Language, language learning and Method

Language, language learning and Method

itself; it seems self-evident to note that what teachers teach and learners learn in ELT classrooms is language, specifically the English language. However, if we start to ‘unpack’ this common-sense understanding of ELT, what initially seems clear is in fact revealed to be full of complexity, and raises a number of dilemmas that are embedded in the everyday practices of ELT teachers and their approach to teaching.

Just some of the issues our tautological question raises are:

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  Is language in the classroom addressed primarily as a system of grammatical rules or patterns, or as a system for expressing meaning and communicating, perhaps communicating to solve tasks or for learners to express their own identity? Of course, it is possible, perhaps likely, that a combination of these perspectives may be part of teachers’ understandings of language and apparent in their classroom teaching. If so, how can they be combined coherently?
  
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  Similarly, which language skills are of primary importance (and of primary importance in the ELT classroom) – ‘spoken skills’ (i.e., listening and speaking) or ‘written skills’ (i.e., reading and writing)?
  
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  Thus, what is meant by language knowledge (or knowledge of language)? Are learners learning about language so they are able to consciously and explicitly describe how language operates, or is the focus more on how to use the language via implicit knowledge below the level of consciousness, perhaps with little or no explicit attention to ‘rules’? And how might teachers balance these perspectives in practice?
  

Linguistic and applied linguistic research has dealt with the issues raised above at length, as we shall see in Chapter 6. However, whether they draw upon ‘academic’ theories or not, the approach teachers pursue in their classes will be informed by their personal hypotheses and beliefs, whether these theories are explicit or remain unconscious.

There are many other classroom issues ‘hidden’ within our opening question, not least whether learners actually learn what teachers teach (as Allwright (1984) asks), or whether all learners pay equal attention and learn at the same rate (it seems reasonable to suggest that this is rarely the case!). Alternatively, touching on a very different issue, what, in fact, is meant by ‘the English language’? Is it, among many possibilities, the English of people who, for example, live in Britain or the USA, and who speak English as a mother tongue (in a high-status dialect and accent), or is it an English as spoken by people who have learned English as a second or additional language to communicate in international contexts? What, in fact, is the target language of the classroom? However, as these questions relate to themes other than our current focus of Method, we shall return to them in later chapters.

Understanding ‘language’: dilemmas for the ELT classroom

As Stern (1983: 119) notes, ‘as soon as we try to learn [or teach] a language, we come up against the most fundamental questions about the nature of language’. One of the main problems is that ‘language’ has many ways of being understood, as does the term ‘linguistic knowledge’. V. Cook (2008: 16), for example, identifies five major meanings of the term ‘language’ ranging from ‘knowledge in the mind of an individual’ to ‘a set of sentences’; Brown (2007) identifies eight key elements within an understanding of language; and many other ELT and applied linguistics texts quite reasonably avoid defining language altogether!

However, how language is conceptualized is not just an issue for applied linguists and other theorists; it is also an issue with practical relevance in the ELT classroom. As Brown (2007: 7) observes, how teachers understand the components of a language influences how it is taught:

If, for example, you believe that nonverbal communication is key to successful second language learning, you will devote some attention to nonverbal systems and cues. If you perceive language as a phenomenon that can be dismantled into thousands of discrete pieces and those pieces programmatically taught one by one, you will attend carefully to an understanding of the discrete forms of language. If you think language is essentially cultural and interactive, your classroom methodology will be imbued with sociolinguistic strategies and communicative tasks.
In effect, Brown is confirming that, at some level, teachers’ concep- tions of how language works, that is, what language is for and how language is used by people, affects what and how it is taught in the ELT classroom.

Task 4.1 Setting the scene: language and the English language classroom

Reflect upon your own experience as an English language teacher:

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  What do learners need to know about language in your classroom? Why?
  
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  What do learners need to know how to do with the target language? Why?
  

Thinking about second language learning: how might learners learn . . . and teachers teach?

Teachers’ knowledge, beliefs and assumptions about how second languages are learned is a second area where differing conceptual- izations might affect how teachers teach. These perspectives in part develop from, and overlap with, the ideas teachers might hold about language and knowledge of language that were introduced above; that is, a particular perspective on language may lead to a view of how languages are best learned. For example, if teachers feel it is possible to break language down into many discrete pieces as Brown observes they might (see above), then they may believe that language is best learned by analysing individual language items (with clear implications for classroom practice). If, however, teachers regard learners’ linguistic knowledge as being primarily the ability to use language, with little need for conscious awareness of grammatical rules, then it is likely that their perspectives on how learners are thought to learn will differ, again with implications for how language is taught and learned in the language classroom.

Similarly, first language acquisition and second language learning are clearly very different, both in terms of the learner characteristics (e.g., the existence of another language in the learners’ minds) and the environment in which they are learning (e.g., amount of time available

for learning). Yet the fact that all children (unless they have a specific disability) acquire a language as they grow up has encouraged some applied linguists and theorists to speculate as to whether ELT classrooms can in some way recreate the conditions for learning that a child experiences when learning its first language, or the conditions under which someone may informally learn a language through immersion, without formal study, in a second language environment. How far this is accepted as a reasonable foundation for classroom language learning clearly underpins how teachers might teach.

Task 4.2 First language acquisition and second language learning

In what ways do you think first language acquisition and second language learning might be different? In what ways might they be similar? You may wish to think of specific second language learning contexts and groups of learners, for example, learning in a classroom or ‘picking up’ the language informally, and differences between young children, teenagers and adult learners of a second language.