References Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination, Imagination, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. P ress. Butler, M. 2004. ‘Repossessing the past; the case for an open literary history’ in D. Walder (ed.). Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents (second Documents (second edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crystal, D. 2008. Think on My Words: Exploring Shakespeare’s Language. Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, D. and B. Crystal. 2004. Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion. Companion. London: Penguin. Deveson, T. and S. Bassnett. 2002. ‘Modernizing Shakespeare’. Around Shakespeare’. Around the Globe 20: Globe 20: 32–3. Eagleton, T. 1986. William Shakespeare. Shakespeare. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Eagleton, T. 2008. Literary Theory. Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson, R. 1998. Teaching Shakespeare. Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge Cambri dge University Press. Johnson, S. 1765. Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies. Tragedies. Available at http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/15566/15566-h/15566-h.htm (accessed files/15566/15566-h/15566-h.htm (accessed on 30 June 2015). Kermode, F. 2000. Shakespeare’s Language. Language. London: Penguin. The reviewer Christina Lima is a Lecturer, Researcher, and Teacher Trainer. Her main interest is in the role of English literature in English language education. Her research focuses on teaching literature and language, reading groups, and the roles of imagination in language education. She is the Winner of the 2015 British Council/Macmillan Education Award for Innovative Writing Writi ng for her materials on teaching Shakespeare to EAP students. She is also the coordinator of the IATEFL, Literature, Media and Cultural Studies Special Interest Group (SIG) and currently teaches at the University of Leicester. Email:
[email protected] doi:10.1093/elt/ccv068 Advance Access publication October 26, 2015
The Principled Communicative Approach: Seven Criteria for Success J. Arnold, Z. Dörnyei, and C. Pugliese Helbling Languages 2015, 148 pp., £21.25 isbn
978 3 85272 938 1
First of all, it needs to be said that the book under activities book, review is an activities book, and should therefore be judged as such, that is to say, on the originality, plausibility, and generalizability of its activities. On the whole, it scores well, and teachers will welcome the clear, no-nonsense presentation and the variety of activity types, even if some of these seem overfamiliar, while others verge on the implausible. At the familiar end of the scale, for instance, is 4.2 ‘What has been done?’ where learners use the passive voice to describe what has changed in a sequence of two pictures. Or 3.5 ‘Is there anybody who …?’, which is basically a variant of that iconic communicative activity, ‘Find someone who …’. At the implausible end, there is 5.5 ‘Rating chunks’, where learners are asked to rate multi-word items not only according to their utility but according to their perceived colour, size, strength, and beauty. On the other hand, many of the activities are original, most would be generalizab generalizable le to a range of contexts, and some are just plain fun. I really liked 6.9 ‘I hear you’, for example, which practises the skill of active listening, and 6.4 ‘Log in’, where learners are shown how to keep a record of their extra-curricular reading. What, though, is the glue that binds these somewhat disparate activities activities together? The clue, of course, is to communicative.. But not be found in the title: they are communicative your common-or-garden communicative, i.e. meaningfocused and fluency-oriented, but communicati communicative ve in a principled way, way, undergirded as they are by seven principles—or pillars, even—of psycholinguist psycholinguistic ic wisdom. It should be unremarkable that a resource book is ‘principled’ and that it is committed to principles that have been extrapolated from research into second language acquisition. Nevertheless, there is a tendency in the discourse on teaching to appeal to personal experience (‘this worked for me’) rather than to empirically grounded principles (‘this works because …’), so a book that so firmly nails its (theoretical) colours to the (pedagogical) mast is to be welcomed. The principles themselves have already been laid out by one of the co-authors in a scholarly book, The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition ( Acquisition (Dörnyei Dörnyei 2009). 2009 ). They are not only revisited in the Introduction
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to the book under review, but form the structure around which the activities themselves are grouped. Chapter 1, for example, is dedicated to ‘the personal significance principle’, Chapter 2 to ‘the declarative input principle’, and so on. Unsurprisingly, the aforementioned ‘Rating chunks’ activity adheres to ‘the formulaic language principle’, while ‘Log in’ supports ‘the language exposure principle’. Does this structure cohere? More importantly: are these principles coherent? Let’s look at the second question first. It is now something of a truism to state that Communicative Language Teaching (hereafter CLT) was originally nourished, not by a theory of learning, but by a theory of language, or, more accurately, a theory of language use. In the absence of a great deal of evidence as to how languages were learnt, early proponents of CLT focused on how they were used , and hence were attracted to the notion of experiential learning, invoking, as the authors of this book note, the ‘rather vague tenet of learning through doing ’ (p. 7, emphasis in original). That is to say, you learn to speak by speaking and to be communicative by communicating. To counteract this hands-off, deep-end, experiential approach and to redress the worst excesses of CLT, the authors offer an alternative, ‘a fresh take’, according to the blurb, a ‘proposal for reform’, according to the Introduction (p. 5). This, then, is no mere recipe book: it aspires to be an approach. Or counter-approach, even. As such, its authors subscribe to what Ellis (2008) calls the ‘strong interface position’, one in which ‘explicit knowledge converts to implicit knowledge through practice’ (p. 420). That is to say, not learning through doing, but learning then doing. The authors insist that ‘the most effective method tends not to throw learners into the deep water’ (p. 33). Accordingly, they draw on cognitive skill-learning theory, which is ‘very clear about the necessity of the initial encoding of a targeted skill, prior to any practice sessions, in the form of declarative knowledge’ (p. 33). They thus align themselves with a long tradition of what might be called CLT revisionism, which effectively rehabilitates a presentation–production–practice (PPP) methodology by arguing that fluency is achieved when declarative knowledge is proceduralized through practice, a position that dates at least as far back as McLaughlin (1987), somewhat belying the claim that this is a ‘new principled approach’ (p. 10) or a ‘fresh take’. Indeed, Dörnyei himself (along with two of his colleagues) was heralding just such a paradigm shift nearly two decades ago (Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, and
Thurrell 1997). At this time, so they claimed, ‘CLT [had] arrived at a turning point: Explicit, direct elements are gaining significance in teaching communicative abilities and skills. The emerging new approach can be described as a principled communicative approach’ (p. 147, emphasis in original). Why, after so much time, one wonders, is a ‘proposal for reform’ still necessary? Admittedly, the renewed interest in content-based approaches and various forms of immersion (for example CLIL) has revived the debate as to how a focus on both form and meaning can be ‘counterbalanced’ (see Lyster 2007). In this sense, this book might serve as a useful corrective. But an exclusive focus on meaning and fluency is, arguably, not common practice, and to claim that ‘many followers of CLT have tended to associate the method with a basically “no grammar” or at least “not a lot of grammar” approach’ (p. 7) or that ‘the natural inclination of most CLT practitioners has been to downplay the significance of … controlled practice’ (p. 51) is debatable, to say the least. The many (admittedly small-scale) studies of the implementation of CLT in classrooms suggest that its principles are more honoured in the breach than in the observance. Karavas-Doukas (1996: 193), for example, found that 40 secondary school language teachers in Greece generally held favourable attitudes towards CLT, but, ‘when the teachers were observed, classroom practices (with very few exceptions) deviated considerably from the principles of the communicative approach. […] Most lessons were teacher-fronted and exhibited an explicit focus on form’. A glance at the current top-selling coursebooks should allay all doubts, characterized as they are by ‘an overall focus on language work, with a communicative gloss … despite the widespread criticisms of all forms of PPP in the professional literature in recent years’ (Waters 2011: 311). If one were to sum up the current orthodoxy, one would not need to look much further than Ellis’s (op.cit.) formulation above: ‘Explicit knowledge converts to implicit knowledge through practice’. Be that as it may, how well do the activities map on to the seven-pillared structure? As a writer on grammar teaching techniques, I was naturally drawn first to the ‘declarative input principle’ and its premise that a principled communicative approach ‘should contain explicit initial input components’, presumably including grammar items. The authors are flexible as to whether deductive or inductive approaches to grammar teaching should be preferred, ‘as long as by the end of it students have been presented with a combination of abstract rules and concrete examples’ (p. 33, emphasis in original). Nevertheless, there
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is not a lot of guidance as to how these ‘abstract rules’ should be divulged, apart from rather vague instructions of the type: ‘Explain that in English some adjectives have two forms …’, ‘Teach or review the expressions below …’, ‘Review the comparative forms with your students …’. Perhaps the chapter dedicated to the ‘focus-on-form principle’ would provide some clues. It claims, after all, to offer ‘a new type of grammar teaching’ (p. 67). But again, many of the activities begin in the same fashion: ‘Present or review the basic information about relative clauses …’, ‘Review the formation and use of the passive voice …’, ‘Teach or review the structure as … as to express equality…’. For an approach that is committed to both a ‘declarative input principle’ and a focus on form, one might expect a little more guidance. To be fair, there are one or two activities that adopt a more reactive approach, where, for example, learners solicit feedback on selected features of their production (4.4 ‘Give me feedback’) or where learners’ errors are the focus of instruction (4.6 ‘No one is perfect’). Moreover, the chapter on formulaic language is a welcome addition to the literature on CLT, which has so far struggled to extend the range of techniques that target this hugely important area of language (the exception being the excellent Teaching Chunks of Language (Lindstromberg and Boers 2008) in the same Resourceful Teacher series). In sum, and as I said at the outset, this is an activities book, and teachers will welcome it as such. And the ‘principles’ on which the activities are based are sound, even if the claim that they instantiate a ‘fresh take’ is somewhat exaggerated, predicated as it is on a misreading of what constitutes the current orthodoxy. References Celce-Murcia, M., Z. Dörnyei, and S. Thurrell. 1997. ‘Direct approaches in L2 instruction: a turning point in communicative language teaching?’. TESOL Quarterly 31/1: 141–52. Dörnyei, Z. 2009. The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ellis, R. 2008. The Study of Second Language Acquisition (second edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Karavas-Doukas, E. 1996. ‘Using attitude scales to investigate teachers’ attitudes to the communicative approach’. ELT Journal 50/3: 187–98.
Lindstromberg, S. and F. Boers. 2008. Teaching Chunks of Language: From Noticing to Remembering . Innsbruck: Helbling Languages. Lyster, R. 2007. Learning and Teaching Languages through Content: A Counterbalanced Approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. McLaughlin, B. 1987. Theories of Second Language Learning . London: Edward Arnold. Waters, A. 2011. ‘Advances in materials design’ in M. H. Long and C. J. Doughty (eds.). The Handbook of Language Teaching . Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. The reviewer Scott Thornbury teaches on an MA TESOL programme at The New School, New York. He is the author of a number of books on language and methodology, as well as series editor for the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers (Cambridge University Press). Email:
[email protected] doi:10.1093/elt/ccv057 Advance Access publication October 8, 2015
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