239 12 Teaching and Learning in ‘The Age of Reform’: The Problem of the Verb Donald Freeman From simplicity to complexity: the core premise In his Six Promising Directions in Applied Linguistics, Dick Allwright (2006, Chapter 1 in this volume) makes the case that we have moved from seeing language teaching and learning as a singular, unified undertaking to one that is multi-faceted, messy and even chaotic (the latter are my words, not his.) Allwright describes this shift as a movement from simplicity to complexity, noting that: Another way of looking at the shift from prescription to description and then to understanding is to think of it more generally as a move from a simplistic way of looking at the world . . . towards a recogni- tion of the essential and irreducible complexity of the phenomenon of classroom language learning and teaching. (Allwright, 2006) Since the 1990s, there has been a great deal of work in both research and theorizing in second language education that supports this state- ment. For example, the research on teacher decision-making (for example, Woods, 1996) portrays teaching as a complex process of socio- cognitive negotiation, while recent theorizing in complexity theory (Larsen-Freeman, 1997) and in sociocultural views of second language (2L) acquisition (Watson-Gegeo, 2004) bear out this movement towards complexity. So it is ironic that the public discourse in the media and in political spheres is moving in the opposite direction – towards a view of teaching in relationship to learning that is more simplified than complex and more focused on the necessity of common standards than on the value of idiosyncratic practices. S. Gieve et al. (eds.), Understanding the Language Classroom © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2006