ABSTRACT
Possibly the most significant development in the field of English language teaching (ELT) in the 1990s was the acceptance of the idea that ELT is and always has been a profoundly and unavoidably political undertaking. Since the beginnings of empirical research and theory building in second language learning and teaching in the 1940s and 1950s, there had been an emphasis on language learning as an individual psychological phenomenon. Though proponents of communicative language teaching, the dominant force from the 1970s, acknowledged the importance of communication in the classroom, they still viewed that classroom as an isolated group of individuals whose broader social and political context was irrelevant to the processes of language learning. It was not until the 1980s that researchers, beginning to feel frustrated with the limited understandings of language learning that experimental approaches were yielding, began to turn to ethnographic and other qualitative research methods in an attempt to grasp the fuller realities of language classrooms. The ethnographic approach, in turn, opened our eyes to the myriad ways in which social and political context crucially influences what goes on in classrooms.
