Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Social communicative teaching
Those who put more weight on social communication see language as communi-
cation between people, rather than as texts or grammatical rules or patterns: it has
a social purpose. Language is for forming relationships with people and for inter-
relating with them. Using language means meeting people and talking to them.
The aim is to give the students the ability to engage in conversations with people.
The teaching syllabus is primarily a way of listing the aspects of communication
the students will find most useful, whether functions, notions or processes. It is not
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so much the ideas which people exchange that matter, as the bonds they build up
between them.
Social communication mostly aims more at international use of the second lan-
guage with people in another country than at local goals in multilingual societies.
The overall goals of the communicative style have not been specified in great
detail in general-purpose language teaching, which usually tries for the gener-
alised situation of visitors to the target country, with the accent on tourism and
travel, without specific goals for careers, for education or for access to informa-
tion. In more specialized circumstances, social communication has been taught
for specific careers – doctors, businessmen, oil technicians, or whatever – and for
higher education.
In practice, many communicative coursebooks adopt what might be called
‘package holiday communication’, centred on tourist activities, with the book
resembling a glossy holiday brochure and the teacher a jolly package-tour rep
organizing fun activities. One entertaining, if light-hearted, method of evaluating
courses is to measure the ‘smile factor’: the average number of smiling faces per
page of the textbook, which gives a quick insight into the attitudes being expressed.
The higher the smile factor, the closer to ‘package holiday communication’.
Headway Elementary (Soars and Soars, 1993), for example, manages to pack 15 smil-
ing faces onto the first four pages (and seven unsmiling); Touchstone (McCarthy
et al., 2005) also has 15 smiles on the first four pages; True to Life (Collie and Slater,
1995) a mere two. The other genres of printed English where such smiling faces
abound are travel brochures and clothes catalogues: the Landsend Overstocks cata-
logue, for example, has 18 on four pages. Whether you consider smiling faces an
advantage or not depends on whether you think this makes English a happy, inter-
esting subject or makes the coursebook a trivialization of human existence.