THE INABILITY OF LEARNERS TO FULLY ASSIMILATE MEANING WITHIN CONTEXTS OF LANGUAGE USE

Language teaching has in most parts of the history of ELT been nothing but focus
on exercises presenting language for practice in make-belief situations. But not many
people realize the folly of excessive focus on analytic or studial as opposed to
experiential learning. The weaknesses of excessive focus on analytical methods was
exposed as early as in 1904 by Jesperson in his text "How to teach a foreign language",
where he said that "we ought to learn a language through sensible communications"
(p.11). What Jesperson wanted was for teachers to move away from language practice
on random lists of disconnected sentences to discourse which is connected to thoughts
communicated. This 1904 exposure by Jesperson was too far ahead of its time and the
period of Practice, Practice, Practice went full steam ahead, for seventy five years,
until after Widdowson (1978) and Slager (1978) re-emphasized the need for "context"
and "longer, more natural discourse" as a basis for language teaching. What Widdowson
and Slager advocated was teaching which totally put a stop to, or paid minimal
emphasis on monotonous drills and endless repetitions. They revealed that our
textbooks are filled with exercises which have students do drills on disconnected sentences. A negative aspect of these exercises is that they are unnatural and contrived.
None of these utterances are rarely ever heard within the local and the native speaker
situation. A typical example of a short dialogue practicing forms and functions
associated to making polite requests within a textbook would have two people in limited
roles such as this:
Dialogue A
John : I'm going to have a cup of coffee.
Janet : Can you please get me a cup of coffee too. John : How much
sugar do you want in your coffee? Janet : I'll have two spoonfuls of sugar
John : Do you want any milk in your coffee? Janet : Yes
please. Just a little.
The above example is typical of dialogues in school textbooks, which basically
achieve what it sets out to do; which is confine dialogue practice to two person
interactions in an office, have the players roll out utterances without any of the
interferences that come with natural discourse and hope-fully let all these register in the
heads of learners after sessions of practice. Most teachers are unaware that "textbook
language" as in the example above put learners at a distinct disadvantage when they are
faced with interaction with native speakers. In most situations, especially at the
workplace, the language is dynamic. A close match to an office situation where natural
language would be used would be one such as this:
Dialogue B
John : I'm going down for a cup of coffee.
Janet : Please John, one for me.
John : White or Black?
Janet : White and two sugars please
Steven : (interrupting) Aaahem... I heard that. I thought you said you were on a diet.
Janet : But that new coffee downstairs is so bitter without sugar John : OK two
sugars Janet
Steven : Can I have a cup too. Black, and no sugar
John : I have only two hands Steven. Go get your own.
The difference between dialogue A and dialogue B is that B is longer and is closer
to natural conversation with interruptions, and all the other peripheral aspects of natural
discourse which include things like hesitations. Dialogue B is also closer to the type of
discourse that native speakers and near-native speakers engage in. If the objectives of a
language curriculum are geared at getting learners to master the language so that they
achieve at least near native speaker competencies or even close to that, then the language as represented in Dialogue B should be more common in ELT materials. But is
this possible with space constraints in ELT textbooks and course-books? Most probably
not. But there are ways to overcome this problem of space constraints and one way is to
not treat the textbook as the only source of material for teaching. Experts in materials
development now say that the core material for teaching (in most cases the textbook)
should cater for exercises that focus on language forms while peripheral material (like
audio CDs and CD-ROMs and videos) should focus on authentic materials with openended interactive communication. In this way both analytic and experiential aspects of
learning merge. Stern (1990:99) explains that an analytic approach is one in which the
language is the object of the study, and an experiential approach is one in which the
language is learned in communication. Allen et al. (1990:77) feel that these two types
of teaching may be complementary and would "provide essential support for one
another in the L2 classroom". An analytic focus in teaching decontextualizes linguistic
features to allow for isolation of the forms for analysis and practice. The forms under
study however should be recontextualized by means of experiential approaches.
Recontextualization can be achieved if teachers provide activities using language
which not only involves grammar but also the functional, organizational and
sociolinguistic aspects of the target language. One way recontextualization can be areality in classrooms would be by getting students to view scenes in videos and CDROMs where natural communication which incorporates the culture of the target
language is taking place, after they have had analytical exposure to the forms of the
language.