Chapter 3 applied linguists and foreign language teacher FULL

This paper: Review briefly the reasons for the emergence of a discourse problem in language study  Examine the nature of this problem  Suggest the ways in which applied linguists and

3 The applied linguist and the foreign language teacher:

can they talk to each other?

Claire Kramsch

The possibilities of mutual enrichment between applied linguists and language teachers have thereby increased dramatically , but so have the buzzwords and shorthand verbal practices, which constitute as many opportunities for misunderstanding

Applied linguists & language teachers see themselves as being in the same boat, “both oars in the water”

(Lightbown 1994)

Do they have a common discourse?

This paper:

 Review briefly the reasons for the emergence of a discourse problem in language study

 Examine the nature of this problem

 Suggest the ways in which applied linguists and foreign language teachers can engage in intellectual dialogue, putting indeed both oars in the same water.

1 Why we have a discourse problem

 Developments in foreign language education

 Demographic and social changes => educated elite of industrialized countries has changed.

 The concept of a stable, consensual discourse community => give way to regconition of a diverse

population of learners with changing needs

 Learning a foreign language :

- A way of discovering another people's multifaceted living culture

- Include the ethnographic variability of language as it is used by native speakers in the variable practice of everyday life.

Language educators have ceased

=> Look to their colleagues in literature for pedagogic guidance

=>They have turned instead to applied linguists like Henry Widdowson (1975, 1984a, 1992a), to ESL and FL methodologists, syllabus desingers, and curriculum developers.

 The growth of the field of applied linguistics

 Programmatic chart proposed by Michael Halliday in 1978 expanded the object of language study

to 4 distinct but overlapping entities

1 Language as a system , i.e phonic and graphic system, grammar and vocabulary

2 Language as knowledge and though t

3 Language as behavior enacted in a social context

4 Language as art , or as a particular way of representing and constructing reality

(Halliday 1978:II)

 The problem is not just that foreign language educators and applied linguists give different meanings to identical

words , but that they are themselves positioned at the confluence of several discourse communities or audiences

 Widdowson called for a model of language in applied linguistics that would be “congruent with the knowledge

and attitudes of language users”

(1984a:26)

• Since 1984, other applied linguists have made Widdowson's concepts - “language use”, “procedures”,

“processes vs products” - widely assessible to language educators.

• Educators have made these concepts relevant to other educators through the mediation of school

guidelines, national standards descriptors, and global educational statements.

=> Each mediation attempts to bring together discourse worlds separated by divergent interests and spheres of influence.

 In sum:

Each discourse domain has it own metaphors, its own categorizations, its own way of relating the parts

to the whole => the broadened intellectual agenda now available to language teachers and applied linguists has made it more difficult to communicate across historically and socially created discourses.

 Hayden White (1978:21)

“ Discourse itself mediates between our apprehension of those aspects of experience still “ strange” to

us and those aspects of it which we “ understand ” because we have found an order of words adequate

to its domestication”.

THE SURFACE STRUCTURE OF THE DISCOURSE PROBLEM

DISCOURSE PROBLEMS

The ways in which various groups talk about the goals of language education

DISCOURSE SPECIFICITY

FOCUS ON LEARNER

1 Researchers in second language acquisition and psycholinguistics:

◦ Learners: “developing an interlanguage’, ‘processing input’, ‘making input

comprehensible’, ‘using good learning strategies’.

◦ Language learning = the discourse of linguistic observation and experimentation.

 Stress the importance of empirical research

FOCUS ON LEARNER

2 Scholars in the social sciences or in the humanities

◦ Learners ‘exercising critical reflection’, ‘demystifying ideologies’, ‘becoming empowered’,

‘developing an awareness of self and other’

◦ Language learning ‘the discourse of critical pedagogy, cultural criticism, post-modern thought’

 Stress the importance of theory to understand concrete realities.

FOCUS ON TEACHERS

1 Foreign language educators

◦ Teachers “establishing goals and objectives’, ‘setting priorities’, ‘setting up procedures’,

‘evaluating progress’, ‘determining outcomes’

◦ Language learning ‘organizational management, the idiom of business, industry and politics’

 Show evidence of efficiency, rentability, utility, and measurable evidence of success.

FOCUS ON TEACHERS

2 Methodologists and teacher trainers

◦ Ways of ‘integrating skills’, ‘contextualizing activities’, ‘sequencing tasks’, ‘designing tests’

◦ Discourse of schooled learning in institutional settings.

 Focus on professional expertise, instructional management and control.

MEDIATION

Different domains of knowledge, mode of representation, power structure, claims to

legitimacy  difference goals and approaches

 Language teachers have to act as mediators between the researchers, the politicians, and the language learners.

APPLIED LINGUISTIC AND POLITICAL IDEOLOGY

Applied linguists

Other researchers

Use the metaphors or politically dominant discourse communities

Example: Krashen’s metaphors echo and reinforce a certain anti-intellectualism prevalent among US American language

teachers => Krashen’s impact on foreign language education in US

The discourse of methodologists – natural

approach- learner-centered instruction

Some phrases from second language acquisition research:

• Learners’ needs

• Individual differences

• Individual variability

• Natural order

Happen to fix nicely into a certain dominant democratic discourse that

• values learner autonomy and self-reliance

• Views with distrust any artificial manipulation of a learner’s interlanguage by social or political forces

Virulent debates in Germany

• Between the educationalist and naturalists in second language acquisition

• Applied teaching and learning research (Bausch and Koenigs :1983)

• Second language research ( Felix, 1978, Clahsen, Meisel, Pienemann,1983)

• The battle raged over who had what to say about language instruction in schools

APPLIED LINGUISTICS AND PROFESSIONALISM

The encroachment of ELT professional talk into all areas of language teaching ( Philipson, 1992)

Foreign language educators often borrow the metaphors of psycho- and sociolinguistics and

And re- index them

=> To fit their own discourse community

“communicative competence”

• Originally coined by Hymes (1972)

• Chomsky’s notion of “competence”

• Was defined by Grumperz in sociological terms as

‘Ability to select, from the totality of grammatically correct expressions available to the speaker, forms which appropriately reflect the social norms governing behavior in specific encounter.’

• Redefined in social interactional terms by Savignon as:

=> ‘ the expression, interpretation, and negotiation of meaning involving interaction between 2 or more person belonging to the same ( or difference) speech community.’

‘ that the student can understand the essential points of what the native speaker says to him in a real communication situation and can response with little or no effort and without errors that are so distracting that they interfere drastically with communication’

( Terrell, 1977:326)

An individual’s linguistic ability to ‘handle every day social encounters With some degree of appropriateness’ and to ‘hold

up one’s won end of the conversation by making inquiries and offering more elaborate responses’

(Omaggio 1986:16)

Thus, different political and professional agendas, born form differenr historical conditions, make communication between researchers and practitioners treacherous

FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION AND POLITICAL/ COMMERCIAL DISCOURSE

Foreign language Education

Textbook author

Publisher

further muddle the mediation by applied linguists of

the results of their research

Applied Linguists and language teacher have crossed the disciplines and opened domain-specific discourses.

It also entails a mediation through language that creates its own

discourse problems.

The deep structure of the discourse problem

 In early sixties, applied linguistics chose electrical process metaphor to describe the

language learning process: input-black box-output

The term input became metaphor for the language to be learned

The deep structure of the discourse problem

 Adopting the input metaphor for language learning, applied linguistics used

metonymy + synecdoche to construct its object of research

 In this course movement from the part to the whole, from the particular to the general ,input

affects the acquisition of a foreign language

The deep structure of the discourse problem

 As the applied linguistics notion of input entered the schools, it was made to reinforce the

mode of consciousness through which administrators and language teachers ask the

questions relevant to their own discourse community

 By passing from the physical science to the language sciences and from the language

sciences to the science of education ,the input metaphor has shaped discourse realities for people who, although may use the same words, end up meaning different things by these words

The deep structure of the discourse problem

The deep structure of the discourse prolem

 What has been missing in each of these transmutations is the fourth trope of discourse, the irony

Current challenges to the input metaphor in language learning all use some

form of irony

 Applied linguistics and language teachers are more interested than ever talking to one another as

they both have to mediate between different discourse constituencies

 What is important for each to understand is not the different answers they give but the

different questions they ask