Comment on Pennycook(1989)

The term "interest" in the title of the article didn't come to me easy until I finished the reading. My understanding of the term is "gain and loss". Second/foreign language teaching starts from someone's or some group's purpose to gain any intentional achievement, and in the way of the achievement, some part of the world should lose something.

This article is mainly about the tension between theory (or academic knowledge) and (teaching) practice in SLA and the political nature of language teaching. The tension between theory and practice has long been discussed and has brought lots of controvercies but neither can be discarded as they are fundamentals of language teaching. "Practice" means reality - in SLA, the real happenings in classrooms, most of which are beyond the control of theoretical explanation. The tension begins from this gap. Pennycook, like in Canagarajah(2006), criticizes the imbalance of researching foci in SLA between theory and practice. Speaking of practice, he wants us to dig into the reality as an aspect of practice. The reality shows a huge but hidden, and uncomfortable political issues in classroom.

The article is very informative to me in that a brief history of second/foreign langauge teaching is offered and it changed my misconception of histoty of teaching English.

When he mentions linguistic tools applied and used in teaching language at U.S. Defense Department, I recalled a news article on foreign language training of U.S. army in Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center. They teach U.S. soldiers 40 foreign languages. After 911, 5 langauges are taught intensively - Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Korean, and Spanish. This is a typical example of political language teaching.

One criticism of mine is that, there is a criticism only about heavily biased research tradition which has neglected sociocultural, context-dependent aspect of language education. He doesn't suggest a clear idea of what a desirable language education would be.
(However, I've come to know that he wrote the article when he was a graduate student when I was reading TQ chapter 2. This is a nicely-written article by a graduate student!)

I wish I could write an argumentative article like him:)