English as an Additional Language

Approaches to Teaching Linguistic Minority Students

Constant Leung, Angela Creese, Constant Leung, Angela Creese

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781847875327, 9781847875310
• eBook ISBN: 9781446242544
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Do you have EAL students in your class? Would you like guidance on teaching your subject to EAL students? With linguistic diversity on the increase, teachers from all subject areas and levels of school education are working with students for whom English is an additional language, helping them to develop their English for learning purposes.

This book provides an invaluable and accessible resource for working with EAL students. It brings together the international experiences and expertise of a team of distinguished language educators who explore a range of teaching approaches and provide professionally-grounded practical advice. The chapters cover themes, references and pedagogic concerns common to teachers across the globe.

This book will be of use to individual teachers who want to extend their knowledge and practice, and also as a set text for professional development programmes.

Professor Constant Leung is Deputy Head of Department of Education and Professional Studies at King?s College London.

Angela Creese is Professor of Educational Linguistics in the School of Education at the University of Birmingham

1

---

Communicative Language Teaching and EAL: Principles and Interpretations

Constant Leung

Introduction

In the past 50 years many English-speaking countries such as Australia, Britain, Canada and the USA have seen large-scale movements of people across national and language borders. These societies now have linguistically diverse school populations. For instance, in England about 13.5 per cent of the primary (elementary) school population is regarded as learners and users of English as an Additional Language (National Statistics, 2007), and in California 25 per cent of the school population is classified as English Language Learners (similar to ESL/EAL) (EdSource, 2008). Different education systems have responded to this growing trend of linguistic diversity in different ways (see Leung, 2007; Leung and Creese, 2008 for a detailed discussion). There is a variety of approaches to English language teaching for EAL learners. In some systems intensive initial EAL tuition is provided for new arrivals, in other places the main response is to make the mainstream (meaning the ordinary) school curriculum as accessible to EAL learners as possible. The latter approach is premised on the proposition that if EAL learners can participate in ordinary subject teaching-learning activities, then English language learning will follow. In this and the next three chapters of the book we will focus on the ideas and principles associated with classroom communication and participation, with particular reference to additional/second language.

The teaching of English language, both as mother tongue and as an additional language, since the mid-1970s has been in numerous ways associated with the concept of Communicative Language Teaching.¹ The ideas underpinning this concept first emerged in the early 1970s and they represented a major shift from a view of language (and language teaching) that was primarily concerned with vocabulary and grammar. In this chapter I first present a brief account of the theoretical bases of the notion of language as communication in social contexts. This is followed by a discussion on the influence of these ideas by looking at some examples of language teaching approaches which prioritize the social nature of ‘communication’ (rather than other formal aspects of language such as grammar). In the final section I suggest that the concept of Communicative Language Teaching has turned out to be a broad church, so to speak. On the one hand, the very powerful core ideas at the heart of this concept can be adopted in a variety of teaching contexts. On the other hand, our collective professional experience has shown that the broad principles of Communicative Language Teaching need to be adapted and extended in local contexts, if teachers are to meet the language learning needs of their students. Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 will provide four situated accounts of how Communicative Language Teaching has worked in practice and the pedagogic issues that this approach has engendered.

Language functions in communication

It has been widely acknowledged that the work of Halliday and his colleagues in the early 1970s represents a significant move to a socially oriented conceptualization of language and language teaching (e.g. Howatt and Widdowson, 2004: Chapter 20). Central to this conceptualization is the idea of ‘language function’. Function is understood in terms of the relationship between meaning and linguistic form. What we, as language users, mean to express in speech and writing is realized by the specific linguistic resources (e.g. words and clauses/sentences) we select to represent our meaning. By the same token, what we say or write is what we mean. Thus, meaning and linguistic form are mutually constituting. This functional relationship ‘reflects the fact that language has evolved in the service of particular human needs … what is really significant is that this functional principle is carried over and built into the grammar, so that the internal organization of the grammatical system is also functional in character’ (Halliday, 1975: 16). A practical example of what this means is to consider a statement such as ‘The Prime Minister said an extra £50 million pounds will be spent on school improvement.’ The same propositional meaning can be expressed in many other ways, for example: ‘The Government promises an additional …’, ‘An extra £50 million pounds will be put into school improvement’, and so on. Each of these statements conveys the same ‘basic’ information, but the variations in vocabulary and grammar signal different emphases in meaning, which are an important aspect of message-conveying through language expressions. The speaker/writer of these statements would have different communicative purposes in mind. (This point will be further elaborated in a later section.) This view represents a major departure from the more conventional view of language that regards language as some sort of autonomous linguistic system that (a) has universal norms of correctness and (b) has an existence independently of human language users and their needs. In passing perhaps we should note that this autonomous view has been very powerful. The persistent calls to teaching students to learn to use grammar rules of the so-called Standard English correctly, irrespective of context and purpose of communication, is a good example of this enduring view.

A fundamental assumption in this Hallidayan functional view of language is that what people choose to mean and say is open-ended. There are infinite options in meaning-making and these options are categorized in terms of three functional components (often referred to as metafunctions in the Hallidayan literature): ideational, interpersonal and textual. The ideational component refers to the aspect of language use where ‘the speaker expresses his experience of the phenomena of the external world, and of the internal world of his own consciousness’ (1975: 17). When people describe events and feelings, the substantive content of what they are describing can be regarded as ideational meaning. The interpersonal component is concerned with the ‘function of language as a means whereby the speaker participates in … [a] speech situation’ (1975: 17). This is the aspect of language use in which social relationships are expressed; speakers can adopt or perform a role in relation to other participants (as friends or as teachers and so on). The textual component represents an ‘enabling function … the function that language has of creating text’ (1975: 17). Put differently, it is concerned with the use and organization of linguistic resources, in the broadest sense, to create a spoken or written message (however long or short, complex or simple) to make meaning in context. It should be stressed that these functional components are analytical categories. In real-life language communication, they occur simultaneously in speech or writing in specific social contexts. (For a fuller discussion of systemic functional grammar see for instance Halliday and Matthiessen, 2000; Halliday, 2004.)

Communicative competence

Another major influence on the development of Communicative Language Teaching was the work of Hymes (1972, 1977) on communicative competence within the tradition of ethnography of communication. His 1972 paper ‘On Communicative Competence’ (first presented in 1966 as a conference paper) explicitly addressed language education issues. It was in part a critique of Chomsky’s (1965) highly abstracted notion of grammatical competence which can be associated with an autonomous view of language discussed in the last section. It was intended as a clarion call to language educators to pay attention to the fact that what counts as competence in language communication can vary within a speech community, let alone cross different speech communities; there is ‘differential competence within a heterogeneous speech community, both undoubtedly shaped by acculturation’ (Hymes, 1972: 274, original italics).

For Hymes (1972: 277), children learning to communicate through language have to develop a language knowledge (vocabulary and grammar) as well as rules of appropriate use. They need to learn when and how to speak, what to talk about with whom, and so on. In other words, there are social rules of use ‘without which the rules of grammar would be useless’ (Hymes, 1972: 278). This inclusion of the ‘social’ makes it necessary to raise questions of context of communication and aspects of sociocultural practice when teaching language. To determine what counts as communicative competence, four real-life language questions must be asked:

Whether (and to what degree) something is formally possible;
Whether (and to what degree) something is feasible in virtue of the means of implementation available;
Whether (and to what degree) something is appropriate (adequate, happy, successful) in relation to a context in which it is used and evaluated;
Whether (and to what degree) something is in fact done, actually performed, and what its doing entails. (Hymes, 1972: 281, original emphasis)

This way of conceptualizing the notion of communicative competence offered language educators a dynamic and socially grounded perspective on language and language use. Canale and Swain produced a series of seminal papers in the early 1980s that rendered the Hymesian ideas in more language education terms with particular reference to additional language (Canale, 1983, 1984, Canale and Swain, 1980a, 1980b). In their account communicative competence comprises four areas or ‘component’ competences of knowledge and skills:

(1) Grammatical competence: this is concerned with the use of ‘knowledge of lexical items and of rules of morphology, syntax, sentence-grammar semantics, and phonology’ (Canale and Swain, 1980a: 29). This type of knowledge and skill allows the language learner to make use of language resources to understand and create propositional meaning.

(2) Sociolinguistic competence: this is concerned with rules of use, including the probability of ‘whether (and to what degree) something is in fact done’ (Hymes, 1972: 281), that is, whether something is ‘sayable’ in a given context, from the point of view of participant members of a particular community.

[It] addresses the extent to which utterances are produced and understood appropriately in different sociolinguistic contexts depending on contextual factors such as status of participants, purposes of the interaction, and norms or conventions of interaction … Appropriateness of utterances refers to … appropriateness of meaning and appropriateness of meaning concerns the extent to which particular communicative functions (e.g. commanding, complaining and inviting), attitudes (including politeness and formality) and ideas are judged to be proper in a given situation. (Canale, 1983: 7)

(3) Discourse competence: this is concerned with organizational features of spoken and written texts (of any kind). There are two elements in this competence: cohesion (Halliday and Hasan, 1976), and coherence (Widdowson, 1978). Different types of texts, such as oral and written narratives, diaries, and scientific reports, tend to combine grammatical forms with selected meanings in particular ways.

Unity of a text is achieved through cohesion in form and coherence in meaning. Cohesion deals with how utterances are linked structurally and facilitates interpretation of a text. For example, the use of cohesion devices such as pronoun, synonyms…Coherence refers to the relationship among the different meanings in a text, where these meanings may be literal meanings, communicative functions and attitudes. (Canale, 1983: 9)

(4) Strategic competence: this is concerned with additional language learners’ capacity to communicate by using verbal and non-verbal strategies (a) to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to a lack of language knowledge or momentary memory limitation (or other psycho-cognitive issues); and (b) to enhance communication (e.g. use of slow speech for rhetorical effect). (Canale, 1983: 11)

This formulation of communicative competence expanded the conceptual base of additional/second/foreign language curriculum and pedagogy that existed up until the late 1970s in countries such as the USA and the UK. It is no exaggeration to say that the Canale and Swain analytic account of communicative competence very quickly became the theoretical and curriculum basis of the emerging Communicative Language Teaching approach in the early 1980s, particularly in the worldwide enterprise of teaching English to speakers of other languages. Over the years the label Communicative Language Teaching has been interpreted and reworked in various ways. But as a conceptualization of language, as a general curriculum principle, and as a teaching approach, it has remained a central concern in the work of language teachers, curriculum planners, textbook writers, and, last but not least, researchers in language education (for instance Bachman, 1990; Brown, 2000; Brumfit, 1984; Burns, 2005; Council of Europe, 2001; QCA, 2007;² Widdowson, 1975, 1978, among many others).

Theory into practice

The central ideas in the two bodies of work discussed above have inspired and influenced numerous curriculum designs and material development projects. A brief description of some examples is provided here.³ As part of the preparation for the introduction of the National Curriculum in England and Wales, the curriculum authorities commissioned the Language in the National Curriculum project (LINC, 1989–92) in the late 1980s.⁴ (For further details, see Carter, 1997; Carter and McRae, 1996; Carter and Nash, 1990.) The brief for this initiative was to produce teacher education material that would support the teaching of English in school within the statutory National Curriculum in England and Wales in the early 1990s. LINC (1989–92: 3) took the view that

pupils’ lan...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Communicative Language Teaching and EAL: Principles and Interpretations
• 2 Mainstream Participatory Approaches: From Slipstream to Mainstream
• 3 Beyond Key Words
• 4 Connecting Communication, Curriculum and Second Language Literacy Development: Meeting the Needs of ‘Low Literacy’ EAL/ESL Learners
• 5 Teaching Approaches in Two-Teacher Classrooms
• 6 Content-Language Integrated Approaches for Teachers of EAL Learners: Examples of Reciprocal Teaching
• 7 Sociocultural Approaches to Language Teaching and Learning
• 8 Bilingual Approaches
• Concluding Remarks
• Author Index
• Subject Index