (education as an instrument of social change). While these categories are rather incomplete, they do at least reflect some of the accepted views on curriculum ideology: Giroux et al. (1981) talk of traditionalists, conceptual-empiricists and reconceptualists; Davies (1969) of conservative, revisionist, romantic and democratic orientations; and Scrimshaw (1983) of progressivist, instrumentalist, reconstructionist, classical humanist and liberal humanist. It is when White attempts to relate these categories to SLE, however, that he makes two major errors. First, he draws too close a comparison between ideology and method, thus assuming that the “grammar-translation method” is “an expression of classical-humanism” (1989: p. 85). As I have argued at length elsewhere (Pennycook, 1989), there is little conceptual certitude to “methods” and it is certainly problematic to conflate a teaching approach with a philosophy and then to dismiss both as “traditional”. Second, and more seriously, he then shows little understanding of the philosophical orientations themselves, suggesting that reconstructionism is “associated with a system-behavioral approach. . . . in which the pedagogical procedures are based on Skinner’s application to education of the principles of operant conditioning (Skinner, 1968)” (White, 1988: p. 25; 1989: p. 85). Thus, while on the one hand correctly identifying Dewey as the father of the reconstructionists (cf. Giroux, 1988), he then claims that they were Skinnerian behaviorists and that presumably behaviorism saw education as a means of radical social change.

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Giroux (1988) gives a detailed account of the progressive and radical policies of the reconstructionists in the 1930s amongst whom there was a “common sentiment in their overall dissatisfaction with capitalist society and in their underlying faith in what some have called the principles of militant democracy” (Giroux, 1988: p. 86). As the mood turned against all leftist policies in the United States after the war, and as behaviorism and psychometric evaluation increased, one of their members, Harold Rugg, even had his books burned for their leftist tendencies (Carr and Kemmis, 1986: p. 14). White’s adoption of Skilbeck’s (1984) “situational model” and rejection of reconstructionist or progressivist orientations, then, is based on the erroneous identification of behaviorism with reconstructionism and then an assumed tension between process (progressivist) and meansends models. This is a serious misrepresentation of the views of radical educators, allowing the rejection of all the implications of education for social change. Having dismissed all other views, White is then able to adopt Skilbeck’s “somewhat wooden and almost technical ‘model’ of curriculum development” (Carr and Kemmis, 1986: p. 19), and to suggest strategies of innovation based on business management. As Carr and Kemmis (1986) point out, and as Skilbeck has apparently acknowledged in private (and cf. Skilbeck, 1984: p. 231), his model oversimplifies complex issues to a misleading degree. Furthermore, “where it attempted to provide a framework for practical judgement, it was often used as a framework for legitimation of curriculum ideas-as a formula rather than a sequence of problematic issues to be resolved in practice” (1986: p. 19). I would argue, then, that the type of model proposed by Skilbeck is not at all what is needed in curriculum development for SLE. This question should remain open for debate, however. My principal objection is with the disregard for educational theory (especially within work claiming to do the opposite), and the misrepresentation of more radical approaches to education. These, I believe, are not simply minor misunderstandings but reflect the overall isolation of SLE from educational theory and its broader philosophical underpinnings. For those who have tried to relate SLE to educational theory, there has been little evidence of an understanding of the underlying ideological questions involved, so that either a conceptualempirical model has been uncritically adopted or the philosophical issues were misunderstood. There are, of course, exceptions to this, most notably in the work of those who have looked to a Freirean model of pedagogy for inspiration (see, for example, Crawford-Lange, 1982; Graman, 1988; Wallerstein, 1983). It is in the work of Freire (e.g. 1970) and others who have come to work under the rubric of critical pedagogy that I think we can find the most useful understandings of the fundamental, social, political and cultural questions in education before readdressing ourselves to the types of questions that I believe need to be raised in SLE.

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Essential to the view of most of the critical pedagogy theorists (e.g. Michael Apple, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Roger Simon) are two predominant elements: a notion of critique that also carries with it a sense of possibility for transformation, and an exploration of the nature of and relationship between culture, knowledge and power. Viewing schools as cultural arenas where diverse ideological and social forms are in constant struggle, critical

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pedagogy examines schools both in their contemporary sociopolitical context and in their historical context. Drawing on various critical traditions-the work of European critical theorists such as Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, the North American tradition from Dewey through the social reconstructionists of the 1930s and more recent work in the new sociology of education, feminism and post-modernist and post-structuralist thought-these theorists articulate a position strongly opposed to positivistic, ahistorical and depoliticised analyses of politics and power in education. The strongest and most pressing criticisms have, not surprisingly, been aimed at the conservative discourse on education, especially in its newly resurgent form embodied in the work of writers such as Bloom and Hirsch. These writers, as Aronowitz and Giroux (1988) and Feinberg (1989) point out, link apparent crises in American economic and military power with a crisis in schooling and suggest that this has in turn been caused by the liberal educational reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. From this human capital perspective, a position is then made for forms of schooling that emphasize monoparadigmatic forms of culture either as a programmatic list of “cultural literacy” or the “Great Books”, and forms of knowledge and skill deemed necessary to produce a labor force that can compete aggressively in the world market. As Giroux (1988) points out-and David (1989) and Apple (1989) suggest that similar trends are occurring under Thatcherism in Britain-this position has lead to a stress on extreme authority in the classroom, to curricula that emphasize a narrow selection of both skills and forms of culture and knowledge and to a view of education that ignores all political issues around minority, race, class, or gender issues. Although the weight of criticism has been aimed at the conservative discourse on education, liberal and more radical views have also been criticized for the limitations of their analyses. Thus while it is acknowledged that liberalism does at least move beyond the reactionary monocultural and technological position outlined above, it is criticized for articulating positions on pluralism and child-centered education that fail to deal adequately with the politics of difference and all too often decline into a romantic and anti-intellectual celebration of individual difference. More radical views of schooling have been criticized for being over-deterministic in seeing schools only as sites of social and cultural reproduction rather than as sites of cultural production and struggle, and thus for not moving beyond a language of criticism to account for student resistance, human agency and a pedagogy of possibility. It is this notion of possibility, of going beyond criticism to take a moralpolitical stance and define a utopian goal towards which one can struggle, that permits the construction of a link between theory and action or praxis, and a view of teachers as transformative intellectuals. Both Simon and Giroux turn to the notion of the Blochian “not-yet” and Bloch’s argument that the only critical theory of value is one that can also articulate the possibility of hope and change. “The project of possibility,” Simon (1987: p. 375) argues, “requires an education rooted in a view of human freedom as the understanding of necessity and the transformation of necessity”. Central to this idea of transformative critique is the view that knowledge is socially constructed. Indeed, Simon (1984: p. 381) suggests that the “first premise of any form of critical pedagogy” is “that the knowledge claims are ‘interested’ and are modes of intelligibility grounded in the struggles, tensions, and inequalities that mark history’s bequest to the present”. Critical pedagogy, then, starts by recognizing that all knowledge is

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constructed in a particular social, cultural and historical nexus of relationships and thus that all claims to knowledge are “interested”, i.e. reflect the particular concerns of a group or individual and are always thus bound up in relationships of power. The significance of this argument is that it opposes all claims that knowledge can be value-free, objective, ahistorical or universal and, regarding knowing therefore as an ideological process, allows us to see the relationships between knowledge, power, culture and ideology. We can then appreciate how “power relations exist in correlation with forms of school knowledge that both distort the truth and produce it” (Giroux, 1988: p. 102). For critical pedagogy, then, the project becomes on the one hand to investigate and make explicit how knowledge is produced and legitimated within schools and society and then, on the other, to confront those forms of knowledge critically in an attempt to legitimate other subjugated forms and to produce new forms. An important area of work is involved in critical literacy. Following the pioneering work of Paulo Freire, who saw literacy not as some technical skill but as a means for learners to decode and demythologize their own cultural traditions and the inequitable structures of their society, and for whom, therefore, literacy was inherently political, Giroux and others (see, for example, Cook-Gumperz, 1986; Freire and Macedo, 1987; McLaren, 1988; Rockhill, 1987) have developed a notion of critical literacy. In contrast to the more common views of literacy as a functional skill or as acquisition of a fixed body of cultural knowledge, these writers have argued that literacy must be based on a view of knowledge as socially constructed, and thus as an ideological process. In this view, by helping students to decode the ideological dimensions of texts, institutions, social practices and cultural forms, critical literacy aims to develop a critical citizenry capable of analyzing and challenging the oppressive characteristics of the society. Literacy, Giroux (1988) points out, is not emancipatory in itself, but is the precondition for engaging in struggles around relations of meaning and power. Significant aspects of this literacy are the “liberation of remembrance”-exploring past injustices in human history as a form of liberating memory-and literacy as “cultural politics”-viewing the learning and use of literacy in the context of the social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of everyday life. A further important aspect of critical pedagogy is the centralizing of a notion of culture as a productive system. It is common in much sociological analysis to relegate culture to a secondary position as a static reflection of the society, an informing spirit or part of the subjective domain. This limited, positivist and structuralist view of culture can also be commonly found in SLE. Where culture has been acknowledged in more than the elitist “high culture” sense as arts, music, literature and so on, it has typically been reduced to a fixed body of artifacts and behaviors that can be transmitted as an adjunct to a language syllabus. For a number of those working around critical pedagogy, however, culture is elevated to a fundamental role in the way we make sense of the world and is taken to be a productive rather than merely a reflective system. Giroux (1988: p. 193) and McLaren (1989: p. 171) use the term culture to signify “the particular ways in which a social group lives out and makes sense of its ‘given’ circumstances and conditions of life”. From this point, critical pedagogy is then able to outline a project of cultural politics, a project which makes problematic the way in which teachers and students “sustain, resist or accommodate those languages, ideologies, social processes, and myths that position them within existing relations of power and dependency” (Giroux, 1988: p. 136). This, then, starts to address questions of student voice, popular culture and difference.

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Giroux (1989) has recently argued for a pedagogy of and for difference, a pedagogy that not only respects student voice and difference, using students’ lived experiences both as a narrative for agency and as a reference for critique, but also relates these differences to the wider social order, creating the democratic sense of respect for difference that is essential to any notion of equality in society. Furthermore, critical pedagogy looks to popular culture not in terms of an ideology critique of mass culture but as a significant pedagogical site of struggle that raises important questions about student subjectivity and experience (see Giroux and Simon, 1989). Closely connected to the emphasis on student experience and popular culture is the notion of voice, “the means at our disposal-the discourses available to use-to make ourselves understood and listened to, and to define ourselves as active participants in the world” (Giroux, 1988: p. 199). These concepts allow for the exploration of students’ cultures and lives and of the connection between experience and knowledge. They suggest a form of pedagogy that emphasizes, validates and explores the culture, knowledge and experiences that students bring to school and yet does not sink into the vapid individualism of “humanistic”, “student-centred” approaches. The criticisms of current educational policy are not only aimed at the current disempowerment of students but also at the disempowerment of teachers, who have become increasingly positioned as classroom technicians employed to transmit a fixed body of knowledge. Essential to critical pedagogy, then, is the realization of the need to empower teachers, to endow them with “emancipatory authority” as “transformative intellectuals”, to view teachers as “professionals who are able and willing to reflect upon the ideological principles that inform their practice, who connect pedagogical theory and practice to wider social issues, and who work together to share ideas, exercise power over the conditions of their labor, and embody in their teaching a vision of a better and more humane life” (Giroux and McLaren, 1989: p. xxiii). Thus teachers are seen not as technicians employed to implement set curricula, but as intellectuals constantly exploring their own and their students’ lives. This view of the empowered and empowering teacher also breaks down the troublesome theory/practice divide and adopts the notion of informed praxis. In this section, in the interests of (I hope) clarity and brevity, I have presented critical pedagogy as something of a canon of thought as found in the works of Henry Giroux. This has had some major drawbacks: not only have I ignored the important work on, for example, the political economy of textbooks and gendered division of the educational workforce (Apple, 1986), and a whole body of work on feminist pedagogy (e.g. Weiler, 1988), but I have also presented critical pedagogy as a far more coherent body of thought than it really is. Weiler’s important work, for example, while drawing on some similar intellectual traditions, brings much more to the fore the fundamental question for many women of the history of their silencing and thus the issue of voice. Important, too, is Ellsworth’s (1989) recent criticism of the “repressive myths” of critical pedagogy. She argues that critical pedagogy is too abstract and utopian, based on rationalist assumptions, and too little grounded in classroom realities. While I think she misrepresents a number of aspects of critical pedagogy (I find little grounds for the accusation of rationalist assumptions, for example), her illustrations of the huge difficulties of teaching critically are important. But Ellsworth shows herself to be a brave and critical educator, and, while I am slightly hesitant in suggesting that we can easily appropriate her criticisms, I think her article adds to the critical debate about education and adds a much-needed critical voice against any canonization of critical pedagogy.

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What I have suggested, then, is that SLE is in dire need of locating itself within a broader range of educational, social, political, cultural and historical thought. Furthermore, what I am suggesting is that, given the political issues centred around language and language education, SLE would do well to look at educational theory that is critical, politically engaged and has transformative goals. What we must surely be engaged in as teachers is the empowerment of our students. This, however, raises the fundamental question: empowerment for what? As Simon (1987) argues, a project of possibility would have to go beyond seeing empowerment simply in terms of “making it”. Rather, from the point of view of critical pedagogy, empowerment would include not only a critical element that would aim to help students draw upon and investigate their own cultural resources and investigate other knowledge claims, but also a transformative vision that would aim to change the society itself and the possibilities it presents. At this juncture, I would like to return more specifically to SLE and raise the question as to what such a view of empowerment implies for students learning a language. If we view ourselves as educators whose principal aim is the empowerment of our students and whose transformative project is to go beyond helping students simply to “make it”, then clearly we must do more than teach functional language skills within a competencybased curriculum. Following the notion of empowerment outlined above, our aims in SLE would need to include validating and investigating students’ knowledge and cultural resources and developing language skills within a framework of transformative critique. From this point, we can start to outline some of the questions which I feel we as teachers should be asking about our educational practice: Under what conditions can induction into a new language and culture be empowering? What kinds of curricula will allow students to explore critically both the second language and the second culture? How can one validate and explore students’ own cultures and experiences through the second language? How can students pose their own problems through the second language? How can one validate student voice when the means of expression of that voice may be very limited? How can one work with limited language yet avoid trivializing content and learners? How does one balance the need to explore critically the forms and implications of standard languages and the need to empower students by teaching that standard language? What are the interests served by functional proficiency-based language programs? What would popular multiculturalism actually look like? What are the implications for other languages, cultures and forms of knowledge, of the worldwide spread of English? In what ways can educational technology limit and in what ways expand the possibilities of SLE students? How can teachers (and students) escape the prescriptive force of prespecified content and methods? How can teachers and students gain control over the evaluation process? What are the interests served by the knowledge produced by applied linguists?

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What are the implications of the use of information-processing and computer metaphors in second language acquisition theories? What are the effects of the preponderance of second language theory being produced in the particular context of North America? How does the political economy of textbook publishing affect SLE? How is the gendered division of the workforce in SLE perpetuated? I am not, of course, going to try to answer these questions, for that would be both presumptuous and ill-advised. Rather, I have tried to suggest the types of questions which I believe SLE teachers need to be asking themselves if they are to go beyond the narrow definition of SLE concerns implied by the questions at the beginning of this paper. This, I am suggesting, is of great importance if we recognize the political context of SLE and see ourselves as teachers with an emancipatory and transformative mission rather than as classroom technicians. Some of these questions are being addressed in the better work on bilingual education, through which, it has been convincingly argued, silent voices can be raised (Trueba, 1989) and minority students can be empowered (Cummins, 1989). Far less work of this sort has been carried out in SLE, but I would suggest that if we are to be involved in any useful form of education for our students, we must start to consider some of these issues. Acknowledgements-I this paper. Monica food for thought.

would like to thank Jim Cummins for his comments on an earlier draft of Heller, Roger Simon, and Arleen Schenke have also provided me with much

NOTES ’ This view he attributes to Crawford-Lange (1982). She, however, is talking about reconcepfuofists (see Giroux ef al., 1981), not reconstructionists, and, in any case, is rightly contrasting this approach to behaviourism.

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