An alternative conception is that of learner as partner, where the emphasis is shifted from consultation to negotiation and where it is possible in Freire's terms for the teacher to 'take on the role of student amongst students'. The assumption here is not one of equality but one of a sharing, relationship within which teachers recognise that they are also learners. The starting point for this kind of teacher is not one of ”I am in charge!”, but one of ”Leťs decide .together how we can all benefit from our time together”. The underlying notions are of mutual trust and respect leading to growth and development for teachers and all their learners. This approach is best exemplified by humanist teachers such as Carl Rogers. In the language classroom, learners can be treated as partners by involving them in decisions about what activities to carry out, asking them what topics they are interested in or allowing them to select books to read. It is also a view that has underpinned work on the use of process syllabuses in language teaching.

Two further possible conceptions of learners are those of the learner as individual explorer and the learner as democratic explorer. In the first of these the role of the teacher becomes almost entirely one of facilitator working largely from a Piagetian perspective, i.e. the classroom is organised in such a way as to enable the learners to explore for themselves and come to their own conclusions with a minimum of prompting from the teacher. This particular approach became very popular with teachers of young children in the UK following the publication of the Plowden Report (1967). This is a view that has tended to pervade approaches to language teaching based on input and acquisition, i.e. the teacher's role is to provide appropriate comprehensible input, which the learners act on in their own wars, leading to language acquisition.

Democratic exploration takes this process one step further and sees it as the function of any learning group to set its own agenda, decide upon its goals and preferred wars of working, and how, if at all, it wishes to draw upon the particular knowledge and expertise of the teacher. Meighan clearly favours this particular approach, at least in working with mature learners. Although it is difficult to envisage how this could be put into practice with younger learners, perhaps the classic example of an attempt to do so is provided by A.S.Neill's alternative school, Summerhill (Neill 1962, 1967).
Approaches such as community language learning draw a little on this conceptualisation of learners. More particularly, task-based approaches to language learning which involve giving groups of learners tasks to engage in, allow groups the freedom to decide how they wish to work, although it is, of course, generally the teacher who selects the activities.

It should be readily apparent that the social constructivist approach which we favour tends to fit more comfortably with the latter end of Meighan's continuum than with the former, but it is also clear that the extent to which teachers feel able to work with their learners as democratic explorers rather than as, say, clients, often depends on factors outside of their control. In making their belief systems about learners explicit, however, teachers should be able to identify inconsistencies and frustrations in their work and thereby search for ways of bridging the inevitable gap between their espoused theories and their theories in action.
Beliefs about learning
As important as their views about learners are teachers' beliefs about learning, although the two are inextricably linked. In Chapters 1 and 2 we outlined a number of different psychological approaches to learning. We have also made the point that teachers' beliefs about what is involved in learning will influence the way in which they teach.