General Introduction
1.0 Introduction
Pedagogy can be defined as the intervention into thought and behaviour which is concerned with the promotion of learning processes for intended outcomes. By definition it therefore simultaneously involves decisions by teachers, action by learners and perceptible outcomes, both immediate and over time.
Pedagogy has been studied for centuries. However, much of that study has been based on principle, prescription and analogy. In contrast, a researched pedagogy (Leung, 1993) scrutinizes pedagogic activity to assess it’s modes of implementation, it’s operation and it’s outcomes. This research builds upon a growing number of previous publications to bring together a series of studies which investigate tasks in this way. This is a long term project, a research as this can only sample a small range of tasks in a limited number of contexts under a restricted range of conditions. There is a substantial range of pedagogic activities that remain to be researched in a vast range of circumstances.
In contrast, this collection makes a small contribution to the field. In fact, research into pedagogic task is one of a growing number of areas of empirical research which have emerged since the early 1980s. One of the basic functions of empirical research into language pedagogy is arguably feedback to the teaching profession, so that, as Brumfit argued ”we are able to attempt to assess the effectiveness of our educational system; and in order to receive information about alternatives to traditional methods, so that the alternatives can be introduced, in some systematic way, into the system” (Brumfit, 1980: 132).
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