Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Contextualisation
Sounds, words and structures, then, are to language what
steel, glass, plastic and rubber are to motor cars and the
language teacher is no more concerned with teaching
philology or transformational grammar than the driving
instructor is with teaching car technology. We have seen in
Chapter 3 how language is a communicative system
representative of reality and thought. Every utterance, to be
language, has a meaning, relating to and part of its context.
This is why the first two lessons in Chapter 2 were
illustrations of English language teaching in a way that the
third was not. A sentence like ‘My aunt’s pen is in the garden’
only has meaning when we know who is speaking, and when
we can identify the other references and implications. The
phrase book for Portuguese learners of English which
included the often-quoted and bizarre sentence ‘Pardon me,
but your postillion has been struck by lightning’
demonstrates a total lack of sense of context: who can have
said this, to whom, when and in what circumstances?
We know that words and phrases are easier to learn and
remember if they are meaningful and in context: it follows

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that the foreign language should always be taught and
practised in a contextualised form. And when the learning is
being done in a class situation, every member of the learning
group should recognise the context.
Faced with the common need to introduce, exemplify and
practise items of language, teachers often have difficulty in
contextualising them. The immediate classroom environment,
with its things and people to identify, count and relate to each
other, is an obvious source of contextualised language which is
common to the experiences of a group of learners. But its
limitations are soon felt after the most elementary lessons.
Supplementation of the classroom’s physical resources is
possible and many enthusiastic teachers enliven their lessons
by bringing appropriate realities (called realia) into their
classrooms. Actual fruit and a knife may be used to ensure that
apple, orange and to cut are contextualised: but again there
are limits to professional resources and ingenuity.
However, there are no limitations to the introduction of the
physical world at one remove, namely by its pictorial
representation. Visual aids are an invaluable contextual
resource, whether completely teacher-produced like
blackboard or over-head projector drawings, or more
professional representations: cut out pictures, maps, wall
charts, film strips, flannelgraphs and film. Of these, it is the
former group over which the teacher has most control in terms
of restricting the context and every language teacher should be
able to produce recognisable blackboard sketches as part of
his professional skill.
Visual identification of the physical world, however, is not
the only form of contextualisation available in a given
teaching situation. To illustrate one meaning of to grow, a
teacher may use the sentence ‘Apples grow on trees’,
verification of which is not needed from a picture since at
least in temperate climates the fact is part of the common
stock of knowledge of the learners. This contextual source,
drawing upon common experience, is clearly culture-bound,
and dependent upon the learners’ ages. But even for a class of
students drawn from the most widely differing backgrounds,
there are many areas of common knowledge. In every
culture, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, water is
wet, people get hungry and tired, babies cry, metal is stronger

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than wood and fire will destroy things: the eternal verities are
the basis of any common stock of knowledge. An important
second layer is a common cultural background, providing a
wealth of events, institutions, people and attitudes, both past
and present as a contextual frame of reference.
Clearly, the longer a group of learners continues to work
together, the more they build their shared stock of
experience. Every happening in that classroom, natural or
contrived, is a contextual source of language for as long as
the group continues together.
The physical world, however, is of less potential than the
world of the imagination. Every shared anecdote or dream,
every item of literature becomes part of the class’s common
experience and therefore the contextual raw material for
communicative language work. Given Coleridge’s ‘willing
suspension of disbelief, the world of the imagination is as
acceptable as the tangible physical world. Indeed the whole
process of foreign language learning is a willing suspension
of this kind, where the learners are pretending to be at home
in another language. To this end, role play is a useful activity,
whereby learners simulate attitudes and roles, which—
however briefly and superficially—they adopt as acceptable.
The Spanish adolescents in the first lesson described in
Chapter 2, by identifying with a manifestly imaginary girl
making a telephone call, were role-playing and their resulting
dialogues were no less in context than if they had been
making an inventory in Spanish of their classroom furniture.
We have argued, then, that the nature of contextualised
language for our professional purposes is that the items of
language are acceptable or verifiable by all members of the
learning group as representing actual or imagined reality. It is
clear that a language item which is contextualised in this way
is part of a larger body of language (whether realised or not)
which the same context may generate. In this way the
imaginary dialogues of Lesson 1 and the comprehension
discussion of Lesson 2 of Chapter 2 are contextualised in a
way that utterances like ‘Do we not walk?’ in Lesson 3
are not.

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