ABSTRACT
Most surveys of classroom second language research (Allwright and Bailey, 1991; Chaudron, 1988; Nunan, 2005) begin with comparative methods studies of the late 1960s and 1970s, which were considered failures because they showed little difference among different teaching methods. These studies simply looked at inputs, such as materials and how language was presented, and outputs-essentially test scores-in hopes of determining a causal relationship between them. The general conclusion is that the studies failed because classrooms are too complex to be compared as unitary phenomena. This heralded a new era of classroom studies, in which the classroom itself, dubbed “the black box” by Long (1980), became the focus. This tradition of “input-output” research continues, recently with more tightly controlled studies (Lightbown et al., 2002; VanPatten and Sanz, 1995). In the past 30 years, however, researchers have also investigated what happens between input and output, that is, what actually goes on in second language classrooms, addressing many different questions, and using a variety of approaches.
