Applied linguistics and language learning/teaching
A PERSONAL ACCOUNT
Alice Kaplan’s 1993 evocative account of her own love story with learning and teaching French reminds us that not all language learning is doomed. Kaplan is blunt about the difficult task of being a language teacher: ‘[L]anguage teachers are always in search of the foolproof method that will work for any living language and will make people perfectly at home in their acquired tongue’ (ibid: 130).
Kaplan has gone beyond the lure of method having seen its infinite regress:
I was told the story of language teaching when I was learning to become a teacher. Once upon the time, the story goes, all languages were taught like Greek and Latin. Learning was based on grammar rules and translation. You talked in your own language about the dead language you saw written down. Then in the late nineteenth century came the Direct Method, the ancestor of Berlitz. You spoke in class in the language you were trying to teach; you worked on pronunciation; you practiced grammar out loud. (ibid)
Based on grammar rules and translation: the dead hand of linguistics has long weighed heavily:
From the forties on, people looked to linguistics to revolutionize language teaching: language classrooms would be ‘labs’ with scientific data and results; the emphasis would be on speaking, speaking like natives and learning like native speakers do. In the late 1950s, Noam Chomsky argued that children acquire language more or less automatically by the time they are five and whatever makes it happen can’t be duplicated by adults – it has nothing to do with situation. Chomsky’s insight did language teachers absolutely no good: they couldn’t duplicate genetic processes, and they couldn’t hope to reproduce childhood as a model for second-language learning. (ibid: 130–1)
Given the ease with which new methods arise and are abandoned one after another, it is surprising how attracted language teachers are to new methods. The reason, Kaplan suggests is that: ‘Language teaching methods make for a tale of enthusiasm and skepticism, hope and hope dashed. Every once in a while, someone comes along and promises a new language method … Whatever the method, only desire can make a student learn a language, desire and necessity’ (ibid: 131).
In spite of the extent of the activity and the attention given to training in method, the fact is, as Kaplan points out:
Language teaching is badly paid, little recognized, and much maligned. It is left up to native speakers for whom it is stupidly thought to be ‘natural’, therefore too easy to be of much value. PhDs want to move on from language teaching to the teaching of literature, and theories of literature. Language teaching is too elemental, too bare. You burn out, generating all that excitement about repetition, creating trust, listening, always listening. In literature class you can lean back in the seat and let the book speak for itself. In language class you are constantly moving, chasing after sound. (Kaplan 1993: 139)
The history of language teaching is, indeed, the history of method. Like fashion in dress/clothes, method in language teaching emerges and disappears, and if one looks far enough it recycles itself after a decent interval. As staleness is to fashion so is failure to method. Since reliance on method alone must of necessity lead to failure, it is inevitable that all methods will be challenged by new or revived alternatives. As Kaplan recognizes in the comment already quoted: ‘language teachers are always in search of the foolproof method’ (ibid: 130).
Language learning and language teaching are ‘problems’ because they are so often ineffectual. The temptation is always to seek new and therefore ‘better’ methods of teaching, better methods of learning. Such an unthought-through solution results from faulty diagnosis, which itself derives from a lack of objectivity. The informal foreign language learner who is not making progress is all too easily persuaded that what is needed is to change the methods of learning. And that is also true in formal instruction where the teacher becomes dispirited because the methods in use are not working. Again, the solution is to change the method. And for a time, the new methods such as direct, mim-mem, communicative, cognitive, technological (Stern 1983) work but then the novelty, the very method effect, begins to wear off and the learning, lacking the halo effect of newness, reverts to its customary lack of progress.
What applied linguistics offers, where its coherence (pace Wilkins 1994) lies is in its recognition that the question to ask is not how to improve the learning, but what is it that is not being improved, in other words what it is that is supposed to be being learned. The ‘how to improve’ question comes from a teacher training tradition where solutions are understandably method directed: what do I do in the classroom on Monday morning? and the answer so often is: learn a new method.
The how question also derives from an approach via linguistics (as Alice Kaplan pointedly notes), whereby the diagnosis has to do with the need for the teacher to understand more about linguistics and then the improvement will come from attention to methods, better use of the old or adoption of new. The reason for such naivety in linguistics is that to the linguist knowledge about language will of itself improve language learning while knowledge about language and skill in teaching and learning are unrelated. That is not the case with the applied linguist for whom knowledge about language and skill in teaching and learning are seamlessly linked, since learning and teaching are themselves aspects of knowing about language in the context of second-language acquisition and it is through understanding them better that improvement will come.
That knowledge is partly quite traditional; it is knowledge about language in itself, dealing here with language systems; then knowledge about a language (usually the one that will be or is the target of teaching), dealing here with language structure; and finally knowledge about language in its interactions, dealing here with acquisition, with cognition and with society.
What this means is that some of the content of a course in applied linguistics which will be of benefit to second language teachers (and by extension to second-language learners) will offer linguistics. But it will not be the whole course (possibly 30 per cent), it will not be identical with courses given to graduate linguistics students and it will take into account in the provision of tasks, workshops, examples and so on, the professional activity of the majority of the students (language teaching). It is important at this stage that students perceive an applied linguistics course as vocationally driven and planned and that their own profession, for example language teaching, is not dismissed or trivialized as uninteresting or not worthwhile.
