Introduction
One of the most striking characteristics of English language teaching in the UK in the past few years has been its pre-occupation with language rather than teaching. We have recently been interested much more in what should be taught than in how. With few exceptions research workers and course writers have focussed their attention on the content of the language programme rather than the ways in which this content should be taught. Notional syllabuses are widely debated and discussed; communicative methodology is still largely unexplored.
This may seem to some a rather sweeping claim. After all, it might be argued, activities such as role-play are now much used. What are they if not communicative? The answer of course is that role-play may or may not be communicative, but it is in itself merely an isolated activity. A consistent methodology is more than just a collection of activities or techniques. It requires an underlying set of principles in the light of which specific procedures, activities or techniques can be evaluated, related and applied.
A number of terms have been introduced in the preceding paragraph which it is perhaps worth clarifying briefly. By method I mean some overall means of achieving the general objectives of a course; a method will be realised as the carrying out of a set of procedures or activities, procedures or activities which will have been chosen by the teacher because they together relate coherently to the way in which it is hoped to reach the course objectives. A method is thus realised as a set of procedures; the procedures themselves involve the use of specific techniques to ensure their success. In an ideal language course it should therefore be possible to see a set of precise objectives in terms of which the classroom procedures, and the techniques which the teacher uses to implement them, have been structured and applied. My feeling is that thus far little communicative language teaching has been 'ideal' in these terms. Too often it has concentrated on a specific technique (e.g. dividing the students into groups or pairs) or procedures (e.g. role-play); too rarely has there been much evidence of an overall method.
The aim of this paper is, then, to consider some of the principles which might guide us in our search for a method. It will not be concerned with particular procedures – they will be mentioned in other papers in this section. But the principles considered here should certainly suggest criteria by which teachers can judge procedures proposed to them, which they can take into account in developing their own, and which they can use to relate specific procedures to each other and to the overall aims of their teaching.
Before discussing what a communicative method may be, let us clarify immediately one thing which it is not. It will be noted that earlier a distinction was drawn between notional syllabuses and communicative methodology. This distinction is crucial. The mere adoption of a notional (or, more specifically, functional) syllabus does not guarantee that we are going to teach our students to communicate. Functions are expressed through elements of the language system; in other words a functional course is ultimately concerned with language forms –just as a grammatically-based course is. The difference may lie simply in the way the forms are organized. But communication involves much more than simply a knowledge of forms; it depends crucially on the ability to use forms in appropriate ways. The problem with most first-generation 'functional' textbooks is that they have concentrated too much on setting out forms – not enough on practising communication. That is why it seems to me that this distinction of terminology is so important. In this paper we are making no assumptions about the form, content or even existence of a syllabus; we are interested in ideas that might help us to see that our students can use the language they learn in order to communicate, without concerning ourselves with the way in which this language is specified.
1. Principle one: Know what you are doing
I mean by this that the focus of every lesson (or part of a lesson) should be the performing of some operation – learning how to do something. Of course this is not a sufficient clarification because 'something' could be chanting verb conjugations or reciting Shakespeare. In fact I mean that the starting point (and end point) of every lesson should be an operation of some kind which the student might actually want to perform in the foreign language. In reading, this might be understanding a set of instructions; in writing it might be a letter reserving accommodation at a hotel; in listening it might be a weather forecast on the radio; in speaking it might be asking for directions in a strange city. All these operations can be approached on a variety of different levels of sophistication, and bearing them in mind throughout the teaching/learning process ensures that there is a clear answer to the student who asks, 'Why am I learning this? What am I learning to do?' Learning the question form of the 3rd person singular of the present tense because it is on page 23 of the textbook is one thing; learning it so that you can ask questions at a railway station ('Does this train go to Birmingham?' 'Does it stop at Reading?' etc) is quite another. Every lesson should end with the learner being able to see clearly that he can do something which he could not do at the beginning – and that the something is communicatively useful.
In some respects, the change that is needed here is largely a psychological one. Very mundane and prosaic activities such as pattern drilling can be given a communicative dimension if teachers and students ask themselves why they are doing them and are able to relate them to the performance of some communicative task. At the same time, this principle must be equally clearly borne in mind when doing activities which seem more overtly oriented towards communication. Role-play, for example, can only be communicative to the extent that the students (and the teacher) see it as contributing to the performance of some real and specific task in the foreign language. Otherwise it, too, can become merely empty mouthing.
2. Principle two: The whole is more than the sum of the parts
One of the most significant features of communication is that it is a dynamic and developing phenomenon. In other words it cannot easily be analysed into component features without its nature being destroyed in the process. It is of course possible to identify various formal features of the way language is used communicatively and these can be studied individually. But the ability to handle these elements in isolation is no indication of ability to communicate. What is needed is the ability to deal with strings of sentences and ideas and in the oral modes (speaking and listening) these strings must be processed in what is called 'real' time. When you are having a conversation with somebody you cannot study what they say at length before producing an appropriate reply; the whole process must be instantaneous. It goes without saying that many users of a foreign language find this extremely difficult and their communicative ability is thus severely hampered. In the written modes, the time pressure may not be so severe but it is still not enough to be able to decipher or produce individual elements of the message. What is needed is the ability to work in the context of the whole.
Thus a crucial feature of a communicative method will be that it operates with stretches of language above the sentence level, and operates with real language in real situations. Interestingly, this principle may lead to procedures which are themselves either synthetic or analytic. A synthetic procedure would involve students in learning forms individually and then practising how to combine them; an analytic procedure would introduce complete interactions of texts and focus for learning purposes on the way these are constructed. Some discussions of the differences between 'analytic' and 'synthetic' approaches to language teaching' have obscured the fact that both of these may be made to share the same concern with the 'whole' rather than the 'parts'. A communicative method is likely to make use of both.
3. Principle three: The processes are as important as the forms
A method which aims to develop the ability of students to communicate in a foreign language will aim to replicate as far as possible the processes of communication, so that practice of the forms of the target language can take place within a communicative framework: I would like to look at three such processes which can be isolated and which can be incorporated either individually or together in teaching procedures. Without denying the value for certain purposes of exercises which incorporate none of the following, the general point may be made that the more of them that are incorporated, the more the exercise is likely to be communicative rather than mechanical.
3.1 Information gap
In real life, communication takes place between two (or more) people, one of whom knows something that is unknown to the other(s). The purpose of the communication is to bridge this information gap.
This may seem to some a gross over-simplification of the uses of language. What about comments such as 'Hello' or 'Nice day, isn't it?' Surely no transfer of information is taking place here. In fact it depends on what you mean by 'information'. Communication is taking place here, but the information which is transferred is of the 'interpersonal' (social) type rather than the 'ideational' (factual). In other words, the speakers are exchanging or confirming information about their social relationship.
In classroom terms, an information gap exercise means that one student must be in a position to tell another something that the second student does not already know. If two students are looking at a picture of a street scene and one says to the other, 'Where is the dog?' when he knows that the dog is sitting outside the post-office because he can see it as clearly as his fellow-student can then this is not communicative. There is no information-gap. But if one student has the picture of the street scene and the other has a similar picture with some features missing which he must find out from the first student, then the same question becomes real, meaningful – and communicative.
This concept of information gap seems to be one of the most fundamental in the whole area of communicative teaching. Any exercise or procedure which claims to engage the students in communication should be considered in the light of it, and one of the main jobs for the teacher can be seen as setting up situations where information gaps exist and motivating the students to bridge them in appropriate ways.
3.2 Choice
Another crucial characteristic of communication is that the participants have choice, both in terms of what they will say and, more particularly, how they will say it. From the point of view of the speaker this means that he must choose not only what ideas he wants to express at a given moment, but also what linguistic forms are appropriate to express them. Deciding on these under the severe time pressure which language use involves is one of the main problems which foreign users of a language face and is an aspect of communicative ability which has been frequently overlooked hitherto in the classroom. A similar problem confronts the listener. The choice which is open for the speaker means that there is always doubt in the listener's mind about what is to come next. This means that an exercise where speaker and listener are controlled in their language use by the teacher fails to practise this aspect of communication.
3.3 Feedback
The third and final process of communication that I want to discuss is to some extent implicit in the two already outlined. When two speakers take part in an interaction, there is normally an aim of some kind in their minds. This is what I referred to earlier as the operation or task which might form the basis of a classroom activity; successful completion of the task is the aim the participants have in mind. In real life, one person speaks to another because he wishes, e.g. to invite him, to complain to him, to threaten him or to reassure him and this aim will be in his mind all the time he is speaking. What he says to the other person will be designed to reach that aim, and what the other person says to him will be evaluated in terms of that aim. In other words, what you say to somebody depends not only on what he has just said to you (though this is obviously very important) but also on what you want to get out of the conversation. The strategies and tactics involved in using language in this way are of fundamental importance in communication, and again they are left out of account in a method which fails to give practice in using language for real purposes.
Taken together the three processes outlined above seem central to the development of any procedure for teaching the communicative use of language. If students are to practise this in the classroom then the activities in which they engage must take account of them. It is a moot point whether procedures which do not incorporate these processes are automatically without value but they are certainly not communicative.
4. Principle four. To loam it, do it
It is now widely accepted that education must be ultimately concerned not just with teaching but with learning. One consequence of this is that what happens in the classroom must involve the learner and must be judged in terms of its effects on him. Another, equally important consequence is that learning becomes to a large extent the learner's responsibility. The teacher can help, advise and teach; but only the learner can learn. Both of these ideas have direct implications for a communicative method of language teaching.
We have seen how developing control of the use of language involves the student in doing things, in making choices, evaluating feedback, bridging information gaps. Such activities demand an environment where doing things is possible. Sitting in regimented rows under the eagle eye of a magisterial teacher, addressing all remarks to or through the teacher – this is a scene which destroys all hope of communication. There are problems of course, particularly at secondary school level, in combining activity with discipline, but a cardinal tenet of learning theory is that you learn to do by doing. Only by practising communicative activities can we learn to communicate.
However, the above should not lead us to conclude that the teacher can just sit back and let the students get on with it. There is still a great value in a framework within which learning can be structured, and the provision of this framework is largely the responsibility of the teacher. The differences between a lesson organised around e.g. a grammatical structure, focussing on form and one organised around the idea of learning to 'do' something in the language will be considerable, but the essential point is that both can – and to my mind should – be organised. There is no reason why a communicative method should not encompass stages of presentation, practice and production, the ideas behind which are perhaps more familiar in a grammatical context. What is presented, practised and produced will be quite different, as will the ways in which it is done, but the principle of organisation seems to me as relevant and valid here as it was before. Much published material which claims to be communicative turns out to be effective at only one of the three stages, and the extent to which it embodies a total method is thus rather limited.
5. 5 Principle five: Mistakes are not always a mistake
One of the most frequently voiced criticisms of a communicative approach to language teaching is that it encourages students to make mistakes, particularly of grammar. There are probably two factors which may account for this and they should be viewed rather differently.
The first possibility is that the student may be taught by a teacher who believes that 'trivial' mistakes of grammar or pronunciation do not matter as long as the student gets his message across. The second is that the student may be forced into activities for which he has not been prepared, and in an effort to deal with them he makes mistakes. The attitude, one takes to these two possibilities must depend on the context in which one is working, but two points are worth making in general: Firstly 'trivial’ mistakes of grammar or pronunciation are often not trivial at all. Even a teacher who adopts a totally communicative stance must accept that grammatical and phonological mistakes hamper communication, and enough of them -- especially in the wrong place -- can totally destroy it. Secondly, a learner who makes mistakes because he is trying to do something he has not been told or shown how to do, or which he has not yet mastered, is not really making a mistake at all. Trying to express something you are not quite sure how to say is a vital feature of using a foreign language, for few learners ever reach the stage of total fluency and accuracy in every situation, and it is often necessary to 'make do' with whatever resources one can muster. Niggling criticism of what he produces will ultimately destroy the learner's confidence in his ability to use the language.
If these two comments seem somewhat contradictory, then it is perhaps because they are. What I am trying to say is that the question of what constitutes t mistake and how the teacher should react to it is far more complex than many have so far thought. Conventional language teaching methods aim at eradicating mistakes by tightly controlling what the learner is allowed to say. When we remove these controls and encourage the learner actually to start using the language with all that this involves, then from a certain point of view problems are bound to arise; but these problems are not solved by an approach which insists on formal accuracy at the expense of use. A communicative approach certainly does not provide an easy solution to the problem of mistakes, but it at least highlights an area which some have treated over-simply hitherto; a communicative method must go back to first principles in deciding how it will reach its aim of developing the communicative ability of the student. It may well be that it will require the flexibility to treat different things as 'mistakes' at different stages in the learning process.
To conclude this introductory paper let us consider briefly the place of the ideas which have been discussed in it within language teaching as a whole. Despite the concentration here on aspects of the use of language, I do not wish to leave the impression that I consider form to be unimportant in language teaching. Communicating involves using appropriate forms in appropriate ways, and the use of inappropriate or inaccurate forms militates against communication even when it does not totally prevent it. The acquisition of forms is therefore a central part of language learning; those of us interested in communicative approaches must not forget this in our enthusiasm to add the communicative dimension. It therefore follows that the principles discussed in this paper may not underlie the totality of language teaching procedures, and that a total method for language teaching may have a component which uses a quite different set of principles to teach language forms and which thus gives rise to procedures which, though not communicative, are justified in their own terms.
This view implies the rather large assumption that it is possible (and desirable) to divide language teaching into two phases learning the forms and then learning to use them. While I think it is undeniable that language learning does involve these two aspects and that it is possible to separate them logically, it seems to me that one of the major unresolved issues in communicative language teaching is to work out under what conditions it may be more efficient to teach the forms through the uses, when a more efficient solution would be to attach uses to pre-specified and pre-taught inventory of forms, or finally, whether it is actually possible to marry the two in some satisfactory way for teaching purposes. This may seem to be primarily a matter of syllabus design, but in fact it is central to how we teach as well for it affects crucially the way we view the language and the activities we practise. For the moment I would just emphasise that, notwithstanding everything written here about the importance of 'use', it is possible and may in certain cases and contexts be legitimate to ignore 'communication' altogether and focus on the forms of the language. In a narrow sense, this perhaps represents a reactionary view; more responsibly, I feel it merely emphasises the need for teachers to assess their own priorities in their own situation. Finding ways to reconcile these two aspects of language in the classroom represents the biggest challenge for our profession in the 1980s.
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