Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Acquiring communicative competence
Learning to use a language thus involves a great deal more
than acquiring some grammar and vocabulary and a
reasonable pronunciation. It involves the competence to suit
the language to the situation, the participant and the basic
purpose. Conversely, and equally important, it involves the
competence to interpret other speakers to the full. Using our
mother tongue, most of us have very little awareness of how
we alter our behaviour and language to suit the occasion. We
learned what we know either subconsciously while
emulating the models around us, or slightly more consciously
when feedback indicated that we were successful, or
unsuccessful—in which case we might have been taught and
corrected by admonitions like ‘Say “please”!’, or “Don’t talk
to me like that!’
As far as the foreign learner is concerned, the history of
language teaching shows emphasis on a very limited range of
competence which has been called ‘classroom English’ or
‘textbook English’, and has often proved less than useful for
any ‘real’ communicative purpose. That is to say, as long as
the use of English as a foreign language was confined largely
to academic purposes, or to restricted areas like commerce or
administration, a limited command of the language, chiefly
in the written form, was found reasonable and adequate. But
in modern times, the world has shrunk and in many cases
interpersonal communication is now more vital than
academic usage. It is now important for the learner to be
equipped with the command of English which allows him to
express himself in speech or in writing in a much greater
variety of contexts.
Designers of syllabuses and writers of EFL texts are now
concentrating on techniques of combining the teaching of
traditionally necessary aspects of the language—grammar,
vocabulary, and pronunciation—with greater emphasis on
the meaningful use of the language. Their aims go well
beyond ‘situational’ teaching because this is merely an
attempt to contextualise grammatical structures while still
retaining as its objective the acquisition of linguistic forms
per se in an order dictated by grammatical considerations.
Now, the need is recognised for greater emphasis in the

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Language and Communication
36
selection and ordering of what is to be taught, on the
communicative needs of the learners, and it has become the
task of everyone concerned to provide teaching materials
rich enough to satisfy these needs.
Suggestions for further reading
W.L.Anderson and N.C.Stageberg, Introductory Readings on Language,
New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966.
L.Bloomfield, Language, Allen & Unwin, 1935.
J.B.Carroll (ed.), Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of
Benjamin Lee Whorf, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956.
E.C.Cherry, On Human Communication, John Wiley, 1957.
M.Coulthard, Introduction to Discourse Analysis, Longman, 1983.
J.P.De Cecco, The Psychology of Language, Thought and Instruction,
New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969.
J.B.Hogins and R.E.Yarber, Language, an Introductory Reader, New
York: Harper & Row, 1969.
G.Leech and J.Svartvik, A Communicative Grammar of English,
Longman, 1975.
E.Linden, Apes, Men and Language, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
W.Littlewood, Communicative Language Teaching, Cambridge University
Press, 1981.
N.Minnis, Linguistics at Large, Granada, 1973.
W.Nash, Our Experience of Language, Batsford, 1971.
S.Potter, Language in the Modern World, Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1960.
E.Sapir, Language, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1921.
N.Smith and D.Wilson, Modern Linguistics, Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1979.
H.G.Widdowson, Teaching Language as Communication, Oxford
University Press, 1978.

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37
Chapter 4
Basic Principles
The preceding chapter, in discussing several aspects of lan-
guage has suggested the complexity of this essentially human
activity; whilst the detailed questions posed at the end of
Chapter 2 imply a professional dimension no less complicated.
Clearly there are people who teach the English language
successfully without professional training or rigorous
language study, succeeding by virtue of those sensitive and
sympathetic qualities which mark the natural teacher. There
are also those whose training for and experience of other
kinds of teaching is successfully transferred to language
teaching. There are students of linguistics whose studies have
provided such insights into English that they are better
teachers thereby. Ideally, however, the professional English
language teacher should have not only the required personal
qualities, but also training in the disciplines and fields of
study appropriate to the language teaching process. Training
of this kind can be stated in terms of what the teacher should
know and what he should do.
Even with the very wide range of educational settings in
the world today, from kindergarten groups of twelve in
Argentina to strictly audio-visual classes in Senegal, or
traditionally taught university seminars in Japan, there are
certain basic principles common to all good language
teaching, principles derived from the interaction of aspects of
those fields of study which contribute to the theory and
practice of EFL teaching. The contributory areas of
knowledge may be represented in Figure 3.

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Basic Principles
38
Linguistics, the study of language itself, has drawn on ideas
from sociology to establish the place and role of language in
the sociology of human behaviour, and from psychology to
investigate among other things how language is learned. The
result is two new disciplines, sociolinguistics and
psycholinguistics, which, together with linguistics proper, form
the central area of applied linguistics. This last field is con-
cerned with many activities involving language—for example,
speech pathology, machine translation, mother tongue acqui-
sition, literary analysis. But for the present purpose its chief
relevance is to language teaching.
The conjunction of sociology and psychology with the
theory and practice box is a reminder that teaching of any
kind draws upon knowledge from these fields quite apart
from language considerations: group interaction, the status
of the teacher and the school in the local culture, the social
role of education as a whole—from sociology; and facts
about memory span, motivation, cognitive development
from psychology. The often forgotten field of pedagogy is
concerned with class management, questioning techniques,
lesson planning and teaching strategies and the numerous
daily tricks of the trade that separate the professional teacher
from the amateur.
Whether the teacher is well read or not in all the above
disciplines, he inevitably makes decisions about the problems
involved. Consciously or unconsciously, he reflects in his
teaching the beliefs he holds about the needs of the learners,
their ways of learning, the best method of motivating them,
etc. The more knowledge he can glean from the wealth of
Figure 3

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Basic Principles
39
writing in the field, the better he will be able to combine this
knowledge with practical experience to produce a suitable
teaching methodology for his own purposes.
In the light of his knowledge, he can then decide what
English to teach, how to give practice in a meaningful way,
and how to prepare and execute a progression of enjoyable,
well-organised lessons.