Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition
Presentation and practice
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Presentation and practice
Just as the processes of language teaching presuppose a theory of the nature of language, they equally need to be based upon a theory of language learning. The one is derived from applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, the other from educational psychology and psycholinguistics. There is now a considerable body of research on the acquisition of the first language, though much less on the learning of a foreign or second language. The two competing theories about how a language is acquired have had great influence on teaching through methodology books and courses and through textbooks themselves. Whether a teacher has studied the theories, or not, his methods necessarily reflect presuppositions about how language is learned. The argument is between the behaviourists and the mentalists, in psychological terms, or in linguistics terms, between the structuralists and the generative grammarians. The view on one hand is that language is learned by habit- formation by imitating utterances and then producing new ones by analogy. On the other hand, it is believed that people learn language by utilising certain innate capacities. This view is based on the idea that every human being possesses a sub- conscious language acquisition device (the LAD) which takes in the language encountered, works out the rules that govern it, and then after some trial and error, manages to apply them. The behaviourist view applied to foreign language learning emphasises the importance of conditioning and reinforcement through the repetition of correct (and only correct) responses to a controlled stimulus. ‘Knowing the meaning’ is equated with ‘giving the correct response’. Learning a foreign language is said to be learning a skill, like riding a bicycle or playing the piano, and these are held to be best learned through automatic and frequent imitation, being positively hindered by conscious awareness on the part of the learner. The mentalists, or rationalists, reply to this that when a person produces an original sentence of a language he is not repeating something he has learned through imitation—and many of the sentences we produce are original. They may be similar to other sentences in the language, but the actual Basic Principles 45 choice of words and their arrangement is new virtually every time we produce an utterance. (Set phrases, ritual speech as in greetings and farewells, idioms, etc., make a very small list of exceptions.) When the behaviourists answer to this that we make new sentences by analogy with those we’ve learned already, they are, claim the rationalists, contradicting their own stimulus-response theory. For the only way to explain the process of making new sentences by analogy involves the notion of observing the regularities (rules, patterns, structure) underlying them and working out how to operate them to generate new sentences. Language is, thus, rule-governed behaviour. This does not mean that the language-learner indulges in any conscious formulation of rules. The argument is that rules are ‘internalised’ and their application is quite unconscious. It is not a matter of deliberate problem solving. But the split between the two schools of thought is not really as fundamental as its proponents may imply. It is extremely difficult to give a water-tight definition of ‘habit’ or ‘rule’, and for the practising teacher it seems quite reasonable to say that the oral skill aspects of language (articulation and discrimination of sounds) are acquired as habits which are as hard to change after childhood as other motor habits are hard to change or acquire (learning to play the violin, to skate). But at the same time one can also say that other aspects of language need a knowledge (conscious or unconscious) of rules, but that these are eventually applied habitually, i.e. without conscious attention. Whether a particular methodology is stricly behaviourist or mentalist, or eclectic, items of language still need to be presented and practised. Presentation consists of introducing each new item of language to the learners in such a way that it can be absorbed efficiently into the corpus of language already mastered. Whether the new language is lexical or structural, its central meaning must be clear from the context in which it is introduced, but the presentation needs to take place in such a way that the learners’ attention is focused upon it. Therefore presentation calls for simple contexts which are at once adequate to demonstrate meaning, but at the same time not so interesting that they distract attention away from the important item of the moment. |
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