Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

1 Know what you are doing.
2 The whole is more than the sum of the parts.
3 The processes are as important as the forms.
4 To learn it do it.
5 Mistakes are not always a mistake.
These clearly do not have the straightforward practicality of the audio-lingual
assumptions and would apply to many teaching methods rather than being exclu-
sive to communicative teaching. The basic question of what we do in the class-
room next Monday at 11.15 is seldom answered by the generalities of the
communicative style. However interesting the techniques we have mentioned
may be, there are rather few of them compared to the vast range available in ear-
lier styles. Teachers sometimes feel lost because they have not been told exactly
what to do, but essentially have been given some overall guidance and a handful
of techniques and told to get on with it. Their preparation time also goes up as
they have to devise roles for the students to play, collect pictures for information
gap games, or invent ingenious tasks for them to do.
Over time, at least three variants of the communicative style emerged, which we
shall call here ‘social communicative’, ‘information communicative’ and ‘task-
based learning’. A conversation requires someone to talk to (social), something to
talk about (information), and a reason for talking (task). As the pioneer linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) said: ‘Speech has both an individual and a social side
and we cannot conceive of one without the other’; Lang
4
is bound to Lang
5
. Social
communicative teaching emphasises the joint functioning of two people in a situ-
ation, what Halliday (1975) terms the interpersonal function of language.
Information communicative teaching stresses the exchange of information, of
ideas and meanings, rather than the relationships between people – Halliday’s
ideational function of language. These two uses will be dealt with under this style;
tasks are expanded as a style of their own below.