Action-based Teaching, Autonomy

and Identity
Leo van Lier
Monterey Institute of International Studies, Language Studies Division,
Monterey, CA, USA
Action-based teaching puts agency at the centre of the learning process. This can be
defined as the socioculturally mediated capacity to act (Ahearn, 2001: 112). An action-
based approach is related to other approaches, such as content-based, project-based
and task-based teaching and learning. However, it makes agency, rather than the
particular curricular organisation, the defining construct. In this paper, various
situated aspects of agency are examined, such as issues of power and control,
democracy in the classroom, and the relationships between structure and process.
A central aspect of an action-based approach is the centrality of perception, and its
intricate connections to action and understanding. Perception is also central in the
development of self and identity, in the shaping of the learners relationships to their
world. Finally, pedagogical strategies and actions are illustrated, such as a coherent
and non-trivial model of pedagogical scaffolding that integrates structuring and
microgenesis.

doi: 10.2167/illt42.0

Keywords: agency, power, control, perception, self, identity

The Move Towards Action-based Learning and Teaching

Action-based (AB) teaching is an approach to teaching that puts human
agency in the centre of attention. A general (provisional) definition of agency
states that it is the socioculturally mediated capacity to act (Ahearn, 2001:
112). This definition, as Ahearn points out, leaves a large number of issues
around the notion of agency unspecified, but it is a useful starting point for
discussion.
Agency has in recent years become a hot topic in a number of disciplines,
including anthropology, sociology, social psychology and critical studies,
particularly those of a postmodern and poststructural nature. In language
teaching the notion of agency has become prominent in the context of project-
based approaches and investigations of social interaction and collaborative
learning in classrooms (Donato, 1994; Ohta, 2001; Swain, 2005). The focus in
second language studies has gradually shifted from linguistic inputs and
mental information processing to the things that learners do and say while
engaged in meaningful activity.
Larsen-Freeman points out that learning is a non-linear process that
emerges in often unpredictable ways from meaningful activity in the L2
(2003). This meaningful activity itself is part of the dynamic system of the
classroom (de Bot, 2005). This system is in many ways self-organising, that is,

1750-1229/07/01 046-20 $20.00/0 2007 L. van Lier

Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching Vol. 1, No. 1, 2007

46
Action-based Teaching, Autonomy and Identity 47

it becomes a community of practice (Wenger, 1998) due to the shared goals,

routines and procedures the participants engage in, as well as the mix of their
personalities and interactional relationships. As all teachers know, every class
has its own personality, which emerges fairly quickly in the course of lessons
and relevant out-of-class activities.
Another development relevant to an action-based perspective is a growing
emphasis on the processes of learning, particularly those that combine social-
interactive and cognitive-reflective work in the classroom. Thus, a number of
teachers and researchers have become increasingly uncomfortable with object
words like input, output, grammar and even proficiency (if it is seen as a set of
test scores, i.e. as a product). As part of this shift from product to process, or
from object to activity, Swain (2005), originator of the output hypothesis and
researcher of dialogic processes among learners, has recently proposed the
verb languaging to replace the noun output. Similarly, Larsen-Freeman
(2003) advocates turning the object-noun grammar into the action-verb
grammaring. On a more general educational front, Sfard (1998) argues that
the traditional product-oriented acquisition metaphor must be complemented
by a process-oriented participation metaphor.
Educational systems often implicitly characterise learners as an input-
consuming and output-producing collectivity of homogeneous (or homogeni-
sable) entities. We treat them all the same, expose them to the same textbook
pages at the same time, and test them the same way on the same days. Sure
enough, lip-service is paid to learning styles, multiple intelligences and other
individual differences, but when at regular
and increasingly frequent

intervals identical test packets are slapped onto each individual learners desk,
the learners right to be different and the teachers ability to honour
differences die a sudden death. Yet, in spite of these
ignored and
uncontested
homogenising forces of the pedagogical enterprise, everyone,
from the politician to the administrator to the teacher and of course the parent,
will pay homage to the wonderful diversity and multiple talents of the
students. There is clearly a huge gap here between the said and the done , but
education is hardly the only field of human practice in which such a gap is
endemic.
Yet, if we wish to be consistent and honest we need to affirm that our
learners are people with their own lives, aspirations, needs, worries, dreams
and identities. As I envisage an AB approach to teaching and learning, treating
the learners as persons in their own right is crucial. This means, quite simply,
that they are listened to and respected as speakers in their own right
(Kramsch, 1993), and as agents of their own educational destiny. To give a
very practical example, this means that they must have things to say to each
other and to the teacher in class that go beyond the sentences or pronounce-
ments proffered by the textbook that lies open on the same page at the same
time on every desk. Learning an L2 involves a struggle to forge a new identity
that is true to the self (van Lier, 2004). The core of identity is voice, and voice
implies agency. Although imitation and mimicry are essential elements in
trying out the L2 voice, the learner must be allowed to appropriate the new
sounds and meanings and make them his or her own (Bakhtin, 1981; Rogoff,
1995).
48 Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching

Finally, and following from the above, the active learner whose actions are
self-initiated rather than commanded by the teacher or the system, will
become strong in terms of intrinsic motivation and autonomy (Ushioda, 2003).
Norton Peirce (1995) rightly emphasises the notion of investment, which is a
key component of all (at least all non-behaviouristic or drives-based) theories
of motivation (e.g. Ford, 1992), and closely related to autonomy, that is, the
feeling of being the agent of ones own actions. It is one of the oldest insights of
education that without motivation learning will not be possible (Corder, 1981),
and without ownership, agency and self-determination, autonomy cannot
develop (Deci, 1995). And ultimately motivation and autonomy are but two
sides of the same coin of agency (van Lier, 1996).
Having made this basic pitch for the notion of AB teaching and learning,
and having provided some moral, ethical and intellectual grounds for it, as it
were, as well as hinting at some practical possibilities, I will now proceed to
lay out a wider case and practical sketch for implementing this approach to
language learning (or any learning, really).

The Old and the New

In this paper I am using the term action-based teaching and learning, but I
want to stress that it is closely connected to a number of well established
approaches that are widely practised today. Here is a non-exhaustive list:

/ task-based
/ content-based
/ project-based
/ exploratory
/ experiential
/ English for specific purposes (ESP)
/ Community-based language socialisation
/ Computer-assisted language learning (CALL)
/ Handlungsorientierter Unterricht
A few words of elaboration on this list may be in order. I am not suggesting
that all the above are synonymous with one another and that AB in some
magical way absorbs and subordinates them all. Yet, what all the approaches
listed have in common, at the very least, is an emphasis on the learner as an
active person, and this means more than being a copier of behaviours, a
receptive input receiver or a rote memoriser of facts. Apart from this central
connection, the approaches listed have different goals, contexts, intellectual
traditions and curricular principles and practices.
Thus, task-based learning focuses on the nature and design of tasks and the
learners strategies and activities in completing them; content-based learning
puts the focus on subject matter and content and the ways in which this
content can be presented to and internalised by the learner. So, in many ways,
task-based and content-based learning complement each other: tasks need
content to make them relevant and meaningful, and content needs tasks to
engage the learners actively. Project-based learning (also thematic units)
Action-based Teaching, Autonomy and Identity 49

combines content and connected series of tasks oriented towards a tangible

goal (whether it is a presentation, a paper or some other academic product).
The term exploratory learning and teaching comes from the work of Allwright
(1996) and is characterised by a close examination of the interaction patterns
between students and teachers in the classroom. Experiential learning is based
on the work of John Dewey, and in applied linguistics it is exemplified in the
work of Kohonen (2001). Other language educators combine experiential,
exploratory and project-based aspects in their work, e.g. Breen (2001).
Various specialised strands of language teaching have traditionally advocated
a strong action-based perspective, e.g. ESP, which for practical and professional
reasons incorporates realistic projects and tasks that professionals in the relevant
professions might face in their work. This is similar to CALL, which from the
early days has emphasised active and open approaches to learning.
Finally, any AB pedagogy must draw on the work of all the major giants of
educational thought of the 20th century. Starting with the 19th-century Swiss
educator Johann Pestalozzi, hugely influential in Europe and also a major
influence on Deweys reform efforts, the Italian innovator Maria Montessori,
and culminating in the two major forces of 20th-century educational and
developmental thought, Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, there is a clearly
discernible trend over the last hundred years or so to recast pedagogy (and
didactics, in the old-fashioned European use of this term) in action-based,
whole-body, experiential terms. All these antecedents and influences are well
embedded in the German approach to language learning (indeed, learning in
general) known as Handlungsorientierter Unterricht, literally translated as
Action-oriented teaching and learning (Bach & Timm, 1996; Finkbeiner, 2000).
Finkbeiner (2000: 255) characterises the approach as one that includes
learners hearts, bodies and senses, as well as their brains.

Power and Control

Advocating AB pedagogy is not simply a matter of persuading the
educational community of its value and effectiveness. If that were the
case, then this would have happened decades ago through the work of
the educational thinkers and practitioners mentioned above, all of whom have
argued the case far more persuasively than I could ever hope to do, and none
of whom, despite significant influence and widespread followers, managed to
transform the traditional, mainstream ways of conducting education in
anything approaching a huge or transformative way. Writers like Pierre
Bourdieu and Michel Foucault have provided penetrating analyses of the
ways in which educational institutions reproduce themselves and their ways
of working, and how power and control are disseminated by virtue of their
indoctrinating practices.
To illustrate, by and large students still sit in rows or chairs facing the front
as they did in earlier centuries, the front being defined by where the teacher is
at. Instruction is delivered in one way or another from the knower to the un-
knower. The job of the un-knower is to study hard, i.e. to expend significant
amounts of energy to put the instructional materials into their head by
50 Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching

cognitive processing (memorising, schema formation and the like), and to

automatise behaviours (by dint of practice) that lead to fluent skills. This is
rewardable hard work, and tests can easily be designed to check how the
students are progressing in the desired direction.
In this paper I would like to use the work of the British sociologist Basil
Bernstein to shed light on the issues of power and control, i.e. the sorts of
issues that can prevent innovations from taking hold. Since the 1960s Bernstein
has been developing a theory of pedagogical processes that lays bare the
patterns and processes that make educational traditions into what they are

and tend to remain. The research of Bernstein is particularly incisive and
penetrating, and it will provide us with a good framework for understanding
the contextual and practical issues involved in implementing AB pedagogies.
Bernsteins work involves a close analysis of pedagogic discourse, that is,
the language used by educators in the classroom, about the classroom and
around the classroom. For a far-reaching innovation such as AB pedagogy to
take hold in a school system, this system must be a democratic one, in a
number of respects. Bernstein (2000: xx) speaks of pedagogic rights that
require certain conditions at individual, social and political levels. In diagram
form, rights, conditions and levels can be shown as follows:

Rights Conditions Levels

Enhancement Confidence Individual
Inclusion Communitas Social
Participation Civic Discourse Political

(Bernstein, 2000: xxi)

Briefly, this model of democracy is explained by Bernstein as follows

(slightly paraphrased):
The first right, to individual enhancement, refers to the experiencing of
past and future possibilities for growth, within the boundaries of
curricula. This right is essential for the condition of confidence in the
educational process.
The second right, social inclusion , is the right to be included socially,
intellectually, culturally and personally (this includes the right to
autonomy within the system). Inclusion is essential for the condition
of communitas (roughly, a community characterized by equality,
solidarity and togetherness), and operates at the social level.
The third right is the right to participate in practices with specific
outcomes, i.e., the right to participate in the construction, maintenance
and transformation of order. This is the condition for civic practice, and
operates at the political level. (Bernstein, 2000: xx
xxi)
There are a number of ways in which these various aspects of educational
democracy may be present or absent in varying degrees and combinations, and
there are of course also serious and important issues linking the schools
Action-based Teaching, Autonomy and Identity 51

democratic profile to that of the local community and beyond (this is where
pedagogic democracy and societal democracy interface).
In all, this brief excursion into the sociology of the school makes it clear that
the work of introducing and implementing AB pedagogy is not a simple
matter such as replacing one textbook with another textbook would be, or one
model of lesson planning with another model of lesson planning. To further
emphasise the connections between AB pedagogy and the socio-pedagogical-
political context, I briefly review Bernsteins notions of power and control.
These two forces (or processes) determine if and how democratic rights and
conditions can be realised in an educational setting. An examination of them in
a particular setting will shed light on the likely success or failure of
implementing a far-reaching pedagogical transformation such as AB peda-
gogy. Power and control are defined as follows:

Power: Classification (voice, identity)

the creation of boundaries between categories (e.g. subject matter
boundaries), and the discourses that establish, justify and maintain
relations between categories, the conditions for specialization and
legitimacy of disciplines;
Control: Framing (message, discourse)
controls on communication in local interactional pedagogic relations;
the internal logic of pedagogic practice; the selection, sequencing,
pacing and criteria of curricula; the rules of social order (regulative
discourse) and the rules of discursive order (instructional discourse).
(Bernstein, 2000)
Both power and control can be relatively weak or strong. When power is
weak, innovations that cut across boundaries of various kinds are possible.
When power is strong, boundaries (pigeon-holes, labels, categories) are rigid
and innovations will be difficult to implement. Similarly, when control is weak,
disciplinary discourses (Hyland, 2004) are fluid and flexible, and exploratory
work with open-ended (unpredictable
see below) consequences will be
possible. If, however, control is strong, certain types of discourses and
interactional participation patterns are enforced and approved, and others
are not. Power and control relationships are shown in diagram form below:

Power Control
Weak Boundaries are permeable; Rules of regulatory and disciplin-
transdisciplinary work is ary discourse are implicit; deep
possible (broad) probing of reasoning possible
(deep)
Strong Boundaries (gender, race, class, Legitimises certain approved
discipline, etc.) are enforced forms of interaction and
and reproduced (narrow) pedagogic discourse (shallow)
52 Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching

Pedagogy as Structure and Process

Like so many things in life, educational work is a unity of structural and
processual ingredients, an essential dyad, as described by the physicist Bohm
(1963) in his universal structure-process construct. It may often seem to us
that a structure, such as the structure of a curriculum, impedes the
development of exploratory processes. On the other hand, it may also seem
that unimpeded processes lead to chaos and disorder. So, structure and
process, if seen independent of one another, are detrimental to educational
success. It is only through the dynamic interaction of structures and processes
that meaningful and effective pedagogy can come about. A well designed
structure can instigate and enhance pedagogical processes that, without
the structure, would not be possible. The trick is, of course, to make sure
that the structures do not unduly constrain or impede desired processes,
and that processes do not run away from us, destroying the structures that are
designed to facilitate the pedagogical processes in the first place. AB pedagogy
is centrally concerned with setting up facilitative structures that enhance, but
not impede, the processes that lead to lasting and meaningful learning.
As Gleick said in his book on chaos theory, playing the game has a way of
changing the rules (Larsen-Freeman, 2003). Thus, not only do the curricular
structures enable desired processes, but the processes themselves also modify
the structures, as learners gain in autonomy and set goals and parameters for
their work that go beyond the confines of the original curriculum guidelines.
In practice, thus, the learners activities in AB pedagogy will be more
structured at the beginning, but gradually new (wider, more open-ended)
structures emerge as the learners become autonomous and define their own
goals. We will look at this dynamism in more detail below in the section on
scaffolding.
As a consequence of the interplay between structure and process, the results
of the work are to a certain degree unpredictable . By this I do not mean the
simple fact that some will score higher or lower on a test than others, but
rather that the skills, knowledge, motivations, goals and outcomes of the work
cannot be predicted. In other words, we cannot predict what the learners will
know or want to do next, what their goals, dreams and ambitions will be, or
where their learning may take them. As Stenhouse (1975: 82
83) put it more
than a quarter century ago, Education as induction into knowledge is
successful to the extent that it makes the behavioral outcomes of the students
unpredictable. This idea of education as emergent expertise of course flies in
the face of much of the standards-accountability-testing mechanisms that
school systems tend to favour. In those scenarios, everything should be
predictable (and testable, of course) to the highest degree possible. If not, the
power and control (see above) that policy makers want would be weakened
and jeopardised.
Moving from the curriculum to the classroom, we can see a similar theme of
structure-process taking place. Lessons and tasks are planned, but they can
never be planned so carefully that every moment goes according to plan. This
means that there is always
and should always be
an element of
improvisation. At the same time, there are parts of lessons that are predictable
Action-based Teaching, Autonomy and Identity 53

Planning

Predictable Exploratory
Lessons Teaching
Innovation,
Routine, Ritual
Exploration
Lack of
Serendipity
Direction

Improvisation

Figure 1 Predictability and Innovation in the Classroom

routines, or rituals, recognisable episodes that recur from lesson to lesson,

week to week. But there are also episodes in which new and unexpected things
happen, surprising or unexpected occurrences that may lead to exploration
and innovation. These two parameters, planning-improvisation on the one hand,
and routine-novelty on the other, intersect in several ways, and create different
flavours of lessons, as shown in Figure 1 (see van Lier 1996, 2004).
The dynamism (and tension) between the planned and predictable and the
improvised and unpredictable is essential in the development of true AB
pedagogy, and I would argue, in all pedagogy. There has to be enough
predictability and security for learners not to feel lost and bewildered
and,
like every culture, the classroom needs its rituals
but there must also be
enough room to innovate and move in novel directions for learners to develop
autonomy and fuel their intrinsic motivation. Therefore, the AB curriculum
needs to build in careful structuring as well as increasing handover
opportunities (see below).

Cycles of Action
Perception
Understanding

From an ecological perspective, language learning-as-agency involves
learning to perceive affordances (relationships of possibility) within multi-
modal communicative events (Greeno, 1994; Kress, 2001; Norris, 2004; van Lier,
2004). Every subject and every topic is an affordance network (Barab & Ross,
2006) that is accessed through collaborative activity.
It is important to understand two things. First, in the ecological perspective,
any and all learning requires an active, perceiving agent. Second, a person does
not learn by receiving input that is delivered via some instructional
mechanism, but by picking up information in the environment on the basis
of and guided by organismic needs and purposes. The latter is a very different
perspective on learning, and one that changes the pedagogical ballgame
completely. The curriculum does not start out by specifying and sequencing
the material that is to be covered, but it starts out with the activities, needs
and emergent purposes of the learner. On the basis of activities and emergent
needs, the teacher makes resources available in the environment, and guides
the learners perception and action towards arrays of affordances that can
further his or her goals.
54 Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching

Central to learning is perception, or more precisely, perception-in-action.

This includes both other-perception and self-perception. According to Gibson
(1979: 126),
Information about the self accompanies information about the environ-
ment, and the two are inseparable. Egoreception accompanies exter-
oception, like the other side of a coin. Perception has two poles, the
subjective and the objective, and information is available to specify both.
One perceives the environment and coperceives oneself.
This reciprocal, reflexive nature of perception is at the core of the concept of
affordance, as originally defined by Gibson (1979: 127): the affordances of the
environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, for good
or ill. More explicitly incorporating the notion of reciprocity and the link with
action, Gibson and Pick (2000: 15) define affordance as follows:
An affordance refers to the fit between an animals capabilities and the
environmental supports and opportunities (both good and bad) that
make possible a given activity.
Traditionally, perception is divided up into the separate senses: eyes for
seeing, ears for hearing, bodies for moving, fingers for touching and so on.
However, in an ecological perspective perceiving is normally multisensory
(except when conducted in experimental labs under controlled conditions

which is where most of the traditional theories of perception come from).
When someone says, Theres a good pozzie for that, listening (the sense of
hearing) is not enough to make sense of the utterance (see van Lier, 2004 for a
more detailed discussion of this example). We also need to see the gesture of
the utterer and the place she is pointing at, and we also see ourselves as we are
trying to examine a woollen sweater in a store in Australia, while carrying a
large shopping bag and not wanting to put it on the floor. The various
perceptions, the surrounding scenery, the words and gestures, all combine to
signal the relevance of the action of putting my bag in a safe place so as to have
my hands free for examining the merchandise. We see then that action,
movement, seeing, hearing, interpreting and further action are all part of an
interpretive event. Language is embedded in multiple sources of potential
meanings, offering linguistic affordances that are linked to other, non-
linguistic ones, all of which make sense when seen in their connectedness,
as a network of affordances (Barab & Roth, 2006). Indeed, instead of treating
the visual, auditory and other senses separately, it often makes sense to speak
of kinaesthetic perception. The anthropologist Geertz (2005/1972: 84
85) offers a
vivid description of such perception in his classic paper on the Balinese
cockfight:
The use of the, to Europeans, natural visual idiom for perception

see, watches, and so forth
is more than usually misleading here, for
the fact that . . . Balinese follow the progress of the fight as much . . . with
their bodies as with their eyes, moving their limbs, heads, and trunks in
gestural mimicry of the cocks maneuvers means that much of the
individuals experience of the fight is kinesthetic rather than visual.
Action-based Teaching, Autonomy and Identity 55

The senses contribute different kinds of information to the activity space in

which learners find themselves. Seeing contributes information that is
different from but complementary to hearing, and both (and others, including
touch, smell, taste, movement) are interpreted in a whole-body action-defined
sense, cognitively, affectively and experientially. All are embodied, but in
different ways. As Kress (2003: 46) puts it:
The affective affordances of sound are entirely different to those of sight
or those of touch; sound is more immediately tangibly felt in the body
than is sight, but certainly differently felt.
Sensory learning (learning to perceive) is an essential constitutive part of
language learning. This has not been sufficiently recognised in mainstream
SLA research. Although there have been many studies on attention and
focusing, they have been mainly conducted in controlled laboratory studies
(Hulstijn, 2002; Tomlin & Villa, 1994) or else have focused on what learners
attend to in particular texts or tasks (VanPatten, 1996), or how elements in texts
or tasks can be enhanced to promote noticing. These types of studies, while
valuable in their own right, sidestep the basic question of how language
perception develops, how it intertwines with action and how it is internalised.
In terms of internalisation, mainstream SLA assumes largely an informa-
tion-processing model, whereby linguistic items or input (grammar patterns,
vocabulary) are stored in linguistically structured systems in the brain, and
gradually made available for output via automatisation procedures. However,
the ecological, action-based view assumes that what is stored in the brain is not
an ever-growing and complexifying linguistic system, but an increasingly
sophisticated array of action-schemata that incorporate linguistic, perceptual,
bodily, affective and other real-world aspects of experiences as models for
future activities that include repetitions
with
changes. Thus, we do not
internalise grammar or a linguistic system, but we internalise the keys to
acting in the world (van Geert, 1994). In first-language development studies,
Kuhl (1998: 300) has found that mental representations are polymodal,
consisting of the auditory and visual speech [children] experience, and the
motor patterns they themselves produce.
It seems that memory itself is based on multisensory experiences, and
consists of multimodal (or polymodal, in Kuhls terminology) structures that
are open-ended and always open to change (cf. Hoppers emergent grammar,
1998).

Language Learning as Process

I mentioned in the introduction that several researchers in our field have
been moving away from object-oriented to process-oriented conceptualisations
of language learning. Thus, Larsen-Freeman has coined the term grammaring
to emphasise that the mastery of grammar is a matter of dynamic use rather
than static knowledge. As she (Larsen-Freeman, 2003) puts it: Grammaring is
the organic and dynamic process of using language accurately, meaningfully
and appropriately.
56 Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching

In a similar vein, Swain rejects the object-notion of output, coining the

process-notion of languaging to replace it. In her words:
Languaging is a process accomplished by active agents who make
choices about what and how they learn based on their own personal
histories, constrained by, and offered affordances by, their localized
environment. Languaging is not output practice. Languaging is
thought in action and thought is never a finished product; it is a
continual process. (Swain, 2005)
All of these considerations cannot and should not obscure the fact that
learners need to learn the language, and that this includes the hard work of
mastering all the elements of phonology, syntax, lexis and pragmatics that
traditional linguistics describes. There are implicit and explicit, inductive and
deductive ways of doing so in many different combinations (Ellis, 1994, 2005;
Fotos & Hinkel, 2002), all of which can be appropriate in certain contexts,
motivated by the purposes of those contexts. If, for example, a learner is
practising an introductory voice-over to a documentary movie about fashion
styles, and pronounces clothes as /klowzis/, then an explicit indication that
it is pronounced as /klowz/ is in order, followed by practising klowz -zu -zu
-zu until the learner is satisfied that she has it right. In such circumstances
practice, even mechanical repetition, can be highly relevant and meaningful, as
there is a direct purpose for the practice.
In other circumstances, practising elements of pronunciation, vocabulary or
grammar may be decontextualised and relatively meaningless, resulting in the
inert knowledge that Alfred North Whitehead decried in 1929 (see also
Larsen-Freeman, 2003). Thus, the traditional structure of the language lesson,
usually referred to as PPP (Present-Practice-Produce) may foster decontex-
tualised practising of items motivated by a textbook progression rather than by
a learners practical need, and so may lead to the sorts of inert knowledge that
can be displayed on tests, but not used productively in real-life situations.
It is instructive here to look at three ways of obtaining knowledge, based on
three ways of scientific and logical procedures as described by Charles
Sanders Peirce at the end of the 19th century: Induction
Deduction

Abduction (Cunningham, 2002). Briefly, applied to grammar, these three
ways represent the following instructional options:

Induction. Data-driven: from examples to rules and patterns.

Deduction . Rule-driven: from rule learning to rule application.
Abduction . Experience-driven: making (tentative) sense of new experi-
ences, working with possibilities in context.

When SLA researchers speak of hypothesis-testing as a key way for

learners to increase their linguistic repertoire, are they thinking of the first, the
second or the third option? I think that in most cases the sensible answer will
be the third option, abduction. That is, the learner participates in a language-
using experience, makes a tentative interpretation of some aspect(s) of it,
remembers this experience in all its tentativeness, and prepares to use it on
future occasions where its use might seem appropriate. All this is emergent
Action-based Teaching, Autonomy and Identity 57

and tentative, open to change, confirmation, rejection, acceptance and

elaboration, depending on the experiences that include the particular matter
at hand. Grammar is in the first instance not what is (induction), nor what
should be (deduction), but what may be (abduction). As a result of the primarily
abductive work done in action, inductive (data-based) and deductive (norm-
based) aspects of language will also become relevant.

Identity: New Ways of Relating Self to World

In recent years, learners sense of identity as second language speakers and
learners has become increasingly prominent. An early study emphasising the
importance of identity
and its struggles
in a second language context is
Norton Peirce (1995), based on case studies of immigrant women in Canada.
When one examines a range of studies, it becomes clear that identity is
conceptualised in diverse ways in our field, as it is in other fields, such as
sociology, psychology and philosophy (e.g. Gallagher & Shear, 1999). One of
the confusing areas is the relationship between identity and self. This
relationship is not often made explicit, indeed, at times the two concepts are
considered synonymous (e.g. Giddens (1991) sometimes uses the term self-
identity). Yet, it is important to be clear about the ontology of the notions of
self and identity in order to account for both constancy and change in the
development of identity. In a semiotic-ecological perspective, important for AB
relations with the world, the self begins with perception, which, as we have
seen above, is reciprocal in this perspective. According to Neisser (1988; 1993),
there are five different kinds of self-knowledge, which together comprise the
sense of self: ecological , interpersonal (together forming the perceptual self),
extended (consisting of memories, and constituting the narrative self), private
(self-knowledge and reflective) and conceptual (beliefs, projected identities,
control).
A second area of concern is that the study of identity is often based on the
learners past history, and investigated through learning histories, autobio-
graphies and other kinds of narratives (Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000). This
approach to identity is similar to well established views in sociology, e.g.
Meads (1934) view of the self as consisting of a present I communing with a
past me. Giddens (1991: 244), in similar fashion, defines his hybrid construct
self-identity as the self as reflexively understood by the individual in terms
of his or her biography. Even Neissers multifaceted construct of self-
knowledge looks back to a persons history more than to his or her present
or future.
An ecological-semiotic perspective on self, on the other hand, considers not
only a persons past history, but also her present actions and struggles and her
future projections (Colapietro, 1989; Wiley, 1994). Thus, the notion of self from
this perspective is a dynamic interrelationship between three sorts of
questions:
58 Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching

Past : where have you been, who have you become?

Present: what are you doing now and why?
Future: where do you want to go? Why? How do you plan to get there?
Having proposed a distinction between self and identity, we next have to
discuss how the two relate to one another. Simply put, identities are ways of
relating the self to the world. This is done, once again, through cycles of
perception, action and interpretation, with the notion of affordance again as a
cornerstone. Ideally the self is in harmony with the environment (including the
physical, the social and the symbolic environment) through well fitting and
satisfactory identities that are shaped both by self-perceptions and other-
perceptions (the precise ingredients and balances vary enormously from
person to person and culture to culture). The ideal is hardly ever the reality, of
course, and in practice identities are in constant construction and de-
construction, change and relocation. When our lives change significantly, as
is the case when learning a second language, new identities (ways of linking
the self to new worlds and words) need to be forged that bridge the gaps
between the known and the new. In addition, relationships with new people
need to be established, and we may need to fight for who we are and will
(want to) become (without losing our self).
What is the importance of this analysis for AB pedagogy? As in our
discussion of learning, we centre the development of identity around the
dynamism of perception, action and interpretation. But equally importantly,
we do not merely look for the learners identities in their past histories
(important though these are), but we also promote agency in the present
through activity that is both thoughtful and mindful. Last but not least, we
focus on work oriented to the future, through the planning of academic
projects and increasingly autonomous work. The learner thus does not only
learn to communicate, This is where I come from, but also This is what I am
doing right now and This is where I want to go.
These are exactly the central questions in an AB pedagogy, as learners will
be working together to construct projects and increasingly shape the path of
their own learning. It is particularly interesting to look at the role of planning
ahead (of a project, a show, a performance, etc.) in the development of
academic (and personal) voice and message (Bernstein, 2000). When planning
together, learners need to articulate their thoughts, marshal their resources,
and commit themselves to a point of view and a course of action, in
collaboration with their peers and teachers (Heath, 2000).

Scaffolding
The game consists of an initial contact, the establishment of joint
attention, disappearance, reappearance, and acknowledgement of re-
newed contact. These obligatory features or the syntax of the game
occur together with optional features, such as vocalizations to sustain the
Action-based Teaching, Autonomy and Identity 59

infants interest, responses to the infants attempts to uncover the

mothers face, etc. These non-rule bound parts of the game are an instance
of the mother providing a scaffold for the child. (Bruner & Sherwood, 1975:
280; emphasis added)
The above quote refers to the ubiquitous peekaboo game that mothers
and babies play in many cultures over a long period of time. Bruner and his
co-workers studied these games and described how they developed over time,
particularly the ways in which the infants gradually became more and more
active and enterprising, and took over aspects of the game. Bruner et al .
documented how the mother supported the childs participation and
scaffolded the childs actions by handing over parts of the game as the
child showed signs of taking the initiative.
This study led to an application of the research to educational contexts a
year later, in Wood et al . (1976). This study, which consisted of individual
tutoring sessions between a tutor and a child involving the construction of a
pyramid with wooden blocks, has been the basis of the extension of the
scaffolding metaphor into classroom contexts.
Unfortunately, the element that was central in the peekaboo study, i.e. the
childs takeover of the game, and the mothers support at that precise point,
was lost in the subsequent tutoring study, and replaced by the structuring of
the pedagogical task and the design that regulated the childs responses. In
other words, the focus shifted from the learners agency to the structures
designed into the tutoring process, and the dynamic processes of interaction
were no longer in the forefront. This shift may have contributed to a
controversy in the interpretation of scaffolding, between those who see it as
a creative, autonomy-supporting process, and those who see it as a curriculum
design feature.
In actual fact, in order to make sense of the concept, scaffolding must be
seen as both a design feature and an interactional process. Only in this way
can scaffolding be a practical pedagogical tool that is supportive as well
as liberating, guiding as well as autonomy-supporting (Gibbons, 2002;
Hammond & Gibbons, 2005). In AB pedagogy, particularly that which
employs project work, this unity of design and interaction (or structure and
process, as described earlier) is crucial. Structures need to be set up to facilitate
the learners entry into the challenging facets of project work, such as
planning, research, discussion, design and so on, but at the same time the
learners initiatives must be noted, encouraged, highlighted and supported.
The heart of the matter is, to use a Vygotskyan concept, the microgenesis of
higher functions, in other words, the moment-to-moment transformation of
experiences into understandings. The curricular rigging in terms of task
design and procedures is only designed to enable this transformational
process. Without the latter, the former is useless.
We can now begin to characterise scaffolding in all its hybridity (and
metaphorical ambiguity) as a pedagogical ground plan that includes several
prerequisites as well as an unfolding interactional patterning. If it were a
game, we would say that it has a playing field, a set of guiding rules, a game
plan, and a number of players actually playing the game
in all its
60 Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching

unpredictability
rules, plans and boundaries notwithstanding. The following

list captures some of the salient design features, with the annotation that
number 5, handover/takeover, is the defining one (van Lier, 2004).

Pedagogical Scaffolding
(1) continuity (task repetition, connections, variation)
(2) contextual support (safe, supportive environment)
(3) intersubjectivity (mutual engagement, encouragement)
(4) contingency (task procedures, teachers actions depend on actions of
learners)
(5) handover/takeover (increasing role for learner, attending to emergent
skills and knowledge)
(6) flow (skills and challenges are in balance, participants are in tune with
each other)

The list above should by now be fairly self-explanatory, but a brief

additional gloss may be useful. Tasks and activities in the classroom need to
be both predictable and variable to a degree. There must be a level of
continuity, predictability, regularity and familiarity in order to provide a sense
of security. At the same time there must be variability in order to provide
interest, expectation and challenge. The classroom must be supportive, so that
learners feel safe to explore and try out emerging skills and understanding
without fear of retribution or ridicule. There must be mutuality and
intersubjective engagement so that interaction is facilitated. The actions of all
participants must depend on one another rather than on an external plan.
Interaction is contingent when every contribution is oriented towards previous
contributions as well as foreshadowing or engendering further contributions.
The next feature, handover/takeover, is, as mentioned, the crucial defining one
of scaffolding. Every participant looks for signs in co-participants of insights,
contributions, ideas and actions that bring something new and original to
further the task, and these unpredictable and unpredicted actions lead to the
give-and-take that is essential to scaffolding. Finally, activities are designed in
such a way that skills and challenges are in balance in order to promote the
state of optimal engagement Csikszentmihaliy calls flow (1990).
Pedagogical scaffolding takes place on three time scales:

Macro: planning (a syllabus, a chain of tasks, a project, etc.) over a long-

term period.
Meso : planning the steps of a particular activity or task.
Micro: moment-to-moment interactional work.
First of all there is an overall plan that stakes out a long-term period of
work, whether it be days, weeks or months. By time x , teacher and learners
undertake to accomplish a particular project, accomplish a certain set of goals,
etc. This overall plan, the macro scale of scaffolding, is kept in mind (at least in
the back of the mind) by learners and teacher, as a time line along which they
all commonly orient towards a goal. Next, every lesson or task is planned in
Action-based Teaching, Autonomy and Identity 61

terms of its component steps or episodes, that unfold over the space of an hour,
half an hour, a day or whatever. This is the meso scale. Finally, the interactional
work of the moment is the micro scale. Thus, teacher and learners operate on
three scales of awareness. They know where they are going, as a class or a
group (or individually even), they know what the job of today or this hour is,
and they know that they are interacting here and now to move towards the
goal sets that are in place.
A recurring theme in this paper has been the dynamic tension between
structure and process. This tension is present at all levels in human activity,
and scaffolding in classrooms is no different. Looking at the above features of
pedagogical scaffolding, and the macro-meso-micro scales, this tension works
in both directions: the structures that are put in place constrain the processes at
the micro level, and this is necessary for meaningful and effective pedagogical
activity to be possible. However, we have also noted that playing the game has
a way of changing the rules, and it is inevitable that micro-level activity will
result in changes at the meso and macro levels, particularly as the learners
gradually achieve autonomy of purpose and action. Therefore, structures must
always be seen as provisional and temporary, open to revision in the light of
emergent practices, and processes as constrained by pedagogical structures (in
positive ways, but not to the extent of hampering autonomy development).

Conclusion
In this paper I have outlined the basic principles of and arguments for an
action-based pedagogy (AB). I have related it to a number of long-established
and well known approaches, including project-based learning and other
meaning-driven approaches. I have also shown how AB is a direct descendant
of the educational theories and philosophies of a number of earlier thinkers
and workers, including Pestalozzi, Vygotsky, Piaget and Montessori.
It can be observed that AB and related pedagogies in general have never
found widespread acceptance in educational systems beyond certain well
defined niches such as ESP and EAP, and as part of educational reform
programmes that have had some success, but have never been able to
transform the basic ways in which education is conducted, i.e. transmission
of knowledge and information punctuated by periodic high-stakes tests. I
have spent some time exploring the reasons for this failure of AB to be other
than a marginal force in the practical conduct of educational work in
mainstream educational systems. I have looked at Bernsteins theory of
power and control as a particularly penetrating analysis of why liberating
and autonomy-supporting pedagogies may have a hard time in getting
accepted at the institutional, school and classroom level. The reason for
including this critical discussion is to dispel the nave notion that an AB
pedagogy can be implemented just because it can be shown to be effective,
ethically responsible and humanly rewarding. Instead, it has to be empha-
sised that the advocacy of such a pedagogy addresses not just what might
make sense in the classroom, but also the very structure of educational
62 Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching

systems, and the power and control networks from the highest to the lowest
levels. Politics is inseparable from pedagogy.
I next outlined the basic features of an AB pedagogy, linking it to ecological
and sociocultural traditions in psychology and education. The basic point is
the centrality of perception, and the inseparability of perception and action.
Out of educational perception-action processes grow interpretation and
understanding. And as language is multimodal, and perception is multi-
sensory, AB pedagogy requires a holistic, whole-person, whole-language and
embodied approach. This does not deny the usefulness of such mundane and
age-old practices as grammar teaching, phonological awareness raising and so
on, but rather it puts those practices in the service of meaning-oriented tasks
and projects.
The learner is a whole person, not an input-processing brain that happens to
be located inside a body that should preferably sit still while the input is
transmitted, received and computed by the brain. The learner is a person with
a social, embodied mind, with dreams, worries and beliefs, and in need of
forging productive identities that link the personal self to the new worldly
demands presented by the new language. The work of negotiating new
identities requires personal investment and engagement, things to do that
make sense, and ways of doing them that are challenging, interesting,
supported and satisfying.
One of the most commonly discussed pedagogical tools for doing interac-
tional work in classrooms is scaffolding, a construct originally based in
mother
child and tutor
child games. Over the last three decades or so
scaffolding has become both very popular and very criticised, and I have tried
to unravel the principles and processes that underlie the notion of pedagogical
scaffolding as it has developed in recent years. I have argued that it consists of
the same structure-process dynamic that characterises all human (indeed, all
physical as well, according to Bohm) phenomena, but that we must make sure
to emphasise at all times that its defining feature is the promotion of emergent
understandings and growing autonomy of the learner. This work occurs at
the micro (moment-to-moment) level of interpersonal interaction, where one
interlocutor is constantly looking for opportunities to hand over, and the other
interlocutor for opportunities to take over, not in any confrontational or
competitive way, but rather as a continuing focus on emergent behaviour, novel
actions, new understandings and increasing autonomy.

Correspondence
Any correspondence should be directed to Professor Leo van Lier,
Monterey Institute of International Studies, 460 Pierce Street, Monterey, CA
93940, USA ([email protected]).

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