Swan a Critical Look at the Communicative Approach 2

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A critical look at theCommunicativeApproach (2)Michael Swan

Syllabus detlgnThe incompetentschool-leaver

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This (the second of two articles) looks at some of the pedagogical aspects ofthe Communicative Approach, including the idea of a 'semantic syllabus'and the question of 'authenticity' n materials and methodology. It is arguedthat the Communicative Approach generally presents an ove r-simplifiedand m isleading account of these issues, and that a sensible approach tolanguage teaching involves integrating semantic and formal syllabusesand com bining authentic with specially-written teaching materials. It is alsosuggested that the Communicative Approach fails to recognize the crucialrole of the mother tongue in foreign language learning.'An English boy who has been through a good middle-class school inEngland can talk to a Frenchman, slowly and with difficulty, aboutfemale gardeners and aunts; conversation which, to a man possessed ofneither, is liable to pall. Possibly, if he be a bright exception, he may beable to tell the time, or make a few guarded observations concerning theweather. No doubt he could repeat a goodly nu m ber of irregular verbs byheart; only, as a matter of fact, few foreigners care to listen to their ownirregular verbs, recited by young Englishmen .. . And then, when theproud parent takes his son and heir to Dieppe merely to discover that thelad does not know enough to call a cab, he abuses not the system but theinnocent victim.' (Jerome 1900).Je rom e K . Jer om e was neither the first nor the last to observe that thelanguag e courses of his day w ere inefficient, or to propo se w ays of improv-ing them. The learner who has studied the language for seven years, butwho cannot ask for a glass of water, a cab, or a light for a cigarette, isregula rly b rou gh t on to the stage to justify de m an ds for a radical ch ang e inour app roac h to language teaching. Jer om e's reco mm endations for reformwere: more time, better qualified teachers, better coursebooks, a moreserious attitude to language learning, and the application of comm on senseto education. T hese are mod est, practical suggestions, but of course Jer om ehad no knowledge of linguistics. He would scarcely have expressed himselfin such down-market terms if he had been writing today, with the benefit ofan M .A. course in one of our better ap plied linguistics dep artm ents . Jer om ewould more probably have complained that his school-leaver knew gram-mar and words, but could not use them appropriately; could not expresseveryday notions, or perform basic communicative functions; lacked pro-ductive and receptive skills and strategies; was unable to negotiate meaningsuccessfully; had learnt language on the level of usage rather than use;created text that was cohesive but not coherent; was not successful inrelating code to context; and in general lacked com mun icative com petence,which he could best acquire by following a good communicative course

ELTJournal Volume 39/2 April 1985


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The communicativesyllabus

Meaning in oldercourses

based on a scientific needs analysis. On the whole, I think I prefer theoriginal formulation.Defective language learning is often attributed to defective syllabus design:the student does not learn the language properly because we do not teachthe right things, or because we organize what we teach in the wrong way.Recently the atten tion of linguists has been focused on m eaning , and it hascome to be widely believed that the secret of successful language teachinglies in incorp orating m eaning properly into our syllabuses. We can perh apsdistinguish four common versions of this belief:a. 'O lde r language courses taug ht forms, but did not teach what the formsmeant or how to use them. We now do this. 'b . 'Ol de r languag e courses taugh t one kind of m eanin g (th at found in thegram m ar and dictionary), but did not teach another kind (the commu nica-tive value that utterances actually have in real-life exchanges). It is thissecond kind that we really need to teach.'c. 'Older language courses failed to teach students how to express or docertain things with language. We must incorporate these things (notions,functions, strategies) into our syllabuses.'d. 'Even if older structure-b ased languag e courses taugh t meanings as wellas forms, they did so very untidily and inefficiently. A communicativesyllabus approaches the teaching of meaning systematically.'The first version (a) is no longer as common as it used to be, and it is notreally worth wasting time on. I have discussed version (b) at length in aprevious article (Swan 1985), in which I argue that the kind of meaningreferred to ('rules of use') does not need to be tau gh t, and cann ot in any casebe codified. Here I should like to deal principally with the issues raised byversions (c) and (d).Tradition al structure-based courses have had a bad press. Cu rrent mythol-ogy not withstanding, they did not systematically neglect the teaching offunctions, notions, and skills. Older courses may indeed have failed to teachpeople to do some important things with language, and more modernm aterials, whose auth ors have access to checklists of com mu nicative func-tions; have plugged a number of gaps. It is also true that many traditionalcourses adopted a very mechanical approach to drilling what was taughtthat is to say, meaning was often neglected during the practice phase of alesson. Nonetheless, it is quite false to represent older courses as con-centrating throughout on form at the expense of meaning, or as failing toteach people to 'do things with language'. I have in front of me a copy of atypical structure-based begin ners' course of the 1960s (Cand lin 1968). T hecourse has many of the typical defects of books of its generation (thoughthese may seem greater to us, with our sharpened hindsight and differentpriorities, than they did to its users). However, by the end of Lesson 8,students have been shown perfectly adequate ways of performing thefollowing language functions: greeting, enquiring about health, leave-taking, thanking, expressing regret, eliciting and giving information, offer-ing, reque stin g goods and se rvices, proffering, self-identification, asking formore precise information, confirming what has been said, exhortation,identifying and naming, describing, narrating, giving informal instruc-tions, agreeing to carry out instructions, and enquiring about plans.A critical look at the Com municative Approach (2) 77


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'Semantico-grammatical categories ' are not neglected: students learn totalk about place and direction, to refer to states and processes, to describepast, present, and future events, to express concepts related to quantifica-tion, and so on. (In other words, they learn prepositions, verb tenses,singular and plural forms, etc. Structures have meanings, and traditionalcourses usually mad e a reasonab le jo b of teaching them.) And of course thebook provides a year's work on lexiswords and expressions are taught,and the notions associated with them are on the whole clearly demon-strated. Finally, the course (like many of its kind) uses the meaningcategory of situation as an organizing principle. Even if each lesson isdesigned to teach a specific structural point, it sets out at the same time toteach the language that is appropriate to a common situation. Present-DayEnglish (like any book of its generation) does in fact have a quite clear andcarefully worked out seman tic syllabus. T he re are per hap s reasons why onemight not wish to teach from this book, but it should not be accused offailing to deal properly with meaning.

Putting meaning first For many people, the central idea in 'communicative' teaching is probablytha t of a 'sem antic syllabus'. In a course based on a sema ntic syllabus, it ismeanings rather than structures which are given priority, and which formthe organizing principle or 'skeleton' of the textbook. Lessons deal withsuch matters as 'greeting' , 'agreeing and disagreeing', 'compa rison', 'warn-ing', 'point of time', and so on. So we do not (for example) give a lesson onthe com para tive forms of adjectives, b ut on a notion such as that of relativesize or degree, which may be expressed not only by using comparativeadjectives but also in many other ways. In the bad old courses, wheregra m m ar was tidy and meanings untidy, students might learn comp arativeadjectives in Ju ne and the as ... as structure the following February; theywere never able to put together the various items they needed to expressfully the notion in question. W ith a sem antic syllabus, items which belongtogether sema ntically are taug ht together, even if they are structu rally quitediverse.

The problem with this approach is obvious to anybody who has recentlytaught a beginners ' class. Unfortunately, grammar has not become anyeasier to learn since the communicative revolution. If we set out to give alesson to elem entary studen ts on the notion of relative degree, we are likelyto run into difficulty straight away, for two reasons. First of all, the mainsyntact ic p at tern s involved a re complex (as tall as, taller than, less tall than, notsolas tall as, etc.) , and if they are presented all together th e students willprobably m ix them u p , confusing as and than and so on. And secondly, it isnot at all obvious to a learner how to form the comparat ives of Englishadjectives: the rules a re complicated, and can hardly be picked up inpassing in the course of a notion-based lesson which introduces severalother structural points at the same time. Experienced teachers often like toisolate an d practise difficult structures (such as comparat ive adject ives)before combining them with others in real ist ic communicat ive work. Theyhave excellent reasons for doing so.

Language is not only a set of formal system s, bu t it is a set of systems, an dit is perverse not to focus on questions of form when this is desirable. Somepoints of gra m ma r are difficult to learn, an d need to be studied in isolationbefore students can do interest ing things with them. It is no use makingmeaning t idy if grammar then becomes so untidy that it cannot be learntproperly. As Brumfit points ou t in his review ofWilkins's Notional Syllabuses,78 Michael Swan


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Structural versusfunctional: a falsedichotomy

the teaching of functions and notions cannot replace the teaching of gram-mar. 'The point about the grammatical system is that a limited anddescribable number of rules enable the learner to generate an enormousrange of utterances which are usable, in combination with paralinguisticand semiotic systems, to express any function. To ask learners to learn a listinstead of a system goes against everything we know about learning theory '(Brumfit 1978).We really need to question the whole idea that one syllabus, whetherstruc tural or functional, should be 'privileged ', acting as the framework onwhich a whole course is built. Language courses involve far too manycomponents, and the relationships between the components are far toocomplex, for us to be able to sub ordi nate everything to a tidy progression ofstructures, functions, notions, or anything else. When deciding what toteach to a particular group of learners, we need to take into considerationseveral different meaning categories and several different formal categories.We must make sure that our students are taught to operate key junctionssuch as, for instance, greeting, agreeing, or warning; to talk about basicnotions such as size, definiteness, texture or ways of moving; to com mu nicateappropriately in specific situations (for instance in shops, on the telephone,at meetings); to discuss the topics which correspond to their main interestsand needs (for example tourism, merchant banking, football, physics). Atthe same time, we shall need to draw up lists ofphonological problems whichwill need a ttention ; of high-priority structures, and of the vocabulary which ourstudents will need to learn. In addition, we must think about performanceas well as com peten ce: we will need a syllab us of skills, to make sure that ourstudents are trained to become fluent in whatever aspects of speaking,understanding, reading, and writing relate to their purposes.Rather than taking either meanings or forms as our starting point,therefore, we really need to look at the language from two directions atonce, asking both 'What words and structures are needed to expressmeaning X?' (semantic syllabuses) and 'What meanings do we need toteach for word Y or structu re Z ?' (formal syllabuses). At first sight, it m ightseem as if sem antic syllabuses and formal syllabuses ough t ultim ately tocover the same grou nd (so that if we have one we can do withou t the ot he r).After all, if we have listed the meanings we want our students to express,and worked out what structures, words, and expressions are used to conveythese meanings, this should surely provide us with a list of all the forms weneed to teach, and it ought therefore to be unnecessary to list the formsseparately. It is important to realize that this is not the case.

First of all, sema ntic sy llabuses tend to list only items th at a re specificallyrelated to the functions or notions included in the syllabus. More 'general-purpose' items slip through the net. If we make a list of high-priorityfunctions and notions and write down all the words and expressions thatare needed to handle them, there is no guarantee that we will include, forinstance, the words umbrella, control, move or rough. These words are, how-ever, common and important, and will need to be included in most inter-me diate cou rses. To be sure of plugging g aps of this kind, we shall need torefer to a traditional lexical syllabu s based on w ord-frequency. T he s am e istrue of structures. Grammar items that do not have an easily identifiable'meaning' (such as points of word order) tend to get left out of notionalsyllabuses, though they may be of great im porta nce for the correct learningof the language.A critical look at the Communicative Approach (2) 79


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Secondly, and conversely, traditional structural/lexical syllabuses arenot very good at catching sentence-length idioms and convention al expres-sions such as 'Can I jus t break in here?' or 'I 'd like to mak e a reversedcharge call'. They may also fail to pick up special uses of 'standard'structures which are important for the expression of certain functions: forinstance, the English use of the co-ordinate structure in threats ( 'Do thatagain and I'm going home'). To be sure of getting such items into ourteaching p rog ram m e, we need to look at lists of functions and notions a ndtheir exponents.It is, therefore, essential to consider both semantic and formal accountsof the langu age w hen deciding what to teach. Failure to do so will result inserious omissions on one side or the other. (There is a well known anddeservedly popular 'communicative' beginners' course which gets througha whole year's work w ithout teaching the nam es of the colours or the basicuse of the verb have.) The real issue is not which syllabus to put first: it ishow to integrate eight or so syllabuses (functional, notional, situational,

topic, phonological, lexical, structural, skills) into a sensible teachingprogramme.

Integrating semantic In discussions of communicative teaching, a good deal of confusion isand formal syllabuses caused by invalid generalizations. For instance, people often talk as iflanguage courses had m uch the same shape at all levels from begin ners' toadvanced. In fact, the relative importance of the various syllabuses, andespecially of the grammar component, varies crucially with level. It isfashionable to criticize old-style courses for being excessively concernedwith teaching structure, and there is certainly some truth in the criticism.But it really applies only to lower-level courses (where grammar must inany case get a good deal of attention, even if this can easily go too far). Atmore advanced levels language textbooks have rarely given very muchspace to grammar: more typical concerns have traditionally been vocabul-ary-build ing, the teaching of reading and writing skills, literature an d o ther'cultural' matters, and the encouragement of discussion.

Equally, the role of' gr am m ar' in language courses is often discussed as if'grammar' were one homogeneous kind of thing. In fact, 'grammar' is anum brella term for a large num ber of sepa rate or loosely related languag esystems, which are so varied in nature that it is pointless to talk as if theyshould all be approach ed in the same way. How we integrate the teachin g ofstructure and meaning will depend to a great extent on the particularlanguage items involved. Some structural points present difficulties of formas well as meaning (for example interrogative and negative structures;comparison of adjectives; word order in phrasal verbs). As I have alreadysuggested, it may be best to deal with such problems of form before studentsdo communicative work on notions or functions in which they will have tomix these structures with others. Other grammar points are less problem-atic, and can be taught simultaneously with work on a relevant notion orfunction. (For instance, students might learn to use can in the context of alesson on offering, or requesting, or talking about ability, ease and diffi-culty.) Some functions and notions may be expressible entirely throughstructu res which are already known : if stude nts have learnt imp erativesand simple (^clauses, and if they can make basic co-ordinate sentences,then they are already in a position to give warn ings. Yet other functions andnotions are expressed mainly through lexis, with no special grammatical

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The importance ofvocabulary

Stereotyped andcreative language

considerations of any importance (for instance greeting, leave-taking,thanking, speed, size).How we organize a given lesson will therefore depend very much on thespecific point we want to teach. A good language course is likely to includelessons which concentrate on particular structures, lessons which deal withareas of vocab ulary, lessons on functions, situation-bas ed lessons, pronu n-ciation lessons, lessons on produ ctive and receptive skills, and several o therkinds of component. Many lessons will deal with more than one of thesethings at the same tim e. Designing a languag e course involves reconciling alarge number of different and often conflicting priorities, and it is of littleuse to take one aspect of the language (structures, notions/functions, oran yth ing else) and to use this system atically as a framewo rk for the whole ofone's teaching.There is a certain air of unreality about the whole 'structural/notional 'debate. Assertions which look plausible and persuasive when they arepresented in general terms ('We should teach units of com m unic ation, notstructures') tend to dissolve and become meaningless when one tries toapply them to specific cases. Part of the trouble is perh aps that pragm atics(the study of what we do with language) is grossly over-valued at themoment, in the same way as grammar has been over-valued in the past.The 'new toy' effect is leading us to look at everything in functional terms:we see the whole of our jo b as being to teach stud ents to convey and elicitinformation, to describe, to define, to exercise and elicit social control, toexpress approval, make requests, establish rapport, warn, apologize, andthe rest of it. It is important to remember two things. First of all, thesefunctional categories are not themselves the nam es of things t ha t have to betaught (though they may help to define how we organize what we teach).Students can already convey information, define, apologize and soonwhat they need to learn is how to do these things in English. Andsecondly, when we have tau ght stu den ts wh at they need to know in order tocarry out the main communicative functions, we still have most of thelanguage left to teach. Students not only have to learn how information isconveyed or elicited, or how requests are ma de: they also have to learn thewords and expressions which are used to refer to the things in the worldthey want to talk ab ou t, ask abou t or request. How ever good a lesson on thefunction of wa rning may be, it will not in itself enable stud ents to say 'Lookoutthe top half of the ladder isn't properly fixed on'. Functions withoutlexis are no better than structures without lexis. And referential lexis is avast fieldit certainly makes up the bulk of the learning load in anygeneral-purpose language course.An earlier linguistic school saw language use as being largely a matter ofconvention, involving a set of predictab le responses to recur rent situatio ns.Although this view of language is discredited, it is not so much wrong asonly partially correct. A great deal of languag e does involve knowing wh atis conventionally said in familiar situationsinterrupting, asking for alight, complimenting, leave-taking, buying stamps, correcting oneself andso on. This stereotyped, idiomatic side of language accounts for a substan-tial proportion of the things we say, and this is the area with which theCommunicative Approach is perhaps mainly concerned, investigating themeanings we most often express and tabulating (in semantic syllabuses)the ways in which we conventionally express them . (For all its attention toA critical look at the Communicative Approach (2 ) 81


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meaning, the Communicative Approach has a strong behaviourist streak.)Not al l language, of course, is stereotyped. Since Chomsky's ideasbecame widely known, we have become accustomed to seeing language assomething that makes infinite (or at least indefinitely large) use of finiteresources. As O'Neill points out in his article 'My guinea pig died with itslegs crossed' (O'Neill 1977), most utterances are not conventionalresponses to familiar situation s. Studen ts need to learn to say new things aswell as old things. A learner of English may need to be able to say 'Couldyou check the tyre pres sures ?'; but he or she may also find it necessary to say'The car makes a funny noise every time I go round a left-hand bend', or 'Inearly ran ov er a policeman ju st by the place where we had tha t awful m ealwith your haird resse r's boyfriend '. Sentences like these are not predicted byany kind of semantic syllabus; they can be generated only by constructingsentences out of lexical and grammatical building blocks in accordancewith the various rules of phrase and sentence construction.

Simplifying somewhat, one might say that there are two kinds of lan-guage: 'stereotyped' and 'creative ' . Semantic syllabuses are needed to helpus teach the first; only structural/lexical syllabuses will enable us to teachthe second.

Methodology Teachers usually feel guilty about something: translating, or explainingThe 'real-life' fallacy grammar, or standing up in front of the class and behaving like teachers, orengag ing in some other activity tha t is temp orarily out of favour. Cu rren tlyteachers feel guil ty about not being comm unicative. Mech anical struc turepractice is out: it would be a brave trainee teacher who used a substitutiontable in his or her RSA practic al exam .' La ngu age work, we are told, shou ldinvolve genuine exchanges, and classroom discourse should correspond asclosely as possible to real-life use of languag e. Old-style c ourse s, it app ear s,failed to take this into account. (At this point in the lecture the speakerusually does his 'Is that your nose?' number, where he reads aloud someappall ing piece of pseudo-dialogue from a bad structure -based course andwaits for the laughs.)

Of course one can hardly quarrel with the suggestion that classroomlanguage should be as lifelike as possible. All other things being equal,authentic or natural-sounding dialogues are better models than art ificialdialogues; it is good to demonstrate structures by using them as they aretypically used in the outside world; writing and speaking practice should ifpossible involve genuine exchanges of information. The more we can (inWiddowson's eloquent formulation) 'contrive to make the language wepresent less of a contrivance', the better. And this is an area where theCommunicative Approach has without question made an important contri-bution to language teaching. Whatever the defects of the communicativetheory of lang uag e and syllabu s design, the last fifteen years or so have seenenormous improvements in our methodology.

None the less, the classroom is not the outside world, and learninglangu age is not the sam e as using languag e. A certain a m ou nt of artificialityis inse par able from the process of isolating and focusing on langu age itemsfor study, and it is a serious m istake to conde mn types of discours e typ icallyfound in the classroom because they do not share all the communicativefeatures of other kinds of language use.A common target for criticism is the use of questions to elicit feedback orto cue practice responses. If you say 'Is this my book?' or 'What am Idoing?' , it is objected t ha t you are asking a question to which you know the82 Michael Swan


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Communicativepractice and'information gap'

answer already; the response will not convey any information, and theconversation is therefore condemned as a piece of pseudo-communicationwhich incidentally gives a misleading picture of how interrogatives are usedin English. N ow conv ersations of this kind may not be very interesting, a ndwe may well be able to think of better ways of getting the responses we w ant,but it is not true that no com mu nication is going on. Th e ques tions have thecommunicative value (common in classroom discourse) of eliciting feed-backof asking stu dents to display know ledge of a piece of information; theanswers show whether the student does in fact possess the knowledge inquestion. Students are always perfectly well aware of the illocutionary forceof questions and answers in exchanges like these (they have been inclassrooms before), and they are in no danger at all of going out of theclassroom believing, for instance, that English-speaking people are alwaysasking questions to which they already know the answers.

A great deal of learning takes place in settings which arc remote from thesituation where the skills or knowledge will ultimately be used. Kittensplaying on a living-room carpet are learning aspects of hunting: stalking,hiding, pouncing, biting, reacting at speed. The fact that they arc learningthese things in the absence of any real-life prey does not seem to detractfrom the value of the practice that is going on. Again, in many kinds oflearning there is an clement of 'mechanical' repetition that makes theactivity at times very different from the goal behaviour that is ultimatelyenvisaged. A boy who takes up the violin may d ream of one day playing theBe ethoven violin co ncerto to a packed conce rt hall. B ut if he is to realize thisaim, he is likely to spend much of his time in the intervening years workingalone doing very 'uncommunicative' things: playing scales, practisingstudies, improving his bowing technique, gaining a mastery of positionalplaying, and so on. Somebody who wants to break the women's 1,500-mctrc record will train for a long time before her big race. But com-paratively little of her training will involve running the full 1,500-mctrcdistance at racing speed; and a lot of what she does (e.g. interval training,calisthenics) will seem artificial and remote from what she is training to do.Lea rning a languag e is not altogether th e same thing as learning to play theviolin, run races, or catch m ice, and an alogies can be dan gero us. However,it should be clear that effective learning can involve various kinds of'distancing' from the real-life behaviour that is its goal. We do not thereforeneed to feel that there is anything wrong if, among our battery of teachingactivities, we include some (repetition, rote learning , translation , structura ldrilling) which seem to have no immediate 'communicative' value. If allour exercises are of this kind, of course, it is another matter.I have suggested that methodology is perhaps the area where the Commu-nicative Approach has done most to improve our teaching. It is surprising,however, how often 'communicative' courses achieve the appearance ofcommunication without the reality. A basic concept in contemporarymethodology is that of 'information gap'. When one student talks toanother, we feel that it is important that new information should betransmitted across tbe 'gap' between them. To this end, ingenious exercisesare devised in which half the class are provided with d ata to which the otherhalf do not h ave access; those who lack the information then hav e to obtainit by using language in an appropriate way. I do not wish to belittle thevalue of such exercises; the technique is a powerful one, and (if usedintelligently) can generate interesting, lively, and useful work. However,A critical look at the Com municative Approach (2) 83


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the information conveyed should ideally have some relevance and interestfor the students. If (to take a familiar example) I give a student a papercon taining the times of trains from M anch ester to Liverpool, purely so tha the can pass on the information to ano ther stu den t who is not in M anch esterand does not wish to go to Liverpool, then we are perhaps still somedistance from genuine communication.Perhaps no classroom exercises can completely achieve the spontaneityan d n aturaln ess of real exchanges, b ut there are certainly more realistic andinteresting ways of organizing informa tion-gap work than by working w ith'imposed' information of this kind. Each individual in a class alreadypossesses a vast private store of know ledge, opinions, and experience; andeach individual has an imagination which is capable of creating wholescenarios at a moment's notice. Student X is probably the only person inthe class to know the number of people in his family, the places he hastravelled to, what he thinks of a film he h as ju st seen, whethe r he is shy,whether he believes in God, and what is going on in his head while the classis doing an information-gap exercise. If student X can be persuaded tocommunicate some of these things to student Yand this is not verydifficult to arrangethen we have a basis for genuinely rich and productivelanguage practice. In many contemporary language courses, communica-tion of this 'personal' kind seems to be seriously under-exploited. Thetendency to get students to exchange unmotivating, imposed informationcan even go to the extreme where much of their 'communication' is aboutthe behaviour of the fictional characters in their coursebooks ( 'You areGeorgeask Mary what she does at Radio Rhubarb') . Role play andsimulation are all very well in their places, but there are times when thesame lan guage practice can take place more interestingly and more directlyif the students are simply asked to talk about themselves.

Authentic materials Like many of the other issues in this field, the question of using authenticmaterials has become polarized into an opposition between a 'good' newapproach and a 'bad' old approach. Many teachers nowadays probablyfeel, in a vague kind of way, tha t th ere is som ethin g basically unsatisfac tory,or even wrong , about using scripted d ialogues or specially written teachingtexts. These are (we have been told) 'unnatural', and contrived; they tendto lack the discou rse features of gen uine text; they are fund am entally non -communicative (since they were written essentially to present languagedata rather than to convey information). Often, of course, this is all tootrue, and the general quality of publish ed EFL dialogues and prose texts isa powerful arg um ent for the increased use of auth entic m aterials, w hatev erproblems this may entail. However, it is important not to lose sight of theprinciples involved. There is nothing wrong in itself with creating specialtexts for specific purposes, and illustrating language use is a purpose likeany other. People use deliberately simplified language when writing forchildren; when ada pting scientific articles for laym en; when creating adver-tising copy; when writing leading articles in the popular press. Why not,the n, when writin g for foreign learners? O f course, we m ust be careful ab ou tquality: the language found in older-style 'John and Mary' type dialogues,or in some elementary story-lines, is so far removed from natural Englishthat it does nobody any good. But this is an argument against bad scriptedmaterial, not against the use of scripted material in general.

In fact, it is obviously desirable to use both scripted and authenticmaterial at different points in a language course for different reasons.84 Michael Swan


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Scripted material is useful for presenting specific language items econ-omically and effectively: the course designer has total control over theinp ut, and can prov ide jus t the linguistic elemen ts and contex tual b ack-uphe or she wishes, no more and no less. Authentic material, on the otherhand, gives students a taste of 'real' language in use, and provides themwith valid linguistic data for their unconscious acquisition processes towork on. If stud ents are exposed only to scripted m aterial, they will learn animp overished version of the lang uag e, and will find it hard to come to termswith ge nuine discourse when they are exposed to it. If they are exposed onlyto authentic material, however, they are unlikely (in the time available forthe average language course) to meet all the high-frequency items theyneed to learn. And elementary students, faced with authentic material thatis not very carefully chosen, may find it so difficult that they get boggeddow n in a morass of unfamiliar lexis and idiom. E ddie W illiams, in a recentarticle, draws attention to 'the paradox that the use of authentic text withlearners often has an effect opposite to that intended; instead of helping thelearner to read for the meaning of the message, an authentic text at toodifficult a level of language forces the reader to focus upon the code'(Williams 1983).

The mother tongue Inforeign languagelearningAs far as the British version of the Communicative Approach is concerned,students might as well not have mother tongues. Meanings, uses, andcommunication skills are treated as if they have to be learnt from scratch.Syllabus design takes no account of the fact that students might alreadypossess some of the knowledge that is tabulated in a needs analysis.(Munby 's Communicative Syllabus Design, for instance (Munby 1978) makesno significant reference to the mother tongue at all.) Communicativemethodology stresses the English-only approach to presentation and prac-tice tha t is such a prom inent feature of the British EF L trad ition. (Perhapsbecause this has made it possible for us to teach English all over the worldwithout the disagreeable necessity of having to learn other languages?)

Th is is a peculiar s tate of affairs. It is a ma tter of comm on experience tha tthe mo ther tongue p lays an im portan t p art in learning a foreign language.Students are always translating into and out of their own languagesandteachers are always telling them not to. Interlanguages notoriously containerrors which are caused by interference from the mother tongue; it is notalways realized that a large proportion of the correct features in an inter-language also contain a mother tongue element. In fact, if we did not keepmaking correspondences between foreign language items and mothertongue items, we would never learn foreign languages at all. Imaginehaving to ask whether each new French car one saw was called 'voiture',instead of ust deciding that the foreign word was used in much the sameway as 'car' and acting accordingly. Imagine starting to learn Germanwithout being able to make any unconscious assumptions abou t the gram-marfor instance, that there are verbs and pronouns with similar mean-ings to our verbs and pronouns. When we set out to learn a new language,we automatically assume (until we have evidence to the contrary) thatmeanings and structures are going to be broadly similar to those in ourown language. The strategy does not always work, of coursethat is whylanguages are difficult to learnand it breaks down quite often withlanguages unrelated to our own. But on balance this kind of 'equivalenceass um ptio n' puts us ahead of the gam e; it makes it possible for us to learn aA critical look at the Communicative Approach (2) 85


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new languag e without at the same time retu rning to infancy and learnin g tocategorize the world all over again.If, then , the m other tong ue is a centra l eleme nt in the process of learnin ga foreign language, why is it so conspicuously absent from the theory andmethodology of the Communicative Approach? Why is so little attentionpaid, in this and other respects, to what learners already know? TheCommunicative Approach seems to have a two-stage approach to needsanalysis:1 find out what the learner needs to know;2 teach it.A more valid model, in my view, would have four stages:1 find out what the learner needs to know;2 find out what he or she knows already;3 subtract the second from the first;4 teach the remainder.Conclusion Teachers do not always appreciate how much new approaches owe tospeculation and theory, and how little they are based on proven facts. Weactually know hardly anything about how languages are learnt, and as aresult we are driven to rely, in our teaching, on a pre-scientific mixture ofspeculation, common sense, and the insights derived from experience. Likeeighteenth-century doctors, we work largely by hunch, concealing ourignorance under a screen of pseudo-science and jargon. Speculation, com-mon sense, and experience do not necessarily p rovide a bad basis to ope rateon, in the absence of anything better, and som ehow our students do ma nageto learn languages. However, the lack of a solid empirical 'anchor' ofestablished knowledge about language learning makes us very vulnerableto shifts in intellectual fashion. A novel piece of speculation can have aneffect out of all proportion to its value, especially since the purveyors of newdoctrines are rarely as humble or as tentative as the situation merits.

As the theoretical pendulu m swings from one extreme to the other, eachexaggeration is followed by its opposite. We realize that we have beentranslating too much, so translation is banned completely. Grammarexplanations are seen to have been over-valued, so grammar explanationsare sw ept away. G eneration A spends half its time doing struc ture d rills; forgeneration B, structure drills are anathema. Contrastive studies promisethe moon and the stars; when the moon and the stars are slow to arrive,contrastive studies disappear from syllabus design as if they had neverbeen. One approach fails to give sufficient importance to phonetics, ormodal verbs, or functions; the next approach does nothing but phonetics,teaches modal verbs for thirty minutes a day, or announces that functionsare more important than grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation puttogether. Argum ents for the current view are invariably highly speculative,extremely plausible, and advanced with tenacious conviction; if one looksback fifteen years, one can see that the argum ents for the previous a ppro ach(now totally discredited) were equally speculative, just as persuasive, andput forward with the same insistence that 'this time we've got it right'. Eachtime this happ ens , the poor language teacher is told to junk a large part ofhis or her rep ertoire of ma terials, activities, and metho ds (because these areno longer scientific) and to replace them by a gleaming new battery ofup-to-date app aratus a nd techniques. Th e students, as a rule, learn abo utas much as before.

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It is characteristic of the Communicative Approach to assess utterancesnot so muc h on the basis of their prepo sitional m eaning as in term s of theirpragmatic value. We should perhaps apply this criterion to the Commu-nicative Approach itself. As with a religion, it may be more sensible to ask,not 'Is it true ?', but 'W ha t good does it do?' This is not a difficult question toanswer. The Communicative Approach has directed our at tention to theimportance of other aspects of language besides prepositional meaning,and helped us to analyse and teach the language of interaction. At the sam etime, it has encouraged a methodology which relies less on mechanicalteacher-centered practice and more on the simulation of real-lifeexch ange s. All this is very valu able , and even if (as with religions) there is agood deal of confusion on th e the ore tica l side , it is difficult not to feel tha t weare teaching better than we used to. By and large, we have probably gainedmore than we have lost from the Communicative Approach.

In the same way, we shall probably benefit from the next languageteaching revolution, especially if we can keep our heads, recognize dogmafor what it is, and try out the new techniques without giving up useful oldermethods simply because they have been 'proved wrong'. (The characteris-tic sound of a new breakthro ugh in language teaching theory is a scream, asplash, and a strangled cry, as once again the baby is thrown out with thebathwater.) Above all, we must try not to expect too much. New insightscan certainly help us to teach more systematically and effectively, but it isprobably an illusion to expect any really striking progress in languageteaching until we know a great deal more a bout how foreign languages arelearnt. For the moment, talk of 'revolution' simply does the profession adisservice, raising hopes that cannot be fulfilled, and soliciting an invest-ment of time and money which is out of all proportion to the return whichcan realistically be expected from the new methods. (It is a shock to realizethat, after more than ten very expensive years of'comm unic ative' teaching,we cannot prove that a single student has a more effective command ofEnglish tha n if he or she had lea rnt the langu age by different m ethod stwenty years earlier. Our research depends to an uncomfortable degree onfaith.) Th e Co mm unicative Ap proa ch, whateve r its virtues, is not really inany sense a revo lution. In retrosp ect, it is likely to be seen as little more tha nan interesting ripple on the surface of twentieth-cen tury language teaching.Received June 1984

Note* poses. London: Modern English Publications.1 The examination leading to the Royal Society of Swan, M. 1985.'A critical look at the CommunicativeArts Diploma in TE FL . Approach (1). ' ELTJournal 39/1:2-12.Williams, E. 1983. 'Communicative reading' in K.Rsfarwnc** Johnson and D. Porter (eds.) . Perspectives in Commu-Brumfit, C. J. 1978. Review of D . A. Wilkins's Notional nicative Language Teaching. London: Academ ic Press.Syllabuses. ELT Journal X X X I I I / l : 7 9 - 2 .Candlin, E. F. 1968. Present Day English fo r ForeignStudents. Fourth edition. London: University of Th* authorLond on Press. Mich ael Swan was formerly Princ ipal of the Swa nJerome, J. K. 1900. Three M en on the Bummel. School of English, Oxford, and has taught English inO'Neill , R. 1977. 'T he limits of functional/notional Britain and Fran ce. For the last few years he hassyllabuses or "M y guin ea pig died with its legs worked full-time as a writer of EL T m ateria ls, and has

crossed" ' in S. Holden (ed.) English for Specific Pur- published several textbooks.

A critical look at the Communicative Approach (2 ) 87

Swan a Critical Look at the Communicative Approach 2

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