Abstract
The main aim of this chapter is to show the usefulness of taking the ‘six promising directions in Applied Linguistics’ which Allwright (2006, Chapter 1 in this volume) has identified as an interpretative lens for examining the learning-teaching relationship in adult literacy education. In keeping with his first ‘direction’, we propose that the intellectual project of adult literacy practitioners and researchers should not be to prescribe nor merely to describe, but rather to understand what is happening in adult literacy educational settings (direction 1). The pursuit of the understanding of learning should be a continuous process, as advocated by Allwright (2001a), Allwright and Bailey (1991), Breen (1985, 2001), Pinto (2001) and others, because learning is not always predictable as a product of input, but occurs through constant negotiations between individuals, social environments and ideologies. This leads us to recognize the move From simplicity to complexity (Allwright, 2006, direction 2) as a particularly fruitful direction for understanding the nature of learning and of learning-teaching events in the adult literacy field, incorporating and integrating the many understandings which we owe to Allwright. To be more specific, in this chapter, we discuss both the learning-teaching relationship and the learning-teaching process, and both are found to be complex.
The research on which this chapter is based was part of the National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy (NRDC) project ‘Adult Learners’ Live’ (PG1.2), directed by David Barton and Roz Ivanič.
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Tseng, Mi.L., Ivanič, R. (2006). Recognizing Complexity in Adult Literacy Research and Practice. In: Gieve, S., Miller, I.K. (eds) Understanding the Language Classroom. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523166_8
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