Swan examined some concepts related to CA in an attempt to reduce the
confusion ... explicit by the grammatical form which the utterance is phrased. ...
Communicative methodology stresses the English-only approach to presentation
and.
A Critical Look at the CA Lecture No. 12
A CRITICAL LOOK AT THE COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH BY MICHAEL SWAN (ELT Journal, 1985)
Swan examined some concepts related to CA in an attempt to reduce the confusion which surrounds their use. The concepts are: 1. “rules of use” vs. “rules of communication” 2. “appropriacy” 3. “skills” and “strategies” 4. syllabus design in the CA 5. The “real-life” fallacy
1. Rules of use vs. rules of communication A basic communicative doctrine > earlier approaches to language teaching did not deal properly with meaning. There are two levels of meaning in language: “usage” and “use”, or “signification” and “value”. Swan > Traditional courses appeared to teach one of these kinds of meaning and neglected the other. All kinds of utterances can express intentions which are not made explicit by the grammatical form which the utterance is phrased. Widdowson > a student cannot properly interpret the utterance “the policeman is crossing the road” if he knows only the propositional (structural and lexical) meaning. In order to grasp its real value in a specific situation, he must have learnt an additional rule about how the utterance can be used. BUT: foreigners have mother tongues and they know already how human beings communicate. The “rules of use” that determine how we interpret utterances such as Widdowson’s sentence about the policeman are mostly non-language specific. The precise value of an utterance is given by the interaction of its structural and lexical meaning with the situation in which it is used. Different cultures may differ in their behaviour, but most utterances are likely to retain their value across language boundaries, problems may occur only in limited cases
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A Critical Look at the CA Lecture No. 12
2. Appropriacy Our choice of language is crucially determined by the setting in which the language is used, the speaker’s relationship with the listener. It is a category that applies to certain items only, most language items are not marked and consequently they cause no special problem for the learner. The “new toy” effect: a limited but valuable insight is over-generalized and presented as if it applied to the whole of language.
3. Skills and Strategies It is often taken for granted that language learners cannot transfer communication skills from their mother tongues and these must be taught anew (e.g. predicting guessing, negotiating meaning).
4. Syllabus design (notional/functional syllabus) The central idea in communicative teaching is a semantic syllabus, which means that meanings rather than structures are given priority. Swan > grammar has not become any easier to learn. Language is not only a set of formal systems, but it is a set of systems and it is important to focus on form when this is desirable. Swan proposes that we should question the whole idea that one syllabus, whether structural or functional should be privileged or favoured. It is essential to consider both semantic and formal accounts of the language when deciding what to teach. The real issue is not which syllabus to put first: it is how to integrate eight or so syllabuses into a sensible teaching programme (syllabus components: functional, notional, situational, topic, phonological, lexical, structural, skills). The various syllabuses have relative importance: their importance varies with level.
5. The “real-life” fallacy 5.1. Communicative vs. non-communicative activities Teachers usually feel guilty about translating or explaining grammar or standing up in front of the class and behaving like teachers.
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A Critical Look at the CA Lecture No. 12 According to the CA, language work should involve genuine exchanges and classroom discourse should correspond as closely as possible to real-life use of language. The classroom is not the outside world and learning language is not the same as using language. A certain amount of artificiality is inseparable from the process of isolating and focusing on language items for study. Effective learning can involve various kinds of “distancing” from the real-life behaviour. Swan > Teachers should not feel guilty if they include such activities in their teaching as repetition, rote learning, translation, structural drilling, which seem to have no immediate “communicative” value.
5.2. Authentic materials Communicative teachers may feel guilty about using scripted dialogues or specially written teaching texts (doctored texts) because they are believed to be unnatural, contrived, they tend to lack the discourse features of genuine texts, they are fundamentally non-communicative. Scripted material is useful for presenting specific items economically and effectively. Authentic materials, on the other hand, give the students a taste of “real” language use.
5.3. The use of the mother tongue Communicative methodology stresses the English-only approach to presentation and practice although it is a common experience that the mother tongue plays an important part in learning a foreign language.
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