In Part 1 we looked at some of the research that has been done on memory. The most important single concept that emerged was "depth." In Part 2 we explored this dimension as it applies to the foreign language classroom, using insights drawn from Abraham Maslow, Eric Berne, T.A. Harris and others. In Part 3 we shall examine what all of this may mean for the design and implementation of methods in our field. In doing so, we shall not attempt to set up yet another method to compete with those already in existence. Instead, we shall aim in this chapter for statements that will respond to those elements of soundness and truth which are to be found in any method that has survived long enough to have received a name. In Chapters VIII, IX and X, we .shall apply the principles of the present chapter to discussions of a number of quite different methods, all of which are considered, in some circles at least, as extremely dubious.
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT
A number of recent writers on methodology have seemed to believe that, as far as language teaching is concerned, the two bounda1·y posts of the inhabited world are "audiolingual habit theory" and "cognitive code
learning theory," and that any teacher or textbook finds a place somewhere between these extremes (Chastain 1971 :Sf and 154f; Hok 1972:263; Mueller 1971; Ney 1974; Oskarsson 1973:251). If this is true, then I myself was born, professionally, in Audiolinguia and have spent most of my career there. A few years ago, however, being attracted by the more fertile fields of Cognitia, I emigrated and took up residence in the new land (though I still retain many good friends in the old country), hoping that after fulfilling the requirements I might be granted citizenship there. Before that could happen, however, something caused me to change my mind and leave Cognitia, not to return to Audiolinguia but to explore Terra lncognita-the unknown land beyond (or beneath?) the boundary posts. I found that, although I was not the first language teacher to set foot on this terrain, the things that I was seeing were almost completely omitted from the literature of our profession. I discovered that to say that audiolingualism and cognitive code learning are the polar extremes in language teaching is a bit like saying that the poles of ancient thought were Rome and Byzantium, or that all significant political activity today takes place on a continuum bounded by Washington and Moscow. To say so would be inaccurate; worse, it would be antiheuristic: it would make us less likely to discover for ourselves what else there is in this world.
THE RIDDLE
One of the circumstances that turned my eyes toward Terra lncognita may be stated in the form of a riddle:
In the field of language teaching, Method A is the logical contradiction of Method B: if the assumptions from which A claims to be derived are correct, then B cannot work, and vice versa. Yet one colleague is getting excellent results with A and another is getting comparable results with B. How is this possible?
This riddle has troubled me for a quarter-century-ever since discovered that the first method I learned to use was not the only good
A General View 105 way to teach. Sometimes the same riddle (and I believe that it is ultimately the same riddle) takes a different form:
Why does Method A (or B) sometimes work so beautifully and at other times so poorly7
Method, in Anthony's sense (1963), differs from method concerning the place of memorization, or the role of visual aids, or the importance of controlling and sequencing structure and vocabulary, or how the-teacher should respond when a student makes a mistake, or the number of times a student should hear a correct model, or whether to give the explanation before or after practice or not at all, and so forth.
To try to reconcile all the answers that we get to questions like these leads to chaos if we remain on the plane on which these matters usually are discussed. I believe, however, that if we leave that plane, which is defined by linguistic analysis and overt classroom behavior, we may find that each method, when used well, fulfills in its own way a set of requirements which go beneath and beyond any one of them. The answer to just what these requirements are lies largely in Terra lncognita. This chapter is therefore a letter from a traveler, rather than an authoritative road map. More than the other chapters in this book, it is written in the first person sin(ular because it describes the view through the eyes of one man.
AN OBITER DICTUM ON RESEARCH
The usual modern answer to unresolved questions such as those listed above is to recommend that there be more research, and that teachers try to stay abreast of it. The call to "keep up with the (i.e., our) latest research" (passim) is based on a belief that past failures have been due to insufficient knowledge, and that therefore what we need is to know more.
If, on the other hand, we start from the assumption that past failures-and successes-have come from the degree of wisdom with which we have handled what we have known at the time, then the urgency of research appears smaller. From this same position, the persons of the teacher and of the teacher-trainer-the very factors that much "controlled research" and much "materials development" seek to eliminate or to become independ
ent of-begin to loom large. But such a conclusion is repugnant to us as
creatures of a culture that has so committed us to exactness, interchange
ability, predictability, and economies of scale. So we flee back to the temples of science, to its priesthood that can feed us on 1 -eliability and validity, no matter in how small morsels, and whose "pie in the sky" will become available for eating after all "further needed research" has been completed, replicated, field-tested and applied. (For a similar view, see Jakobovits and Gordon 1974:93ff.)
I personally feel toward research very much as I feel toward motherhood: I am in favor of it, I respect it, I hate to think where we would all be without a certain amount of it; but I am biologically unequipped to perform it.
This is not to say that from a psychodynamic point of view research is to be scoffed at. But its worth now becomes heuristic rather than prescriptive: instead of expecting research findings to tell us how we ought to design and conduct our courses, we look to them for light which may or may not help us to perceive more readily what is going on in a total, particular human experience "as it really is" (Curran 1972:67). In Curran's terms, research may thus be an aid toward "incarnation." In transactional terms, it ceases to be a (sometimes fickle, always oracular*) Controlling Parent figure. Instead, it becomes "a vast store of data ... (which may be) a burden or a boon depending on how appropriate it is to (a given situation), and on whether or not it has been updated by the (practition
er's) Adult" (Harris 1968 :46).
Four words, useful in sketching what the title of this chapter calls "a general view of method," are the terms of two polar distinctions. Perhaps the easiest way to describe those distinctions is to begin with an incident that I observed recently: A Turkish class in its 30th hour of instruction was drilling itself on a pattern that usually is reserved for about the 150th hour. With very few interventions by the teacher, the students were making up the drill as they went along, proceeding with deliberation, but smoothly. There was noticeable lack of tension. As their supervisor, I complimented them and their teacher, at which one of them replied in Turkish "we-thank-you," a form that he had never heard. This happened to be the very form that had been the subject of discussion among the
*This word is used here in the sense of "resembling an oracle in some way, as in solemnity, wisdom, authority, obscurity, ambiguity, dogmatism." (Webster's Second International Dictionary)
A General View 107
staff only a few days earlier. We had noted that even our advanced students failed to come up with this form when they needed it, preferring instead to use teJekkur ederim "I-thank-you" as an all-purpose translation of English "thank you." So this particular class session was doubly delightful to me. How did it happen?
I'm not sure, of course. But the following are my best guesses.
PERFORMANCE: PRODUCTIVE OR REFLECTIVE
First of all, we need to distinguish between two kinds of performance:
that which is productive and that which is reflective, or echoic. Insofar as a student is bouncing back what the teacher is throwing at him, his performance is reflective. The extreme case is mimicry of pronunciation, where the meaning of a word, even if the student knows it, is unimportant.
But substitution drills, transformation drills, and other conventional kinds of grammatical calisthenics are almost as completely reflective as phonetic mimicry is. Even retelling of stories, answering questions about a dialog, or discussing a reading selection, though they contain some elements of productivity, are still largely reflective.
Insofar as performance is productive, on the other hand, the student does not start from the assigned task of following a language model that the teacher or textbook has provided. Instead, he starts with something that he wants to say and with a person to whom he wants to say it. He then draws on the models that are available within himself, in order to fulfill his purpose. The Turkish class that I described above had been working productively, rather than reflectively, for most of its 30 hours.
The students had been both allowed and required to notice what they were doing, and to piece together their own individual pictures of how Turkish works. This is, I suspect, the reason why one of them arrived quite naturally and spontaneously at the form "we-thank-you." It also may account for the performance on which I had complimented them in the first place.
Reflectivity and Productivity in the Literature
Language teachers have produced a constant flow of articles about how to get back from students the responses that we want them to give; we like to worry about the best way to design materials for this purpose, and the most appropriate kinds of teacher behavior; we construct fascinating and
sometimes useful models of what must go on in the student's head as he acquires the ability to repeat a dialog or go nimbly through a drill.
Whenever we do these things, we are concentrating on reflectivity, and it is this variety of performance that has received almost all our attention.
From this point of view we ask ourselves "how7"-"how" do learners use their brains in learning (Wardhaugh 1971 :19), or "how" does the learner become able to encode or decode grammatical sequences? (Titone 1970:47); and we analyze the various levels of the linguistic side of
"what" they say (J akobovits 1970: 19f); but we do not ask "where" the content of the sequences comes from, or "when," or "why." We forget that social decisions are made prior to linguistic constructions (Mehan 1972:7).
References to productivity, in my sense of the word, are not entirely missing from the literature, however. One teacher who has shown a consistent concern for it is Lipson. The goal of a language course, he says, is communication in a natural language environment, with the students making their own sentences motivated by a desire to communicate specific information. He chooses vocabulary that students will want to talk about, regardless of its rank in frequency counts. He also chooses some words not familiar to the student, or typical of his native environment, hoping in this way to reduce the student's inhibitions in playing with the content (Lipson 1971 :235f). The details of Lipson's very interesting method, or even its aptness, are not of concern here. I have cited his work as an example of attention to "where" a student responds from, and "when"
and "why," rather than the eternal "how."
The concept gets mentioned from time to time in the writings of others though it seldom receives sustained attention. One very useful list of productive activities is found in Rivers (1972), who remarks that
"unless [the students'] adventurous spirit is given time to establish itself as a constant attitude, most of what is learned will be stored unused, and we will produce individuals who are inhibited and fearful in situations requiring language use" (78).
In their discussion of the psychological characteristics of instruction
al strategies, Bosco and Di Pietro (1971) list eight binary "distinctive features." One of these they call "ldiographic vs. non-ldiographic." In a strategy called "+ldiographic," the student "is not forced into pre
established molds, but is encouraged to manifest expressional spontaneity"
A General View 109
(46). These writers examine the Grammar-Translation, Direct, and Audiolingual Methods in relation to their matrix of distinctive features.
Their finding that all three are predominantly "non-ldiographic" supports my statement (above) that concern for productivity is usually submerged in our preoccupation over getting the kind of reflective behavior that we want. (Careful examination of at least one widely used "cognitively"
oriented textbook by another author indicates that the same generaliza
tion may apply to this type of course as well.) Further corroboration is found in their prediction that while future strategies "will become more personalized and communication-oriented, [they] will continue to empha
size the generalized [linguistic] patterns and [cognitive] integrated processes underlying language behavior" (52). Unfortun)\:ely, the authors do not develop further the meaning of "idiographic."
The word performance, as it is used in this chapter, includes the meaning that it has when it is contrasted with competence in the writings of generative-transformational scholars. By its inclusion of "from where,"
"when" and "why," however, it goes beyond what those writers usually describe when they use the term.
The same is true for the word productive. We are accustomed to hearing speaking and writing referred to as "the productive skills," and it is indeed true that most student activity that is productive, in the sense of this chapter, will involve speaking and/or writing. But it should be obvious that speech and writing can also be reflective; Bosco and DiPietro confirm our suspicion that in organized language study they usually are.