text:
Applied Linguistics
18/3, 1997, 279-313.
and Practice in Applied Linguistics:
Conflict, or Dialectic?1
are remaining at the moment the prisoner of our own categorisations.
Chris Brumfit (1980: 160)
enduring problems of co-ordinating theory with practice in applied linguistics
and language teaching are surveyed in view of the symptomatic disconnections of
theory from practice in theoretical linguistics, with the suggestion that how
far a theory is applicable to practice is a good measure of how far the theory
is valid as a theory. The basic frameworks of 'doing language science' are
explored in terms of their applicability, including Krashen's 'theory',
and an alternative programme is proposed.
two ways of 'doing language science'
relation between theory and practice can be a difficult issue in nearly all
domains of human activity. In most domains, human practices were well
established long before theories began to be provided and have also played a
much more effective role in the history of societies. So we might expect that
practice would play a decisive role also in deciding what sorts of theories
ought to be produced. In fact, however, theory has typically taken over the
leading role and at times has been disconnected from practice altogether. This
tactic allows a society or its institutions, especially education, to maintain
an official theory of humanity, equality, and efficiency, while also maintaining
practices that are symptomatically inhumane, unequal, and inefficient and which
consistently favour elite groups (cf. Apple 1985; Giroux 1992; Beaugrande 1996).
relation between theory and practice also appears uneasy within linguistics, the
'modern science of language'. In real life, we see a rich mosaic of
practices relating to language, ranging from the general operations of language
learning and ordinary conversation over to highly specialised strategies of
communication such as translating poetry. But in 'mainstream' linguistics,
we chiefly see a sparse array of theories, some of them self-consciously
disconnected from all of these practices.2
large-scale close analysis of the discourse of linguistic theorists (Beaugrande
1991) indicates that theoretical linguistics is currently in a stagnation of
crisis proportions, though linguists are understandably reluctant to admit it.
With due poetic justice, the domains where theoretical linguistics has
encountered recalcitrant problems are typically also the domains where the
theories are least suitable for applications. This correspondence suggests a
principle which, according to H.G. Widdowson (personal communication) has hardly
been raised in the central work on applied linguistics: how far a theory is applicable to practice is a good measure of how far
the theory is valid as a theory. Still, I believe we can mount a fairly
strong case for the principle.
can start by drawing a basic distinction between the two main ways of going
about constructing theories of language. Fieldwork
linguists, as the term says, go out to 'work' in the 'field' of
cultural and social activities and carefully record and describe what native
speakers are actually observed to say.
Their theories are both data-driven insofar
as observation and induction exert prominent control, and practice-driven insofar as fieldworkers must join in the social practices of the community of speakers in order
to gather and interpret the data. If your 'theory' of the language is wrong,
you'll soon find out by getting misunderstood, ridiculed, or ignored when you
attempt to speak it.
contrast, homework linguists (to coin
a matching new phrase) 'work' at 'home' or in the office with data that
may have come from a variety of sources, ranging from previously completed
fieldwork, to corpuses collected from public discourse, to specific discourse
types such as samples from language textbooks, and finally to data invented by
the linguist during the homework process itself. As we move across this range in
this order, control increasingly shifts from observation and induction over to introspection and intuition,
whose task is to formulate and describe what native speakers (including the
linguists themselves) are presumed to know
about their language. The theories are mainly theory-driven insofar as homeworkers construct them according to
predetermined methods and standards of design, such as formality, rigour,
compactness, and so on. In exchange, data and practice may enter only obliquely
and indirectly through artificial, isolated sentences invented by the linguists
expressly to make a theoretical point — a situation utterly disparate from
ordinary language practices where utterances are intended to convey a message,
enhance co-operation, and so forth. Yet these linguists face about and assert
that these artificial data are precisely the most revealing for the structure of
the entire language.
distinction cuts the pie a somewhat different way than does the usual
distinction between the descriptive
linguistics that dominated the 'mainstream' of research until the 1960s
versus the generative linguistics that moved into the mainstream thereafter.
Typically, we do find fieldwork methods at the base of descriptive linguistics,
and homework methods at the base of generative linguistics, but not always.
Still, my distinction may be the more relevant one for applied linguists and
language practitioners, because fieldwork and homework correspond to two
different approaches to language learning as well.
fieldwork linguistics versus language learning
To explore this correspondence, we might begin by asking how
far fieldwork research may offer significant analogies to ordinary language
learning. Before any theoretical statements can be made about the language, the
fieldworker first has to learn the language reasonably well. The task is most
challenging when using the 'monolingual method' developed chiefly by Kenneth
Lee Pike (1944, 1967), where the fieldworker has no prior description of the
'target language' to be described and no helpful bilingual interpreters. In
return, the fieldworker has the major advantage of doing the linguistic version
of 'situated learning' (in the sense of Lave and Wenger 1990) within the
community as fluency is gradually attained.
the situation of the fieldworker differs from that of the ordinary language
learner in at least seven ways:
The fieldworker is not accompanied into the field by an explicitly trained teacher, but tries to learn from a gradually
accumulating circle of contacts and acquaintances, who represent the
community's language from multiple perspectives. Most language learners depend
heavily at each stage on one teacher, whose version of the target language may
be in some ways untypical.
Fieldworkers are required to assemble
their own systematic data corpus, whereas language learners are given
textbooks compiled by other people and with means that are often rather
The fieldworker is a mature and educated
adult with an intense and
round-the-clock commitment to the task as compared to those language
learners who are children and adolescents and may find themselves in
second-language classrooms for a variety of accidental or administrative reasons
such as 'language requirements'. Voluntary adult language learners (e.g. in
the massive programmes in Scandinavia) fall in between the two situations.
The fieldworker has received highly specialised
training skills for writing
down utterances in a reliable phonetic alphabet or for distilling out regular
patterns from the data that might correspond to categories like 'nouns' and
'verbs'. Most language learners are untrained and unskilled, and the teacher
may be uncertain about how they perceive or organise the data from classrooms or
The fieldworker is operating under conditions of total cultural immersion. Language is always being observed in
relation to human activities that provide both important clues as to what
certain utterances mean and a pervasive sensitivity to the general cultural
setting of the target language, whether or not such factors are not addressed in
the fieldworker's official 'linguistic theory'. Learners of foreign
languages may have scant contact with the culture.
The fieldworker is conversant with
explicit theoretical concepts about language, directed partly toward the
native language and partly toward experience with other languages during a
period of pre-fieldwork training. Language learners have at most an implicit and
disorganised theory of language derived only from their native language.
The fieldworker's results are intended for presentation
to a scientific community of other experts, some of whom may re-examine the
data and compare it to the theoretical statements made about the language.
Language learners may have no clear idea where they will later display their
seven factors ensure the success of the fieldworker as an ideal language
learner, whereas the prospect of failure causes widespread anxiety for ordinary
classroom learners.
the parallel between the two learning situations does bear upon the question of
how a theory of language might be made to order for practitioners (see section
6). First, such a theory would have to specify
the relationships between native and second-language learning. If this is
done in sufficiently concrete terms, the coordination of the native language and
second-language instruction could be equally attentive to the requirements on
both sides. We need to reassess the main differences between available theories
of native-language learning — or, to use the conventional term, 'language
acquisition' (cf. sections 4 and 5) — and of second-language learning. A
child learning the native language is in a situation far more similar to the
fieldworker's in regard to cultural immersion; yet the social range of the
child's experiences is necessarily narrower, being more focused on a single
family or even on a single parent. Both factors can assist the child: the
immersion by supplying rich clues about what things mean, and the range by
allowing attention to focus on what is interesting and relevant on a daily
both factors are heavily reshaped during second-language learning. In the
standard situation, cultural immersion is not available, and the social range is
limited to the classroom, where materials are to be learned by compulsion
irrespective of whether the learner considers them interesting and relevant.
absence of immersion, the second-language teacher in the classroom is
conscripted into the role of a representative of the community of speakers of
the second-language. This role is more problematic and daunting than many
teachers would probably care to acknowledge. A fieldworker can circulate among
farmers, shopkeepers, householders, and so on, in order to consult a
cross-section of social types, each of whose perspective complements the others.
In contrast, the second-language teacher may have only a single perspective
which is strongly determined by an academic setting and profession, and which
emphasises the reading of literary written texts and the grammatical analysis of
banal sentences. What would be needed here would be a theoretical framework for
expanding the education and training of second-language teachers to provide a
spectrum of cultural outlooks on the language and its social and regional
contexts and varieties.
the teacher has the equally daunting task of trying to offset the learner's
lack of specialised training of the kind fieldworkers have. What is needed here
would be a theoretical framework for attenuating this lack by training
some basic techniques for describing and discussing language as language. Usually,
teachers have to rely on a traditional 'meta-language' that is either too
technical for learners (e.g. 'gerund' and 'gerundive') or too
philosophical (e.g. 'a complete sentence is a complete thought'). We need
terms that exploit ordinary capacities to use the language (e.g. 'a complete
sentence is one that can be made into a sensible yes-or-no question') (cf.
Beaugrande 1985).
is also essential that the meta-language be designed for parallel
use in both native-language and second-language learning within the same
school system. Most schools work at cross-purposes in this regard, so that
learners encounter confusions and inconsistencies in terms when moving from one
classroom to another. Or, terms are glibly transferred, as from Latin over to
English, without appreciating the problems that can arise, e.g., that English
categories are much less systematically distinguished by their forms than are
Latin ones.
theory should further provide a framework for a concerted
and continual interaction among the personnel engaged in the teaching and
learning of both native and all foreign languages. The various needs and
issues could thereby be co-ordinated and made into an explicit context for
developing flexible and sharable methods.
desirability seems plain of making a vital part of the second-language
teachers' training be a period of actual
cultural immersion for the learning of at least one foreign language, if at
all possible the native language of the expected learner population. From a
practical standpoint, this requirement would not be unduly difficult to meet for
second-language teachers who go abroad and take up residence in a country where
the learners' language is spoken. It would suffice for the host country to
provide a lodging and a living stipend for an appropriate period prior to
beginning actual teaching. Immersion programs in Latin America or in the Middle
East would also be ideal for teachers who will later be working in the United
States with the many pupils whose native languages are Latin American Spanish
and Middle Eastern Arabic.
tactic would compensate for the commonplace situation in which the language of
the host country does not belong to the handful of languages that are
traditionally taught in the schools of such countries as the United States and
the United Kingdom. It would not merely put the second-language teacher in a
situation fairly similar to the fieldworker's, but would also involve a
similar commitment to the work and a similar opportunity to attain cultural
sensitivity. To argue that this is not practicable or affordable for so-called
'languages of lesser diffusion' is a stingy rhetorical dodge that allows the
bureaucrats in host countries to economise foolishly on the training of teachers
of second languages that are vital to personal and social development; and,
worse yet, it allows the bureaucrats in the 'source country' to maintain a
colonial mentality of cultural and linguistic superiority in regard to the
cultures and languages in the host countries (cf. Phillipson 1992; Pennycook
from a practical standpoint, it is plainly desirable if a period of actual
cultural immersion can be made a vital part of the second-language learners'
training, for at least three reasons. First, the teacher would receive priceless
support in the otherwise daunting task of representing the community of
speakers. Second, the learners would be far more motivated and committed in
their home schools if they were anticipating such an excursion. Third, their
experience of a foreign culture would be the best antidote in later life against
the rising tides of disrespect for cultural and linguistic human rights and
against the language intolerance that threaten both global security and local
coexistence (Phillipson, Skuttnab-Kangas, and Ranut [eds.] 1994).
from a theoretical standpoint, the concept of 'cultural immersion' is not
yet well accounted for. It is certainly not guaranteed by physical presence in
the host country; visitors may simply form their own separate groups and keep
their distance from the locals and the culture, chiefly for motives of language
insecurity or personal anxiety. Or, they may mingle but with a group of locals
who want to speak their language
instead, a problem already noted by Henry Sweet (1899).3
the commonplace notion of culture as a unified, readily definable entity can be
quite misleading. In a 'modern' society, 'sub-cultures' are proliferated
as means for seeking status or compensating insecurities (cf. Apple 1985: Chs. 3
and 4). The culture of adolescents is likely to differ substantially from that
of their parents and their teacher (Brake 1980). And further subcultures persist
within the multi-culturalism that has reached even such officially mono-cultural
societies as the US and the UK, and can be expected to rise considerably in the
future (Giroux 1992).
a practice-driven theory needs to explain how cultural contacts occur and how
they might be guided to meet the specific needs of second language learning.
Extremely valuable here would be case studies of the whole process of fieldwork
not just in linguistics, but also in anthropology and sociology (see for example
Hymes [ed.] 1964; Rabinow 1977; Baugh 1983). Case studies should also be
assembled of teachers or learners who have been placed in cultural immersion
practice-driven theory also needs to explain how both the training of teachers
and the role of learners in conventional classrooms might effectively offset the
lack of opportunity for cultural immersion. Here, we would create a framework
for assessing fieldwork on the activities of prospective or practising language
teachers and language learners (e.g. Cohen 1976). These studies would offer a
vital complement to studies of the informal diaries kept by classroom learners,
such as carried out by Kathleen Bailey (see survey in Bailey and Ochsner 1983),
which have shed new light on such vital factors as learner anxiety (Bailey
having undergone cultural immersion during the successful acquisition of foreign
language, teachers need guidance in appreciating the typical problems of
learners arising naturally from the contact between the first and the second
language. A 'practice-driven' theory drawing on case studies could support
an effective programme of deliberately building up cultural sensitivity.
resource would be all the more vital when the learners come from a whole spread
of different native languages. This situation is a natural reflex of the
mobility and multi-culturalism in a 'modern' society. The first phase might
be to sort the learners out by cultural areas, such as Latin America, Northern
Africa, or Southeast Asia. A language teacher with a knowledge of only one of
the languages of the area could still attain a cultural sensitivity that would
go a long way toward appreciating the situation of the learners and putting them
more at ease.
practice-driven theory should also describe methods whereby ordinary learners
can attain at least some indirect access to cultural immersion via the
classroom. Practical materials have long been available, such as films and
videos; but to my knowledge, we still lack a theoretical framework indicating
how such materials and technical resources might best be exploited, and what
further materials should be developed and distributed. Video-taped television
programmes sent out from the US and the UK to Africa or the Middle East might
well be both culturally inappropriate to the host country and culturally
distortive or disadvantageous for their image of the source country,
particularly in respect to the wanton and graphic violence that passes for
'entertainment' in the 'first world' as a release valve for with its
galloping social and economic tensions.
second-language teacher whose training does not provide parallels to fieldwork
methods and who has not successfully acquired any foreign language is in a
position like that of a homework linguist, obliged to rely heavily on intuitions
and introspections. Of course, a monolingual and monocultural second-language
teacher can attain successful results, just as homework linguists can produce
significant descriptions of their own languages. But due to the theoretical
principles outlined above, the success rate would seldom be sufficiently
reliable or widespread.
can fieldwork linguistics do the job?
can now total up the central requirements for a practice-driven theory
explicated so far. It should provide realistic data-driven and practice-driven
descriptions of the emergence of the language system at various stages of
fluency in both native and second languages and in both natural and pedagogical
settings, plus an account of the more effective and expedient means of moving
from a less advanced stage to a more advanced one. A body of such theorising
should be closely co-ordinated with a library of fieldwork and case studies on
the actual activities of the participants, made widely accessible and expandable
via Internet.
are the prospects of fieldwork linguistics supporting an 'applied
linguistics' able to provide such a theory? In section 2, I have suggested
some ways in which fieldwork linguistics could be a highly valuable source. Yet
fieldwork linguists are hardly prone to go offering theory for its own sake in
the academic marketplace, least of all if doing so means ignoring the different
conditions between their own situation and that of teachers and learners of
language. Their sense of professionalism rests on the sound conviction that a
theory must be a guide for data-driven practice, and must therefore be
data-driven itself (I shall return to this in section 4). Even the most
monumental and ambitious theoretical framework in the fieldwork tradition, Ken
Pike's (1967) 'unified theory of the structure of human behaviour', clings
tenaciously to the data. It chiefly explores the methods of phonology and
morphology and only occasionally and cautiously reapplies them to the
description of other modes of 'behaviour' (overview in Beaugrande 1991).
the applied linguistics deriving from fieldwork linguistics has tended to favour
sparse and sceptical theorising with a mechanical and behavioural emphasis. The
'audio-lingual' method followed these tendencies to such an extent as to
seriously misrepresent the fieldwork tradition in at least three ways. First,
its taboo on giving learners any descriptions and explanations of the target
language put them in the bizarre position of fieldworkers with no training or
guidance. Second, it equated language learning with imprinting behavioural
patterns and sequences, thereby starving out the rich and explicit cultural
orientation of fieldwork. And third, the method failed to appreciate the nature
of the classroom itself as a culturally deprived behavioural ambience wherein
rich clues about what to say and what other people mean may not be available to
compensate for the sparseness of materials and activities like 'pattern
drills'. In all three ways, the 'audio-lingual' method was a practice
actually at variance with the body of theory from which it was official derived.
fieldwork methods from phonology and phonetics have contributed enormously to
the teaching and learning of pronunciation
— surely the most successful application of linguistics so far (see now Dalton
and Seidlhofer 1994). Morphology and syntax made a smaller impact, partly just
because fieldwork had concentrated on lesser-known languages that are seldom
taught as second languages in schools, and partly because many teachers kept on
relying upon the numerous traditional grammars devoted to the languages that are
frequently taught.
still remains to be done for the application of fieldwork linguistics is to
supply a detailed theoretical and empirical account of the ways in which
fieldwork both resembles and differs from ordinary language learning and from
organising language materials for the classroom. As suggested in section 2, the
issues are complex and have not received the consideration their potential
importance would merit, mainly due to the practical difficulty imposed by the
conditions for exploring them, e.g., the labour of doing large-scale case
studies of cultural immersion among different groups of teachers or learners.
Future work may profitably be invested here.
can homework linguistics do the job?
what are the prospects for the application of homework linguistics? Its
'mainstream' branch has professed a lively interest in 'language
acquisition', but has pointedly used this term in a rather different sense
from 'language learning'. A detailed analysis of their own theoretical
discourse has led me to conclude that this interest and this difference were
chiefly rhetorical moves in their campaign gain control over theoretical
linguistics while discrediting fieldwork. Chomsky's followers evidently
believe to have accomplished this high-minded goal. Newmeyer's (1980: 249f) Linguistic
Theory in America presented
Chomsky's as 'the world's principal linguistic theory', for which 'no
viable alternative exists'; 'the vast majority' of 'linguists' 'who
take theory seriously4 acknowledge (explicitly or implicitly) their
adoption of Chomsky's view of language'. However, this self-confidence of
the Chomskyan school has grown increasingly brittle, nurtured mainly by not
reading any linguistic research outside their own circle and by not
acknowledging the burgeoning body of criticism and opposition.
the late 1950s, Chomsky presented himself as a rescuer at the time when
fieldwork linguistics was in trouble because its stringently data-driven methods
were not transferring smoothly from phonology and morphology over to syntax (cf.
Beaugrande in 1996). 'Phonemes' and 'morphemes' are theoretical units
corresponding straightforwardly to practical units (sounds, word-parts, words)
that are 'in' the data and can be reliably isolated by segmenting recorded
utterances into the smallest pieces. 'Syntactic rules' are not 'in' the data and must be postulated or reconstructed.
Chomsky's 'transformational grammar' proposed a new and seemingly rigorous
and compact way to do so: design a system of rules that describe sentence
structures in terms of other sentence structures. Such a system would be an
economic way for fulfilling the ambition of linguists to provide a complete
description of a language. The net effects of this research, however, have in my
view amply shown that no such system
exists, due to one simple fact, already noted among the Prague School
inaugurated by Vilém Mathesius (overviews in Beaugrande 1992, in press): the
formation of sentences is not determined exclusively by linguistic rules, but
also by the cognitive and social constraints of contexts (Lakoff 1987; Harris
1990; and see now Halliday 1994a; Beaugrande 1996). But a whole generation of
'syntactic theories', including Chomsky's, continues to search in vain for
such a system, and hides the stagnation and inadequacy of their projects behind
an evasive rhetorical double-tracking we shall see later on, and behind a
congealing thicket of impenetrable terminologies and formalisms (cf. Escribano
1993). These moves cannily cash in on the general valuation of theory over
practice in modern society and especially in universities, as I mentioned at the
polemical talent for 'negative campaigning' was most conspicuous in his
much-deserved deconstruction (Chomsky 1959) of the behaviourist theory of
language spearheaded by B.F. Skinner (1957), which gave no sense of how language
is organised as language and not
simply as 'verbal behaviour'. But more crucial to his project of gaining
control over theoretical linguistics was his negative campaigning against
fieldwork linguists, whose methods and cultural immersion ensured that their
results would not be subject to the same strictures as Skinner's vacuous
extrapolations from animal conditioning experiments (cf. discussion in
Beaugrande 1984).
key argument in Chomsky's campaign was that fieldwork would never attain
'the deeper and more important notions of linguistic theory', due to its
'limitation-in-principle to classification and organisation of data'
(Chomsky 1965: 18f):
is no reason to expect that reliable operational criteria for the deeper and
more important notions of linguistic theory [...] will ever be forthcoming
[because] knowledge of the language, like most facts of interest and importance,
is neither presented for direct observation nor extractable from data by
inductive procedures of any known sort.
campaign was capped by the straightfaced declaration that the 'inadequacy'
of the 'grammars for natural languages' based on fieldwork had 'been
established beyond any reasonable doubt' (1965: 67). Moreover, Chomsky (1957:
52f) judged it 'unreasonable to demand of linguistic theory' that it
stipulate a 'discovery procedure' 'for actually constructing the grammar,
given a corpus of utterances' — just what his own theory obviously
couldn't do. 'How one might have arrived at the grammar' would not be
'relevant to the programme of research'; 'one may arrive at a grammar by
intuition, guess-work, all sorts of partial methodological hints, reliance on
past experience, etc.' (1957: 57) — the most convenient 'homework'
approach imaginable. He promised that 'once we have disclaimed any intention
of finding a practical discovery procedure', 'certain problems that have
been the subject of intense methodological controversy simply do not arise'
(1957: 56). In the event, however, methodological controversies got more violent
because linguists no longer needed to pass through a phase of heavily
data-driven and practice-driven discovery before building a theory; so Chomsky
was soon embroiled in disputes over 'notions of linguistic theory' with
other linguists, some of whom had been his own pupils and had picked up their
polemical talents from watching him.
the fieldwork linguists were stunned by such accusations and caught wholly
unprepared. They had never questioned for a moment that linguistic theory must supply discovery procedures, and had devoted their lives to
developing and improving them. In their eyes, the 'adequacy' of a
'grammar' or any other description depended
directly on 'how one arrived at it' — not just from 'intuition,
guess-work', and 'hints', but from painstaking analysis of a 'corpus'
of recorded authentic data. Any fieldworker would find it patently absurd to
declare that we can 'establish the inadequacy' of not just one
'grammar' but of a whole class of
'grammars' at one stroke, and that this class is precisely the
'grammars' extracted through discovery procedures!
context of this campaign is vital for understanding Chomsky's professed
interest in 'language acquisition'. If you roundly reject fieldwork as base
for theory, and if fieldwork resembles ordinary language learning in at least
some ways, then you naturally want to invent a new theory of language learning
that looks as little as possible like fieldwork and as much as possible like
homework — and that is precisely what Chomskyan linguistics did. Cleared of
its technical verbiage, their 'theory' says that the acquisition of language
is not primarily data-driven or practice-driven. Instead, the child is cast as a
miniature homework linguist and starts off with a 'universal theory of
language' and specifies the theory for the native language by hypothesising
from some abstract aspects of what Chomsky calls 'primary data' — what the
child hears people actually say. To clinch this idea, Chomsky (1965: 201)
pointedly devalued 'primary data' for being, 'from the point of view of
the theory he [the child] constructs, deficient in various respects'; 'much
of the actual speech consists of fragments and deviant expressions'. Such data
would therefore be inadequate for a child learning the language just a much as
for a fieldworker constructing a theory of language. Only if the child had a
prior theory of language could acquisition proceed; and since no theory could be
extracted from data before acquisition starts, the theory would have to be
innate. Each rhetorical step in this line of reasoning compelled a further step,
so that the initial resolve to undercut fieldwork linguists launched a circular
chain of further claims, each of which was to be made plausible by the others
and not by methodical 'discovery procedures'. The gap between what real
native speakers say or what real children learning the language do versus what
the theory said or implied about them was continually blurred by rhetorical
double-tracking to combine each theoretical construct with a conveniently
commonsense (mis)interpretation. The very term 'generate', technically
meaning 'assign a structural description to' a sentence that has already
been produced (usually invented by the linguist), invites us to think of the
human acts or processes of 'producing' the sentence; Chomsky warned us not
to, but he himself pictured the 'grammar' 'producing language' or
'strings' or 'sentences', referred to 'the process of generating
sentences', and equated 'generating' with 'creating' (1957: 48, 11f,
13, 18, 30f, 38, 45f, 103, 35; 1965: 135f).
special importance for the discussion here is the double-tracking by means of
'systematic ambiguities' that seem innocuous but in fact directly
incorporated the reality and validity of 'the linguist's account' into the
discourse of theoretical linguistics:
the term 'grammar' with a systematic ambiguity to refer, first, to the
native speaker's internally represented 'theory of his language' and,
second, to the linguist's account of this, we can say that the child has
developed and internally represented a
generative grammar in the sense described. […] we are again using the term
'theory' — in this case 'theory of language' rather than 'theory of
a particular language' — with a systematic ambiguity to refer both to the
child's innate predisposition to learn a language of a certain type and to the
linguist's account of this. (Chomsky 1965: 25)
just to use the terms 'grammar' and 'theory of language' in
his 'sense' would seem to automatically
equate his 'account' with what it proposed to account for, and to assert
that 'the native speaker' does indeed hold an 'internally represented
theory of his language', and that 'the child' does indeed have an
'innate predisposition to learn a language of a certain type' — assertions
craftily downplayed by unobtrusive possessive constructions ('native
speaker's theory', 'child's predisposition'), instead of more
obtrusive subject-verb constructions ('native speaker holds
a theory', 'child has a
predisposition'). Such discourse evades the scientific responsibility to
provide empirical evidence to prove both that the 'linguist's account' is
valid, and that 'internally represented theory of language' and the
'innate predisposition' are there in the first place to require an
comparable importance for our discussion is the double-tracking about
'underlying competence as a system of generative processes' (1965: 4):
interesting generative grammar will be dealing, for the most part, with mental
processes that are far beyond the level of actual or even potential
consciousness. Furthermore, it is quite apparent that a speaker's reports and
viewpoints about his behaviour and competence may be in error. Thus a generative
grammar attempts to specify what a speaker actually knows, not what he may
report about his knowledge. (1965: 8)
speaker is not 'aware' or 'conscious' and is thus prone to make
'statements' and 'reports' of doubtful 'interest' and 'accuracy'
or downright 'errors'. In contrast, linguists ascend the status of
exceptional human beings who are able to become 'aware' and 'conscious'
of 'mental processes' after all, and who can ignore at will what speakers
'report' (cf. Beaugrande and Seidlhofer, in review). Technically, this
rhetorical evasion was overkill, since we have already been informed that
'linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-hearer in a
completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly'
(1965: 3) — and just try finding such a person to make 'reports'!
is in this rhetorical context that we can appreciate why Chomsky reanimated and
reinforced the view, well-established in linguistics at least since Saussure
(1916), that linguistics should describe language
by itself. Fieldwork methods had ensured that the language was always
observed in cognitive and social contexts, whence the notion of language as part
of the 'unified' system of 'human behaviour' envisioned by Pike and
cited in section 3. Because Chomsky's own theory of language gave no clue of
how language relates to such contexts, he was impelled to claim, in absolute
terms, that language is a separate domain or faculty of human beings. The
inevitable next step was to propose a theory of language acquisition also
running only on language — in fact, on only those aspects of language
addressed by his own 'theory'. He thus had to invent his famous 'language
acquisition device' (hereafter LAD), as a 'hypothetical' but 'useful
and suggestive framework' for 'posing and considering' 'certain problems
of linguistic theory': 'the theorist has the problem of determining the
intrinsic properties of a device capable of mediating' between 'the primary
data' as 'input' and the 'grammar' as 'output' (Chomsky 1965: 47).
For rhetorical expedience, its job
was defined precisely as doing what Chomskyan homework linguistics did:
extracting formal rules out of sets of sentences while abstracting away from the
'deficiency' of 'primary data' (quoted above). He gave no clear notion
himself of how it did the job; after all, his campaign against fieldwork
linguistics had led him to dismiss the question of how a linguist 'might have
arrived at the grammar', as we saw. By the same token, he gave no clear notion
of how a child could learn a language as a set of formal rules, witness his
audaciously evasive 'instantaneous model' wherein 'successful language
acquisition' happens in a single 'moment' (1965: 36). Otherwise, he would
have had to specify how the LAD proceeds by building up rule after rule. Doing
so would have unsettled his vision of language being a formal system of rules
that operate on other rules; such a system can only operate in its complete
state, and is not designed to 'add' rules but only to 'generate
sentences'. The alternative would be to use contexts to compensate for missing
rules, just as fieldworkers do; and Chomsky's campaign precluded this
prospect. He dourly conceded that 'it would not be at all surprising' if
'normal language learning requires use of language in real-life situations',
but he doubted, a bit absurdly, that 'information regarding situational
context' 'plays any role in how language is acquired, once the mechanism is
put to work and the task of language learning is undertaken by the child'
(1965: 33).5 For good measure, the 'acquiring' of 'grammar'
despite 'the degenerate quality and narrowly limited extent of the available
data' was asserted to owe the 'striking uniformity' Chomsky believed it
has to being 'independent of intelligence, motivation, and emotional state'
(1965: 58).
have recalled these well-known and often-cited lines of argument in order to
highlight the rhetorical double-tracking whereby Chomsky came to propagate a
'theory of language acquisition' which was expressly not a practice-driven
'theory of language learning'. His campaign depended critically on the bald
assertion that data-driven 'practical discovery procedures' are forever cut
off from the 'deeper and more important notions of linguistic theory', which
he simultaneously claimed the right to identify and define; and he cynically,
and rightly, expected ardent support from upcoming homework linguists had no
taste for the arduous labours of fieldwork and who were delighted to find
'intuition' and 'guess-work' so nicely legitimised. This assertion and
this claim authorised his own school to invent 'notions of linguistic
theory' in advance of data, along with a forbiddingly complicated apparatus
for relating the theory to data in technical and evasive ways that are
deliberately hard to pin down and challenge.
authorisation was naturally sought by means of a theory of 'language
acquisition' being a similar mode of theorising done by the child in advance
of data and with a complicated apparatus furnished by genetics — the
'LAD'. Ironically, whole branches of research 'psycholinguistics' and
'second language acquisition' have sprouted up, taking it as given that the
LAD exists and only exploring miscellaneous claims about how it works or in
which order.
As time passed, all these confident, untested, and largely
circular claims were entrenched by constant repetition and citation and were
passed on to new waves of linguists and language specialists who were not
properly aware of the original rhetorical context during an aggressive academic
campaign. The claims provided the background and terminology in which further
discussions were routinely carried on, like a dominant but invisible ideology
that passes for reality and the natural order (cf. Beaugrande 1996). The
participants in the discussions might then be quite unaware of how many untested
theoretical claims they were taking as given when the real issue should be to
subject the claims to empirical justification or practical evidence. Here,
theoretical linguistics has already begun to made us 'the prisoner of our own
categorisations', as Brumfit (1980: 160) commented on applied linguistics.
the original rhetorical context for Chomsky's 'theory' is rarely
appreciated for what it was: a campaign for building a theory while discrediting
a whole class of competing theories. Chomsky was strangely eager to throw out
the baby with the bathwater and the bathtub as well, because he had a new
bathtub to sell, which later became a whole series with a luxurious range of
fixtures and attachments; and he had a new baby to put in too, one equipped with
the LAD at no extra cost.
It seemed like a good-news, bad-news situation. The bad news
was that the 'important notions of linguistic theory' would have to be
reformulated essentially from the ground up, irrespective of the impact on the
careers and publishing opportunities of linguists using descriptive fieldwork
approaches, who were firmly given to understand that their professional work in
the 'coverage of a large mass of data' was not 'an achievement of any
particular theoretical interest or importance' (Chomsky 1965: 26). Moreover,
language learning would have to be reconceptualised as a heavily theoretical
operation called 'language acquisition' and related in abstract, complicated
ways to ordinary encounters with language data. The good news was that you could
jump right into 'linguistic theory' without the intense labours of being
trained and tested in fieldwork and of applying scrupulous analytic methods to
large corpuses of authentic data; you could just invent a few sentences in your
own native language and set to work inventing formal rules to 'assign them
structural descriptions'. Moreover, you could jump right into 'language
acquisition theory' without the labour of teaching anybody a language or doing
large-scale longitudinal studies of language learners. And best of all, your
theory would be nearly immune to empirical or practical refutation because it
would be encircled by protective theoretical constructions, abstractions, and
idealisations founded upon double-tracking dichotomies ('competence' vs.
'performance', 'generate' vs. 'produce', 'learning' vs.
'acquisition', 'deep structure' vs. 'surface structure' etc., etc.),
which all imply that, in Widdowson's (1980: 166) words, 'language, like God
moves in a mysterious way and outside the range of the common man's
awareness'. Unfavourable evidence in 'primary data' could easily be
deflected as mere 'performance' or 'surface structure', for which the
theory could not be held accountable. We might well ask here whether Chomsky's
proposals even qualify as a theory,
given these largely untestable factors.
number of prominent linguists, including Wallace Chafe, Michael Halliday, John
Sinclair, František Daneš, and Ruth Wodak, hold (as I do myself) that this
'good news' has in the long run turned out to be very bad
news for the field as a whole. The homework linguistics of Chomsky's school
has fostered an unfortunate rhetorical ambience of top-heavy, divisive
theorising and gratuitous confrontations, turning every theoretical issue of
question into an occasion for vigorous sparring matches. It has become
unreasonably hard to take a stand on any important issue without being promptly
attacked or co-opted (or both) for implying a position on endlessly disputatious
topics like 'universal grammar' or 'deep structure'.
such an ambience, a theory is prone to be designed chiefly as a weapon,
not to describe or explain language as we find it in the world of real people,
but to make language out to be exactly the opposite of whatever your opponent
says, or (what is more to the point) whatever you allege your opponent is
saying. Fieldwork linguistics never claimed
to be a 'theory of language acquisition', but rather a theoretical guide for
discovery and description; and as such it remains unexcelled. It had no great
affinities for 'notions of linguistic theory' as an end in themselves,
precisely because it had to be established in the sparse and sceptical
environment of 'unified science' centring on the 'hard sciences', where
it was academically prudent as well as productive to stick very close to
observed data. Hardly had linguistics become fully established and begun to
offer well-paying jobs when a crew of self-proclaimed 'revolutionary'
homeworkers appeared with the plan to ignore the significant success of
fieldwork linguistics in describing hundreds of previously undescribed
languages, many of them threatened with extinction, and to denounce fieldwork
for being incapable of attaining a set of 'deeper and more important notions
of linguistic theory' whose necessity had not been realised before and has, I
submit, never been convincingly shown since then, but merely imposed by
self-confident hand-waving rhetoric of the type we have seen here.
this campaign on behalf of chimerical and divisive 'deeper notions' has
distracted many linguists, both theoretical and applied, away from the really
urgent issues, such as the massive communication problems in our increasingly
global, multicultural, and multilingual societies (cf. Halliday 1994b; Pennycook
1994; Beaugrande 1996). We should devote our efforts to a generation of
practice-driven theories that are 'deep' and 'important' not just
because they serve the rhetoric and academic interests of one cadre of
theoretical linguists over the others, but because they account for the rich
diversity of languages and of their connections with society and cultures,
including the processes of learning to speak and learning to speak better. Some of the learning is biologically prepared and genetically
transmitted as innate capacities; some of it is derived from experience in
real-life situations; and some of it is explicitly and consciously learned from
parents, siblings, friends, teachers, and so on. So humans come by their
'language competence' partly by subconscious, automatic processes, partly by
conscious learning, and partly by making canny guesses about what words or
people mean in the contexts where you hear or read them.
can now return to the principle proposed at the outset: how far a theory is
applicable to practice is a fairly good measure of how far the theory is valid.
By this standard, far from being an explanation or account of language and
language acquisition, Chomskyan theory is a static enclosure of circular
technical constructs created chiefly to subserve academic politics. If we ask,
'can this homework linguistics do the job for language teaching?', the
answer is likely to be: according to this linguistics, there is
no job, because acquisition is the competent hands (or cogs) of the
'language acquisition device' that always works and in the same way for
everybody, serenely undaunted by the woeful 'deficiencies', 'fragments,
and deviant expressions' in 'actual speech'. Perhaps our job would be to
make language learners conscious of these deficiencies' in hopes of getting
them to match up better their 'performance' with their 'competence', and
their 'surface structure' with their ' deep structure' — which would
be, under more technical terms, essentially what authoritarian traditional
grammar proposed to do. But how we would go about it is totally unclear insofar
as we can't get a good look at 'competence', and ' deep structure',
because they have always been abstract idealisations belonging to the 'ideal
speaker-hearer in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its
language perfectly' — and whom we'll never get to see or hear, not even in
the most elite departments of linguistics and philosophy.
a case study: the discourse of stephen krashen
Interestingly, the 'theory' of Stephen Krashen proposed to
be an application of this homework linguistics after all. He claims his
'theory' 'support Chomsky's position, and extends it to second-language
acquisition' (1985: 3).6 Finding such an enterprise paradoxical and
anticipating some interesting rhetoric, I have carried out a discourse analysis
of his the 1985 volume The Input
Hypothesis: Issues and Implications. He certainly does follow Chomsky by
mounting a campaign to gain control by means of complicated theoretical
arguments, albeit this time over applied linguistics. His discourse is a bit
less self-confident than that of Chomsky's school (e.g. Newmeyer's cited in
section 4) about whether he has achieved this. To be sure, he equates 'current
second-language acquisition theory' with his own work (e.g. 1985: 100). But
the extreme difficulties of 'extending Chomsky's position' this way have
rendered him a bit more cautious than Chomsky's school and have impelled him
to read linguistic research outside his own circle in his continuing campaign to
show that it either supports his
theory or at least doesn't contradict
it — which he likes to suggest is much the same thing.
Chomsky, Krashen has launched his campaign by telling people — practitioners
and teachers this time rather than fieldworkers — that what they have been
doing all along is at odds with 'linguistic theory', i.e. with Chomsky's.
Doing so capitalises on Chomsky's own prestige on the canny (and justified)
assumption that many practitioners have no clear idea of what Chomsky's theory
really says (after all, they were never supposed to). The ones who do, like
myself, won't be impressed of course, but the number of those who don't, or
who don't feel competent to challenge Chomsky, might suffice to muster a
substantial following, as Krashen apparently has.
as Chomsky presented himself as a rescuer when fieldwork linguistics was in
trouble with syntax, Krashen has exploited the insecurities and uneasiness of
language practitioners and teachers who had long been discontented with the
otherwise sparse and sceptical applied linguistics and were thus eager for
change. They were on the rebound, as it were, from various theories and methods
whose results had proven disappointing. Krashen easily profited from on
Chomsky's well-orchestrated rebuke of Skinner's behaviourism, and on the
growing perception that its widely accepted 'audio-lingual' method had not
fulfilled its promises. The newer theories that had been put forth in the
interim had not managed to achieve an equally wide acceptance or to provide a
new consensual framework: the 'cognitive code-learning theory' because the
notion of 'language as code' is not very helpful or well-defined; and the
'communicative approach' because so much of both theoretical and applied
linguistics had not yet dealt with communication in realistic and productive
ways (cf. Beaugrande, in review).
fervently adopted Chomsky's (1965: 47) 'language acquisition device',
which, as I noted, had originally been proposed
as a 'hypothetical framework' during Chomsky's plan to invent a
theory of language learning that looks like homework linguistics. The frank
resemblance between what the child was claimed to do and what the homework
linguist actually does do was handled not as a self-serving cagey move to
replace the child with an idealisation and replace the hard labour of studying
real children with glib speculation based on what linguists do, but as a serious
argument for the validity of Chomsky's theory. Besides, hearing that children
will automatically and inevitably learn their language, thanks to the stalwart
LAD, has immense appeal for pedagogues and teachers, even when, for reasons I
hope to have made clear, they are not told how the device does the job.
strategic 'hypothetical device' has gradually moved out of its original
rhetorical context of theoretical argument and switched from a 'hypothetical
framework' to a separate 'mental organ'.
This odd term would seem to designate a piece of the human anatomy —
Krashen (1982: 96) at one point portrayed the LAD as 'a part of the brain'
— but one that cannot even be detected, let alone observed. It's not a
physical organ, yet is claimed to resemble one by only 'functioning
automatically' and 'subconsciously' (Krashen 1985: 4, 100, citing Chomsky
1975). So learners could never even become aware of this 'organ', let alone
control it, any more than 'certain cells in the embryo choose' 'to become
an arm' (Chomsky 1975: 71).
Equally expedient was the implication of 'uniformity in the language
faculty', such that 'the language acquisition device operates in
fundamentally the same way in everyone' (3). This proviso authorises you to
disregard variations in personality, social status and so on, about which
Chomsky's 'theory' had nothing to say anyway.
LAD became an anchor-point for Krashen's own static enclosure of technical
constructs, these too, like Chomsky's, evasively disconnected from real data.
These constructs too prop each other up in circular ways, e.g.: language must be
acquired by the LAD; the LAD must exist because language gets acquired. Just in
one book, it's easy to spot Krashen's blunt rhetorical strategy of promoting
his theses — he calls them 'hypotheses', though they aren't tested but
merely imposed by his own rhetoric, again like Chomsky — simply by repeating
them like mantras, especially when he wants to reject an alternative account. As
for Chomsky's proposals, we might well ask here whether
Krashen's even qualify as
a theory, given the obstacles to
testing it; surely brute repetition cannot replace empirical validation.
sum, Krashen has transposed, with minor modifications, Chomsky's theory of
first language acquisition over into a theory of second language acquisition
composed largely of hypothetical processes and undetectable operations and
programmatically disconnected from the ordinary observable realities of
deliberate language learning. The most breathtaking property of this brave new
world (that has strange people in it) is its resolute disconnection from the
ordinary world of teachers and learners. To 'support Chomsky's position'
and his own, Krashen is prepared to declare
acquisition completely independent of learning. So Krashen presents a theory
which, at one and the same time, purports to explain the result of practices,
i.e., the fact that humans do various activities and at some point have learned
a language, while expressly denying that the usual practices can have led to
that result. Such a theory, for which I know of no parallel in any science,
requires a divisive, confrontational rhetoric of affirmation (my way is how
acquisition does and must proceed) plus exclusion (their way is how acquisition
does not and cannot proceed).
to language pedagogy, the 'theory' views acquisition as an 'automatic'
and 'subconscious' outcome serenely indifferent to what teachers and
learners are 'consciously' doing. Like Chomsky, Krashen equates the
acquisition of language with the acquisition of grammar rules, and competence
with the person's set of acquired rules. He also invokes a 'natural order'
prescribed by Mother Nature herself and presumably programmed into the 'mental
organ' of the LAD, where we'll never get a good look at it. 'We progress
along the natural order' by 'understanding input that contains structures at
our next "stage" — structures that are a bit beyond our current
level of competence' (2). Since the child can't know what rules are yet to
be acquired, this 'order' must somehow be managed by the LAD; yet if so, it
would apparently have to the same order for all languages, because the LAD can
acquire any one of them.7 That implication seem highly suspicious,
the more so when Krashen defines the 'natural order' in terms of
'structures' and avows that 'natural orders have been found' for
'several languages' that were 'investigated' (2, 20). Actually, these
findings bear only on the 'acquisition' of certain morphemes (cf. Gregg
1984; White 1987), and not on the rest of the grammar, and even less on lexicon
or vocabulary.
all events, a damaging contradiction impends: competence is the human ability to
understand language, yet humans somehow proceed by understanding things beyond
their competence — unless 'competence' is define more evasively not as the
ability to understand but as an
entity merely 'underlying' that ability.8 But, as with Chomsky,
we may detect some rhetorical double-tracking here to combine a theoretical
construct with a conveniently commonsense (mis)interpretation, namely the
ordinary sense in which a real person who has learned a second language would be
judged 'competent' to actively speak it and not just, say, to passively get
the gist of other people's speech.
problem arises: insofar as the theoretical construct of 'competence', being
a system of formal rules, is deterministic, it could not allow for (or
'underlie') the understanding of structures for which no rules have been
'acquired', except by analogy to those it has.9 Krashen's
solution is to modify Chomsky's denial, cited in section 4, that 'use of
language in real-life situations' 'plays any role in how language is
acquired': 'we are able to understand language containing unacquired grammar
with the help of context, which includes extra-linguistic information, our
knowledge of the world, and previously acquired linguistic competence' (2).
Krashen invokes 'evidence' that the 'natural order' is 'independent of
the order in which rules are taught in language classes' (1). So 'the
language teacher need not attempt deliberately to teach the next structure along
the natural order — it will be provided in just the right quantities and
automatically reviewed if the student receives a sufficient amount of
comprehensible input' (2). I don't see how one structure could be
'provided in quantities'; perhaps Krashen means it will be exemplified by
quantities of input. But if so, the quantities could hardly be called 'just
right', seeing that he nowhere gives us measures of quantity and generally
just implies the more the better.
all events, Krashen roundly avows, in magisterial tones reminiscent of
Chomsky's rhetoric about the 'deeper and more important notions of
linguistic theory', that the role of 'comprehensible input' is 'the
fundamental principle in second-language acquisition' and therefore 'the
most important part of the theory of second-language acquisition' (vii, 3).
His 'Input Hypothesis' states that humans acquire language in only one'
'amazingly simple way' — 'by understanding messages', or 'by
receiving comprehensible input' (vii, 2). He sells this idea with a grandly
confident promise: 'to the extent' his 'Input Hypothesis' 'is applied,
to that extent will our language programmes be more productive and efficient for
our students and easier and more pleasant for teachers' (viii). Despite
'objections' 'made on practical grounds', 'the theory promises much
more successful language acquisition in the classroom, both in fluency and
accuracy, and is far easier to apply than any of the alternatives' (54).
in these 'amazingly simple' terms, what Krashen offers is not a
'hypothesis' at all but an incontestable truism (cf. Gregg 1984). Of
course people must have input in order to learn; otherwise they would be cut
off from the outside world. And of course
the input must be comprehensible; what is incomprehensible would not be
'input' at all except in the technical or mechanical sense, in
communications engineering, that a system can receive an input of mere
then can Krashen claim that 'comprehensible input'
is 'the one essential ingredient' that 'has escaped us all these
years' (ii)? The answer would seem to be that 'comprehensible input' has a
more technical and evasive meaning: not so much the messages
you do understand in practice, as the structures
you can understand in theory by virtue
of your competence, i.e., your set of 'acquired rules'. This account
brings back the same problem of a deterministic 'competence' that would rule
out learning in principle if you could only comprehend what is already
comprehensible. So, as we saw, Krashen primly makes allowance for a narrow
margin where 'extra-linguistic information' from 'context' and
'knowledge of the world' enables people to 'understand language containing
unacquired grammar'. But he unwisely retains the stringent restriction that
this margin can absorb only a 'rule' that is 'i + 1', i.e., 'next in
line within 'the natural order' (39). Unwise because he might be asked to
say just what the natural order is and not just that 'natural orders have been
found' and that the 'natural order is independent of teaching order'.
Krashen is so intent on establishing his 'theory' over all others that he
feels impelled fend off any prospect of 'beating the natural order' whereby
'any rule can be acquired at any time' (41). He does so by boldly denying
that 'learning can become acquisition', lest there be 'two paths to
acquisition, one way via comprehensible input, and another via conscious
rules'. Here, Krashen's self-centred exclusion of rival theories animates
his rhetoric to create an unbridgeable split between conscious learning versus
unconscious acquisition. In a stern warning, any 'approach assuming the
correctness of the "learning becomes acquisition" view' is accused of
'creating an impossible situation for teacher and student; not only do we have
to teach and learn all the rules of grammar, we must also teach and learn the
subtle and numerous rules that relate language functions and grammatical
rules' (55). 'If sentence-level grammar is too difficult and complex to
teach and learn, which it is, adding sociolinguistic rules to the students'
burden can only make the situation worse. In reality, many of these rules are
acquired, both in the language classroom and in the real world. Our
responsibility in language teaching is only to put the student in such a
position that he can continue to acquire such rules outside the language
class' (55f).
rhetorical work achieved by these discourse moves is further animated by the
prospect that Chomsky's own theory projects a view of 'sentence-level
grammar' that really is far too 'difficult and complex to teach and learn' — a
problem that probably helped compel him to propose the 'language acquisition
device' in the first place, as I suggested in section 4. Also, Chomsky's
theory is notoriously shy on 'rules that relate to language functions', and
even more on 'sociolinguistic rules'. So the major gaps in Chomsky's
theory become for Krashen the issues that should not or cannot be taught, and
teachers are warned to fear and shun them or suffer 'impossible'
consequences. The warning both plays on teachers' present insecurities and
purports to explain why the teaching of rules hasn't done so well in the past.
I have already stated what I submit is the real reason: much
of language use is simply not governed by linguistic rules at all, but by
strategies for fitting utterances to contexts
and to cognitive and social constraints.
'providing more contextualised practice of grammatical rules' and
'teaching sociolinguistic rules' are hallmarks of the 'communicative
approach', Krashen's main strongest rival upon which he visits the
unintentionally comic dismissal that it doesn't 'fit the theory' (55),
whereas his theory was of course designed such that it wouldn't fit the
'communicative approach'. In real practice, though, good teachers frequently
do provide functional and sociolinguistic information, though they may well not
call it by those terms, for example, whenever they indicate that a certain
expression is 'colloquial', 'slang', 'respectful',
'old-fashioned', and so on. Since neither Chomsky's nor his own theory
takes account of all that, Krashen advises teachers to leave it all to 'the
real world' and to teach only what is 'necessary to avoid truly insulting
and impolite behaviour' (56), Evidently, the lesser perils of seeming nosy,
quaint, foolish, snobbish, and so on, would be matters for students to learn the
hard way out on their own.
another self-centred rhetorical exclusion is performed against the 'output
hypothesis' he ascribes to 'communicative theories of acquisition' (35,
55), his leading rival. There, 'competence develops via output practice in
communicative situations. Specifically, the performer acquires rules by
"trying them out" in communicative situations: when he experiences
communicative success, his hypothesis about the rule is confirmed; if this
happens often enough, the rule is acquired'. The 'output hypothesis'
is made into an obvious straw man: a flat denial that input alone can ever
do the job and that 'input-type teaching methods' can have any
'success' (36). This straw man 'predicts that language acquisition is impossible
via listening alone, that radio and television are always
useless, that acquisition via subject-matter teaching will occur only when the student talks, and that reading is never
helpful' (35f, i.a. [= italics added]).
does hedge, but only a little: a 'denial of the Output Hypothesis is not a
denial that language acquisition involves hypothesis-testing. This
hypothesis-testing, however, according to the Input Hypothesis, takes place on a
subconscious level. In addition, it does not require production, nor does it
involve communicative success' (36). Moreover, he does not deny that 'the
performer's own output can serve as comprehensible input to his own language
acquisition device. Even if rules are consciously learned by the performer, if
he uses them correctly, he conceivably understands the message he conveys [I
can't 'conceive' how the 'performer' could be said not
to 'understand the message'!] and thus provides himself with comprehensible
input containing a structure he had not yet acquired.' But here too, 'the
performer's own output will "count" as input for language acquisition only
if the structures involved happen to be at the acquirer's current i + l'
(cf. § 56). These predictable hedges enable Krashen to steer clear of a genuine
compromise by making modest expropriations from output strictly on his own
terms: by emphasising the 'subconscious' activities over 'production' and 'communicative success', and by
circuitously interpreting output as
input. Compare also his stark opposition: 'the crucial element that peer
interaction provides' 'is not output practice but low-filter comprehensible
input' (66); we shall examine his 'filters' in a moment.
rhetorical exclusion wins out once again, albeit less openly, when theory and
practice get placed in opposition. 'Much of the difficulty we experience in
language education comes from our efforts' to 'develop speaking skills via
speaking practice', and to
'develop grammatical accuracy via grammar drill and error correction'; this
tendency is encouraged when we use tests that require and focus on output and
grammatical accuracy' (92). Why attention to 'output' must produce a
'focus on grammatical accuracy' is not explained; learners can surely focus
just as well on its 'communicative success', another factor Krashen has
uncompromisingly rejected, as we saw (cf. Widdowson 1990: 21). In an
afterthought unobtrusively placed in a fine-print footnote at the end of the
book, he concedes he 'does not mean that output practice should be avoided;
some practice in producing language may help the student gain confidence, and in
the case of writing may help the student develop an efficient composing
process' (93). But his 'theory predicts that a programme emphasising only
output will not be effective, even if the students' goals are only writing or
speaking, without comprehension' (91). Of course, only a tiny handful of
radically behaviourist programmes ever proposed to disconnect output from
comprehension in order to emphasise pure 'conditioning'; once more, Krashen
unfairly overstates rival positions to make them obviously untenable.
together, all these rhetorical exclusions make ordinary language learning seem
both horribly difficult and rather irrelevant to what Krashen calls 'language
acquisition'. Apparently, we should just regale our 'acquirers, no longer
calling them "learners"' and now viewing them as 'humanoid receptacles
in a maximum state of receptivity' (Widdowson 1990: 21), with torrents of
'comprehensible input' and let the LAD do its job. We might even conclude
that 'materials, lesson plans, etc. are not necessary'; and Krashen calmly
tells us that 'theoretically, this is so' (55) — a stupefying move if you
don't know that he's building up to a sales pitch for his own favoured
method. No one seems to notice here, and Krashen would be crazy to say so, that,
by the same logic, his 'theory' also 'predicts' that we could fire
teachers and replace them with automatic input-providing devices like radios
and televisions, or with naive native speakers brought in off the streets of
foreign cities, who would work for low wages and would require no expensive
training in pedagogical methods he has declared to be all wrong anyway.
could Krashen's 'theory' account for the fact that many would-be acquirers
don't succeed so 'automatically', even when input is
comprehensible? He cannot say that the LAD doesn't
work so well for some people; he won't even allow that it works in different
ways, as we saw. After all, his brash good news that it uniformly and
automatically must work is one of the theory's big selling points, because it
predicts that we could totally eliminate failure. So he has to introduce some
additional mechanisms that intervene
between the LAD plus competence versus the outside world where real learners do
real things. His proposals have varied in the past; in our discourse sample, he
has three mechanisms, one on the input side and two on the output side. The
imbalance of one against two is an interesting feature, as we shall see.
the input side, Krashen postulates a filter
that can prevent some comprehensible input from getting in to the LAD;
incomprehensible input needs no filter because it couldn't get in anyway.
(This design does not allow the possibility that input might be noticed but not
comprehended until a later time and then acquired, as I have observed in my own
learning of languages, especially using written materials.) He builds in, on the
ground floor of his theory, 'the Affective Filter Hypothesis' stating that
'comprehensible input is necessary
for acquisition, but it is not sufficient;
the acquirer needs to be "open" to the input' (3, i.a.) The 'affective
filter' is a mental block that prevents acquirers from fully utilising
comprehensible input for language acquisition. 'When it is "up", the
acquirer may understand what he hears and reads, but the input will not reach
the LAD. This occurs when the acquirer is unmotivated, lacking in
self-confidence, or anxious, when he is "on the defensive", when he
considers the language class to be a place where his weaknesses will be
revealed. The filter is down when the acquirer is not concerned with the
possibility of failure in language acquisition and when he considers himself to
be a potential member of the group'.
have postponed mentioning this main 'hypothesis' until a point where we can
better see Krashen rhetorical motives for needing it. He cannot simply deny, in
the face of practice, that language learners can and do attain widely varying
degrees of success and failure; yet Chomsky's idealised theory making uniform
'competence' be the 'automatic output' of the 'LAD' predicts they
should all do much the same, and this 'uniformity' is taken over by Krashen
too, as I noted. Nor can Krashen allow for such prime factors as varying degrees
of conscious attention or varying amounts of deliberate practice in giving
output, because his self-centred rhetorical exclusions deny the relevance
of all these factors in principle, as we have seen.
he constructs hypotheses that contribute blocking factors that are not defined
in terms of language and especially not in terms of Chomsky's theory — they
are plainly 'outside the language organ'. They are performance factors,
although they are not actually among the ones cited in Chomsky's (1965: 3) Aspects
model, namely: 'memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and
interest, and errors (random or characteristic)'. For Chomsky (1965: 4), such
factors affect output in 'natural
speech', producing 'false starts, deviations from rules, changes of plan in
mid-course, and so on'. But he did not, indeed dared not, imply that such
factors materially affect input while
'the child learning the language' is 'determining from the data of
performance the underlying system of rules' (1965: 4). Instead (as quoted in
section 4), he stressed the robustness of the process whereby 'children
acquire first or second languages quite successfully', even when 'actual
speech consists of fragments and deviant expressions'. Moreover (again as
quoted above), Chomsky salvaged the 'striking uniformity of the resulting
grammar' by declaring them 'independent of intelligence, motivation, and
emotional state' (1965: 58) — the latter two being factors Krashen now
invokes as major determiners of acquisition. In effect, Chomsky's theory had
saddled Krashen's with a LAD that is just too robust to be seriously marketed
among experienced practitioners. Since the robustness is a big selling point
that cannot be sacrificed, Krashen can only adduce a set of exclusionary
performance-based constraints and 'filters' to exonerate the LAD for not
doing in practice what the theory says it should.
research on cognition has firmly established that both learning and performance
are indeed significantly supported by motivation, self-confidence, and a sense
of belonging to a group, and impeded by anxiety and defensiveness, feelings of
weakness, and expectations of failure (cf. surveys and references in Beaugrande
1980, 1984, 1996). But the research takes all these factors to apply to human
capacities at large, and does not give them the special job of filtering the
'input' to an independent 'device' or 'language organ' that would
otherwise 'automatically' do 'perfect' work. The consensus is rather
that processing resources are always limited; models which, like Chomsky's,
airily set aside factors like 'memory limitations, distractions, shifts of
attention', are unrealistic and unproductive, and — a main point in my
argument here — untestable.
either doesn't see the danger or hopes we won't, of admitting on principle
that performance can crucially determine the development and quality of
competence, seeing how critically his 'theory' hinges on the thesis that the
usual performance tactics in language classrooms definitely cannot
do so — only comprehensible input can, and it is determined by competence. If
performance can, then 'communicative success' and 'output practice in
communicative situations' can help 'competence develop' after all — if
not directly, then indirectly by building self-confidence, lowering expectations
of failure, and so forth. Such activities would exert not a filter effect, but a booster
effect on both competence and performance.
Krashen can't allow an input booster that could justify classroom methods he
has disdained. So, opposite to just one
filter on the input side, he installs two
mechanisms on the output side: a
filter and a booster. With a mild show of 'reluctance' (44), he adds an
'output filter hypothesis' (64) but doesn't capitalise it or enshrine it
among the official 'five hypotheses' of the theory (1-4). As he did when
contemplating two 'language acquisition devices', one for native and one for
non-native language, he coyly protests that 'the prevailing philosophy of
science encourages us to use a minimum number of theoretical constructs — the
"simplest" theory to account for existing data is considered to be the one
closest to reality' (44), where we again have to wonder which 'data' and
'reality' can be meant. He invokes 'largely non-experimental evidence'
he finds 'nevertheless compelling' (45).
'The output filter'
is a handy 'device that attempts to explain why second-language users do not
always perform their competence'; it also help out by 'adding another
explanation for variation in performance' (45, 64) despite the 'striking
uniformity' inherited from Chomsky's LAD. Again, the LAD is exonerated:
'there has been real acquisition, but affective forces' 'prevent us from
showing this competence' — presumably 'just those factors responsible for
the input or affective filter' (46) too. 'The output filter' 'prevents
acquired rules from being used' (45).
output booster does get a place of honour in the main theory under
the title of 'the Monitor Hypothesis' 'stating how acquisition and
learning are used in production' and how 'the output of the acquired
system' is 'changed' 'before we speak or write'
(1f). The Monitor is free to apply all the 'learning' and
'conscious knowledge' Krashen's
rhetoric of exclusion has strictly sealed off from 'acquired competence' and
'subconscious knowledge'. This 'Hypothesis' offers yet another chance to
recite his twin mantras: 'claiming' that 'acquiring via comprehensible
input' and 'learning via conscious rule teaching' are two systems'
'used in very different ways'; and that 'learning cannot become
acquisition' (22, 24). Krashen even contemplates enshrining his exclusions in
an anatomical split: 'Monitor use involves the left cerebral hemisphere' and
gives an 'advantage' for 'listening' with the 'right ear', whereas
'dichotic' 'listening' with both ears 'taps only acquisition',
though he admits he is on 'far shakier ground' here than with his
'non-interface' position (64f). Indeed.
now, his rhetorical motives should be transparent. Denying conscious control
altogether would be far more audacious for giving output (which can be closely
observed) than for getting input (which cannot), and would lose credibility
among teachers. So Krashen admits it but wants it kept tightly contained. He at
once imposes 'two conditions', 'both difficult to meet':10
'the performer must be consciously concerned about correctness; and he or she
must know the rule' (2); later in the book, he imposes three conditions:
'focus on form, rule knowledge, and time' (22). He also stipulates that
'the gain in grammatical accuracy achieved by utilising the conscious Monitor
is modest' (21). He decries 'Monitoring while performing' as a
'risk' against which only 'very advanced and linguistically sophisticated
second-language performers' can 'succeed' (22). Or, to criticise 'drill
and conscious attention to form' once more, he warns that
'using the conscious Monitor will only cover up the error temporarily'
because (cue the mantra) 'learning does not become acquisition' (48).
further conjure 'the dangers of Monitor-overuse', he links his output
booster with his 'output filter' by saying that both can 'impede
fluency' (38, 64). In place of 'Monitor use', he recommends' 'lowering
the output filter' by 'focusing off form and on meaning' (64), though we
might wonder if 'focusing' does not entail some conscious attention. Yet the
split-up exclusionary design of his theory impels him to claim that the
'operation of the output filter does not affect the Monitor'; and the claim
causes problems for at least two reasons. First, an experienced teacher knows
that 'affective forces' can easily hamper second language learners from
watching their grammar when they speak (give 'output'). Second, Krashen's
counsel for 'acquisition with optimal efficiency' is to 'temporarily
forget' you are using another language (101); and his leading piece of
evidence for his 'output filter' was a case where 'students' were
impelled to 'forget' because of 'strong feelings about the topic' (45). So the same factors that 'lower
the filter' would also affect the Monitor. Indeed, 'lowering the filter'
and 'raising the Monitor' might be corresponding descriptions or
explanations of the same operation if Krashen weren't so determined to split
them apart.
to teach to an LAD so hemmed in with input and output gadgetry might seem a
parlous venture. But it's another good-news, bad-news situation quite like the
one I diagnosed for Chomsky. Krashen too is eager to throw out the baby with the
bath water and the bathtub, because he too has a new bathtub to sell, namely, a
teaching method. 'If the Input Hypothesis and Fundamental Principle are
correct', runs his forecast, 'we may be facing a "period of
adjustment"' (57f). 'If the theory is correct, it will find its way into
general education, and language students will no longer expect learning to be
the central component of their language course' (58). The 'Natural
Approach' he has developed along with Tracy Terrell and others bears a label
which was already found in the writings of Henry Sweet (1899 [reprinted 1964]:
74f), who roundly rejected for 'putting the adult in the position of an
infant' and 'not allowing him to make use of his own special advantages'
of 'generalisation and abstraction', and 'greater powers of concentration
and methodical perseverance'. Now, the same label hints the method is
meticulously designed to follow the 'natural order'
in which Krashen claims rules must be 'acquired', as we have seen. But
our discourse sample gives little evidence that he has specified (or knows how
to) in any detail what that order might be, and gives many arguments against
teaching rules at all. Without those specifications, the label is hardly more
than a catchy brand-name like breakfast cereals have, and slyly implies that
teachers who don't use it might be performing unnatural
acts in the classroom!
design of the method is actually quite spontaneous and informal, and by no means
so different from the 'communicative approach' as his exclusionary rhetoric
implies. 'It uses a semantic, or notional, syllabus, simply a series of topics
that students will find interesting and that the teacher can discuss in a
comprehensible way, supplemented by games, tasks, and other activities that
provide comprehensible input' (55). Not at all surprisingly, it
'de-emphasises production' (34) (i.e. 'output'). We are assured it has
'been compared to traditional approaches and demonstrated to be significantly
and clearly better' (13). After a 'year' in this approach, 'an adult
foreign-language student' 'will be able to converse comfortably with a
native speaker (who adjusts his speaking a bit to the level of the student) on a
variety of everyday topics; this is a great success when compared with the
results of the usual second-language class' (71). 'Involvement in a topic of
real interest has a chance of resulting in the students' focusing on the
message — a prerequisite' 'for real language acquisition' (74).
Moreover, 'interesting materials' 'should be far easier to create' than
'bone-dry exercises' with a 'grammatical focus'; there is no need to
ensure that particular grammatical rules or vocabulary are practised, and
initial field testing need determine only whether the materials are interesting
and comprehensible for the intended student audience' (56).
most of Krashen's claims, these are easily testable: either the approach works
as advertised or it doesn't. But its success rate is in no way a test of the
sole validity of Krashen's theory. It offers no proof of fostering an
'acquisition' that does not pass through 'learning'; nor of bypassing
'conscious monitoring'; nor of getting around the various 'filters' to
and from the LAD. At most, students soon get the message that they'd better
not do things in class that look like conscious learning or monitoring — and
that message already came packaged with the audio-lingual method too!11
The success is far more likely due to creating a relaxed, non-threatening
environment wherein students are not just passively regaled with
'comprehensible input', but are doing interesting
activities instead of doing grammar drills, like discussing their
own topics and playing 'games', where there is a deal of output practice,
albeit of a more spontaneous kind.
submit that interest is the real key,
and that it is not a concept accounted for by Krashen's theory, and still less
by Chomsky's. Interest is not a linguistic category, and Chomsky's Aspects model (1965: 3) expressly excluded it as 'irrelevant'
for 'linguistic theory', as I have shown. Moreover, since the LAD is
exclusively a 'language organ' and (Chomsky says) does its work without
having to rely on 'real-life situations', it would be incapable
in principle of ranking input by interest. It can only rank by
'comprehensibility' assessed in terms of current 'competence' — a set
of language rules. And a great deal of comprehensible input is not at all
interesting, as almost any commercial language textbook can demonstrate.
does 'interest' appear in Krashen's opening procession of 'five
hypotheses' constituting 'an overall theory of second-language
acquisition' (1-4). Instead, it blithely pops up halfway through the book:
'according to the Input Hypothesis, we need simply present students with
messages that are interesting and
comprehensible' (55, i.a.). An equally sly alteration happens to his
flamboyantly heralded 'fundamental principle in second-language
acquisition'; at first it says that 'people acquire second languages only if
they obtain comprehensible input and if their affective filters are low enough
to allow the input in' (3). Later on, it stipulates that 'a language teacher
is first of all someone who can present messages
of interest, help make them comprehensible, and put students at ease; in
short, a communicator' (57f) —
even though we recall Krashen castigating the rival 'communicative method'
for promulgating a 'futile approach' on the wrong assumption that
'competence develops via output practice in communicative situations' and by
achieving 'communicative success' (35,
55). These are certainly not equivalent formulations of his 'Hypothesis' or
'principle'; and the discrepancies among them are essential because, if
taken literally and practised radically, Krashen's theory — and not the communicative method he accuses of doing so
— really does 'create an
impossible situation for teacher and student'. As teachers, we would have to
continually assess comprehensibility without letting learners consciously
monitor whether they are comprehending. We would have to assess the competence
level of an inaccessible LAD hedged round with filters that can visibly
misrepresent its 'real acquisition'. We would have to actively discourage
learners from learning explicit rules by rebuking them that they are just
wasting their time if not indeed hurting themselves. And we would heavily
emphasise input at the expense of output. Only a vehemently Unnatural
Approach would even try to do all these things, and would certainly not have
'great success when compared with the results of the usual second-language
most flagrant restrictions and pressures would result for teaching or learning vocabulary.
Chomsky's Aspects model made no
mention of 'vocabulary' (except as a technical term of the theory),12
and certainly not in his account of 'acquisition', which is all about
'grammar' and 'syntax'. And his dim view of the 'lexicon' can be
plainly seen when he said that 'the lexical entries constitute the full set of
irregularities of the language' (1965:142). The same argument implies that the
acquisition of vocabulary cannot in principle be entrusted to the LAD. If not
even formal linguistics attributes the acquisition of vocabulary to
'unconscious rules', then the only alternative, obvious to anyone who has
successfully learned a second language, is that vocabulary items must be learned in the conscious
awareness that they are vocabulary
items and not just some spontaneous mumbles or some mistaken pronunciations of
other items. So the 'comprehensibility' of input does not automatically lead
to the 'acquisition' of vocabulary items but presupposes
the learning of the items, just as no LAD can supply an innate dictionary of
words, even if it can supply some principles for organising input that consist
of words.
theory leads to the queasy conclusion that acquired
rules are constantly interacting with learned
items, in open defiance of his mantra, cited repeatedly here, that the two
domains have 'no interface'. And in fact, Krashen does associate the use of
'second-language vocabulary' with the use of the 'Monitor' as 'a way
of outperforming one's competence' and 'sounding far more advanced than the
users really are' (13, 26); and he even describes 'teaching vocabulary' as
'relying on deception' (28). But unless vocabulary has been learned, there
would simply be no comprehensible
input for the LAD to do its unconscious handiwork. You may forget the experience
of having learned the items as you become more fluent, though some cognitive
theories suggest that the contexts of learning persist as robust memory traces,
e.g. the 'encoding specificity principle' of Tulving and Thomson (1973). But
somehow, consciously learned items must get into unconscious competence, most
probably by a gradual lowering of the consciousness threshold. The plain
conclusion is not so much that 'learning becomes acquisition' but that learning is the front end of acquisition — just as practice
is the front end of theory, at least in real life if not in linguistics.
When theory tries to throw out the front end of practice or to take over its
role — as have the theories of both Chomsky and Krashen in their self-centred
exclusionary campaigns — they can only lead to practices that are either
inconsistent with the theory or else downright impossible.
to the degree that the Natural Approach does succeed, it is not an application,
let alone a test, of Krashen's split-up theory and provides no 'support for
Chomsky's position'. Instead, the whole 'theory' has been a rhetorically
driven by promotional campaign contrived to do in applied linguistics just what
Chomsky's theory was contrived to do in theoretical linguistics, as shown in
section 4: to justify for the theorist a leading role in theorising and to make
everyone else feel pressured to cite him and adopt his terminology. Chomsky has
evidently been much more successful. After all, his theory was expressly crafted
to be untestable and irrefutable; it legitimised large savings of labour for
linguists; and it brought no obligation to produce any practical results such as
a teaching methods. Krashen's job is much harder, since he is resolved to
exploit Chomsky's theory while producing a method. Doing both at once is so
hard that he has split his job into two jobs and hopes practitioners won't
notice that his theorising doesn't at all enforce his teaching method nor make
him the chief architect of the 'period of adjustment' we would all agree we
are 'facing'. The zeal of Krashen the theoretician to totally exclude all
other accounts and seal them off from his own puts an divisive strain on Krashen
the practitioner.
should other practitioners flock to a 'theory' (or to public lectures about
it) implying that most of what they have been doing is irrelevant to 'language
acquisition' — in fact, as I see it (though Krashen of course doesn't say
so), implicitly providing a rationale for a mass firing of well-trained teachers
and hiring naive ones or just buying television sets and VCRs. The chief
attraction no doubt lies in the theory appearing both to explain why
conventional second language teaching methods have been so disappointing, and to
open up a brave new world of 'language programmes being more productive and
efficient for our students and easier and more pleasant for teachers'. (Notice
that the 'efficiency' goes to the students, while the 'ease' and
'pleasantness' go to the teachers!) The ensuing euphoria has no doubt helped
to paper over the extent, shown above, to which the theory does not underwrite
the practice in any but the most general and evasive terms.
surprisingly, Krashen's theory signally fails to meet the requirements
advocated in the foregoing sections of this paper. Instead of specifying the
relationships between native and second-language learning, Krashen simply
equates the two as twin jobs for the LAD. His theory would strongly discourage
the use of a meta-language in second-language learning and the training of basic
techniques for describing and discussing language as language, on the grounds
that it's all too 'conscious' and fosters 'monitoring'. He gives no
guidance to teachers for appreciating the typical problems of learners arising
naturally from the contact between the first and the second language, but
remarks glibly, and a bit absurdly, that 'pedagogy does not need to help the
acquirer fight off the effects of the first language' (Krashen and Terrell
1983: 41); he presumably expects the LAD and 'universal grammar' to overcome
all such problems. He does not reflect upon how a teacher might better be
able to act as representative of the community of speakers of the
second-language; 'comprehensible input' could just as well come from
anybody, a principle which, as I said, secretly implies we can largely dispense
with teachers and with teacher training, too. And worst of all, his theory is
silent about cultural outlooks on the language, social and regional contexts and
varieties, and on ways for guiding how cultural contacts can meet the specific
needs of second language learning. Like Chomsky's 'theory' with its
'completely homogeneous speech-community', Krashen's 'theory' projects
language learning to be an unconscious process in a cultural vacuum. But surely
learning about other cultures and interacting them are prime motivations for
learning a second language?
back to the drawing board
hope to have shown that the application of theories taken over from theoretical
linguistics — what Widdowson (1980) calls 'linguistics applied' as
compared with 'applied linguistics' — has, aside from phonology and
phonetics for pronunciation, been problematic enterprise to be approached with
cautious attention to terms and concepts and to their rhetorical contexts and
implications. The theories of fieldwork linguistics are tailored to the
situation of the specialised fieldworker, who is a language learner with special
qualifications; such theories might be extended to developing methods that give
second-language teachers and learners at least a modest proportion of the
advantages fieldworkers enjoy (section 3). The theories of 'homework'
linguistics of the Chomskyan type are tailored to the situation of fiercely
competitive theoreticians who do not need to have learned any more languages
than their native language; such theories frankly work at cross purposes with
the development of either fieldwork methods or teaching methods (section 4).
Fieldworkers would rightly scoff at the notion that their work follows some
'natural order' genetically programmed into their LAD; instead, they proceed
according to the quality and quantity of the data as it happened to be
collected, depending on which persons or groups in the community are disposed to
be recorded. Pending much better evidence, teachers should also scoff at the
notion that their learners follow some 'natural order' but that we needn't
follow it in our teaching.
we are back to the question of how an applicable theory might be made to order
for practitioners (section 1), and how we may cease to be, in Brumfit's (1980:
160) words, 'prisoners of our own categorisations'. Instead of describing a language
in its full and finished state, as theoretical linguistics almost always
has, such a theory needs to describe the degrees
of approximation to the language that are appropriate and manageable for
communication from the very earliest stages onward.
the implications for practice seem to be somewhat radical and disorienting from
the standpoint of conventional pedagogy. Such a theory could specify
a succession of interlanguages that share features both of the native
language and of the second language. These would differ from the
'interlanguages' as the term' has usually been used (e.g. Selinker 1972)
in having been expressly and strategically designed on a theoretical foundation
rather than being spontaneously produced by individual learners or learner
groups in real-life situations. The characteristics of the native language would
be heavily represented in the early stages and gradually phased out over a
suitable period of time in favour of second language features — not in a
hypothetical 'natural order' but in a demonstrably
workable order.
unorthodox this approach may sound, it might offer some significant advantages:
It resembles the way languages are normally acquired in authentic multilingual
settings both by children or adults, much more than do conventional classroom
methods. The strategies people naturally select when left on their own resources
to do their best job are surely obvious candidates for renewed attention from a
theoretical standpoint.
All the learners could freely participate in a communication, rather than
restricting their contributions to the small handful of occasions where they
feel reasonably secure of the second language vocabulary, grammar, and
The typical stress and anxiety expressed for instance in learner diaries would
be considerably lessened because distinctions between 'correct' versus
'incorrect' usage would be made only to the degree that is appropriate at a
particular stage. The criteria of native speaker 'correctness' would only
become significant in the more advanced stages.
cannot predict on theoretical grounds alone how
long the progression would take before we could expect learners to perform
within a reasonable approximation of the performance of native speakers of the
second language. But I would predict that at the end of that period of time,
fluency and self-confidence would be on the average considerably higher than
what we are obtaining now, and would be much more democratically distributed
among the general population of learners and not just among the modest portion
that are obtaining reasonable fluency with current methods.
sum up: if the prospects of application were determined before the theories were
built, we could expect a generation of theories that share the following
The theories would be not just descriptive for current, ordinary practices but
also instrumental in the development of more powerful practices.
The theories would give higher priority to criteria of effective application
than to idealised standards such as theoretical formality, rigour, or
They would not be theories of language separated off by itself but theories of
language as it is organised partly by its own criteria and partly by its use in
organising people's models of world and society.
The role of the theoretician and the practitioner would be explicitly accounted
for within the theories, stipulating under what conditions a theory or practice
is related to a given language or to language as general conception, and how
the theoretician and the practitioner can claim to represent a language
community or its knowledge of the language.
The cycles of theory and practice would dialectically feed back to and refine
each other as the theory becomes steadily more able to specify their respective
roles, and as the practice brings steadily more evidence to bear on the
requirements for an applicable theory. Once theory and practice each has the job
of writing and rewriting a script for the other, their interaction would finally
take on a systematic continuity often lacking in the past.
The theories would be 'driven' by large corpuses of authentic data, such as
the International Corpus of Learner's English (ICLE) being assembled for eight
language groups and banked at the University of Louvain. Such data would help us
to build a series of models of the language at various stages and in various
settings to take into account the age of the learners, their social background,
their native language, their culture, and the environment in which acquisition
or learning occurs.
The theories would also be 'driven' by corpuses of case studies of people
learning languages in various situations such as fieldwork linguists, language
teachers in training, learners in language classrooms, and work trainees
learning new special-purpose languages on the job.
The theories would seek to specify the correlations among various modalities of
spoken and written language, which have traditionally been crudely divided into
'four skills'. New theories will doubtless show that 'speaking',
'writing', and so on are not unified blocks of activity but subtly nuanced
complexes of activities keenly sensitive to the respective practical uses they
The theories would draw together observational studies of conventional
classrooms and experimental classrooms, attempting to reason back from the more
successful practices toward theories that can account for them.
The theories would indicate the position of second-language learning within the
overall curriculum, especially in respect to the native-language curriculum and
to those subject areas in which the second language will later be used, e.g.
when students in South-East Asia learn English in as a step toward careers in
the computer industry.
the start of this paper, I remarked that practice has usually preceded and
determined theory, but theory has typically taken over the leading role and at
times has been disconnected from practice. In this respect education and
linguistics reflect the priorities of society. I can't help wondering if the
low importance some 'mainstream' linguistic theories assign to practice, and
the problems of doing applied linguistics at cross-purposes with theoretical
linguistics has not ominously encouraged the stingy commitment of resources by
governments and institutions to language pedagogy, on the assumptions that the
elites who need the language will learn it anyhow by studying abroad or hiring
special tutors, and that the development of genuinely new theories and methods
is not likely to result from increased investments.
all events, theories which sharply raise the status of practice are one
indispensable prerequisite to improving public and institutional attitudes. A
generation of theories that can put language back into authentic cognitive and
social contexts and can demonstrate the merits of multilingualism for the future
well-being of our increasingly global society will also create an ambience in
which theory and practice can finally be united as equals and dialectical
partners in the enterprise of guiding the teaching and learning of languages.
This is a revised version of a paper prepared for the 1994 AAAL and TESOL
Conventions in Long Beach but informally summarised there rather than read out.
I am deeply indebted to Prof. Barbara Seidlhofer and to Prof. H.G. Widdowson for
discussions of this topic and for carefully reading and assiduously commenting
upon earlier drafts of the paper, and to three anonymous referees of this
journal their helpful advice.
The term 'mainstream linguistics' is used here merely heuristically for
conventional notions which were either stated in central works and frequently
cited from these or else taken for granted; and which dominated the agendas in
academies, universities, professional conferences, and so on (see my survey in
Beaugrande 1991 for specific sources and quotes. Pennycook (1994: 25) observes:
'there has clearly been a rejection of connections between language and its
contexts in much of mainstream linguistics'.
For example: 'it is often almost impossible for an Englishman to learn
educated colloquial German in the county because all the Germans want to
practice their English upon him' (Sweet 1899 [reprinted 1964]: 76).
as the book directly equates 'theory' with Chomsky's, the claim is a mere
tautology, since there would be nothing else left to 'take seriously'.
presumably meant 'language acquisition' rather than 'language learning',
but his phrase 'undertake the task' inappropriately suggests that the child
makes a deliberate effort.
For compact citation, I shall omit the '1985' in references to this one
volume; and I also omit a reference when it is identical to the one just before
Widdowson (1990: 18) draws the same conclusion and points out that the
'evidence' actually bears on 'consistency in accuracy' and not on
'internalisation'. Conversely, Gregg (1984: 97) argues that the natural
order cannot be 'explained' via the LAD, but neither he nor Krashen explains
how it could possibly operate without the LAD.
I am
indebted to one of my reviewers for pointing out this possibility.
prospect was in fact entertained by the Chomskyans for time as a promising way
to get 'semi-sentences' or 'partially well formed sentences' into the
theory, but Krashen doesn't pursue it in the discourse I analysed.
Elsewhere, Krashen (1982: 18) says that 'most people, even university
students', need 'a real discrete-point grammar-type test to meet all three
conditions for Monitor use'; if so, it could not be so grave a 'risk' as
he alleges.
Widdowson (1990: 25) notes some interesting 'similarities' between
Krashen's 'theory' and behaviourism, including the 'capacities for
making mischief'. I would add that some key terms, such as 'input',
'output', and 'affect', were also made current by behaviourism, though
in more precise and operational senses than Krashen's.
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