RADICAL TEFL

Implications A practical implication, for the EFL teacher-enquirer, of this
understanding of validation as being progressive, might be as follows: let's imagine
that the teacher-enquirer has been working with her class on the problematic situation
given in Section 1, where the example was introduced of present simple and present
continuous tenses being apparently confused by students who consistently use the
form “I am do”. Let's imagine, further, that the teacher has 'experimented' with her
class (in the sense of 'trying things out'), to try and help students avoid this conflation,
and that the teacher now wants to validate or test whether her work has been
successful. The teacher may observe that under some conditions students will not
conflate these tenses (eg, under written test conditions, with time to think), but that
under other conditions (eg, in a role play) students may fall back into confusion. Or,
on Friday, students will seem to have 'learned' the distinction, but on the following
Monday morning they will relapse. Eventually, perhaps on holiday in England, a
student may start to use the present tenses correctly and without thinking, and this is a
stronger validation than a written test. The validation (or 'test') of a student's
understanding can therefore be of different kinds, and different stages of validation
will perhaps be needed. This example implies that if a validation attempt of a
teacher's work with students is regarded as a one-off event, as 'successful or
unsuccessful', the teacher will be mis-led, just as the teacher will be misled if she
regards the students' problem concerning the confusion of the present tenses as due to
one problem rather than a cluster of problems (sec. 1 above).
Even to formulate a research question, for the enquirer, is to make claims to
knowledge in the form of assumptions underlying the question (all questions have
embedded assumptions), and so validation can begin as soon as enquiry begins, in the
form of 'questioning the question'. Validation (similarly to diagnosis of the problemsituation),
whether done materially or mentally 18 , can therefore be present
throughout the enquiry. Whilst it is a fair approximation of the enquiry process to say
that a problem leads to a knowledge claim which leads to some scrutiny/ validation, in
practice an enquiry may loop and spiral more like a circle than a straight line.
3. 2 Validation (sometimes called warranting or justification) is perhaps both the
most intractable problem in doing research, as well as the most neglected. A
significance of validation attempts, or of some scrutiny or test of knowledge claims, is
that validation allows work to be self-correcting and so allows it to develop, and also,
validation (for example, validation of ideas from language studies when applied in a
large classroom) can keep claims close to reality.19 The main function of validation,
18 At the validation stage, reason or reflection can be used to: pose critical questions to conclusions and
to methods used and to starting assumptions; to identify flaws and fallacies in reasoning, and to look
for contradictions in claims or conclusions, as inconsistency will be a sign that the problem has not
been solved. The function of reason here is not to build knowledge, but to challenge knowledge
claims.
19 There is superficial discussion of validation (warranting) by Professor Widdowson in his Aspects of
Language Teaching (1990: chs 3 & 4). The only sustained attempt within EFLT to scrutinise, or
validate, ideas for the classroom from Applied Linguistics seems to be by Michael Swan (2012:
passim), Thinking about language teaching. This is a key collection of articles. Some specialists
including Widdowson (see his polemical and insufficiently-researched paper The theory of practice in
his (2003) Defining Issues in Language Teaching), and Rod Ellis (2008 & 2012), are apparently
unaware of literature within mainstream education on researching the classroom, especially on the
pitfalls in doing research. (See the footnote in bold below in section 5. 3 here for some citations of
14