Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Present-day English for Foreign Students (Candlin, 1964), is organized around ‘sen-
tence patterns’ such as ‘John has a book’, and ‘new words’ such as ‘John Brown’.
The style values what people know about the language rather than what they
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comprehend or produce. Students are seen as acquiring knowledge rather than
communicative ability. The learner progresses from controlled conscious under-
standing of language to automatic processing of speech, as described in Chapter
12. The language teaching classroom is similar to classrooms in other school sub-
jects, with the teacher as a fount of knowledge and advice.
The academic style is appropriate for a society or an individual that treats aca-
demic knowledge of the second language as a desirable objective and holds a tra-
ditional view of the classroom and of the teacher’s role. Its strengths, to my mind,
are the intellectual challenge it can present some students, unlike the non-intel-
lectual approach of other styles, and the seriousness with which it views language
teaching: the pupils are not just learning how to get a ticket in a railway station,
but how to understand important messages communicated in another language,
particularly through its literature. The links to literature are then valued. ‘Culture’
is taught as the ‘high culture’ of poetry and history rather than the ‘low culture’
of pop music and football. At the time I was taught Latin I hardly appreciated this;
nevertheless, it has remained with me in a way that the functional French I learnt
has not. One trivial example is the way that Latin quotations come to mind:
Horace’s line, ‘Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt’ (those who
travel across the seas change the weather not their souls), is pithier than any
English quotation, as is shown by Christopher Marlowe’s use of it in Dr Faustus.
Likewise, the fact that I had studied Cicero’s speeches gave me a good model for
appreciating Fidel Castro’s devastating defence at the tribunal of those accused in
the attack on the Moncado barracks. In other words, I have certainly had my value
out of learning Latin in terms of individual goals.
One weakness in the academic style is its description of language. As Michael
Halliday et al. (1965) pointed out many years ago, you cannot judge the use of
grammar in the classroom as wanting if people have not used proper grammars.
The linguistic content is usually traditional grammar, rather than more recent or
more comprehensive approaches, described in Chapter 2. At advanced levels, it
ventures into the descriptive grammar tradition in English, for example Collins
COBUILD Grammar (Sinclair, 1990). While the treatment of vocabulary in text
exercises is far-ranging, it is also unsystematic; the teacher has to cover whatever
comes up in the text. Though the academic style laudably strives to build up rela-
tionships between vocabulary items encountered in texts, it has no principled way
of doing so. Despite being concerned with linguistic forms, it pays little attention
to components of language other than grammar and vocabulary, and occasionally
pronunciation. The same academic techniques could in fact be applied systemati-
cally to other areas, say listening comprehension or communicative function.
The academic teaching style caters for academically gifted students, who will
supplement it with their own good language learner strategies, and who will prob-
ably not be young children – in other words, they are Skehan’s analytic learners
from Chapter 8. Those who are learning language as an academic subject – the lin-
guistics students of the future – may be properly served by an academic style. But
such academically oriented students form a small fraction of those in most educa-
tional settings – the tip of an iceberg. Those who wish to use the second language
for real-life purposes may not be academically gifted or may not be prepared for
the long journey from academic knowledge to practical use that the style requires.
When should the academic style be used? If the society and the students treat
individual goals as primary, language use as secondary, and the students are aca-
demically gifted, then the academic style is appropriate. In a country where the
Second language learning and language teaching styles
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learners are never going to meet a French-speaking person, are never going to visit
a French-speaking country, and have no career needs for French, an academic
style of French teaching may be quite appropriate. But the teacher has to recognize
its narrow base. For the academic style to be adequate, it needs to include descrip-
tions of language that are linguistically sound and descriptions that the students
can convert into actual use. The academic style would be more viable as a way of
L2 teaching within its stated goals if its grammatical and vocabulary core better
reflected the ways in which language is described today. Little teaching of English
grammar in the academic style, for example, makes use of the basic information
from Chapter 2 about grammatical morphemes or principles and parameters. If
the intention is that the students are able to use language at the end, the grammar
it teaches has to be justified not only by whether it is correct, but also by whether
the students can absorb it. Stephen Krashen makes the useful point that we
should be teaching ‘rules of thumb’ that help the student, even if they are not
totally true (Krashen, 1985). A quick remark by the teacher that English compara-
tives are formed with ‘-er’ for monosyllabic words (‘big /bigger’, ‘small /smaller’,
etc.) and with ‘more’ for words of more than two syllables (‘intelligent /more
intelligent’, ‘beautiful /more beautiful’), leaves the student only to puzzle out
words with exactly two syllables, such as ‘lovely’ or ‘obscure’. The rule of thumb
will not satisfy the linguists, but it may help the students.
While the individual goals of the academic style are potentially profound, the
danger is that teachers can lose sight of them and see grammatical explanations as
having no other role than imparting factual knowledge about grammar. The other
important goals of language awareness, mental training and the appreciation of
other cultures may not be achieved if the teacher does not give them particular
attention in planning lessons and in carrying them out.
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