ABSTRACT
Walk into any language classroom, 1 no matter where it is in the world, and you will see things going on, and you will hear language being used. Teachers will be saying and doing things, and students will be saying and doing things. Even if the participants are not physically moving around the classroom, even if the rows of desks are fixed, even if it is completely silent, there is activity going on. There is language being used (and not used) in the classroom. The people who use (or don’t use) it verbally or in writing and when and how they use it all constitute the activity of language teaching and learning. In this chapter, we probe that activity. We examine the question of what all these comings and goings—all this activity—adds up to. How do the work called teaching, the actions of the teacher, and the work called learning, the actions, in the broadest sense, of the students, connect? Because classrooms are predicated on this connection, the assumed link between what teachers know and do and what, through their teaching, their students come to know and be able to do is arguably the most fundamental relationship in education. In this chapter, we reexamine how this basic equation relates teaching to learning. Our intent is to move beyond the prevalent notions of causality that dominate thinking and rhetoric about this connection to reframe it as a “relationship of influence” between teacher learning and student learning. In so doing, we argue that a more sophisticated and sensitive way of conceptualizing this relationship is needed to capture and more fully understand the work in the language classroom.
