Process and Experience in the Language Classroom

Michael Legutke, Howard Thomas, Christopher N. Candlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317901600
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Process and Experience in the Language Classroom argues the case for communicative language teaching as an experiential and task driven learning process.

The authors raise important questions regarding the theoretical discussion of communicative competence and current classroom practice. They propose ways in which Communicative Language Teaching should develop within an educational model of theory and practice, incorporating traditions of experimental and practical learning and illustrated from a wide range of international sources. Building on a critical review of recent language teaching principles and practice, they provide selection criteria for classroom activities based on a typology of communicative tasks drawn from classroom experience. The authors also discuss practical attempts to utilise project tasks both as a means of realising task based language learning and of redefining the roles of teacher and learner within a jointly constructed curriculum.

1 The modern language classroom: the case of the outmoded paradigm

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The ideal of using the present simply to get ready for the future contradicts itself. It omits, and even shuts out, the very conditions by which a person can be prepared for the future. We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. This is the only preparation which in the long run amounts to anything.

(Dewey 1963, p. 49)

1.1 The challenge of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT): shifts of paradigms

The last two decades have seen a major shift in paradigms in the debate over foreign language learning. We have witnessed an exciting time in the development of programmes for language teaching and learning and for the consequent training and education of teachers. One of the key concepts that has emerged is the notion of communicative competence. Ideas relating to and deriving from this concept which were speculation in the late 1960s and early 1970s have gained the increasing support of philosophical investigation and — as we will see — classroom experimentation and experience.

In 1980 the newly founded journal Applied Linguistics immediately joined the debate by publishing two programmatic articles in its first volume. Both of them dealt critically with the notion of communicative competence and with ‘communicative approaches’ which had emerged in the 1970s and rapidly gained prominence among theoreticians, textbook authors and practitioners in Europe, Canada and to some extent in the USA (see Howatt 1984; Jäger 1984). In the first article, Canale and Swain (1980) presented a critical framework for the consideration of ‘communicative competence’, which led them to identify various shortcomings of the emerging ‘communicative approaches’. They concluded that the many aspects of communicative competence had to be investigated in a more rigorous manner before a communicative approach could be fully implemented in second language teaching and testing. They called for classroom-based research which would have to investigate — among others — several immediate and long-term research issues. Some of the immediate issues were:

(1) the manner in which and extent to which communication is focused on in different second language classes in ‘current’ general programmes (e.g. the function, scope and limitations of communicative activities);

(2) the suitability of CLT for young learners;

(3) how to interpret the significant differences between and among groups of learners with reference to implementing a communicative approach and testing its outcomes;

(4) the relationship between CLT and learner motivation.

The second programmatic article in this initial volume of Applied Linguistics by Breen and Candlin (1980) presented the potential characteristics of CLT in terms of a curriculum framework. The authors called for a radical departure from objectivist curriculum models which had dominated foreign language teaching and classroom practice. By aiming at the operationalization of predetermined goals, the objectivist models had turned the classroom into a hierarchically structured, teacher-dominated arena of knowledge and skill transmission whose procedures and forms of interaction were neither compatible with what we had come to know about learning, nor with educational values of democratic societies. The objectivist model sui generis could not provide for the development of a responsible and participatory citizenry.

Just as the language classroom is the main focus of Canale and Swain's rigorous research agenda, so the classroom is at the heart of Breen and Candlin's curriculum framework. The classroom is understood as a unique social environment with its own human activities and its own conventions governing these activities. It is an environment where a particular cultural reality is constructed, which implies a communicative potential to be exploited for learning rather than constraints which have to be compensated for:

Within the communicative curriculum, the classroom — and the procedures and activities it allows — can serve as a focal point of the learning-teaching process …. It can become the meeting place for realistically motivated communication-as-learning, communication about learning, and metacommunication. It can be a forum where knowledge may be jointly offered and sought, reflected upon, and acted upon.

(Ibid, p. 98)

In short, a curriculum with its emphasis on learning and teaching of communication highlights a process whereby the interrelating curriculum components are themselves ‘open to negotiation and change’ (ibid., p. 106). This framework of a negotiated curriculum has far-reaching consequences for:

(1) the classroom process itself where and through which negotiation takes place;

(2) the definition of teacher and learner roles;

(3) the provision of learning content from both teacher and learner;

(4) the structuring of the learning process for which both teacher and learner take responsibility;

(5) the methodology exploiting the classroom as a genuine resource with its own communicative potential.

Ten years later, Applied Linguistics (10: 2/1989) published a special issue reporting proceedings of a British/American gathering of researchers and theoreticians to ‘take stock’, so to speak, of what had become of communicative competence. The papers focus on the development of the construct, the various sources from which it was correctly or wrongly derived, the impacts these derivations had on the theory of language acquisition and learning, etc. It is not our intention to devalue the contributions of this conference. Nevertheless we believe it omitted to address two crucial areas.

The first is that no reference is made to the non-English speaking voices during twenty years of intensive debate. In particular the continental European contributions, which unfortunately are written in French, Dutch, German, Danish, Portuguese or Polish, needed to be taken into consideration. In this respect the attempt at stock-taking remained parochial (see van Essen 1989).

The second, and more important, fact is that the social reality of the language classroom on both sides of the Atlantic is not only ignored from a systematic perspective, but also from a historical point of view:

– What do we know — after two decades — about the psycho-social nature of the L2 classroom, its culture and the impact it has on L2 learning?

– What has happened in L2 classrooms since the introduction of the construct of communicative competence, since curriculum developers and textbook authors have begun to use it — even if applications seem to have been ‘too extensive and premature’ (Applied Linguistics 10: 2/1989: 114)?

– What do we really know about implementation efforts at secondary and tertiary levels, and what were their outcomes? What kind of evidence, for example, do we have about the effects of the Council of Europe's Modern Languages Project No. 12?

– What has become of Canale and Swain's call for a rigorous research programme? Has it been carried out? What would be its contribution towards helping, directing or even correcting the implementation of communicative approaches?

– In which way has the investigation of the L2 classroom following Canale and Swain, Breen and Candlin, or any other framework enriched or even changed the construct of communicative competence itself?

– How has the construct — even if it was often diluted, misunderstood, or not clearly defined — challenged teachers to rethink and ultimately reorganize their teaching?

– How do teachers teach at the end of the 1980s, and how do L2 learners learn? In which way do both their activities differ from those of the early 1970s? Have there been any specifiable changes in the roles of teachers, learners, content and process?

– What do teachers, who do not have the time to write research papers nor the money and sabbatical options to attend language-acquisition conferences, have to say about their own attempts at implementing innovation in their classrooms? Should the teachers (and if so, in what way) be part of the research process itself?

– Do we have any accounts of negotiated curricula in action, and what do we learn from them?

Since none of the above questions is addressed in this special issue, it comes as no surprise that Canale and Swain's research programme seems to have fallen by the wayside, and that Breen and Candlin's call for radical curriculum renewal is not even mentioned.

Before we return to the issues relating to the L2 classroom, we will take a brief look at some of the shifts of paradigms we mentioned above. Without making any claim for completeness with regard to the overall debate (see Morley 1987 for survey), we hold the following shifts to be of crucial relevance for the argument of this book:

(1) We have seen a shift from language as form to language in context and as communication (Piepho 1974; 1979; Widdowson 1978).

(2) We have experienced increased attention on the construct of task as the pivotal component of classroom design and implementation (Prabhu 1987; Candlin and Murphy 1987; Legutke 1988a).

(3) Connected to the focus on task and meaningful activities in which learners engage in an effort to cope with communication has been the shift from the learner as a passive recipient of language form to an active and creative language user (Kramsch 1984; Puchta and Schratz 1984; Bredella and Legutke 1985a).

(4) There has been a clear shift from the learner as individual to the learner as member of the social group actively involved in comanaging the learning process (Schwerdtfeger 1977; Dietrich 1979b; Martin 1985; Allwright 1984).

(5) With the growing interest in meaningful encounters there has been a noticeable rediscovery of literary texts for L2 classroom use as an important means of authenticating communication. After being neglected in the early phases of notional and functional teaching literary texts are now considered essential for the teaching and learning of language-in-culture (Hunfeld 1982; Bredella 1985; 1989; Kramsch 1985).

(6) The curriculum is no longer exclusively understood as a list of items to be completed, but as something which also requires a process of negotiation in which both the teacher and the learner participate (Breen and Candlin 1980; Nunan 1987).

(7) Consequently, the roles of teachers and learners have not just been expanded in scope, they have received new definitions (Wright 1987a).

(8) In keeping with the emphasis in communicative curriculum models on the learning process as opposed to learning outcomes, assessment ‘now tends to be regarded … not merely as a means of measuring outcomes, but also as an aid to learning’ (Brindley 1989).

(9) Finally, we are witnessing a rediscovery of the educational values of language learning — not only for the elites as in the past, but for all citizens. The shift from language instruction to a holistic, critical and explanatory pedagogy is immensely political (Bach and Timm 1989; Candlin 1989; Kohonen 1989).

1.2 CLT: a ‘glimpse’ at classroom reality

Whereas the quantity of books and papers heralding these changes and propelling the debate forward has now reached proportions which can no longer be grasped by the individual researcher, investigations of the dynamics of the L2 classroom's culture itself have remained scarce. We have, as van Lier points out, so far failed to consider and investigate its communicative potential ‘and the authentic resources for interaction it has to offer’ (van Lier 1988, p. 30). Our insights are still rather limited as to whether the aforementioned changes mirrored in academic works are matched by respective modifications of classroom practice. The little we know gives rise to some well-founded scepticism.

In a comparative study of forty different English classes from different West German high schools between 1971–73 and 1981–83, G. Solmecke (1984) takes the shift in paradigms as the starting point for his investigation. He argues that if one takes into account what has been published in the last decade one could assume that far-reaching changes must have occurred at classroom level, especially in the forms of learning management and learner-teacher interaction. However, his study leads him to the well-founded assumption that the basic structure of classroom interaction has changed very little. It is no exaggeration to characterize it as a largely ego-impoverished and teacher-centred one-way street, in which display questions still dominate, concerns of accuracy by far outnumber fluency attempts, and where communication is hard to find.

Solmecke does not claim general validity for his findings. However, if we add further studies by Schratz et al. (1983...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editor's Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The modern language classroom: the case of the outmoded paradigm
• 2 Theme-centred interaction in the L2 classroom
• 3 From ‘Humanism’ into the classroom: critical criteria
• 4 Building bricks: communicative learning tasks
• 5 Learning in projects (overview)
• 6 Issues in project learning
• 7 Learner education
• 8 Teacher education
• Bibliography
• Index