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Graham Hall

The classroom, notes Wright, “is the true centre of educational experience … it is here, through the teaching-and-learning process, that education ‘happens’” (2005, p. 1). And, although the work of an English language teacher comprises many elements and activities – for example, lesson preparation, training and continuing professional development, setting and marking assessments, developing materials, and report writing – the classroom is, for most, “the crucible” of our professional lives (Gaies, 1980).

This was certainly true for myself as I started out as an English language teacher in the early 1990s. Yet it was soon evident that the care with which I planned my lessons, carefully trying to anticipate potential pitfalls and problems in order that a session’s aims and objectives could be achieved and language could be learned, did not relate in straightforward ways to what happened in the classroom. For example, teaching the same or similar material to two different classes would often lead to differences in the way the learners engaged with the lesson content and with each other in class, and in the language they seemed to remember and/or learn; some classes seemed to go well, some less so. And even after significant reflection, I often could not quite understand why this was.

Of course, every teacher encounters similar issues, of why some lessons “work” but others do not; “common sense” tells us that this is just part of the life of a teacher. However, it was while studying for an MA in English language teaching (ELT) at Lancaster University a few years into my teaching career that I first encountered ideas and conceptualizations of the language classroom that started to make sense of it all. Not only is the classroom a place (either physical or online) where “typically, one teacher and a number of learners come together for a pedagogical purpose” (Allwright, 1992, p. 267; emphasis added), classrooms are also social environments (Tudor, 2001). From this perspective, classrooms have their own complex social cultures (Breen, 2001), which are shaped by, and shape, teachers and learners. A language class is thus: