Professional Documents
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learning
Guy Cook
I shall call these two beliefs the first premise and the second premise,
and summarize them as follows:
These two premises are still the basis of many current approaches;
including for example interactional, task-based, process, procedural, and
learner-centred approaches (see Long and Crookes 1992).
Challenging the There are many ways in which the first premise might be challenged.
first premise One line of attack might be to question the meaning of the terms
natural and authentic. The two terms are fairly synonymous, and
though rarely defined by their advocates, appear to refer to language
224 ELT Journal Volume 51/3 July 1997 Oxford University Press 1997
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used in communication by native-speaker adults, and/or to language
used to and by native-speaker children in the process and as the means
of acquiring their first language. Yet in practice the terms are as vague in
language teaching theory as they are in the discourse of advertising from
which they derive: modifiers which indicate approval rather than any
intrinsic quality. References to natural language and authentic
language in language teaching seem no more precise than the authentic
cooking and authentic landscapes of travel brochures, or the natural
goodness and natural sweetness of food advertising. If natural and
authentic define a type of language, then they must presumably have
opposites. There must be such a thing as unauthentic, unnatural
language. But what is that? If it is language produced to aid learning, it is
not clear why. Simplified grammar, slow clear speech, and the selection
of basic vocabulary, are natural features of adult speech to children, and
for that matter natural features of speech to a foreign speaker of our
language who does not understand. Indeed, in all circumstances an
effective communicator adjusts to the level of his or her interlocutors.
But this is overlooked in the literature. Richards and Lockhart (1994:
184), for example, are critical of the way in which teachers may
sometimes develop a style of speaking that does not reflect natural
speech. Yet what could be more unnatural and unauthentic than
teachers trying to force themselves - against their better instincts - to
talk to language learners as they talk to their compatriots?
Challenging the The second premise, like the first, has been used to justify a primary
second premise focus upon meaning and communication rather than upon form. To give
one of countless available examples, Nunan (1989: 10), defining a task,
writes that:
At any point in language teaching history there are always items of faith
which nobody questions. The belief in a focus on meaning is the dogma
of our time. It derives from an uncritical acceptance of theories of
language and language acquisition developed without reference to what
learners want or need. As such it is the antithesis of reflective practice,
an instance of what Schn (1983) refers to critically as technical
rationality, the view that:
professional practice consists in instrumental problem-solving made
rigorous by the application of scientific theory and technique
(ibid.: 21)
Perhaps the scientific theories which have been applied too insensitively
in language teaching are those of communicative competence (Hymes
1972) and natural acquisition (Krashen 1982).
Leaving doubts about the first premise aside, and accepting for the
moment and for the sake of argument that authentic language is best, I
should like to challenge the second premise by asking two questions:
To what extent is a focus on meaning and function authentic and
natural?
Is focusing on language form as unnatural and unauthentic as we are
told?
For the reigning methodologies, the implications of negative answers to
these questions would be very serious.
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Two major areas of adult play are sport and fiction, although the
boundaries between the play and the real world may be blurred by the
financial, political, and social consequences of professional sport and
storytelling. In all the major media - film, radio, television, and
increasingly on computer - it is sport and fiction rather than depictions
of reality which occupy pride of place (Dunbar 1996: 5, 102).
Language play In keeping with the definitions I have advanced of play in general,
language play may be defined along similar lines. It can be divided into
two types, corresponding to the formal and semantic levels of language.
At the formal level there is play with sounds (or with letter shapes,
though this is less common) to create patterns of rhyme, rhythm,
assonance, consonance, alliteration, etc., and play with grammatical
structures to create parallelisms and patterns (Jakobson 1960). At the
semantic level there is play with units of meaning, combining them in
ways which create worlds which do not exist: fictions.
Language play by Far from being fixated on meaningful language to effect social action (as
and for children Krashen and others would have had us believe), young children
acquiring their first language spend a great deal of their time producing
or receiving playful language. They have, after all, only limited reasons
to use language for practical purposes in a world in which their every
move - what they wear, what they eat, where they go - is decided by
somebody else. If we imagine that, for the prelinguistic baby, speech
sounds are like music - pleasurable, socially bonding, and affective -
whereas for the adult language is conceived more as a way of doing
things and making meaning, then the small child may be envisaged as
making a transition from one of these poles to the other. Thus, for young
children a good deal of language remains primarily driven by sound
rather than meaning, chosen to produce chance patterns which are
pretty to the ear, but whose meaning may be absurd or unclear, as in this
childrens rhyme:
Young children are famous for asking why?: the word which enables
them to uncover the meaning of events and of the words they encounter.
Yet adults might well ask why children do not use this word more often,
considering how much of what they encounter must either be
meaningless and mysterious, or assigned idiosyncratic and, from an
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adult point of view, incorrect meanings. In childrens stories, even when
texts are meaningful to the adult who is reading them aloud, a good deal
must be impenetrable to the child. Consider, for example, the opening of
The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne, and how difficult it must be in
terms of meaning to a small child:
By the time it came to the edge of the forest the stream had grown up,
so that it was almost a river, and, being grown up, it did not run and
jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but
moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to
itself There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.
or
Moreover small children like the same stories again and again, and they
like to know rhymes and songs by heart. Supposedly the best and most
natural language acquirers, they do all the things that contemporary
approaches would have us avoid: repetition, rote learning, substitution
tables, saying things without understanding them, producing and
receiving language which communicates little.
So even if (and its a very big if) the first premise is true, we are wrong
to suppose that this should entail using language only for task solving,
for social action, or for talking about the real world. Authentic, natural
language both for children and for adults can also be preparatory,
repetitive, artificial, removed from reality, and focused upon the rules of
the game, including the rules of grammar and phonology.
Implications for What implications should this have for language teaching? Certainly it
language could be used to justify the reinstatement of many discarded activities:
teaching explicit attention to form, manipulation of form, repetition, rote
learning, recognition that the language classroom is not a real world
where behaviour has serious consequences but-like much of the
discourse of native-speaker children and adults - a play world in which
people can practise and prepare.