The Communicative Approach -
its history and theoretical background
Communicative and Natural have long been good marketing terms for people and institutions offering services to language learners. In fact, different forms of the communicative approach go back several centuries.
Unsurprisingly, educators who claim that their methods are natural often emphasize people s natural capacity to learn languages. In A History of English Language Teaching by A.P.R.Howatt with H.G.Widdowson buy new: 2nd Revised edition [2004] buy used 1st edition [1984], the authors group together several labels (Natural Method, Conversation Method, Direct Method, Communicative Approach) which they associates with communicative language teaching. The suggested common denominator is the hypothesis that the conditions which awake natural capacity to learn languages are (a) someone to talk to (b) something to talk about and (c) a desire to understand and make yourself understood.
The continuing importance of syntax in language syllabus design
The 1970s conception of The Communicative Approach, billed at the time as a major change in direction, sets further conditions. These vary according to different proponents of the approach. Some theorists appear to believe that The Communicative Approach should replace The Structural Syllabus. However, this has not happened. Most market leading English coursebooks retain a structural thread, especially at lower levels of proficiency.
Complete abandonment of the structural syllabus would make language learning and teaching difficult, if not impossible. There is a distinction to make between acquiring a first language from birth and learning a second language later on in life. Clearly it is not the same experience. However, research studies into how infants acquire language examine every level of linguistic analysis e.g. from the ability to produce the phonemes in "Ma Ma" and "Da Da" to the stage when a English speaking child is able to produce the Third Person Singular "s" on the end of a verb.
Books exploring the relationship between syntax and meaning in the English language
The relationships between choice of syntactic forms (SYNTAX) and meaning (SEMANTICS) is so important that it is the main focus in books which I would highly recommend to language leearners and teachers:
Meaning and the English Verb Geoffrey Leech [09/09/2004] and,
A Communicative Grammar of English Geoffrey Leech, Jan Svartvik [06/01/2003]
Focus on sentence-level syntax in Berlitz s natural method
Berlitz s Natural or Direct Method (used from the end of the 19th century) depended very heavily on the structural syllabus. The pattern drills present in course material involved a considerable amount of sentence-level question and answer. It is difficult to reconcile Berlitz s Natural method with other Natural Methods which have appeared more recently.
Focus on discourse in more recent natural methods
One of the advances made by 1970s versions of The Communicative Approach, was focus on discourse. Reference skills need to be developed in the context of paragraphs as well as sentences.
It is fair to say that the audio-lingual method coupled with the structural syllabus, which was one of the mainstay approaches used in private language schools during the 1960s and much of the 70s, pushed discourse off the agenda.
Main course books for lower level students - such as L.G. Alexander s successful First Things First, Practice and Progress and Geoffrey Broughton s Success With English (which had longer texts!) - used anything resembling a paragraph mainly to contextualise new structural items. Although these particular authors could write skilfully, the texts in many coursebooks of this era were devoid of cohesive devices and lacked coherence. At worst, longer texts consisted of a series of disconnected sentences. Dialogues were lacking in the features of spoken English conversation; instead they were often an exchange of structure-speech i.e. stilted. However, to be fair to authors, the purpose which they set out to fulfil was authentic in its own right; they quite deliberately set out to present language patterns in a controlled environment in order to make bits of language (which students could parody for their own generative use) easier to learn.
There were a few good materials on the market for learning to write well constructed prose, usually intended for use at higher levels of proficiency. One, which still remains a favourite, was From Paragraph To Essay: Developing Composition Writing - by Maurice L. Imhoof and Herman Hudson [1975].
For higher level learners with time on their hands to develop writing skills, the offering of US publishers was noticeably better than that of their UK counterparts. By the late 1980s, the growing numbers of students from non-English speaking countries attending US and UK universities had increased the offering of language learning materials focusing on discourse:
Comprehending College Textbooks by Cortina/Elder/Gonnet [1989]
Models for Writers: Short Essays for Composition by Alfred F Rosa, Paul a Eschholz [1989]
Beyond The Conventions edited by Jeanne Gunner [1990]
Prose in Brief: Reading and Writing Essays by Edward Proffitt, Paul a Eschholz [1991]
Assignments in Exposition (12th Edition) by Dunbar, Clement; Dunbar, Georgia; Rorabacher, Louise E. [1997]
By the late 1970s, British universities were calling upon private languages schools for ideas on how to set up learning centres offering language support for L2 learners. Simultaneously, private language schools were recognising that more of their students were preparing for studying at a UK university and that there were other reasons for reading and writing than practising structural patterns at sentence level. Early ELT readings skills titles which I like were:
Reasons for Reading
by Davies, Evelyn and Whitney, Norman [1979], and
Reading and Thinking in English - a study skills course pitched at different levels. [1979] [1980]. Among the authors are H. G. Widdowson well known for his influential work Teaching Language as Communication [1978] and Tom McArthur who went on to compile an outstanding vocabulary source book entitled Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English [1981] which I would highly recommend to L2 students wishing to expand their English vocabulary.
To meet the rapidly growing interest in English for Academic Purposes, private English language schools needed to offer more accurate models of both written and spoken English discourse.
Alongside titles such as Tom McArthur s Reading and Thinking in English: Discovering Discourse [1979], offerings for teachers appeared such as Gillian Brown s Listening to Spoken English [1977]. There is also a 1990 edition. This theoretical work alerts those learning to teach English that there is much more to listening than merely knowing the meaning of the words you hear i.e. stress, intonation, voice quality, gesture. It offers a good analysis as to why many second language users find it difficult to understand native speakers.
The much maligned grammar / translation method focused on passages of text as well as sentences, which remains the skill of the professional translator.
It should also be remembered that the grammar/translation method extended beyond sentence-level in the tasks learners were expected to perform. Some of our best linguists can be found among people who earn their living through translation. Awareness of both semantic and grammatical relations within longer sections of text is critical to good translation. Translators today keep databases storing examples of chunks of text they have previously translated well. If they have particular customers requiring specific genres (e.g. the language of social history or industrial relations), similar content is likely to reappear whether this is individual words, complete sentences, or methods of topic development within paragraphs.
Great progress has been made in the field of textual analysis, given the power of modern computers (the use of Concordancers, frequency data, etc). It is now well recognised that a good stylistic analysis needs to be both structural and functional i.e. it should look at both usage and use. For structural methods of analysing text, see:
>Investigating English Style by David Crystal and Derek Davy [1973]
المادة المعروضة اعلاه هي مدخل الى المحاضرة المرفوعة بواسطة استاذ(ة) المادة . وقد تبدو لك غير متكاملة . حيث يضع استاذ المادة في بعض الاحيان فقط الجزء الاول من المحاضرة من اجل الاطلاع على ما ستقوم بتحميله لاحقا . في نظام التعليم الالكتروني نوفر هذه الخدمة لكي نبقيك على اطلاع حول محتوى الملف الذي ستقوم بتحميله .
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