What influences what and how second and foreign language teachers teach?

Graham Crookes

University of Hawai’i

In this paper, I discuss certain of the influences on second and foreign language (S/FL) teachers, and their teaching. I take the social contexts of teaching in schools as of primary concern, particularly as despite claims that teaching is a profession, its members often operate under conditions of far less autonomy than many of those in more prestigious professions. I go on to consider the role of administrations on S/FL teachers, both negative and positive. Administrative support for teacher development may have an important role to play in improving matters. FL teacher education and research is considered in the light of some criticisms that have been levelled at it, and an addtional perpective, that of critical applied linguistics is introduced, which, I argue, may help to rectify some of the problems.

In a recent introductory survey of second and foreign language (S/FL) teaching and learning, Freeman & Freeman (1994) address themselves in a brief, commonsense, but not particularly critical way to the question of what influences the teaching of S/FL teachers. While recognizing that there is much variation in how teachers teach, the Freemans identify the following factors acting to influence individual teachers: (1) how they were taught themselves, (2) how they were trained and the content of that training, (3) their colleagues and the administration, (4) new ideas coming into their vicinity, (5) materials available, (6) the kind of students they have, and (7) their view of learners and learning. This plausible list presents a point of departure for the present discussion of the influences on foreign and second language teachers’ teaching. Freeman & Freeman are not engaged in developing a critique–however, my own experience as teacher and teacher educator suggests that a critique is desirable, and I join with many others, both in applied linguistics and in mainstream education, particularly those engaged in forms of critical pedagogy, who believe that there are grounds for grave concern when we consider the factors influencing the teachers and teaching of second and foreign languages in many parts of the world.

I begin by characterizing the situation of the teacher in general, including that of the S/FL teacher. In line with social theory that adopts a position critical of dominant social structures (e.g., Morrow & Torres, 1995), I believe that the employment circumstances of too many teachers are unduly similar to those of individuals working outside the professions, in factories and businesses, and can be described by the term "alienation" (Auerbach, 1991; Crookes, 1993; Gitlin, 1987, inter alia). That is to say, there is a psychological separation between teachers as human beings, and their working environment (Geyer, 1980; Schacht, 1970). Many S/FL teachers that I know, professionally trained and with a professional outlook, are working under conditions in which they cannot maintain professional standards. They are thus unable to derive the kind of satisfaction and opportunities for personal growth that one might expect of "professional" work, at least (and optimistically, might want to see typify all employment). In many areas of both ESL and FL education in the U.S., including my own state, educational systems, not to mention private language schools, literacy programs, etc., refuse even to provide the basic training (and appropriate remuneration) that teachers need to discharge their duties effectively (Auerbach, 1991; Willett & Jeannot, 1993). At least four areas stand out immediately as indicative of this deskilling of professional S/FL teachers.

(1) Despite the fact that many S/FL teacher preparation programs provide training in program design, in many schools the curriculum is not designed by teachers, but is mandated from above or determined by the need to deal with standardized tests. One of the most fundamental tools by which teachers can discharge their responsibilities is thus not within their control.

(2) In many schools, particularly state schools, two distinguishable functions, education and schooling, are at odds (cf. Beneveniste, 1985; Kanpol, 1992). The history of the US curriculum and instructional methods is quite clear on this point, to take just one example (e.g., Popkewicz, 1987). It is well known that at the beginning of this century one of the primary responsibilities of the schools was to handle the vast influx of European immigrants and "Americanize" them, and while this is no longer an overt goal in the U.S., the pastoral and socializing functions of schools remain intact, and in many cases primary, particularly in countries with ethnolinguistic minorities or immigrant populations but without a pluralist ethos (cf. García, 1992, citing Skutnabb-Kangas, 1990). Within U.S. history, too, we can find some explanation for why certain "foreign" languages (the so-called commonly-taught languages) are taught, and not others (those of non-white immigrants, the so-called less commonly taught languages; García, 1992; cf. Walton, 1992).

Along with the strong socializing function of schools is also a child-minding function, which results in a strong "accountability" of schools and of teachers to their immediate administrators and to political authorities; this in turn results in heavy reporting demands for tests taken, grades given, or day by day conformity to a specific page of a text. Consequently, teachers are obliged to spend a great deal of time dealing with administrative matters or in general working with "lowered teacher discretion and increased routinization" (Beneveniste, 1987, p. 9; cf. Kramsch, 1988 citing Krumm 1985 on the ubiquity of this phenomenon in FL teaching).

(3) Teachers are isolated: Edelfelt (1989, p. 223), drawing on the classic work of Lortie (1975) has referred to the "deafening silence" which characterizes teachers’ situations and derives from "their subordinate status, and ... their isolation within the cellular structure of schooling". Interaction between teachers is often very restricted because of physical arrangements – the very buildings in which they work may not make this possible. Tight scheduling is an obvious reason which makes it difficult for teachers to interact with one another (Nias, 1987) – which is to say that administrators simply do not realize nor act on the need that teachers have for professional development through professional conversations. Even preparation for lessons is sometimes denied to be part of a teacher’s paid professional responsibilities. Elementary teachers in the U.S. often do not have preparation periods (Gitlin, 1987), and part-time S/FL teachers (a mainstay of programs at all levels) certainly do not get paid for that part of their responsibilities, with regrettably predictable effects on program quality. Full time teachers may be a little better off, but basically teacher interaction on professional matters usually has to come out of personal time or the little time allocated for the essential task of preparation. In addition, since in almost all circumstances resources are limited, teachers soon end up competing with one other for them, or at least taking measures which inhibit the sharing of both resources and knowledge.

(4) It hardly needs to be mentioned that in many situations where S/FLs are taught as part of a state education system, that system itself is often totally underfunded, so teachers are obliged to take second jobs to make ends meet and cannot afford any time on professional development activities. Under these conditions, of course, "teachers set survival ... at higher priority than pedagogic concerns" (Holliday, 1994, p. 87, citing Woods, 1984, and Hargreaves, 1984). This is not a matter confined to the less developed countries. Almost all of the public sector elementary FL instruction in my home state is conducted by untrained teachers because there are no permanent full-time positions. With recent budgetary cutbacks, the supervisory "resource teachers" who provided guidance and support to both elementary and secondary teachers have been eliminated. Internationally, while poorer countries may well not invest heavily in state education, it is noteworthy that in FL instruction in such "rich" countries as Japan and Korea class sizes of 50 are commonplace. In the latter country, the government is about to introduce English instruction into the elementary schools, though few elementary teachers have more than a minimal command of the language and little provision has yet been made for teacher training (Daily Yomiuri, 1996)! Although it is obvious that major increases in resource allocation could alter many educational programs for the better, it is most unlikely that they will materialize; consequently, again as a product of time pressures, large classes, and resource lacks, the teacher-student relationship, which should be at the heart of teaching, is threatened and weakened (Gitlin, 1987).

2 Curriculum, materials, and school structures

One of the Freemans’ key factors is "materials available". Arguments have been advanced (Long & Crookes 1992, 1993; Ruiz 1987) which are deeply critical of existing curricula and materials in S/FL. Much of what is touted as theoretically superior fails to have any basis in what has been discovered, thus far, about the psychological and social processes of second and foreign language learning. The problem is exacerbated, however, by the fact that in many parts of state school systems, state or school board mandated textbooks are required, and in addition, in the U.S., "90 per cent of the time teacher instruction follows the text" (Komoski, 1985). In EFL contexts this is surely the standard pattern, as it is for much post-secondary FL instruction (Kramsch, 1988; Tedick & Walker, 1994a). Elementary and secondary FL contexts in the U.S., where a language is often an elective, may evade district control of curriculum but are still subject to the time pressures which lead to text-following. Alternatively, in some systems, text selection may be relatively open but constraint comes from state or national examinations, so that again teachers have little real control over curriculum. They also typically have no control over other aspects of school structure–consider, for example, the ubiquity of the 45-minute period for high school work in the U.S., where "teachers often see as many as 200 students a day" (Gitlin, 1987, p. 109). The effect of this on the development of the teacher-student relationship cannot be ignored, and indeed, figures as high as this are, by contrast, grounds for a grievance by unions to school administrations in Canada.

Schools are typically hierarchies. So "teachers find themselves in a responsive mode, reacting to the particular context established by administrators, while at the same time they are competing with one another for the small rewards the principal offers" (Gitlin, 1987, p. 109). Even though they may have sprung from the ranks of teachers, administrators have different responsibilities, interact with different colleagues and peer group members, face different pressures, and have different fears and goals (Hannaway & Sproul, 1978-79, cited in Pitner, 1987 – but cf. Pennington, 1983, for a slightly different perspective). As noted by Guthrie & Reed (1986, p. 171),

And at least in private schools, the interests of the organization are making a profit. Of course, many administrators are people who used to be successful classroom teachers, but as Denison & Shelton (1987, p. 16) observe,

Finally, even if language program administrators were trained for their job (unlikely, if Denison & Shelton's "tradition" is still widespread, cf. Smith, 1993 and Staczek, 1991, supporting this position in the case of ESL administrators, and Bugliani, 1994b, for post-secondary FL administrators) there is no guarantee that administrative decisions are made rationally. According to one study, at least 60% of an administrator's day is spent in brief verbal encounters of a minute or two with individuals while dashing from one meeting to another (Gronn, 1983), and administrators, like other executives (and indeed ordinary teachers too), are prone to settle for whatever "satisfices" ("a course of action that is satisfactory or 'good enough'": Simon, 1957, p. xxv). Tonkin, himself a university administrator with a foreign language background, states, "Most colleges and universities are today engaged in efforts at self-preservation, and most actions by senior administrators can be explained in these terms" (1987, p. 41). A full description of an educational administrator's workpatterns is provided by Pitner (1987, p. 56): it is characterized by

While understandable, many of those characteristics may lead to decision-making that is not necessarily the most logical. Now if we are asking the question, Why do teachers teach the way they do? with the implication that we are not really satisfied with the situation, a central concern with administration must then be, Why don’t administrations help teachers change the way they teach? I have implied above that an overarching answer is simply that the administration of S/FL programs is likely in general to be of a patchy quality. But there is, I believe, an additional important consideration - that many educational administrations have yet to recognize (or act upon) their responsibilities for promoting change in the way teachers teach, in the sense of promoting increased teacher expertise and insight. Goodlad’s (1984) work testifies to the long-term static nature of classroom instruction in the U.S.; he also documents the fact that normally, principals visit teachers not more than once or twice a year; and of course, on those occasions, the purely feedback aspects of the visit are vitiated by its rarity and its accompanying evaluative tone. That is to say, the potential for change provided by the feedback loop that administrations might, prima facie, be expected to constitute, often is simply non-existent.

This feedback loop should not just act at the level of the individual teacher, of course, but should be a characteristic of the program as a whole. That is to say, procedures should be in place for a systematic on-going evaluation or self-study (Henrichsen, 1994) of any S/FL program. I see some evidence that this is to be found as a function of accreditation demands (e.g., Weir & Roberts, 1994, cf. Brumfit & Coleman, 1995); but even accrediting boards are unfortunately capable of focusing on, for example, the physical plant or support services of a program rather than its ability to constitute a learning site for teacher development.

There has been much discussion (Edelfeldt, 1985; Furtwengler, 1985; Holmes Group, 1986) of the concept of a teacher career ladder. It has been observed that by comparison with business or civil service, the concept of the professional advancement of teachers is not clear – that a series of steps connected with increased experience, expertise, and financial reward is not obvious. And what advancement does occur often takes teachers out of the classroom and into administration. In state systems in many countries, teachers may advance up a series of salary steps according to years of experience and the accumulation of professional qualifications often in the form of university courses related to education. However, unless supported by a close concern for effects on teaching, experience and university credits may be insufficient indicators of professionalism.

At an administrative level, supervisory review of teaching can be a productive force for teacher development, though it must be designed in cooperation with teachers, so that it is not a punitive or unrealistic system (Hickox & Musella, 1992). It is commonplace for "human resource management" systems to provide for the review of performance and growth of individuals in hierarchically-structured systems, whether business or bureaucracy. In such systems, individuals are given feedback on key areas of job performance, and dialogically negotiate goals for areas to improve in, and others in which knowledge or competence will be developed. So when applied to teaching, such systems can provide a structured process whereby teachers can identify aspects of their professional life which they can focus on and improve. In this system, each person taking part might meet, for example, twice yearly with another professional (peer or senior) to review a contract that they have drawn up together, setting negotiated goals and objectives for personal and professional growth (Smith, 1976, p. 67). Sometimes called "growth contracting", this idea, in the post-secondary sector, has been in existence for more than twenty years now, yet it is only recently that discussion of such matters have surfaced in language teaching contexts (see White, Martin, Stimson, & Hodge, 1991, for ESL, and Bugliani, 1994a, Parr, 1993, and Terry, 1993, for FL).

However, it is essential that administrations implementing such systems provide support for teachers to work upon such goals. An example of how this may be done is the "Peer Assistance and Review" program, instituted during the late 1980s in one U.S. school district (Rochester). In this system, the school district identified about 20 teachers who had demonstrated outstanding teaching ability, and released them completely from their classroom responsibilities, so they could act as mentors to about 150 more junior teachers.

A subsequent innovation in this same district was the development, through negotiation with the teachers’ union, of the Career in Teaching program (CIT). As part of teacher development, it was intended to "provide teachers with career options that do not require them to leave the classroom in order to assume additional responsibility and leadership roles..." (p. 447).

It is good to be able to report such examples, but still throughout most of even those countries which have well developed infrastructures and devote a respectable part of their national budget to education, schools (and language departments) are generally not seen as sites of knowledge creation; they are not learning organizations; and teachers are not supported in professional development activities which will truly result in professional development.

There are marked limitations of teacher preparation curricula and practices in our area. In my own state, for example, the situation is quite inadequate: most teachers who enter FL education in the high schools will have had no more than one or two classes in pedagogy and none in SLA theory or research. But according to some authorities, higher levels of preparation are not necessarily better. Referring only to the U.S., Tonkin (1987, p. 29 & p. 34) notes:

Though the situation may have improved in some areas in the last ten years, my own experience is that such improvement is not the general rule, and I agree with Tedick & Walker’s recent assessment (1994a, citing Joiner, 1993, p. 205): "we have failed decade after decade to bring about substantive and lasting national change in the preparation and certification of language teachers". Tedick & Walker (1994a, p. 300; cf. 1994b, 1995) are of the view that "the most exciting foundation on which to base major reform in second language teacher education is the realization that all of second language education should be integrated [so]...the preparation for teaching Spanish, German, French, or a less commonly taught language is in many ways similar to the preparation to teach English as a second language". However, even relatively innovative S/FL teacher preparation programs, including ESL programs, usually reflect a more general tendency in education – a technocratic orientation which makes it difficult to provide new teachers with an understanding of their socio-historical context, of themselves as political actors, and of the idea that the classroom is not a given (cf. Gore & Zeichner, 1991; Willett & Jeannot, 1993). "The professional training of ELT people concentrates on linguistics, psychology and education in a restricted sense. It pays little attention to international relations, development studies, theories of culture or intercultural contact, or the politics or sociology of language or education" (Phillipson, 1988, p. 348). "Most departments of foreign languages... have remained faithful to their academic origins and have given relatively little attention to revolutionary new developments in sociolinguistics or to the whole question of the social and political implications of language" (Tonkin, 1987, p. 34). Consequently, for the FL community, the effects of the dead hand of literature (the "academic origins") upon actual language pedagogy cannot be ignored. Graman (1988, p. 443) is worth quoting at length on this point:

An issue related to the nature of teacher education programs is the relationship of research to teaching and of researchers to teachers. This has been the subject of extensive agonizing in both the FL and ESL sections of applied linguistics for many years, but nevertheless I cannot avoid touching on it briefly here. First, consider the position of Freed (1991, p. 4; cf. Silber, 1991, Swaffar, 1989, Saporta, 1989), who addresses the problem from a somewhat technical-rational position, which is nevertheless informed by an awareness of power (i.e., critical) issues in (U.S.) FL institutions. She remarks:

This position, then, is that FL teachers teach the way they do partly because their work is not informed by more recent information about the nature of S/FL teaching and learning. But we may go further: Valdés (1992, p. 33) questions the self-limitation of the FL teaching profession in the U.S. to the teaching of incipient bilingualism to monolinguals, and advocates its redefinition to encompass the many bilingual students of heritage languages in the US, remarking,

That is to say, Valdés calls for, at the very least, research which is social and contextual where language is concerned. Now it has been suggested that "school structure does not determine how teachers behave. Rather, teacher behaviour reflects a compromise between teacher values, ideology, and the press of school structure" (Gitlin, 1987, p. 107). If this position is accepted, it should be clear that research which denies a role for values is unlikely to inform and improve teacher practice. That is, of course, a standard charge laid against investigations done in a "positivist" mode. So the concern of Freed and others like her, though important, should be supplemented with a position that the non-uptake by FL teachers of much of the research produced thus far by mainstream SLA researchers, many more of whom work with English than with other languages, should not be surprising and even, perhaps, is not necessarily a bad thing. According to Pennycook (1990, p. 10), this kind of research typifies applied linguistics, and "entails a continued faith in an apolitical, ahistorical view of language". Since it never questions the status quo of the political enterprise of language teaching except on grounds of "efficiency", it thereby continues to prop up what is an inequitable enterprise (cf. Cherryholmes, 1985; Popkewiz, 1981). Accordingly, what is needed to change how teachers teach is, as Auerbach (1993, p. 7; and many others) have said, a form of research which revalues the work of teachers vis-à-vis researchers:

The most well-established change in educational research paradigms in recent years is the shift from quantitative to qualitative approaches. But this move alone does not alter the individualist nature of such research. Modifications of the traditional research paradigm that better address Auerbach’s call through requiring new social dimensions to educational research are teacher-researcher partnerships (e.g., Heath, 1983) and action research. The latter is a conception of research which most immediately places the development of theory in the hands of the practitioner (Crookes, 1993). Both are typically "interpretive qualitative" (Davis, 1995, p. 436) in nature. When they speak directly to the power differential referred to by Auerbach, they embody a committed stance and an emancipatory intent, founded on a search for the way power relations play themselves out in second and foreign languages, and in how they are both taught and researched. This viewpoint is often to be found with the label "critical" (e.g., critical ethnography [Simon & Dippo, 1986], and cf. Comstock, 1982, Kincheloe & McLaren, 1994) or "participatory" attached (e.g., participatory action research [McTaggart, 1991]), to which I now turn.

The comments of Tonkin, Valdés, and Pennycook in the previous section all hint at a more trenchant analysis of the inadequacies of how S/FL teaching is "constructed". The simple and indisputable position I accepted at the outset of this paper, that how teachers are taught and how they are trained have important effects on how they teach, can be seen as resulting from analyses at the individual level, which should be placed in a broader socio-historical and political context. It is certainly likely that how we operate as teachers will, in the absence of other pressures, be strongly affected by how we were taught as students, but it might be said, more broadly, and with a critical tone, that teachers teach the way they do because of the effects of the social structures in which they are embedded and which create them, and which they in turn create.

At the most obvious level, schools are instruments for the transmission of culture, which is why the children of the elites are to be found in elite schools, a major function of which is the maintenance and transmission of elite ("upper-class") culture (cf. Cookson & Persell, 1985). State systems also work to perpetuate class, race, and gender distinctions (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Ogbu, 1979; Weiler, 1988). This is not always easy to perceive, because there is a tendency to see disciplines and the curriculum as preexisting, rather than created (at which point, "power becomes naturalized in our common sense": Fendler & Popkewitz, 1993, p. 25). The history of the construction of these things is not often presented in a thorough fashion in teacher education programs, but it is essential for understanding the current situation. Popkewitz (1987, p. 2) comments:

It is analyses of this sort, applied to S/FL contexts, which are needed to supplement the largely technical problems that I have written about so far. This line of work is grounded in critical social theory, concerning the social structures and processes that surround and construct teaching in general and S/FL instruction specifically, and in the analyses which are made, in a critical vein, of classrooms and curricula. The former analyses have been associated in educational theory with Giroux (e.g., 1981), McLaren (e.g., 1989), and colleagues, the latter with Freire (1971) and Shor (1990); behind them stands the critical theory tradition of Habermas and Gramsci, among others (cf. Sirotnik & Oakes, 1986). Of them all, those associated with Freire have most been applied to FL education, following the early work of Crawford-Lange (1981, and Crawford, 1978; cf., Faltis, 1990, Graman, 1988) and to ESL (Auerbach, 1991; Auerbach & Wallerstein, 1987; Nash et al., 1989). Discussion in the broader social theory style has appeared in applied linguistics more aimed at ESL (Pennycook, 1990; Phillipson, e.g., 1988).

For these writers, the matter of how teachers teach, and why, would be addressed in terms of the teacher’s socialization into teaching and the nature of knowledge. Freire’s well-known term ‘banking education’ summarizes the kind of teaching that is still most common in the US, if not the world–it implies an all-knowing teacher, a strongly hierarchical relationship between teacher and student, and a conception of knowledge as "out there", independent of social conditions, and arising apparently independent of the power relations within society. Teachers are constructed into this model of teaching and knowing; they are unlikely to move out of it by themselves (unless, perhaps, there are wider social struggles in which they become engaged). I have already asserted that schools are not learning institutions and generally operate to transmit the social status quo. In the absence of a sufficient mass of likeminded individuals, they are not usually sites within which the values of existing teachers could be moved away from the status quo, and as for new teachers, there is evidence that schools resocialize them to fit the schools’ own, usually more conservative views. Although in some cases, either individual teachers or teacher development groups can modify this, we must also look elsewhere. One obvious site for attempts to address these problems (besides society itself, not my charge here) is teacher education.

Many instutional obstacles lie in the way of attempts to apply Aronowitz & Giroux’s analysis to improve S/FL teacher education programs. And because of the hegemonic power of the dominant culture in most countries, this sort of analysis is also problematic for some student teachers, who may find the critical position difficult to take on board (Willett & Jeannot, 1993). However, if they do not, then in these times of declining enrollments and reduced educational budgets, FL teachers may not be prepared for the ultimately political struggles they will need to engage in if they are to obtain jobs and maintain programs. ESL teachers in the US and other English-speaking countries are already marginalized (Auerbach, 1990), particularly because their constituency, their students and the parents of their students do not come from the mainstream. But neither group is prepared by their teacher education programs to be organizers or see themselves as "language activists". Referring to the U.S., García (1992, p. 19) remarks, "internationally, our position must be founded in the realization that our difficulties as foreign language educators lie in teaching non-official languages (viewed as unimportant) in a de facto officially monolingual English-speaking context" –and, one must add, in a context that though English-speaking is often reluctant to support even the teaching of that language to those who do not already command it! In this line of critique Shor, (1990, p. 349) remarks:

This sort of analysis also applies to the ‘what’ as well as to the ‘how’ of S/FL teaching. At present, S/FL teacher education rarely makes clear that because S/FL instruction is a cross-cultural enterprise with strong political connections, that the S/FLs taught and even how they are taught is likely to be a reflection of international power, and that in many instances S/FL teaching is a direct instrument of colonialism (Phillipson, 1988, Tollefson, 1989, 1995; Pennycook, 1990; cf. Tedick & Walker, 1994a). One issue that cuts across teaching contexts is the "trivialization of content" Pennycook (1990) finds in S/FL instruction . Although he sees this as following from the growth of communicative (ESL) language teaching, with its emphasis on interactive activities and games, the content of a FL lesson or text (Kramsch, 1988) rarely addresses social issues, but deals in stereotypical families, cultures that are apparently homogenous, and topics which are uniformly non-provocative. Pennycook remarks, "If we teach for communicative competence without exploring both how language use has been historically constructed around questions of power and dominance as well as how in everyday usage it is also always involved in questions of power, we will once again be developing a teaching practice that has more to do with assimilation than empowerment." (ibid, p. 14). At the level of text, Kramsch (1988. p. 68) is quite explicit:

And though, as Kramsch points out, a FL text is itself a cultural construct reflecting aspects of the country in which it is to be used almost more than the culture of the language it is to teach, such texts are unlikely to provide "the skills necessary to analyze critically the American culture in the English texts and the foreign culture in the foreign language texts" (ibid.). Kramsch’s analysis suggests that the absence of a critical approach to culture makes it difficult for teachers, given their limitations discussed earlier, to teach FL in a way that is critical and teach FL cultures in their own terms rather than as American (i.e., dominant culture) interpretations of the foreign culture. That this analysis applies more broadly is indicated by the fact that the same position is taken up for EFL in Brazil by Busnardo & Braga (1987; cf. Brock, 1993, for Hong Kong) who draw on Freirean analyses to emphasize the importance of teachers demythologizing the culture of the FL when engaged in teaching dominant foreign languages.

I have argued that how S/FL teachers teach, and how in that sense, S/FL teaching is "constructed", can be seen at two major levels. At a technical level, we are not given the tools to do the job even when the job of S/FL teaching is depicted at a level of non-provocative liberal discourse–to educate children and adults in second and foreign languages. Even on their own terms of technical rationality, the managerial systems present do not allow professionals to function professionally, and systems that obviously should be designed to be adaptive and capable of adjusting to new situations and demands are not in place. Much teaching remains at the level of coping; most schools are hard pressed to adapt, swiftly or at all, to new demands. Having sketched the inadequacies of teaching (for which I am not in any way blaming teachers), I went on to address my responsibility to provide some answers to my own criticisms. At a technical level of analysis, I do believe that it is possible to make schools more like "learning institutions" and less like the static time-defying forms that they sometimes seem to be. The incorporation of on-going self-study or internal evaluation components, and the support of teacher action research as part of a required and supported program of professional development, possibly associated with accreditation exercises, would be the main innovation I would advocate. And of course, it is one that is already in place in some sites.

However, I have also argued that at a critical level of analysis, how teachers teach is constructed socially, and thus the role of schools, whether free-standing language teaching institutions, elite boarding schools, or state schools, in society’s self-reproduction, must be considered in asking how S/FL teaching comes to be "constructed" as it has been. In addition, the role of non-English languages in the U.S., or English in many other countries elsewhere in the world, must be assessed. Languages and language teaching are political, and language teachers are political actors (or instruments) whether they like it or not. If how S/FL teachers teach, or how S/FL teaching is constructed is seen as inadequate in some way, we are unlikely to rectify the situation without an analysis which takes into account political factors, which at the very beginning means looking to the political status of the language(s) under consideration, and goes on, inevitably, to consider the necessity of political action. This must address, and preferably alter, whether S/FL teaching is to be constructed at the expense of teachers, or whether, rather, we S/FL teachers should not indeed ourselves be the people to engage in this construction, and make it a construction we can be proud of.

Subsequently published: Modern Language Journal, 81(1), 67-79.