Chapter 3 applied linguists and foreign language teacher FULL

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.
2.
3.

4.

Language as a system, i.e. phonic and graphic system, grammar and vocabulary
Language as knowledge and thought
Language as behavior enacted in a social context
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

DISCOURSE SPECIFICITY

MEDIATION

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

DISCOURSE SPECIFICITY

LEARNER FOCUS

TEACHER FOCUS


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.


DIFFERENT GOALS

DIFFERENT APPROACHES

CONTENT-BASED INSTRUCTION
(CBI)

TASK-BASED INSTRUCTION

STRATEGY-BASED
INSTRUCTION


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

Use the metaphors or politically dominant
discourse communities

Other researchers

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

Some phrases from second language acquisition

approach- learner-centered instruction

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.