Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

1 single unrelated commands such as ‘Grapple with your opponent’;
2 action series like the one above;
3 natural action dialogues based on a short script;
4 action role-playing without a script, that is, a freer version of (3).
These lead in to a technique called TPR storytelling, in which students retell famil-
iar stories through the second language. TPR is discussed further in Chapter 13.
During the 1980s there was much talk of listening-based methods, summed up
under the slogan of ‘Listening First’ (Cook, 1986). Postovsky (1974) had described
how students who were taught Russian by methods that emphasize listening were
better than students taught in a conventional way. According to Gary and Gary
(1981a; 1981b), the benefits of concentrating on listening are that students do not
feel so embarrassed if they do not have to speak; the memory load is less if they
listen without speaking; and classroom equipment such as tape recorders can be
used more effectively for listening than for speaking. Classroom research has con-
firmed that there are distinct advantages to listening-based methods, as shown in
the collection by Winitz (1981). A major schism in communicative teaching is
between those who require students to practise communication by both listening
and speaking, and those who prefer students to listen for information without
speaking.
Krashen brought several disparate listening-based methods together through
the notion of ‘comprehensible input’. He claims that ‘acquisition can take 
place only when people understand messages in the target language’ (Krashen 
and Terrell, 1983). Listening is motivated by the need to get messages out of 
what is heard. L2 learners acquire a new language by hearing it in contexts 
where the meaning is made plain to them. Ideally, the speech they hear has
enough ‘old’ language that the student already knows and makes enough sense in
the context for the ‘new’ language to be understood and absorbed. How the
teacher gets the message across is not particularly important. Pointing to one’s
nose and saying ‘This is my nose’, working out ‘nose’ from the context in ‘There’s
a spot on your nose’, looking at a photo of a face and labelling it with ‘nose’,
‘eyes’, and so on, are all satisfactory provided that the student discovers the mes-
sage in the sentence. Steve McDonough (1995) neatly summarizes the process as
‘the accretion of knowledge from instances of incomprehension embedded in the
comprehensible’.
Stephen Krashen claims that all teaching methods that work utilize the same
‘fundamental pedagogical principle’ of providing comprehensible input: ‘if x is
shown to be “good” for acquiring a second language, x helps to provide CI [com-
prehensible input], either directly or indirectly’ (Krashen, 1981b).
Krashen’s codebreaking approach to listening became a strong influence on lan-
guage teachers. It is saying, essentially, that L2 acquisition depends on listening:
decoding is codebreaking. It did not, however, oddly enough, lead to a generation
of published listening-based main coursebooks in the teaching of English, though
some examples exist for teaching other languages in the Two Worlds series by
Listening and reading processes
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Tracey Terrell and others (Terrell et al., 1993), and in ‘More English Now!’, an
appendix to the Gary and Gary (1981b) materials discussed in Chapter 13.
But Krashen’s theory does not say what the processes of decoding are and how
they relate to codebreaking. The statement that teaching should be meaningful
does not in itself get us very far. Most teachers have always tried to make their les-
sons convey messages, whatever method they may be using, even the conversa-
tional interaction drills mentioned in Chapter 2. Comprehensible input is too
simplistic and too all-embracing a notion to produce anything but general guide-
lines on what a teacher should do. It pays little heed to the actual processes of lis-
tening or learning, but promises that everything will be all right if the teacher
maximizes comprehensible input. As advice, this is too vague; the teacher can do
anything, provided the students have to make sense of the language that is
addressed to them – at least anything but make the students produce language,
thus eliminating most of the ‘British’ communicative methods.
Discussion topics 133