Collins Teaching Techniques for Communicative English

Jane Revell

• Publisher: Collins
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780007556854
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: English Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A practical teacher guide book for helping students to improve their communication skills in English

How can teachers bridge the gap between the language of the classroom and the world outside?

The lively activities in this book give learners a chance to experiment creatively with newly-acquired language so they can communicate in a meaningful way in real-life situations.

Chapter 1
Communication

1.1 Surprises

Communication is an exchange, between people, of knowledge, of information, of ideas, of opinions, of feelings. It takes place in a multitude of ways, from the writings of the weightiest tome to the merest flicker of an eyelid.

For genuine communication to take place, what is being communicated must be something new to the recipient, something that person does not know in advance. Com-munication is full of surprises.

It is this element of unexpectedness and unpredictability which makes communication what it is, and for which it is so hard to prepare the student by conventional teaching methods. It is true that there are a few fairly predictable responses: ‘Hello’ will produce one of a limited number of predictable replies, ‘Hello’, ‘Hi’, ‘Good morning’, etc. But these exchanges take place in a very small number of special situations – they are often social formulae, which serve to establish or maintain relations between the speakers rather than convey any earth-shattering information.

It is also true that we can often predict the semantic area of a response and even guess at key words which will come up. If, after a visit to the zoo, someone asks, ‘Did you see the reptiles?’, the response is likely to be in the general area of ‘zoo-going’ and animals, and words such as ‘snake’, ‘lizard’ and ‘crocodile’ might well occur.

In a lot of cases, however, responses are completely unpredictable. The question ‘Did you see the reptiles?’ could produce any of the following replies: ‘You bet we did. At £16.80 to go in, we made sure we got our money’s worth!’; ‘That reminds me, did you ring Aunt Nelly?’; ‘Oh, have you heard about John going to Kenya?’ etc. This sort of interaction is very often ignored in language teaching.

In the early days of TEFL, the emphasis was on the formation of language habits rather than on the development of communicative skills. Stimulus / response drills and the like encouraged learners to think that any given utterance has a set reply.

Although this type of classroom exercise is still valuable practice in formulating communications and ‘getting the tongue round’ stretches of language, it is a means to an end rather than an end in itself, and the transfer to real life is not automatic: an intermediate stage is called for. The sort of activities described in subsequent chapters of the book (see particularly Chapter 4), are designed to help bridge this gap.

1.2 Communication

We use language to communicate. We do not just communicate facts to each other, we always convey what we feel about those facts – finding a completely neutral statement is impossible. If I say ‘It’s raining’, listeners will know whether I’m surprised (because the sun was shining only ten minutes ago), or whether I’m upset (because we were going to have a picnic), or whether I’m relieved (because the hockey match will be cancelled) and so on, and the clues they will use to deduce this will not necessarily be verbal ones.

Words are used to communicate propositions. Words can also convey attitudes, but more often than not, attitudes are conveyed by intonation, gesture, facial expression and many other non-verbal means. Meaning is conveyed not only through language, but also through bodily contact, physical proximity, orientation, bodily posture, gesture, head-nods, facial expression, eye movement and even appearance. Also important are the non-linguistic aspects of speech itself: the speed at which a person speaks, how loud or how softly they speak, the pitch and the quality of their voice (whether husky, whispered, strident, etc.), all these things contribute to the meaning of the actual words said.

La Barre’s work on gesture^[1:1] seems to prove that this is both specific to certain cultures and arbitrary (and therefore needs to be taught), rather than universal and instinctive. We may think that everybody uses a finger to point at something like we do, but the American Indians, for example, point with their lips. When a Masai spits, it is a sign of affection, not of contempt. The Basuto hiss to applaud; the Japanese to show respect to a social superior. While Westerners stand up to show their respect, Fijians and Tongans sit down. Even very widespread gestures like nodding the head to mean ‘yes’ and shaking it to mean ‘no’ are not totally universal: the Anin in Japan, the Semang in Malaya and the Ethiopians all use different gestures to indicate ‘yes’ and ‘no’.

There are also wide cultural differences when it comes to bodily contact and physical proximity. While Latin peoples tend to stand very close to the person they’re talking to and often touch each other in the course of a conversation, Northern Europeans often prefer to keep a greater distance between speakers and touch each other less (although this does seem to be changing with more and more cross-cultural communication).

To prevent misunderstandings arising, students need to be able to communicate not only propositions, but also the attitude that is appropriate to what they are saying. It is not being advocated that learners become proficient in non-verbal communication at the expense of their linguistic skills, even though it’s quite possible to make yourself understood on certain matters simply by grunting and waving your arms about! Verbal and non-verbal aspects of communication should interrelate in a teaching programme, and some of the activities suggeted later have been designed with this in mind.

1.3 Communicative competence

In 1965 the American linguist Noam Chomsky^[1:2] made a distinction very similar to the one that Ferdinand de Saussure had made between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’ in 1916.^[1:3] The distinction made by Chomsky was between ‘competence’ – a speaker’s intuitive knowledge of the rules of their native language – and ‘performance’ – what the person actually produces by applying these rules. Chomsky was talking about grammatical rules: native speakers, he said, know intuitively which sentences are grammatical, and which are not, and it is their linguistic competence which tells them this.

In 1970, Campbell and Wales^[1:4] proposed that the Chomskyan notion of competence should be extended beyond purely grammatical competence to include a more general communicative ability. Language does not occur in isolation, as Chomsky seemed to suggest; it occurs in a social context and reflects social rather than linguistic purposes. A child acquires a knowledge of sentences not only as grammatical, but also as appropriate to the context in which they are made. ‘He knows when and when not to speak, what to talk about with whom, when, where, and in what manner’.^[1:5] A child has communicative competence as well as linguistic competence.

Theories of communicative competence imply that teachers must do more than just supply learners with a number of language structures to manipulate. There are cases of people being unable to use a language after years of formal teaching! We need to demonstrate how language items are used, and in what situations they are appropriate. We need to show learners that a choice of words is possible, indeed necessary, and will colour the propositional content of what they say. They must teach them, in short, the ‘use’ of language as well as its ‘usage’.^[1:6]

1.4 Teaching communicative competence

The crucial question is how to bridge the gap between linguistic competence and communicative competence, how to develop a smooth transition between ‘skill-getting’ and ‘skill-using’.^[1:7] In 1973 Wilga Rivers warned that a schizophrenic situation can develop between these two types of activity: in ‘skill-getting’ the emphasis is on the going, not on the destination, whereas in ‘skill-using’ students are aiming at the goal of communicative competence.

The gap is so difficult to bridge because the classroom environment by its very nature makes genuine communi-cation extremely elusive: as we have already said, com-munication stems from necessity, and this element is usually absent in a classroom situation. Students often know in advance what they will say and what everybody else will say too. Everybody (including the teacher) asks questions to which they already know the answer:

      T    (Referring to a picture or a text) Ask what Johnny was doing at 3 o’clock yesterday.

    S1    What was Johnny doing at 3 o’clock yesterday?

    S2    He was sitting under a banana tree.

Nobody is exchanging any information, and consequently nobody really needs to listen to what is being said. The element of choice talked about in the last section is missing – there is too much control, there are no surprises.

Necessity, in the form of doubt, of unpredictability, of an information gap can, however, be created in the classroom by the use of activities where the participants are only in possession of part of the total information. Students then have a certain amount of choice in what to say, they ask questions because they don’t know the answer, and they have a reason for listening to one another.

‘Jigsaw’ listening or reading – an idea pioneered by Geddes and Sturtridge in the 1970s^[1:8] – is one way of providing an information gap. Each student, or group of students, has one section of the whole tape or text, or certain bits of information that the others don’t have, and they must swap ideas and information in order to discover the whole.

Activities where one person, or half the class, has all the information, and the rest none, also make for authentic communication: those in the know must give instructions to those in the dark. Someone, for example, might have a geometric design and must give the others precise instructions for drawing exactly the same thing. Or, using Lego, one group of students could give another instructions to make a specific model.

Practical exercises which can be recorded and compared with a native speaker’s performance – scientific experiments, making things, assembling component parts of a puzzle, describing the differences between a corkscrew and a bottle-opener etc., can also help learners to gradually build up a ‘native speaker-type intuition’^[1:9] (though they are not necessarily easy to organise in a traditional classroom set-up).

Sandra Savignon way back in 1972^[1:10] took a slightly more radical view. She felt that experience in ‘authentic’ communication should not be delayed until the learner has a basic set of grammatically correct sentences. Trial and error learning should be used straight away: skill-getting is achieved through skill-using. Her students (English speakers learning French) were introduced to simple kinds of role-play activity very early on. They would enact a situation in English on greetings, for example, watch the same situation enacted in French by native speakers, and then discuss the differences. They then would re-enact the situation in English using French gesture before moving on to try it entirely in French (verbally and non-verbally). Needless to say they had to learn a lot of useful expressions – ‘Je ne comprends pas’, ‘Comment dit-on …?’, ‘Eh bien, … ’, ‘truc’, ‘machin’, etc. – right from the start.

What I would suggest for bridging the skill-getting and skill-using gap are activities where learners are playing a part in situations which are not predictable – e.g. role-play (see Chapter 4, ‘Playing a Part’).

1.5 Accuracy versus fluency

Teaching communicative competence means a reassessment of our attitude towards error. Having decided that perfection at the pattern drill level is not enough, and that communicative competence is our goal, are we going to allow our learners to make mistakes? And if so, to what extent and of what kind?

In the late 1970s there was a swing away from the idea that every mistake should be stamped out immediately or else the student would develop bad habits which were then impossible to get rid of. It was also believed that emphasis on correct production at all times could lead to serious inhibitions in the learner.

Instead, making mistakes was considered to be a necessary part of a foreign learner’s progress towards mastery of the language, or their ‘interlanguage’,^[1:11] the sum total of their knowledge of the language at any given moment, which is constantly changing. It was thought that these mistakes would right themselves in the normal process of things as the learner received more information. They would not right themselves however unless the learner was encouraged to test out the hypotheses they are continually making about the new language, that is, unless they were given the opportunity to make mistakes.

When a learner acquires a new word or structure or function, they can only find out what the boundaries of its use are by trying it out in different contexts. If they are always terrified of making a mistake, they will never really come to master that piece of language but only have a partial understanding of it.

What this means for the classroom is that once students have had an opportunity to practise a new bit of language in a fairly controlled way, they should be able to try it out on their own without too much interference from the teacher. Hypothesis-testing mistakes must of course be corrected so that the learner can widen or narrow boundaries, but this needn’t be done on the spot. As teachers, we need to develop sensitivity as to when and how to correct (see the section ‘Dealing with Mistakes’ in Chapter 2).

Chapter 2
Limbering up

2.1 Getting in the mood

In this chapter we shall be looking...