Spoken language and the classroom
6.2 The status of speaking in classrooms
Historically, there are several reasons for the special status of spoken inter-action in applied linguistics and language pedagogy. These perspectives have a strong influence on what is regarded as good classroom practice whether the explicit name of the component in the syllabus is speaking or not. Spoken interaction is seen as an important, if not key, aspect of the language learning process and has been for over a hundred years.
The spoken form is variously conceived of as:
• the primary mode in which ‘natural uptake’ can occur (as in ‘The Natural Method’ or ‘The Oral Approach’ prevalent in the early years of the last century until the early 1960s),
• a powerful tool for developing automatic and fluent output, together with consolidation of grammatical patterns (as in ‘The Direct Method’
or ‘The Audio-lingual Approach’),
• the ideal medium for the exploration of language and one that allows a focus on communication to take precedence over form (a fundamental aspect of ‘The Communicative Approach’ and later developments such as ‘Task Based Language Teaching’).
In terms of approaches, methods or techniques (to use Anthony’s (1963) often used and still useful categorisation to distinguish different levels of teaching methodology) the spoken form has for a long time retained a very significant status in the language classroom.
However, the status and handling of the mode have not remained static and, in particular, the decade of the 1970s marked a significant transition.
If, then, we first get a thorough knowledge of the spoken form of the for-eign language, and then proceed to learn its literary form, we shall be in exactly the same position as regards relative strength of associations as the natives themselves: we shall think in the spoken language, because our asso-ciations are directly with it.
(Sweet, 1900: 52–3)
For the teacher, understanding classroom communication, being able to
‘shape’ learner contributions and making strategic decisions in the moment-by-moment unfolding of a lesson are regarded as being crucial to developing SLA in the formal, L2 classroom context.
(Walsh, 2006: 133)
The language learner in a 1950s and 1960s classroom, whether in the UK or the United States or contexts influenced by these major Anglophone communities, would have had a very high chance of being exposed to the spoken form. Indeed the influence of early British applied linguists such as Henry Sweet remained powerful throughout the first half of the century and, as Quote 6.1 suggests, led to a strong emphasis on the oral mode.
What emerged as ‘The Natural Method’ relied on introducing language items systematically and almost entirely through speech, and then on the very accurate (in phonetic terms) oral practice of explicitly taught language rules and features. In the United States, ethnographic approaches which depended on close and careful scrutiny of the oral form were also influen-tial and these were superseded by what eventually became known as ‘The Audio-lingual Method’. This again relied heavily on oral input, exposure to native-speaker models, and repetitive oral work (‘drilling’) which could be carried out with very little reference to meaning or context. The role of speech in the language classroom during these post-Second World War to late 1960s years was rather similar to a Petri dish in an experiment. It was the ‘medium’ or container of carefully selected (in the better programmes) linguistic items that would flourish in this sheltered environment and then become automatic and natural for the learner who had absorbed and inter-nalised them through extensive practice. The focus was not primarily on communication but on structure and accurate production.
There was, however, a gradual acknowledgment from the late 1960s onwards that language rules and explicit focus on input and practice could only take the learner so far. Quote 6.3 gives an example of an early state-ment of the issues.
Quote 6.3 Widdowson on the role of communication in language teaching
The difficulty is that the ability to compose sentences is not the only ability we need to communicate. Communication only takes place when we make use of sentences to perform a variety of different acts of an essentially social nature. Thus we do not communicate by composing sentences, but by using sentences to make statements of different kinds, to describe, to record, to classify and so on, or to ask questions, make requests, give orders. Knowing what is involved in putting sentences together correctly is only one part of what we mean by knowing a language, and it has very little value on its own:
it has to be supplemented by a knowledge of what sentences count as in their normal use as a means of communicating. And I do not think that the recommended approach makes adequate provision for the teaching of this kind of knowledge.
(Widdowson, 1972: 16)
The acknowledgment of the limitations of ‘putting sentences together correctly’ came about at the same time as a changing ethos in educational circles in liberal Western thinking. These repositioned ‘The Teacher’
and ‘The Student’ and made the idea of an authoritative model presented by a native speaker less attractive. Several simultaneous factors therefore combined to mean that the learner in a 1980s classroom would be asked to carry out a very different set of tasks from his or her counterpart of the post-war era. This language learner would, in classrooms influenced by Western academic applied linguistic thinking, be far less likely to be asked to carry out structured oral practice of a language feature and much more likely to be involved in a student-led task involving negotiation and dis-cussion with peers, carried out in the medium of speech and with little explicit focus on rules and ‘getting it right’. In this early ‘communicative’
classroom the spoken mode was, and still is, vitally important but it was no longer merely the receptacle or tool of instruction, rather it was coming to be seen as the actual medium through which the learner’s state of linguis-tic knowledge is shaped and altered. To understand this change it is neces-sary to go back to another highly influential set of trends and discussions in linguistics and applied linguistics that took place from the mid-1960s, and which continues to be relevant today. In particular, there was a strand of debate from that period onwards about how to incorporate the domi-nant Chomskyan paradigm of the time into the language-teaching arena:
how could language practitioners approach second language teaching in ways that reflected his insights about first language development?
One answer was based on the premise that there is no real difference between the two acquisition processes. These ideas were not new but were most extensively explored as a method or approach for the ELT classroom by Stephen Krashen (Krashen, 1981 through Krashen, 2008) in what came to be called ‘The Natural Approach’ (not to be confused with the early twentieth-century ‘Natural Method’ which emerged as part of the reaction to ‘Grammar-Translation’ methods). Like the Communicative Language Teaching movement this theory suggested that a second language is best acquired not by a learner being presented with grammatical information and rules by a teacher but by active engagement in meaningful communi-cation (the ‘learning–acquisition’ distinction), and by the student needing to comprehend discourse which is slightly beyond that which they can express themselves (Krashen’s ‘input hypothesis’). See also Quote 6.4 and Concept 6.1.
The idea underpinning Krashen’s theory was that in the process of exposure to the target language just beyond a student’s current capacity and in the engagement of meaningful and enjoyable communication in it, something akin to a child’s acquisition of language would occur. This was an exciting idea offering to bridge the gap between classrooms and the current language theories that dealt with language as an idealised system
difficult to relate to the realities of the language-teaching classroom.
The reason it was well received, therefore, was that it gave a theoretically convincing answer to the language practitioner who had faced the issue of how to relate the specifics of language ‘performance’ in their classrooms to underlying development of L2 ‘competence’. Krashen’s model appeared to provide the solution: the process will happen as naturally as L1 acquisition, if you provide the right conditions. Because spoken interaction was the primary channel for child language development, this perspective placed great emphasis on the spoken mode in second language learning theory and was one of the major drivers of change to what was regarded as good practice in the language teaching classroom by the late 1980s.
Rather quickly, however, Krashen’s theory became the subject of heated debate concerning how to apply and how to verify it (for example, White, 1987), together with the growing sense in the field that L2 acquisition differs from L1 in a variety of ways (see for instance, Ellis, 1986). The significant impact that the ideas had means that Krashen’s ideas are retained in the standard English language teacher training syllabus and the focus on interaction rather than explicit instruction that they promoted provides part of the explanation for the strong focus on speaking in language acquisition that remains to this day. As noted, the change of emphasis from explicit tuition and drilling to looking at language in use was also shared by the Communicative Language Teaching movement that began to be highly influential from the early 1970s.
Quote 6.4 Krashen on the role of spoken interaction in language acquisition
Language acquisition [original emphasis] is very similar to the process chil-dren use in acquiring first and second languages. It requires meaningful interaction in the target language – natural communication – in which speakers are concerned not with the form of their utterances but with the messages they are conveying and understanding.
(Krashen, 1981:1)
The input hypothesis runs counter to our usual pedagogical approach in sec-ond and foreign language teaching. . . . [O]ur assumption has been that we first learn structures, then practice using them in communication, and this is how fluency develops. The input hypothesis says the opposite. It says we acquire by ‘going for meaning’ first, and as a result, we acquire structure!
(Krashen, 1982: 21)