Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

particular class has to remember that it will not appeal to students with other
types of goal, say an interest in language structure or a desire for personal libera-
tion. The unexpectedness of the classroom situation it relies on may need selling
to the students; they have to realise that the onus is on them to take advantage of
the classroom, not on the teacher to spoon-feed them. It needs balancing with
other styles to make certain that the coverage of language components is adequate
even to achieve its own goal of communicative competence, for example, in the
teaching of pronunciation. But at least it sees communication as a dynamic social
activity to be acquired by active participation by the students, marking a clear
break in this respect from the academic and audio-lingual styles.
One seldom discussed danger has been the academic standing of language teach-
ing as a discipline. The academic style of teaching was to some extent educationally
The communicative style 255

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respectable because it stressed intellectual understanding of the language system,
studied high art in the form of literature, and used translation as a teaching tech-
nique, which was clearly a unique and highly demanding skill. First audio-lingual-
ism, then communicative language teaching, said teaching should be based on
everyday use of language. When describing the setting up of the language centre at
the University of Essex in the 1960s, David Stern (1964) claimed that it would con-
centrate on ‘learning as a practical skill as distinguished from an academic discipline
dependent on the command of the language’. Both at school level and at university
level, this view resulted in teachers from other disciplines failing to take language
teaching seriously. In schools, some felt that it should no longer be part of the core
academic curriculum, but an optional extra, like keyboard skills, because it no
longer contributed to the core educational values of the school. At universities in
England, if not elsewhere, this has led to a down-valuing in terms of esteem. The
consequences of Stern’s plan is that an Essex professor said recently that language
teaching is only about teaching people to order coffee in a bar in Paris. These dan-
gers are one reason why I have been arguing for the deeper value of language teach-
ing throughout this book. L2 users are different from those who speak one language,
not just people who can order a coffee or read a map in another language. L2 teach-
ing is about turning learners into these distinctive types of people.
Second language learning and language teaching styles