Learner-Centered English Language Education

The Selected Works of David Nunan

David Nunan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415631341
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136220388
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This carefully crafted collection provides a snapshot of the evolution of David Nunan's theoretical and empirical contributions to the field of second language education over the last 40 years. The volume focuses on the development of his work on second language curricula, and in particular, the work for which he is best known: learner-centered education and task-based learning and teaching. David Nunan has been a language teacher, researcher and consultant for 40 years. He has lived and worked in many countries, principally in the Asia-Pacific region, but also in the Americas, Europe and the Middle-East. In addition to his research and scholarly work, he is the author of several major textbook series for the teaching and learning of English as a foreign Language. These texts are based on his task-based language teaching approach, and are widely used in schools, school systems and universities around the world.

PART I

THE SECOND/FOREIGN LANGUAGE CURRICULUM

In Part I, I include a series of chapters that trace the development of my approach to second language curriculum development. The concept that ties the chapters together is that of learner-centeredness, a concept that has dominated my thinking and my work as a teacher, teacher educator, researcher, and author over most of my professional career. Chapter 1 is taken from my first full-length book on learner-centered language curriculum development. It looks at the theoretical and empirical bases of learner-centeredness as well as key concepts such as communicative language teaching and the notion of language proficiency. Chapter 2 was originally published in the special 25th anniversary issue of TESOL Quarterly, and presents the communicative task as a central organizing principle in curriculum design. The third chapter is an edited compilation of two chapters from a 1999 book, Second Language Teaching and Learning, which updates theory and research into key concepts first introduced in my earlier book. Chapter 4 presents the text of a plenary presentation at the International TESOL Convention in Vancouver. It draws on narrative accounts from learners themselves which dramatize the centrality of the learner to the learning process. In Chapter 5, I present a set of learner-based strategies for closing the gap between intended and actual outcomes of instruction. The place of a focus on form in task-based language teaching has been controversial for many years, and in Chapter 6 I present my own perspective on the controversy. Chapter 7 is a relatively recent contribution to the third edition of Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. I have included it in this selection because it provides an updated account of task-based language teaching, and synthesizes recent theoretical, empirical, and practical approaches. Theory, research, and practice are well and good. However, if they are ignored by policy-makers, then their educational value is greatly diminished. In the final chapter in this part, I look at curricular policies and practices in the Asia-Pacific region in the wake of the emergence of English as a global language, examining in particular the impact of theory and research on governmental decision-making.

CHAPTER 1

LEARNER-CENTRED CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT

In the spring of 1986, I attended the annual International TESOL Convention, which that year was held in Anaheim, California. I presented two papers, one of which was on the learner-centred curriculum model that I was developing with colleagues in Australia for the Adult Migrant Education Program. Following the convention, I began working on an extended version of the paper. The result was a book-length treatment on theoretical, empirical and practical dimensions of learner-centred curriculum development. In this chapter, I look at the theoretical bases for learner-centred education, the relevance of learner-centredness to communicative language teaching, and the role of the teacher within a learner-centred curriculum.

Reprinted with permission from The Learner-Centred Curriculum, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Introduction

One way of typifying curriculum models is in the degree to which they allow curriculum development to occur at the local level. A fully centralised curriculum, as the name suggests, is one which is developed in a centralised location and then disseminated (this is sometimes known as the centre–periphery model for obvious reasons). Many school curricula developed during the 1950s and 1960s accorded with this centralised model. They were often produced by a government department or agency, and then disseminated to a wide range of learning institutions. The responsibility of the teacher in such systems was often little more than to implement the curriculum and to act as ‘classroom manager’. An example of a centralised approach to language teaching is the Situational English course which was developed for teaching ESL in Australia during the 1960s and early 1970s. During this time, it was possible to go into language classrooms all over the country and find a similar curriculum in place for teaching a wide range of learners. In those days, the only criterion for differentiating learners was their level of proficiency.

During the 1960s, the relative inflexibility of centralised curricula, and a change in educational thinking which paid more attention to the learner, led to the ‘school-based’ curriculum development movement. School-based curricula are devised either wholly or in part within the teaching institution itself. Such curricula are capable of being much more responsive than centralised curricula to the needs and interests of the learners they serve. The learner-centred movement in ESL/EFL is partly an offspring of the school-based curriculum movement.

A perennial tension in language teaching is between those who subscribe to a subject-centred view and those who subscribe to a learner-centred view of language and language learning. The subject-centred view sees learning a language as essentially the mastering of a body of knowledge. The learner-centred view, on the other hand, tends to view language acquisition as a process of acquiring skills rather than a body of knowledge. Both viewpoints are quite valid, and most courses will reflect elements of both. It is the relative emphasis given to language as a body of content to be internalised, or language as a communicative process to be developed, which will determine which of the labels ‘subjectcentred’ or ‘learner-centred’ should apply to a given curriculum proposal.

Proponents of learner-centred curricula are less interested in learners acquiring the totality of the language than in assisting them gain the communicative and linguistic skills they need to carry out real-world tasks. Implicit in this learner-centred view is a recognition that no one person (not even a native speaker) ever masters every aspect of the language. If it were possible to master every aspect of every skill in a given language, and if one had unlimited time to teach or learn another language, then there would be no need to make choices, and consequently no debate. However, given the fact that most learners do not have unlimited time (many may have only between 150 and 300 hours of formal instruction) it is crucial that appropriate choices be made.

Theoretical bases for learner-centred curricula

In this section, the theoretical background to the development of learner-centred language teaching is explored. We shall take a brief look at the theory and practice of adult learning before looking at the development of communicative language learning and teaching. The proficiency movement is also described. Finally, we shall look at the implications of a learner-centred philosophy for the language teacher. This provides the context for an examination of the nature of the curriculum and the various elements within a curriculum model which come into prominence when the curriculum is seen from a learner-centred perspective.

The theory and practice of adult learning or andragogy has had a long history. However, it is only comparatively recently that this theory and practice has been related to adult language learning. The most prominent theorist in the field of adult learning is Malcolm Knowles (1983), whose book, The Adult Learner: A Neglected Species, became very influential in adult learning circles.

Two other specialists in adult learning theory whose work has been influential in language teaching circles are Brundage and MacKeracher (1980). Their book, Adult Learning Principles and Their Application to Program Planning, is regularly cited these days in the language teaching literature.

Some of the principles of adult learning identified by Brundage and MacKeracher are as follows:

•	Adults who value their own experience as a resource for further learning or whose experience is valued by others are better learners.
•	Adults learn best when they are involved in developing learning objectives for themselves which are congruent with their current and idealized self-concept.
•	Adults have already developed organized ways of focusing on, taking in and processing information. These are referred to as cognitive style.
•	The learner reacts to all experience as he perceives it, not as the teacher presents it.
•	Adults enter into learning activities with an organized set of descriptions and feelings about themselves which influence the learning process.
•	Adults are more concerned with whether they are changing in the direction of their own idealized self-concept than whether they are meeting objectives and standards set for them by others.
•	Those adults who can process information through multiple channels and have learned ‘how to learn’ are the more productive learners.
•	Adults learn best when the content is personally relevant to past experience or present concerns and the learning process is relevant to life experiences.
•	Adults learn best when novel information is presented through a variety of sensory modes and experiences with sufficient repetitions and variations on themes to allow distinctions in patterns to emerge.

(Brundage and MacKeracher, 1980: 21–31)

Th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The Second/Foreign Language Curriculum
• Part II Language And Culture
• Part III Teachers And Teaching
• Index