Understanding Language Teaching

From Method to Postmethod

B. Kumaravadivelu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780805851762
• eBook ISBN: 9781135607616
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book traces the historical development of major language teaching methods in terms of theoretical principles and classroom procedures, and provides a critical evaluation of each. Drawing from seminal, foundational texts and from critical commentaries made by various scholars, Kumaravadivelu examines the profession's current transition from method to postmethod and, in the process, elucidates the relationship between theory, research, and practice. The chief objective is to help readers see the pattern that connects language, learning, teaching methods, and postmethod perspectives.

In this book, Kumaravadivelu:
*brings together a critical vision of L2 learning and teaching--a vision founded at once on historical development and contemporary thought;

*connects findings of up-to-date research in L2 learning with issues in L2 teaching thus making the reader aware of the relationship between theory, research and practice;

*presents language teaching methods within a coherent framework of language-, learner-, and learning-centered pedagogies, thus helping the reader to see how they are related to each other;

*shows how the three categories of methods evolved historically leading ultimately (and inevitably) to the emergence of a postmethod condition; and

*provides the reader with a solid background in several interconnected areas of L2 pedagogy, such as concepts of competence, input factors, intake processes, interactional modifications, and instructional design.

Understanding Language Teaching: From Method to Postmethod is intended for an international audience of teacher educators, practicing teachers and graduate students, researchers, curriculum planners, and materials designers in the field of second and foreign language teaching.

Part One

LANGUAGE, LEARNING,
AND TEACHING

Chapter 1

Language: Concepts and Precepts

1. INTRODUCTION

“A definition of language,” observed the British cultural critic, Raymond Williams, “is always, implicitly or explicitly, a definition of human beings in the world” (1977, p. 21). That is because language permeates every aspect of human experience, and creates as well as reflects images of that experience. It is almost impossible to imagine human life without it. And yet, we seldom think about it. We are oblivious of its ubiquitous presence in and around us, just as the fish is (or, is it?) unmindful of the water it is submerged in. Even those who systematically study language have not fully figured out what it is. A case in point: After brilliantly synthesizing both Western and non-Western visions of language developed through the ages, the leading French linguist and psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva (1989, p. 329) ends her erudite book on language with the humbling phrase: “that still unknown object—language.”

Without delving deep into that still unknown object, I briefly outline in this chapter my understanding of how theoretical linguists have attempted to decipher the fundamental concepts of language and how applied linguists have tried to turn some of those theoretical concepts into applicable pedagogic precepts.

1.1. THEORETICAL CONCEPTS

Although there are timeless and endless debates on what constitutes language, for the limited purpose of understanding its relevance for language learning and teaching, I look at it from three broad conceptual vantage points: language as system, language as discourse, and language as ideology.

1.1.1. Language as System

We all know that a human language is a well-organized and well-crafted instrument. That is to say, all the basic components of a language work in tandem in a coherent and systematic manner. They are certainly not a random collection of disparate units. From one perspective, a study of language is basically a study of its systems and subsystems. By treating language as system, we are merely acknowledging that each unit of language, from a single sound to a complex word to a large text—spoken or written—has a character of its own, and each is, in some principled way, delimited by and dependent upon its co-occurring units.

As we learn from any introductory textbook in linguistics, the central core of language as system consists of the phonological system that deals with the patterns of sound, the semantic system that deals with the meaning of words, and the syntactic system that deals with the rules of grammar. For instance, at the phonological level, with regard to the pattern of English, stop consonants are distinguished from one another according their place of articulation (bilabial, alveolar, velar) and their manner of articulation (voiceless, voiced) as shown:

	Bilabial	Alveolar	Velar
Voiceless	/p/	/t/	/k/
Voiced	/b/	/d/	/g/

These minimal sounds, or phonemes as they are called, have contrastive value in the sense that replacing one with another will make a different word as in pit-bit, or ten-den, and so forth.

Understanding the sound system of a language entails an understanding of which sounds can appear word-initially or word-finally, or which can follow which. It also entails an understanding of how certain sound sequences signify certain meanings. In the aforementioned example, the user of English knows that ten and den are two different words with two different meanings. We learn from semantics that every morpheme, which is a collection of phonemes arranged in a particular way, expresses a distinct meaning, and that there are free morphemes that can occur independently (as in den, dance) or bound morphemes like plural -s, or past tense -ed, which are attached to a free morpheme (as in dens, danced).

Different words are put together to form a sentence, again within the confines of a rule-governed grammatical system. The sentence, The baby is sleeping peacefully, is grammatical only because of the way the words have been strung together. A change in the sequence such as Sleeping is the peacefully baby will make the sentence ungrammatical. Conversely, sentences that may have a grammatically well-formed sequence as in the well known example, Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, may not make any sense at all. These examples show, in part, that “the nouns and verbs and adjectives are not just hitched end to end in one long chain, there is some overarching blueprint or plan for the sentence that puts each word in a specific slot” (Pinker, 1994, p. 94).

Language as system enables the language user to combine phonemes to form words, words to form phrases, phrases to form sentences, and sentences to form spoken or written texts—each unit following its own rules as well as the rules for combination. Crucial to understanding language, then, is the idea of systematicity. Language as system, however, is much more complex than the description so far may lead us to believe. A true understanding of the complexity of language requires a robust method of analysis. More than anybody else in the modern era, it is Chomsky who has persuasively demonstrated that language as system is amenable to scientific analysis and, in doing so, he has elevated our ability to deal with language as system to a higher level of sophistication.

Chomsky (1959, 1965, and elsewhere) began by pointing out certain fundamental facts about language as system. First and foremost, all adult native speakers of a language are able to produce and understand myriad sentences that they have never said or heard before. In other words, an infinite number of sentences can be produced using a finite number of grammatical rules. Second, with regard to the child's first language acquisition, there is what Chomsky calls “the poverty of stimulus,” that is, the language input exposed to the child is both quantitatively and qualitatively poor but still the child is able to produce, in a short period of time, language output that is immensely rich. The stimulus (that is the language data) available to the child is impoverished in the sense that it has only a limited set of sentences among all possible sentences in a language, and a large number of grammatical types remain unrepresented in the data as well. Besides, the parents' or the caretakers' language addressed to the child may not be the best possible sample because it is full of hesitations, false starts, sentence fragments, and even grammatical deviations. But still, all children, except those who may have neurological or biological defects, acquire the complex language rapidly, and, more importantly, without any formal instruction.

The Chomskyan thought about these and other “logical problems of language acquisition” is essentially premised upon mentalism, which states that much of human behavior is biologically determined. And, language behavior is no exception. Positing the notion of “innateness,” Chomsky argues that human beings, by virtue of their characteristic genetic structure, are born with an “innate ability,” that is, with an “initial state” of “language faculty” in which general properties of language as system are prewired. Using this “prewired” system, children are able to distill and develop the complex grammatical system out of the speech of their parents and caretakers. The system that the child is born with is common to the grammars of all human languages, and hence Chomsky calls it “Universal Grammar.”

The Universal Grammar is a set of abstract concepts governing the grammatical structure of all languages that are genetically encoded in the human brain. It comprises principles and parameters. The way it is considered to work is that children, using the unconscious knowledge of Universal Grammar, would know the underlying universal principles of language; for instance, languages usually have nouns, pronouns, and verbs. They would also know their parameters; for instance, in some languages verbs can be placed at the end of the sentence, or in some languages pronouns can be dropped when in the subject position, and so forth. Thus, based on the specific language they are exposed to, children determine, of course unconsciously, whether their native language (L1) allows the deletion of pronouns (as in the case of Spanish), or not (as in the case of English). Such unconscious knowledge helps children eventually to “generate” or create all and only grammatical sentences in their L1.

The abstract generative system of grammar that Chomsky has proposed (which he has frequently updated) is actually a theory of linguistic competence. He makes “a fundamental distinction between competence (the speaker-hearer's knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations)” (1965, p. 4) and he is concerned only with discovering the mental reality (i.e., competence) underlying the actual behavior (i.e., performance) of a speaker-hearer. He is very clear in emphasizing that his linguistic theory

is primarily concerned with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of language in actual performance. (Chomsky, 1965, p. 3)

Clearly, the speaker-hearer Chomsky is talking about is an artificially constructed idealized person; not an actual language user. In addition, as Lyons (1996, p. 30) pointed out, for Chomsky, “linguistic competence is the speaker-hearer's tacit, rather than conscious or even cognitively accessible, knowledge of the language-system.”

Chomsky's theory of linguistic competence is actually a theory of grammatical competence. It should, however, be remembered that his term, linguistic competence, subsumes phonological, syntactic, and semantic subsystems. That is why the unconscious possession of this abstract linguistic competence helps native speakers of a language to discriminate well-formed sentences from ill-formed word-sequences as well as well-formed sentences that make sense from those that do not (see the previously given examples). In the same way, native speakers of English can also identify the ambiguity in sentences like

Visiting mother-in-law can be boring.

or tell who the agent is in structurally identical pairs like

John is easy to please.

John is eager to please.

In other words, linguistic competence entails a semantic component that indicates the intrinsic meaning of sentences. This intrinsic meaning is semantic meaning and should not be confused with pragmatic meaning, which takes into consideration actual language use, that is, the speaker-hearer's ability to use utterances that are deemed appropriate in a particular communicative situation. As Chomsky clarifies, the notion of competence does not include actual language use: “The term ‘competence’ entered the technical literature in an effort to avoid the slew of problems relating to ‘knowledge,’ but it is misleading in that it suggests ‘ability’—an association I would like to sever” (Chomsky, 1980, p. 59).

By not considering the pragmatic aspect of language use in formulating his theory of linguistic competence, Chomsky is in no way dismissing its importance. For purposes of “enquiry and exposition,” he considers it fit “to distinguish ‘grammatical competence’ from ‘pragmatic competence,’ restricting the first to the knowledge of form and meaning and the second to knowledge of conditions and manner of appropriate use …” (Chomsky, 1980, p. 224). In other words, he is interested in looking at human language as a cognitive psychological mechanism and not as a communicative tool for social interaction. Those who do treat language as a vehicle for communication find it absolutely necessary to go beyond language as system and seriously consider the nature of language as discourse.

1.1.2. Language as Discourse

In the field of linguistics, the term discourse is used to refer generally to “an instance of spoken or written language that has describable internal relationships of form and meaning (e.g., words, structures, cohesion) that relate coherently to an external communicative function or purpose and a given audience/interlocutor” (Celce-Murcia & Olshtain, 2000, p. 4). The focus here is a connected and contextualized unit of language use. During the 1970s, discourse analysis began to gain grounds partly as a response to the dominance of the Chomskyan view of language as system that focused mainly on disconnected and decontextualized units of phonology, syntax, and semantics. Although there are many who have made contributions to our understanding of language as discourse, I briefly consider here the seminal works of Halliday, Hymes, and Austin.

Rejecting the Chomskyan emphasis on grammar, Halliday (1973) defined language as meaning potential, that is, as sets of options in meaning that are available to the speaker-hearer in social contexts. Instead of viewing language as something exclusively internal to the learner, as Chomsky does, Halliday views it as a means of functioning in society. From a functional perspective, he sees three metafunctions or macrofunctions of language: the ideational, the interpersonal, and the textual. The ideational function represents the individual's meaning potential and relates to the expression and experience of the concepts, processes, and objects governing the physical and natural phenomena of the world around. The interpersonal function deals with the individual's personal relationships with people. The textual function refers to the linguistic realizations of the ideational and interpersonal functions enabling the individual to construct coherent texts, spoken or written.

For Halliday, language communication is the product or the result of the process of interplay between the ideational, interpersonal, and textual functions of language. Through this interplay, the meaning potential of language is realized. Learning a language, then, entails “learning to mean.” As the child interacts with language and language users, he or she begins to understand the meaning potential within the language, and develops a capacity to use it. It is only through meaningful interactive activities in communicative contexts that a learner broadens and deepens the capacity for language use. And, language use is always embedded in a sociocultural milieu. That is why Halliday (1973) preferred to define meaning potential “not in terms of the mind but in terms of the culture” (p. 52).

Unlike Halliday who questions the Chomskyan notion of competence and seeks to replace it, Hymes seeks to expand it. For Chomsky, competence is a mental structure of tacit knowledge possessed by the idealized speaker-hearer, but for Hymes, it is that plus the communicative ability to use a language in concrete situations.

We have to account for the fact that a normal child acquires knowledge of sentences not only as grammatical but also as appropriate. He or she acquires competence as to when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when, where, and in what manner. In short, a child becomes able to accomplish a repertoire of speech acts, to take part in speech events, and to evaluate their accomplishment by others. (Hymes, 1972, pp. 277–278)

And the way Hymes seeks to account for that fact is by positing the concept of communicative competence, which “is dependent upon both (tacit) knowledge and (ability for) use” (1972, p. 282).

Communicative competence consists of grammatical competence as well as sociolinguistic competence, that is, factors gove...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• ESL & Applied Linguistics Professional Series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Brief Contents
• Contents
• Preface: The Pattern Which Connects
• PART ONE LANGUAGE, LEARNING, AND TEACHING
• PART TWO LANGUAGE TEACHING METHODS
• PART THREE POSTMETHOD PERSPECTIVES
• Postscript: The Pattern Which Comforts
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index