Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

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13.3 The communicative style
The communicative style 247
Box 13.4 The audio-lingual style of language teaching
Typical teaching techniques
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dialogues, structure drills, exploitation activities
Goals
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getting students to ‘behave’ in appropriate situations
Type of student
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non-analytical, non-academic
Learning assumptions
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‘habit-formation’ behaviourist theory
Classroom assumptions
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teacher-controlled classroom
Weaknesses from an SLA research perspective
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inadequate form of grammar
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no position on other aspects of language knowledge or use
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inefficiency of habit formation as a means of teaching use
Suggestions for teaching
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use for teaching certain aspects of language only
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be aware of the underlying audio-lingual basis of many everyday techniques
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What do you understand by ‘communication’? Do you think this is what stu-
dents need?
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To what extent do you think the classroom is an educational setting, to what
extent a preparation for situations outside?
Focusing questions
functions and notions: functions are the reasons for which people use lan-
guage such as persuading and arguing; notions are the general semantic
ideas they want to express, such as time and location
information gap: an exercise that gives different students different pieces of
information which they have to exchange
communicative style: basing teaching on communication, both as the target that
the students need to achieve, and as the means of acquiring it in the classroom
Keywords

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The 1970s saw a worldwide shift towards teaching methods that emphasized com-
munication, seen as the fundamental reason for language teaching. Indeed, com-
municative teaching has now become the only teaching method that many
teachers have experienced; it was the traditional method from the twentieth cen-
tury as grammar/translation was the traditional method from the nineteenth.
To start with, this style meant redefining what the student had to learn in terms
of communicative competence rather than linguistic competence, social Lang
4
rather than mental Lang
5
, to use the terms introduced in Chapter 1. The crucial
goal was the ability to use the language appropriately rather than the grammati-
cal knowledge or the ‘habits’ of the first two styles. The communicative behaviour
of native speakers served as the basis for syllabuses that incorporated language
functions, such as ‘persuading someone to do something’, and notions, such as
‘expressing point of time’, which took precedence over the grammar and vocabu-
lary accepted hitherto as the appropriate specification of the syllabus. Instead of
teaching the grammatical structure ‘This is an X’, as in ‘This is a book’, students
were taught the communicative function of ‘identifying’, as in ‘This is a book’.
Though the structure may end up exactly the same, the rationale for teaching it is
now very different, not grammatical knowledge but ability to use grammar for a
purpose.
The elaboration of communicative competence into functions and notions
affected the syllabus but did not at first have direct consequences for teaching
methods. The fact that the teaching point of a lesson is the function ‘asking direc-
tions’ rather than the structure ‘yes-no questions’ does not mean it cannot be
taught through any teaching style, just as grammar can be taught in almost any
style. The course Function in English (Blundell et al., 1982) displayed a list of alter-
natives for each function categorized as neutral, informal and formal, and linked
by codes to a structural index – clearly academic style. The coursebook Opening
Strategies (Abbs and Freebairn, 1982) made students substitute ‘bank’, ‘post office’,
‘restaurant’, and so on, into the sentence ‘Is there a __________ near here?’, an
audio-lingual drill in all but name.
To many people, however, the end dictates the means: a goal expressed in terms
of communication means basing classroom teaching on communication and so
leads to techniques that make the students communicate with each other.
Consequently, communication came to be seen more as processes rather than
static elements like functions and notions. So syllabuses started to be designed
around the processes or tasks that students use in the classroom.