Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition
Acquiring communicative competence
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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 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. 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. 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 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. Download 0.82 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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