Applied Linguistics, Volum1 , Issue 1, 1980

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THEORETICAL BASES OF COMMUNICATIVE APPROACHES TO SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHING AND TESTING*

INTRODUCTION

MICHAEL CANALE and MERRILL SWAIN

The Ontano lnslltutefor Studies in Educatlo".

THE present position paper represents an initial stage in our broader research effort to determine the feasibility and practicality of measuring what we will call the 'communicative competence' of students enrolled in 'core' (similar to general) French as a second language programmes in elementary and secondary schools in Ontario. Thus in this paper we have chosen to examine currently accepted principles of 'communicative approaches' to second language pedagogy by determining the extent to which they are grounded in theories of language, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and other languagerelated disciplines. The examination of the theoretical bases -has led us to question some of the existing principles, and in tum to develop a somewhat modified set of principles which is consistent with a more comprehensive theoretical framework for the consideration of communicative competence. These principles serve as a set of guidelines in terms of which communicative approaches to second language teaching methodologies and assessment instruments may be organized and developed. Such a theoretical analysis is crucial if we are to establish a clear statement of the content and boundaries of communicative competence-one that will lead to more useful and effective second language teaching, and allow more valid and reliable measurement of second language communication skills.

The organization of this paper is as follows. First we will provide a general background to communicative approaches, distinguishing the notions of communicative competence and communicative performance. Then we will examine ·various theories of communicative competence that have been proposed, discussing the advantages and disadvantages of a communicative approach for general second language programmes. Next we will propose a theoretical framework for communicative competence and examine its

•we would like to express our gratitude to the Mirustry of Education, Ontario for its financial suppon of the research (French as a Second Language: Ontario Assessment Instrument Pool Project) reponed here. We also wish to thank Rosaria Giglio and Nancy Villarroel for their technical assistance in the preparation of this paper, as well as the following friends and colleagues for their valuable comments on an earlier draft: J. Patrick Allen, Andrew Cohen, Alan Davies, Claus Faerch, Bruce Fraser, Daina Green, Peter Groot, Birgit Harley, Randall Jones, Keith Morrow, John Oller, Jr., A. S. 'Buzz' Palmer, H. H. 'David' Stem, and Joel Walters. Of course we assume full responsibility for the views expressed here and all forms of error.

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2 A P P R O AC H E S TO SECO N D L A N G U AG E TEAC H I N G

implications for second language teaching and testing. Finally we will suggest some directions for research that bear either directly or indirectly on our own research goals.

1. B A C K G R O U N D

1.1. Grammatical and communicative approaches For our purposes it is useful to make a general distinction between gram

matical (or grammar-based) and communicative (or communication-based) approaches to second language teaching. In choosing these particular terms we hope to avoid the confusion that has resulted from use of the more inclusive terms 'formal' and 'functional' (cf. Stern 1978 for discussion). By a grammatical approach we mean one that is organized on the basis of linguistic, or what we will call grammatical forms (i.e. phonological forms, morphological forms, syntactic patterns, lexical items) and emphasizes the ways in which these forms may be combined to form grammatical sentences. Most teaching materials currently in use in general second language courses are organized along these lines: for example, the Lado English series and the series Le fran�ais international. A communicative (or functional/notional) approach on the other hand is organized on the basis of communicative functions (e.g. apologizing, describing, inviting, promising) that a given learner or group of learners needs to know and emphasizes the ways in which particular grammatical forms may be used to express these functions appropriately. Second language textbooks developed within this framework, such as the Challenges series (Abbs et al. 1978) and the series Communicate (Johnson and Morrow 1978), have begun to appear but are in general limited to English as a second language.

A third approach referred to quite o.ften in recent work on second language teaching is the situational syllabus (cf. Morrow 1977, Munby 1978, Wilkins 1976). This approach is organized primarily with reference to the particular settings (or situations) in which the learner may need to perform in the second language.• Ockenden's (1972) Situational dialogues is cited frequently as an example of teaching material developed from this perspective. While it is clear that the three approaches are logically distinct, in this paper situational syllabuses will simply be subsumed under either the grammatical or communicative approach. There are two reasons for this decision. First, as has been pointed out by Morrow (1977), grammatical syllabuses often present the grammatical forms under study in dialogues or contexts that are labelled 'situations'. However, to the extent that the basis of syllabus organization is the grammatical forms and not the situations themselves, the approach is essentially a grammatical one. Second, to the extent that the main reasons for including a given situation in a situational syllabus are to respond to the learner's sociocultural needs and to generate appropriate language, there seems to be sufficient overlap in objectives between situational approaches and communicative approaches to justify relaxing the distinction. The work of Johnson and Morrow (1978) illustrates this point quite clearly.

Other types of approaches are of course possible and have surfaced in second language research and materials (cf. Candlin 1977 and Cook 1978 for discussion). Again, although we think that these approaches are all logically distinct, we will not distinguish them here in view of the overlap of their main



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objectives and those of the grammatical or communicative approaches. The brief descriptions of grammatical and communicative approaches

provided above are intended to serve as general working definitions throughout the rest of this paper. Also, although it should be clear, it is important to note that the term 'approach' is used here to refer to principles of syllabus construction and not to actual classroom teaching materials and methods (cf. Wilkins 1978 for such a use of this term). More detailed descriptions of communicative approaches will be provided in Section 2.

1.2. Competence and performance The terms 'competence' and 'performance' are used frequently in dis

cussions of second language approaches. Since these terms are used differently by various researchers and signal important distinctions for the purposes of second language teaching and testing, it is worthwhile to discuss them in some depth.

Chomsky (1965) introduced the term 'competence' and 'performance' in modern linguistics through statements about the methodological necessity of studying language through idealized abstractions and ignoring what seem to be irrelevant details of language behaviour. As Campbell and Wales (1970) have pointed out, Chomsky (1965) uses these terms in both a weak sense and a strong sense. The weak sense of these terms is implied in the following passage:

We thus make a fundamental distinction between competence (the speakerhearer's knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations) . . . In actual fact, it [performance) obviously could not directly reflect competence. A record of natural speech will show numerous false starts, deviations from rules, changes of plan in mid-course, and so on (Chomsky 1965:4, his emphasis).

Thus competence refers to knowledge of grammar and of other aspects of language while performance refers to actual use. Campbell and Wales (1970) accept the methodological distinction between knowledge or ability and actual performance as an 'eminently honourable' one in any discipline. In fact, most linguists do seem to accept this weaker claim. A notable exception is Halliday (1970), who rejects it as either unnecessary (if the distinction refers merely to what we can describe in the grammar and what we cannot) or misleading if, for example, it restricts the data one considers. We agree with his implication (and with Chomsky's 1976 explicit statement) that theoretical assumptions as to what are and what are not relevant data in a given discipline can be dangerous and must not be accepted as dogma leading to the exclusion of other research lines.

Chomsky's (1965) stronger claim is that competence refers to the linguistic system (or grammar) that an ideal native speaker of a given language has internalized whereas performance mainly concerns the psychological factors that are involved in the perception and production of speech, e.g. perceptual parsing strategies, memory limitations, and the like. Given this perspective, a theory of competence is equivalent to a theory of grammar and is concerned with the linguistic rules that can generate and describe the grammatical (as opposed to ungrammatical) sentences of a language. A theory of performance, on the other hand, focusses on the acceptability of sentences in speech perception and production, and is a theory of the interaction between the theory



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of grammar and the set of nongrammatical psychological factors bearing on language use. Consider, for example, the sentences in (1).

(I) a. the was cheese green (ungrammatical) b. the cheese the rat the cat the dog saw chased ate was green (grammatical

but unacceptable) c. the dog saw the cat that chased the rat that ate the cheese that was green

(grammatical and acceptable)

According to our own intuitions, ( la) differs from both (1b) and ( lc) in terms of grammaticality but (1b) and (1c) differ with respect to acceptability: i.e. ( l b) is more difficult to interpret and produce than (lc).

Hymes (1972) and Campbell and Wales (1970) were among the first to point out that this stronger version of the competence-performance distinction provides no place for consideration of the appropriateness of sociocultural significance of an utterance in the situational and verbal context in which it is used. For Campbell and Wales (1970) 'by far the most important linguistic ability' is that of being able to 'produce or understand utterances which are not so much grammatical but, more important, appropriate to the context in which they are made' (p. 247, their emphasis). Hymes (1972) asserts somewhat less boldly that 'there are rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless' (p. 278). His point is illustrated clearly in his discussion of a (hypothetical) child who has the ability to understand and produce any of the grammatical sentences in a language. We quote:

Consider now a child with just that ability. A child who might produce any sentence whatever-such a child would be likely to be institutionalized: even more so if not only sentences, but also speech or silence was random, unpredictable (Hymes 1972:277).

He continues:

We have then to account for the fact that a normal child acquires knowledge of sentences, not only as grammatical, but also as appropriate. He or she acquires competence as to when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when, where, in what manner. In short, a child becomes able to accomplish a repertoire of speech acts, to take part in speech events, and to evaluate their accomplishment by others. This competence, moreover, is integral with attitudes, values, and motivations concerning language, its features and uses, and integral with competence for, and attitudes toward, the interrelation of language with the other code of communicative conduct [viz. social interactiOn] (Hymes 1 972:277-278).

In view of Chomsky's (1965) strong claim that competence is to be associated exclusively with knowledge of rules of grammar, both Hymes (1972) and Campbell and Wales (1970) propose a broader notion of competence, that of communicative competence. This notion is intended by them to include not only grammatical competence (or implicit and explicit knowledge of the rules of grammar) but also contextual or sociolinguistic competence (knowledge of the rules of language use). Furthermore, Hymes (1972) explicitly and Campbell and Wales (1970) implicitly adopt the distinction between communicative competence and performance, where this latter notion refers to actual use.



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However, there is some diversity of opinion in the literature as to (i) whether or not the notion 'communicative competence' includes that of 'grammatical competence' as one of its components and (ii) whether or not communicative competence should be distinguished from (communicative) performance.

As concerns (i), it is common to find the term 'communicative competence' used to refer exclusively to knowledge or capability relating to the rules of language use and the term 'grammatical (or linguistic) competence' used to refer to the rules of grammar. The terms are used in this manner by, for example, Allen (1978), Jakobovits (1970), Palmer (1978), Paulston (1974), and Widdowson (1971). It is equally common to find these terms used in the manner in which Hymes (1972) and Campbell and Wales (1970) use them; thus one finds them employed in this way by Connors et al. (1978), Cooper (1968), Morrow (1977), Munby (1978), and Savignon (1972), among others. Munby (1978) claims that the view that communicative competence includes grammatical competence is to be preferred to the view that it does not since the former view logically excludes two possible and misleading conclusions: first, that grammatical competence and communicative competence should be taught separately, or the former should be taught before the latter; and second, that grammatical competence is not an essential component of communicative competence. We find his first reason unconvincing since even if one adopts the position that communicative competence includes grammatical competence, it is still possible to maintain that the teaching of grammatical competence could be separate from or precede the teaching of sociolinguistic competence. Munby's second reason, however, is to us both convincing and important. Just as Hymes (1972) was able to say that there art: rules of grammar that would be useless without rules of language use, so we feel that there are rules of language use that would be useless without rules of grammar. For example, one may have an adequate level of sociolinguistic competence in Canadian French just from having developed such a competence in Canadian English; but without some minimal level of grammatical competence in French, it is unlikely that one could communicate effectively with a monolingual speaker of Canadian French (ignoring, with Clark 1972, the quite limited 'communication' that nonverbal means permit). Note that in adopting the view that grammatical competence is an essential component of communicative competence, we nonetheless agree with Widdowson (1978) that in normal conversation native speakers will focus more on language use than on grammar. We will return to this point in Section 2.3.

Let us tum now to (ii), the issue of whether or not communicative competence should be distinguished from (communicative) performance. It is fair to say that almost all researchers dealing with communicative competence do (at least implicitly) maintain this distinction. One exception, mentioned above, is Halliday (1970 and elsewhere). Another is Kempson (1977), who adopts Chomsky's (1965) strong position that competence refers exclusively to rules of grammar and identifies the notion of communicative competence with a theory of performance. This seems to be a common view among linguists working within the Chomskyan paradigm (cf. Dresher and Hornstein 1977, for example). Kempson reasons as follows:

A theory which characterises the regularities of language is a competence theory; a theory which characterises the interaction between that linguistic



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characterisation and all the other factors which determine the full gamut of regularities of communication is a theory of performance . . . A theory characterising a speaker's ability to use his language appropriately in context, a theory of communicative competence, is, simply a performance theory ( 1977:54-55).

She claims further that the strong version of the competence-performance distinction makes a difference of logical priority between the study of the language users' knowledge of their language, which she identifies as competence, and the study of the use of that knowledge, or performance in her terms. That is, the study of competence must logically precede the study of performance (cf. also Chomsky 1965 on this point). We do not question this claim so much as its interpretation given Kempson's identification of competence as grammatical competence and performance as communicative competence. We disagree with her exclusion of what we have called sociolinguistic competence from the study of competence; nor are we convinced that a description of grammatical competence must be logically prior to one of sociolinguistic competence, as her interpretation would imply. It seems entirely reasonable to assume, on the contrary, that there are rule-governed, universal, and creative aspects of sociolinguistic competence just as there are of grammatical competence. A position that ignores these properties of the knowledge of language use would be subject to criticism quite parallel to that levelled by Chomsky ( 1965) against traditional and structuralist linguistics. Our view, then, is that the study of sociolinguistic competence is as essential to the study of communicative competence as is the study of grammatical competence. It is reasonable to assume then that regularities in both the user's knowledge of grammar and knowledge of language use can be abstracted from their actual realization in performance and studied independently of nonessential or nonspecific (in Campbell and Wales' 1970 terminology) features of performance.

To summarize, we have so far adopted the term 'communicative competence' to refer to the relationship and interaction between grammatical competence, or knowledge of the rules of grammar, and sociolinguistic competence, or knowledge of the rules of language use. Communicative competence is to be distinguished from communicative performance, which is the realization of these competencies and their interaction in the actual production and comprehension of utterances (under general psychological constraints that are unique to performance). In Section 3.2 we will propose a third system of knowledge to be included in a theory of communicative competence.

We think it is important to maintain these basic definitions for second language teaching and testing purposes. For example, if a communicative approach to second language teaching is adopted, then principres of syllabus design must integrate aspects of both grammatical competence and sociolinguistic competence. Furthermore, teaching methodology and assessment instruments must be designed so as to address not only communicative competence but also communicative performance, i.e. the actual demonstration of this knowledge in real second language situations and for authentic communication purposes. It is also important to keep in mind that one cannot directly measure competence: only performance is observable. We will return to these points in more detail in Sections 3 and 4.

Several other points about these definitions should be kept in mind throughout the rest of this paper. Firsf, by adopting the position that communicative



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competence (minimally) includes both grammatical competence and sociolinguistic competence, we do not assume that communicative competence is the highest or broadest level of language competence that can be distinguished or that is relevant for second language teaching purposes. This point is not made clear in the majority of research studies on communicative competence, although the assumption that communication is the essential purpose of language is widespread (cf. Campbell and Wales 1970, Groot 1975, Habermas 1970, Munby 1978, Searle 1969, for example) and would seem to imply that communicative competence is the most inclusive language competence. This assumption will be discussed in Section 3; for the moment we wish only to point out that in this paper communicative competence will be viewed as a subcomponent of a more general language competence, and communicative performance viewed as one form of more general language performance.

Second, we have used the notion of competence-be it communicative, grammatical, or whatever-to refer to underlying knowledge in a given sphere. Hymes (1972) reasons that this notion should refer not only to tacit knowledge but also to ability for use. He states:

Certainly it may be the case that individuals differ with regard to ability to use knowledge . . . : to interpret, differentiate, etc. The specification of ability for use as part of competence allows for the role of noncognitive factors, such as motivation, as partly determining competence. In speaking of competence, it is especially important not to separate cognitive from affective and volitive factors, so far as the impact of theory on educational practice is concerned . . . (Hymes 1972:283, his emphasis).

It seems reasonable to characterize communicative performance as including factors such as volition, motivation, and pathology (organic or functional) that may influence the range of choices of action one has in a given domain. However, we hesitate to incorporate the notion of ability for use into our definition of communicative competence for two main reasons: (i) to our knowledge this notion has not been pursued rigorously in any research on communicative competence (or considered directly relevant in such research), and (ii) we doubt that there is any theory of human action that can adequately explicate 'ability for use' and support principles of syllabus design intended to reflect this notion (cf. Chomsky 1975 for relevant discussion). There is also the fear that by introducing the notion of ability for use as an essential component of communicative competence, one allows the logical possibility of language users having 'linguistic deficits' (or 'communicative deficits'), i.e. inadequate language competence resulting in social class and power differences (cf. the early work of Bernstein-for example, Bernstein 1965-for a discussion of this view). This latter view has been criticized on sociolinguistic grounds by Dittmar (1976), and raises political and philosophical problems similar to those discussed by Bracken (1973). It is thus not clear to us that inclusion of ability for use in our definition of communicative competence would have any practical applications for communicative syllabus design or that it is worth dealing in our research with the issues regarding the notion of 'linguistic deficit' that this inclusion would provoke.

A third aspect of our basic definitions of communicative competence and communicative performance concerns the place of general psycholinguistic



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factors (e.g. memory, perceptual strategies). We have assumed that these factors are nonspecific to communicative competence and should thus be treated as aspects of communicative performance, as suggested by Campbell and Wales (1970). Other researchers have suggested that such factors should be included in the notion of communicative competence (e.g. Hymes 1972, Jakobovits 1970). Our only reason for omitting these factors from our basic notion of communicative competence is that they are normally thought of as general psychological constraints on, among other things, the actual production and comprehension of sentences (cf. Bever 1970 for discussion of this point), and we can find no compelling reason for including them in a model of communicative competence. Of course, these factors may still be relevant to communicative syllabus design: for example, as concerns the sequencing of grammatical structures.

Finally, it should be emphasized that although we consider that the study of communicative competence should focus minimally on the relationships and interaction between regularities in grammatical competence and regularities in sociolinguistic competence (as noted by Munby 1978 and discussed above), we also feel that certain aspects of each type of competence can be investigated on their own merit. Thus just as there are regularities in a user's knowledge of language use that can be studied independently from grammar itself (e.g. the appropriateness of a speaker's intended meaning in a given sociolinguistic context, regardless of how this meaning is expressed verbally), so there are regularities in a user's knowledge of grammar that can be studied independently from sociolinguistic context (e.g. formal and substantive linguistic universals as discussed by Chomsky 1965). This point tends to be ignored in most research on communicative competence. We mention it since we feel that a theory of communicative competence will only be as strong as the individual theories of competence (grammatical, sociolinguistic, or other) on which it is based.

2. SOME THEORIES OF COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

Our discussion up to this point has been quite general. However, in order to arrive at a theory of communicative competence that is suitable for our research purposes, it is useful to consider in some detail some of the theories of communicative competence that have been proposed. There are many different ways in which these theories can be classified and presented; we have chosen to begin with what we consider to be theories of basic communication skills and work up to more comprehensive and integrated theories. It should be made clear that our classification of the different theories to be considered is based solely on the emphasis which each puts on grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, other areas of competence, and their components; there are few models of communicative competence that neglect important aspects of communication completely. In this section then we will present several representative theories and examine their aims, theoretical bases, and some empirical data bearing on each, where available. We will also discuss some advantages and disadvantages of these theories with reference to second language approaches for general programmes.



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2.1. Theories of basic communication skills Theories of basic communication skills, more so than the other types of

communicative theories we will examine, seem to be designed with general second language programmes in mind. A theory of basic communication skills can be characterized as one that emphasizes the minimum level of (mainly oral) communication skills needed to get along in, or cope with, the most common second language situations the learner is likely to face. Thus Savignon (1972) is concerned mainly with the skills that are needed to get one's meaning across, to do things in the second language, to say what one really wants to say. Schulz (1977) expresses a similar concern. VanEk (1976) states as the general objective for the 'threshold level' for general second language programmes that 'the learners will be able to survive (linguistically speaking) in temporary contacts with foreign language speakers in everyday situations, whether as visitors to the foreign country or with visitors to their own country, and to establish and maintain social contacts' (pp. 24-25). Much of the research on basic communication skills tends to put less emphasis on other aspects of communicative competence such as knowledge of the appropriateness of utterances with respect to sociocultural context (e.g. Rivers 1973, Schulz 1977, and some of the early research discussed by Paulston 1974) or knowledge of discourse (e.g. Savignon 1972, Van Ek 1976). Furthermore, some of the communicative approaches based on this work do not emphasize grammatical accuracy (e.g. Palmer 1978, Savignon 1972).

It is not always clear just what skills are included in theories of basic communication skills. For example, Savignon (1972) makes explicit reference only to grammatical skills (e.g. pronunciation, vocabulary), communicative tasks with respect to particular communicative functions (e.g. greeting, leavetaking, information-getting, information-giving), and other factors such as willingness to express oneself in the second language, resourcefulness in making use of limited grammatical skills, and knowledge of kinesic and paralinguistic aspects of the second language (e.g. facial expressions, gestures). The criteria she adopts for evaluating the communicative performance of her students include effort to communicate, amount of communication, comprehensibility and suitability, naturalness and poise in keeping a verbal interaction in hand, and accuracy (semantic) of information. However, she provides no description or specification of the grammatical and other skills required in, say, information-getting, nor is there any empirical justification of the criteria for evaluation.

Van Ek (1976) provides perhaps the clearest statement of basic communication skills that we have come across. His model emphasizes 'language functions' (or communicative functions) and 'notions', and considers only in second place what language forms must be known to give expression to these functions and notions. He supplies lists of general language functions (e.g. imparting and seeking factual information, getting things done by someone, socializing), specific language functions (e.g. under the general heading 'imparting and seeking factual information' are included identifying, reporting, correcting, and asking), general notions (e.g. existential, spatial, temporal), specific notions (e.g. names, addresses, likes and dislikes), topic areas (e.g. personal identification, house and home, travel, food and drink), settings (e.g. home, school), and roles (e.g. stranger, friend). All of these factors are



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involved in determining the particular inventories of vocabulary, structures, and grammatical categories that he proposes. But in spite of these specifications, there are serious gaps in the description of certain skills. For example, there is no description of any rules of language use bearing on appropriateness of utterances, even though factors such as role, topic, setting, notion, and function are considered in the model.

As concerns the theoretical bases of theories of basic communication skills, we think it is important to consider two principles: (i) that these theories can be said to specify a minimum level of communication skills and

. (ii) that more

effective second language learning takes place if emphasis is put from the beginning on getting one's meaning across, and not on the grammaticalness and appropriateness of one's utterances.

<i:onsider (i). There is no clear sense in which any theory of language that we are familiar with specifies what minimum level of skills is ne�essary to communicate in a given language. Notions of a minimum level based on language varieties such as pidgins and creoles (cf. Bickerton 1975, Hymes 1971, for example) are of no clear relevance, since these language varieties are generally not mutually comprehensible with the superordinate and subordinate languages they are based on. Furthermore, the notion of a minimum or threshold level as used by Van Ek (1976), for example, is in no way clearly related to the notion of a threshold level as it is understood by psycholinguists such as Cummins (1979). In this latter's work it is suggested that there may be threshold levels in the native language that the learner of a second language must attain in order to avoid cognitive disadvantages, and that must be attained in the second language to allow the potentially beneficial aspects of bilingualism on cognitive development and educational achievement to develop. Cummins (1979) mentions no attempts to characterize the psycholinguistic notion of threshold level in the manner in which VanEk (1976) characterizes the communicative notion, and it is not clear whether a description of the former notion would be more or less comprehensive than the latter or in what ways the two descriptions would overlap. It would certainly be worthwhile to investigate the notion of threshold level that Cummins proposes in more detail before deciding whether or not to adopt certain aspects or all of Van Ek's model. For example, a close examination of the communicative competence of the immersion students discussed by Swain (1978) might be carried out with reference to VanEk's model. Such an examination might be especially relevant and instructive since the immersion studies described by Swain (1975, 1978) are cited by Cummins (1979) as evidence for the positive effects that bilingualism can have on cognitive functioning and academic achievement.

Consider now (ii), the view that more effective second language learning takes place if emphasis is placed immediately on getting one's meaning across rather than on the grammaticalness and appropriateness of one's utterances. With respect to emphasis on meaning over grammaticalness, it is quite reasonable to assume that since in acquiring a first language the child seems to focus more on being understood than on speaking grammatically, then second language acquisition might be allowed ·to proceed in this manner. furthermore, since in first language acquisition most parents and peers seem to be more interested in finding out what a child has to say than in how he/ she says it, then the second language teacher might assume a similar role to provide a



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more natural context for second language learning. However, although both neurological (e.g. Lenneberg 1967, Penfield and Roberts 1959) and cognitive (e.g. Piaget 1954) theories suggest that similarities might be expected to exist in acquiring first and second languages in childhood, the onset of lateralization (Scovel 1978) and of formal operations (Krashen in press, Rosansky 1975) in early adolescence significantly affects the means by which new language data are processed and stored. Effective teaching of a second language should take this into account by modifying the presentation of the material to suit the dominant processing mechanisms of the learner.

Thus although the view that second language teaching should mirror parental 'teaching' of the first language may be appropriate with respect to young learners of a second language, we hesitate to endorse it in relation to adolescent and adult learners for several reasons. First, although it is clear that certain learner errors are the same in first and second language acquisition (cf. Dulay and Burt 1974, for example), others are clearly not-for example, interlanguage transfer (cf. Canale, Mougeon, and Beniak 1978, Schachter and Rutherford 1979, for example). Thus not all the grammatical inaccuracies a second language learner makes are necessarily those that a native speaker of the second language is likely to overlook, either because the latter does not expect them or finds it otherwise difficult to process them for meaning. Second, it is 110t _clear that adolescent and adult second language learners themselves are prepared or willing ai: the early stages to put emphasis exclusively on getting their meaning across. Davies (1978) summarizes a number of studies of adolescent and adult second language learners that suggest that receptive skills should be emphasized at the early stages of introductory classes but that production skills should not. Savignon (1972) found that college students in her experimental class in which emphasis was put on getting one's meaning across rather than on grammaticality, showed a significant drop in integrative motivation (i.e. the desire to think and act like a native speaker of French) when compared with groups of students in which emphasis was not put on getting one's meaning across. She comments that 'it may be hypothesized that the initial difficulty as well as shock experienced by some in being asked to perform like native Frenchmen was responsible for the decrease in integrative orientation' (Savignon 1972:60). Third, it is not clear that second language learners will develop grammatical accuracy in the course of their second language programme if emphasis is not put on this aspect from the start. It may be that certain grammatical inaccuracies will tend to 'fossilize'i.e. persist over time in spite of further language training-more when grammatical accuracy is not emphasized at the beginning, resulting in a more or less permanent classroom 'interlanguage', i.e. a language system that may satisfy basic communicative needs in the classroom but does not correspond entirely to the language systems used by native speakers of the second language (cf. Selinker 1974, Selinker, Swain, and Dumas 1975, and Swain 1974, for discussion of these notions). There are no data from later stages of study available on the groups Savignon (1972) examined, but there are some data from studies of primary immersion programmes suggesting that even with young children, grammatical accuracy in tlie oral mode does not improve much after a certain stage, perhaps when the learners have reached a level of grammatical accuracy adequate to serve their communicative needs which, importantly, do



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not typically include interaction with native French speaking peers (cf. Harley and Swain 1978).

As to the other aspects of (ii), that is that emphasis should be put on getting one's meaning across rather than on the sociocultural appropriateness of utterances, two comments seem relevant. First, it may well be the case that there are more or less universal conditions of appropriateness that hold for the common communicative functions that a second language learner in the early stages of a programme is likely to be concerned with (cf. Widdowson 1975 on this point). For example, it is reasonable to assume that the appropriateness conditions for giving a command in any language include the speaker's belief that the hearer has the ability and right to see that the command is carried out, that the speaker has the right to give a command to the hearer, and so forth. Of course, certain aspects of the appropriateness conditions for a given communicative function will not be universal; our point, however, is that second language learners may already have acquired an adequate knowledge of appropriateness conditions for their basic communicative needs in the second language just by having acquired such knowledge for communicative needs in the first language.

Second, it is not clear that native speakers of the second language expect second language learners at the early stages of a programme (or even at later stages) to have mastered sociocultural rules bearing ·on appropriateness. Perhaps of relevance here are B. J. Carroll's (1978) tentative findings suggesting that native speakers of a language are more tolerant of second language learners' 'stylistic failures' (e.g. not understanding stylistic features or not using appropriate language-d. Munby 1978:92) than of their grammatical inaccuracies. However, it is also not clear how widely native speakers vary in their tolerance of sociocultural failures, what sociocultural contexts can be associated with different levels of tolerance, and so forth. Nor is it clear whether tolerance of grammatical inaccuracies that do not interfere too much with meaning is higher or lower than tolerance of sociocultural failures. Answers to such questions are important if second language learners' and teachers' expectations of tolerance to grammatical and sociocultural inaccuracies are to correspond to actual levels of tolerance shown by different groups of native speakers of the second language. We will return to these points in Section 3.

There are some empirical data from the field of language testing bearing on theories of basic communication skills. We think it is instructive to consider those data that concern the extent to which grammatical competence is acquired in second language courses organized on the basis of these theories and the extent to which communicative competence is acquired in courses organized on the basis of theories of grammatical competence.

Although it is a frequently expressed opinion that grammatical competence is not a good predictor of communicative competence (cf. Upshur 1969, for example), one of the first empirical studies dealing with this question in a rigorous manner is that of Savignon (1972). She studied the communicative skills and grammatical skills of three groups of college students enrolled in an introductory audiolingual French course in the United States. All three groups received the same number of hours of instruction in the standard (formal and grammatical) programme, but one group had an additional class-hour per week devoted to communicative tasks (where the emphasis was mainly on



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getting one's meaning across), the second group devoted an additional hour to a 'culture lab' programme, and the third spent an additional hour in a language laboratory programme. We will refer to these as the communicative competence (CC) group, the culture group, and the grammatical competence group respectively. She found that although there were no significant differences among groups on tests of grammatical competence, the CC group scored significantly higher than the other two groups on four communicative tests she developed. The first test was a discussion in French between a student and a native speaker of French on one of three topics, the second an information-getting interview in which the student had to find out as much information as possible about the native speaker by asking him questions, the third a reporting task in which the student had to discuss a given topic first in English, then in French, and the fourth a description task in which the student had to describe an ongoing activity. The criteria of evaluation for these tests have been mentioned above (p. 9). The total testing time for each student was thirty minutes. She claims that 'the most significant findings of this study point to the value of training in communicative skills from the very beginning of the [foreign language] program' (Savignon 1972:9).

Another study reporting that grammatical competence is not a good predictor of communicative skills is discussed by Tucker (1974). He and several students conducted an experiment in both Cairo and Beirut. Two groups of subjects were selected: one group had scored very high (95th percentile) in English language proficiency as demonstrated on the Michigan Test of English Language Performance and the Test of English as a Foreign Language, and the other group had scored much lower (60th percentile) on these tests. In one of the communicative tests given to these subjects, the testee was asked to describe an object or picture so that a listener on the other side of an opaque screen could identify the object or picture from among an array of such items before him. On three of four such communicative tests, no significant difference was found between the performance of these groups of subjects. That is, 'the individuals who were relatively low in their measured proficiency in English (i.e. their ability to manipulate grammatical transformations and so on) were able to communicate as effectively and as rapidly in English as were the individuals of high measured proficiency in English' (Tucker 1974:219).

Similar findings are reported by Upshur and Palmer (1974). In their study, the measured linguistic accuracy of Thai students who had learned English through formal classroom training was not found to be a reliable predictor of their measured communicative abilities.

It seems that an appropriate conclusion to draw from these three studies is that focus on grammatical competence in the classroom is not a sufficient condition for the development of communicative competence. It would be inappropriate, however, to conclude from these studies that the development of grammatical competence is irrelevant to or unnecessary for the development of communicative competence (given that all the subjects in each study did have grammatical training).

Savignon's (1972) reported finding that the CC group did just as well on the grammatical tests as the other two groups suggests that attention to basic communication skills does not interfere in the development of grammatical skills. Two other studies dealing with language testing data are relevant to this



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finding. Schulz (1977) reports on a study of two groups of students of introductory French differing in that one group was given only communicative tests (developed by her) and the other given only grammatical tests. She found that the former group did no better than the latter group on overall communicative post-tests and performed at a significantly lower level on overall grammatical post-tests. Thus her findings suggest that a communicative approach that is implemented in the classroom through a testing programme but not through teaching or syllabus design is no more effective than a grammatical approach in developing grammatical skills. Palmer ( 1978) studied two groups of students of English who differed in that one group's classroom materials were modified to communication tasks while the other group's materials were kept standard (e.g. dialogues, grammar exercises, listening comprehension exercises). He found that the first group scored significantly lower than the second group on one of the grammatical tests (viz. a pronunciation test) but performed at the same level as the second group did on all other grammatical tests and on all communicative tests administered. He is careful to point out, however, that the teaching objectives for both groups of students dealt with language use skills, that the communicative tasks did not involve language use for personal or realistic needs, and that the students in the standard programme were involved in quite a bit of conversation in English with the instructor (the author) outside the classroom. Thus it is not clear that the two groups differed in any substantive sense with respect to the amount of attention devoted to the development of communicative competence. It would therefore be inappropriate to interpret Palmer's findings as evidence that attention to basic communication skills interferes in the development of grammatical skills, or for that matter, that using communicative materials in the classroom does not enhance communicative skills.

Many of the points discussed in this section will be examined further in Section 3. However, it may be helpful to summarize certain aspects of our view of theories of basic communication skills at this point.

First, there seem to be no strong theoretical reasons for emphasizing getting one's meaning across over grammatical accuracy at the early stages of second language learning. In fact there seem to be a number of reasons for not doing so, as we pointed out. These findings must not be taken to mean that grammatical accuracy should be emphasized over getting one's meaning across, however. There is evidence against this view from a number of sources (aside from the well-known and warranted frustration on the part of students and teachers as concerns strictly grammatical approaches). Oller and Obrecht ( 1968) found that the effectiveness of pattern drills is significantly increased when the language in the drill is related to communication. Their conclusion is that from the very beginning of a second language programme, aspects of grammatical competence should be taught in the context of meaningful communication. Oller and Obrecht (1969) report a similar finding in another study. Thus some combination of emphasis on grammatical accuracy and emphasis on meaningful communication from the very start of second language study is suggested. It must be noted that there is certainly no reason to focus on all aspects of grammar before emphasis is put on communication, nor does there seem to be a reason to focus on aspects of grammar that are not immediately related to the learner's second language communication needs at



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a given stage of instruction (cf. Belasco 1965 on this point). Second, there appears to be some reason to emphasize getting one's meaning

across (or communicating) over explicit concerns about appropriateness at the early stages of second language study. The primary motivation for this view is the assumption that the appropriateness conditions that hold for the most common communicative functions differ little from language to language in certain fundamental respects. This is certainly a conservative and reasonable assumption, one that would have to be confronted with falsifying evidence before a more complicated hypothesis was advanced. Certainly these appropriateness conditions may be considered to be more universal than certain aspects of grammatical competence that are crucial to the verbal expression of meaning (e.g. vocabulary), and which may be quite arbitrary from one language to another. Of course many questions bearing on this view (such as the ones raised above concerning tolerance of errors in language use) remain to be studied. But it seems quite reasonable, in our opinion, to hold off on explicit emphasis on sociocultural aspects of language use at the early stages of second language study in general programmes. Instead, one might begin with a combination of emphasis on grammatical accuracy and on meaningful communication, where such communication is generally organized

''according to

the basic communication needs of the learner and the communicative functions and social· contexts that require the least knowledge of idiosyncratic appropriateness conditions in the second language.

Finally, it would seem that unless a (basic, at least) communicative approach is adopted for the classroom, there is little reason to expect that students will acquire even basic communication skills· in a second language. Grammatical approaches that incorporate only a communication-based testing component (e.g. Schulz 1977) or communicative tasks where no personal or realistic communication takes place (e.g. Palmer 1978), would seem to be no more (or less) effective than an unmodified grammatical approach for developing communicative competence; and in fact, they may be less effective than an unmodified grammatical approach in developing grammatical competence (e.g. Schulz 1977). However, basic communicative approaches such as the one adopted by Savignon (1972) would seem to be just as effective as grammatical approaches in developing grammatical competence and more effective than grammatical approaches in developing communicative competence.

2.2. Sociolinguistic perspectives on communicative competence Research on communicative competence from sociolinguistic perspectives

has been of a more theoretical and analytic nature than work on basic communication skills. Although there have perhaps been few direct applications of this research to general second language programmes (cf., however, Kettering 1974, Paulston and Bruder 1976, Paulston and Selekman 1976), the work of Halliday and Hymes in particular has inspired many of the communicative approaches that have been proposed. It is worthwhile then to examine some of the assumptions and components of their tlteories of language in its social context.

Two aspects of Hymes' research are of particular interest: his theory of communicative competence, and his analysis of the ethnography of speaking.

As noted in Section 1.2, Hymes (1972) has rejected the strong version of



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competence for language that Chomsky (1965) adopted-where this competence is equivalent to grammatical competence-and proposed a theory of competence that includes the language user's knowledge of (and ability for use of) rules of language use in context. The actual theory of communicative competence that he suggests is comprised of knowledge (and abilities) of four types:

I . Whether (and to what degree) something is formally possible; 2. Whether (and to what degree) something is feasible in virtue of the means of

implementation available; 3. Whether (and to what degree) something is appropriate (adequate, happy,

successful) in relation to a context in which it is used and evaluated; 4. Whether (and to what degree) something is in fact done, actually performed,

and what its doing entails (Hymes 1972:281 , his emphasis).

Communicative competence is thus viewed by Hymes as the interaction of grammatical (what is formally possible), psycholinguistic (what is feasible in terms of human information processing), sociocultural (what is the social meaning or value of a given utterance), and probabilistic (what actually occurs) systems of competence. Thus a given utterance may be, for example, ungrammatical with respect to a particular grammar (e.g. the was cheese green with respect to Standard Canadian English), unacceptable or awkward in terms of a particular perceptual strategy (e.g. the cheese the rat the cat the dog saw chased ate was green with reference to a perceptual constraint on processing multiple centre-embedded clauses), inappropriate in a particular social context (e.g. saying good-bye in greeting someone), or rare in a particular community or situation (e.g. saying may god be with you instead of good-bye, bye-bye, or the like in ending a routine telephone conversation). In Section 1.2 we expressed the opinion that it is not necessary to include psycholinguistic competence in one's model of communicative competence; we will maintain this opinion, although there seems to be little at stake on this point for second language teaching since perceptual strategies, memory constraints, and the like would seem to impose themselves in a natural and universal manner rather than require conscious learning on the part of a student. However, the inclusion of probabilistic rules of occurrence in Hymes' model seems to be an important aspect of language use that is ignored in almost all other models of communicative competence (however, Widdowson 1978 mentions this factor). Knowledge of what a native speaker is likely to say in a given context is to us a crucial component of second language learners' competence to understand second language communication and to express themselves in a native-like way (cf. Morrow 1977 and Oller 1979 for related discussion). We will return to this aspect of Hymes' model in Section 3.2 . 2

Hymes has spearheaded most of the recent work that is devoted to the description of sociocultural competence, i.e. the basis for judgments as to the appropriateness of a given utterance in a particular social context. He has proposed the term 'ethnography of speaking' (Hymes 1964, 1967, 1968), to refer to the system of factors and rules that make up the structure of speaking or communication in a group and that are the basis for the social meaning of any utterance. We will be concerned here primarily with the components of speech events.



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Hymes (1967) employs the notion of speech event to refer to activities or aspects of activities that are governed directly by rules of language use. For example, a speech event such as a private conversation would have rules of use associated with it that differed from those associated with a church sermon. A major aspect of the ethnography of speaking is the analysis of speech events in terms of their constitutive components. These are: participants (e.g. speaker and hearer, sender and receiver), setting (i.e. physical time and place), scene (i.e. psychological or cultural setting), the actual form of a message (i.e. a linguistic description of the message), topic (i.e. what the message is about), purpose (i.e. goal, intention), key (e.g. serious, mock), channel (e.g. oral, written), code (i.e. language or variety within a language), norms of interaction (e.g. loudness of voice, when and how to interrupt, physical distance between participants), norms of interpretation (i.e. how different norms of interaction or violations of them are interpreted), and genre (e.g. casual speech, poem, prayer, form letter).

According to Hymes, these components of speech events are crucial to the formulation of rules of language use and to the analysis of the social meaning of utterances. Although some progress toward these ends has been made within Hymes' framework (cf. in particular Ervin-Tripp 1972, Hymes 1967, and references cited in both articles), many of the basic issues remain to be clarified. For instance, it is not clear that all of these components are always crucial in all speech events (as pointed out by Hymes 1967). Allen and Widdowson (1975) point out that 'utterances can take on an enormously wide range of meanings in different contexts' and that 'not only is there a difficulty in establishing how many contexts to consider when specifying the range of appropriateness of an utterance, but there is the problem of knowing how much of ti1e context is relevant' (p. 88, their emphasis). Hymes (1967) suggests that hierarchies of precedence among components may emerge but notes that it is not clear that any ranking of components can yet be established. Walters (1978) reviews a variety of research studies showing that contextual factors such as setting, topic, and the sex, age, and race of the participants are the most salient in their effect on variation in requests, but there is much less research on variation in the expression of other communicative functions. Van der Geest (1978) reports on a communication analysis system that takes into consideration such factors as situation variables, role variables, communication variables, and syntactic variables; he stresses, however, that only a relatively small part of communication is able to be handled within this system. Furthermore, it is not clear how rules of language use should be expressed formally (though see the work and suggestions of Ervin-Tripp 1972 and Hymes 1 972). It is quite reasonable to conclude with Hymes (1�67), Morrow (1977), Stratton (1977), Walters (1978), and Widdowson ( 1975), among others, that relatively little is known about how social context and grammatical forms interact. Nonetheless, we find the notion of sociolinguistic competence to be a crucial one in a theory of communicative competence and particularly deserving of research with respect to second language teaching and testing. More detailed directions for research in this area will be pointed out in Section 4.

Consider now the work of Halliday on sociosemantic aspects of language and language use. One of the most significant aspects of his research has been



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the development of a 'meaning potential' approach to language, primarily at the clause level rather than at the discourse level (cf. , however, Halliday and Hasan 1 976). Halliday ( 1 973, 1 978) views language essentially as a system of meaning potential, i.e. as sets of semantic options available to the language user that relate what the user can do (in terms of social behaviour) to what the user can say (in terms of the grammar). The process involved in language production is one in which a social system determines sets of behavioural options (what speakers can do) which are realized as sets of semantic options (what they can mean, or the meaning potential) which in turn are realized as sets of grammatical options (what they can say). Halliday (1973, 1978) has suggested that his approach to linguistic interaction is not unlike that advocated by Hymes ( 1972, for example), where the notion of a socially constrained meaning potential is similar to Hymes' notion of communicative competence. 3

We find it reasonable to distinguish the three levels of options in Halliday's model; however, there are some points to consider with respect to the direction of influence from level to level. As concerns the claim that grammatical options are the (direct) realization of semantic options, there is little ground for disagreement. It is one of the axioms of modem linguistics that any hunan language can express any meaning in some way. To our knowledge there is no convincing evidence for the alternative views that semantic options are determined by grammatical options or that certain meanings are inexpressible (as opposed to not normally expressed) given the grammars of certain languages.

Munby ( 1978) has taken the significance of this claim for pedagogical purposes to be the theoretical support it gives to programme designers, materials and test developers, and teachers to approach the development of grammatical competence from the standpoint of meaning, from the very beginning. We agree that meaningful communication should be emphasized as a means of facilitating the acquisition of grammatical competence from the beginning, but nonetheless maintain that meaningful (verbal) communication is not possible without some knowledge of grammar. It may be more realistic to view the normal process at the beginning of such learning as one in which what can be said (grammatical options) determines in some what can be meant (semantic options) in the second language. That is, the meanings (and perhaps some of the social behaviour options) that one is able to exploit through the second language are restricted by the grammatical means of expression that have been mastered. Given this latter perspective on second language learning, it is not surprising to find that many of the students in Savignon's (1972) communicative competence class-where emphasis was put on getting one's meaning across-emphasized their difficulties in thinking of the right vocabulary and structures on her tests of communicative competence. Nonetheless, it is quite possible that at later stages of second language learning, in particular after a good basic command of grammar has been acquired, grammatical options are more of a direct realization of semantic options rather than the reverse. It is possible that one way to facilitate and perhaps speed up the onset of this normal interaction between semantic options and grammatical options is to try to base the specification of the grammatical options to be learned on the particular communicative needs of the learner. This possibility is suggested by the plausible assumption that there is a close



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relationship between the learner's communicative needs and those semantic options (and social behaviour options) that he/she is most likely to express.

Let us turn now to Halliday's claim that semantic options are the realization of social behaviour options. This view seems to be reductionist in at least two ways. First, it is obvious that semantic options are constrained by certain aspects of human cognition. Halliday would certainly admit this point but has maintained (e.g. in Halliday 1978) that his orientation and goals in linguistics are socially, not psychologically oriented. Second, we see no compelling reason to give primacy to social behaviour options over semantic options in characterizing what one can mean in a language. We would certainly not agree that one is limited to expressing semantically only what social conventions, for example, allow; one may choose to violate or ignore such conventions. In fact until it is shown that there are any strong social limits on what one may choose to mean, Halliday's position would not seem to differ substantively from the opposite position, namely that meaning options determine social options. Furthermore, language can be used with little or no reference to social context in many different ways: for example, in honest self-expression, in organizing one's ideas, and in creative uses of language (cf. Chomsky 1975 for related discussion). It is not clear why, then, semantic options must be viewed exclusively as the realizations of social behaviour options. Halliday himself has made this point:

We would not be able to construct a sociosemantic network for highly intellectual abstract discourse, and in general the more self-sufficient the language (the more it creates its own setting . . . ) the less we should be able to say about it in these broadly sociological, or social, terms (Halliday 1 973, cited in Munby' 1 978: 14).

It seems clear that a theory of natura1 language semantics must make reference to social behaviour options if it is to be of relevance to a theory of communicative competence; but such social options do not seem sufficient to account for the sets of intentions or other semantic options available to the language user.

In summary, the sociolinguistic work of both Halliday and Hymes is important to the development of a communicative approach in that they have been concerned with the interaction of social context, grammar, and meaning (more precisely, social meaning). We find that there is still little known about rules of language use and about the manner in which and extent to which semantic aspects of utterances are determined (and grammatical forms selected) on the basis of social context. Nonetheless, work in these areas is crucial to the statement of specifications, objectives, and evaluation criteria within a communicative approach.

2.3. Integrative theories of communicative competence The theories of communicative competence that we have examined to this

point have focussed mainly either on the minimum (oral) communication skills needed to cope in a second language situation (e.g. Savignon 1972, Van Ek 1976) or on the interrelation between language and social context (e.g. Halliday 1973, Hymes 1967). These theories cannot be considered to be integrative in that they devote relatively little attention to how individual utterances may be linked at the level of discourse and do not provide an integration



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o f the different components o f communicative competence. I r. our view, an integrative theory of communicative competence may be regarded as one in which there is a synthesis of knowledge of basic grammatical principles, knowledge of how language is used in social contexts to perform communicative functions, and knowledge of how utterances and communicative functions can be combined according to the principles of discourse. Such theories are discussed in the work of, for example, Allen (1978), Allen and Widdowson (1975), Candlin (1978), Morrow (1977), Munby (1978), Stern (1978), Widdowson (1975, 1978), and Wilkins (1976). These theories might also be viewed as integrative in that they focus on speaking, listening, writing, and reading rather than on a subset of these skill areas. The most recent and comprehensive of such theories that we have examined is that proposed by Munby (1978). Since a review of Munby (1978) appears in this issue we will focus only on general aspects of his framework, discussing other studies as they relate to it.

The theoretical framework that underlies Munby's model of communicative competence consists of three major components: a sociocultunil orientation, a sociosemantic view of linguistic knowledge, and rules of discourse. The sociocultural component is based quite heavily on the work of Hymes discussed in the preceding section (2.2), and there is little that we can add here.

We also have little to say about the discourse component in Munby's model, both because we are still relatively unfamiliar with the work in this field and because there seems to be no theory of discourse that one can turn to with confidence. In our opinion, the clearest and most directly applicable description of discourse for second language teaching is that discussed by Widdowson (1978). He makes a fundamental distinction between cohesion and coherence in spoken or written discourse. Cohesion is a relational concept concerned with how propositions are linked structurally in a text and how the literal meaning of a text is interpreted. In the work of Halliday and Hasan (1976), five main types of cohesion are isolated: anaphoric reference (e.g. use of pronouns to refer to something mentioned previously, as in I gave IT to THEM; substitution, which is quite similar to the first type (e.g. substitution of one for a book in Mary has a book. I wish I had one) ; ellipsis, that is omission of a grammatical element that has been expressed already (e.g. John doesn 't have a book, nor do I, where have a book is not repeated); conjunction, which involves the use of such grammatical connectors as soon (temporal), and (additive), although (adversative); and . lexical cohesion (e.g. direct repetition of the same term to refer to the same object rather than the use of different terms to refer to the same object). Coherence is concerned with the relationships among the communicative values (or contextual meanings) of utterances. Widdowson (1978:29) provides the following example to illustrate this notion:

A. That's the telephone. B. I 'm in the bath. A. O.K.

Although there is no overt signal of cohesion among these utterances, they do form coherent discourse to the extent that A's first proposition has the value of a request, that B's remark functions as an excuse for not complying with



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A's request, and that A's final remark is an acceptance of B's excuse. Note how important the notions of setting, role of participants, goals, and so forth are in arriving at a coherent interpretation of these utterances (e.g. consider the setting to be the subway as opposed to a home).

Other approaches to the analysis of discourse are reported in the literature and deserve mention. Among the studies that approach discourse as part of a theory of social interaction are those on conversational analysis (e.g. Fine 1978, Goffman 1978, Grice 1975, Labov and Fanshel 1977, Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974), analysis of classroom discourse (e.g. Chaudron 1977, Herman forthcoming, Sinclair and Coulthard 1975), the definition and classification of speech acts (e.g. Austin 1962, Searle 1976), the role of discourse routines in language acquisition (e.g. Bates 1976, Bruner 1978) and in interpretation of utterances (e.g. Candlin 1978), and the relation between the choice of utterances and social status (e.g. Olson 1978). More formal linguistic approaches are reflected in the work of Harris ( 1952) and Hurtig (1977) as well as in work on artificial intelligence (e.g. Shank and Nash-Webber 1975 and references cited there). In addition to Halliday and Hasan (1976), an approach from the viewpoint of stylistics has been adopted by Benson and Greaves ( 1973) and is reflected in the work of Allen and Widdowson (1974). Representative work from a variety of research perspectives is presented by Freedle ( 197-7) and Grimes ( 1975). It is not unfair to say that all of this work is still at an embryonic stage.

As concerns the sociosemantic component of Munby's theoretical framework for communicative competence, several points warrant discussion.

First, Munby adopts the theoretical position suggested by Halliday (1973) that we discussed in the preceding section, i.e. the view of language as semantic options derived from social structure. Our reservations about this position concern its application to communicative approaches to second language teaching. In particular, we do not accept the view that grammatical options in the second language are best handled at the early learning stages as arising only from semantic options and indirectly from social options. Although Munby does suggest that considerations of appropriateness and generalizability of grammatical forms should be involved in determining actual grammatical options, these criteria, and the process suggested, seem inadequate. For example, nowhere is there reference made to the relative grammatical complexity of forms as a constraint on the semantic options and social behaviour options that may be selected, or even as a constraint on the grammatical options selected via his processing model. We think that at some point prior to the final selection of grammatical options, semantic options and social behaviour options, grammatical forms must be screened in terms of the following: (1) grammatical complexity (e.g. the structures and lexical items that must be mastered to produce a given form spontaneously); (2) transparency with respect to the communicative function of an utterance (e.g. I suggest you try the fiSh is a more clear-cut and obvious grammatical encoding than Have you never tried our fiSh?, The fiSh is nice, etc. if one is a waiter in a restaurant trying to make a polite, deferential, and encouraging suggestion to a customer concerning what to order); (3) generalizability to other communicative functions; (4) the role of a given form in facilitating acquisition of another form; (5) acceptability in terms of perceptual strategies; and (6) degree



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of markedness in terms of social and geographical dialects (cf. Johnson and Morrow 1977 and Morrow 1977 for additional criteria and discussion).

Our concern with grammatical complexity (amoog other criteria) is closely related to perhaps the most common and significant concern with respect to communicative approaches: What is the optimum combination of attention to grammar and attention to other communication skills? Van Ek (1976) has pointed out quite explicitly that the objective of his threshold level approach is only part of a second language programme:

It is obvious, then, that the present [threshold level] objective cannot be offered as the objective of foreign language teaching. It is merely offered as the minimum objective for the teaching of (mainly oral) foreign language communication. As such it can, in most cases, only be one part of a more comprehensive foreign language curriculum (p. 17 , his emphasis).

Various combinations of emphasis on grammatical skills and on other communication skills are suggested by Alexander (1976), Johnson (1977), and Wilkins (1978), among others, but no empirical data on learner performance under different treatments exists. Most of the communicative materials that have appeared recently (e.g. Edelhoff et al. 1978 and Johnson and Morrow 1978) tend to organize the syllabus primarily on the basis of the functions to be carried out, but do provide drills whose focus is a particular grammatical point. An example of a grammatical approach that provides drills whose focus is particular communication points may be the approach used by Savignon (1972) discussed in Section 2.1. There is no obvious way in which one could make comparisons of the effectiveness of Savignon's approach with respect to the type of approach suggested by Edelhoff et al. or by Johnson and Morrow (assuming that empirical data from tests or other instruments were available on this latter approach) without information on the similarities and differences between the groups at the pretreatment stage, information on the instruments, etc.

Our thinking, then, is that there is an overemphasis in many integrative theories on the role of communicative functions and social behaviour options in the selection of grammatical forms, and a lack of emphasis on the role of factors such as grammatical complexity and transparency. Perhaps the major problem of such a distribution of emphasis at the early stages of second language learning is that the grammatical forms to be mastered will not necessarily be organized or presented in an effective manner. As Johnson (1977, 1978) and Morrow (1978) have pointed out, it seems unlikely that a syllabus organized along communicative lines can be organized equally well along grammatical lines. Thus Johnson (1977) writes:

It seems reasonable to expect sentences which form a homogeneous functional grouping to be grammatically unlike. The choice of a functional organization therefore seems to imply a degree of structural 'disorganization,' to the extent that many structurally dissimilar sentences may be presented in the same unit, while what may be taken to be key examples of particular grammatical structures will be scatterred throughout the course (p. 669).

Furthermore, it is not clear that the types of communicative approach that advocates of integrative approaches envision would lend themselves equally well to the teaching of different areas of grammar; for example, although



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vocabulary and certain aspects of morphology and syntax might be organized quite naturally in terms of communicative functions, other areas of grammar-phonology, morphological features such as gender distinctions, verb classes (e.g. -er, -ir, -re verbs in French), etc.-might not be served so well by an organization based on functions. It is perhaps because most applications of communicative approaches have been directed at advanced levels of second language learning (cf. Wilkins 1978, among others, on this point) that there is a tendency to accord grammatical factors a secondary role in the organization of communicative syllabuses.

From a purely theoretical point of view, there are at least three basic assumptions that may be largely responsible for an overemphasis on communicative functions in communicative syllabus organization.

First is the assumption that the essential purpose of language is communication. This seems to be a fundamental assumption in speech act semantics (cf. Searle 1969, for example) and in many theories of communicative competence (e.g. Campbell and Wales 1970, Habermas 1970). As has been pointed out by a number of linguists (e.g. Chomsky 1975, Fraser 1974, Halliday 1978), there is little reason to view (externally oriented) communication as more essential than other purposes of language such as selfexpression, verbal thinking, problem-solving, and creative writing. Furthermore, it is not clear how crucial the communicative role of language is with respect to Cummins' (1979) notion of threshold level or Bruner's (1976) notion of analytic competence (cf., however, Bruner 1978 for further comments). Nonetheless, the communicative purpose would seem to be the most practical concern for a general second language programme (cf. Clark 1972), and an approach focussing on this purpose may help to develop more positive learner attitudes toward second language learning (cf. Palmer 1978).

Second, the assumption that grammatical form follows the communicative purpose or use of language is often taken as the main reason for adopting an approach based on communicative functions (cf. Fawcett 1975). However, such an assumption is in our view inadequate as the basis for syllabus organization for several reasons. First, it is difficult to isolate the individual purposes of language or the ways in which different purposes interact; thus even if one were to assume that communication is the essential purpose of language (an assumption that we would not support), it would be misleading to associate certain language forms with this purpose exclusively since communication is not the only purpose of language. Slobin ( 1977) has pointed out that the goals or uses of language may conflict with one another, and there is as yet no theory of language, language acquisition, or language change that allows one to predict with any certainty when a given purpose will take precedence over another. Second, the position that form follows purpose implies a teleological point of view (i.e. that a given form exists because it is needed for a given purpose) that is as questionable in linguistics as it is in biology and evolution (cf. Lenneberg 1964). Third, as was mentioned in our discussion of Halliday's (1973) sociosemantic approach to language, the opposite view, namely that use serves grammatical form, is perhaps a more realistic one to adopt with respect to second language acquisition in the early stages. This opposite view even has some support in studies of first language acquisition at the early stages. Thus although young children do not seem to acquire forms



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that they do not need (cf. Bates 1976 and Halliday, 1975, for example), they nonetheless may use a single form for many different communicative functions-where this form may be more easily acquired and in some sense 'simpler' than the forms used most often by older speakers to convey these other _functions (cf. Bloom 1970 and Slobin 1971a).

Finally, Widdowson (1978) has made the assumption that in normal communication one is concerned with aspects of language use and not with aspects of grammatical usage. This is certainly a reasonable assumption as regards normal communication between native or native-like speakers of a language, although we assume that there is some attention to grammatical usage when native speakers of different dialects or registers communicate. Certainly knowledge of how to adjust (in both reception and production) to other varieties of a language is an important part of communicative competence in that language (cf. Hymes 1972 and Segalowitz 1973, for example). However, there is some reason to question Widdowson's assumption as it applies to the beginning second language learner. First, this type of learner will most likely be unable to devote much attention to the task of how to use language until he/she has mastered some of the grammatical forms that are to be used. That is, it may be difficult to focus simultaneously on use and usage, particularly at early stages (cf. Stern 1975). Savignon's (1972) communicative competence group indicated this in their evaluation of their own performance on the communication tests she administered, as we mentioned above. Second, B. J. Carroll's (1978) tentative findings on the tolerance levels of native speakers to grammatical errors and use errors in the speech of nonnative speakers (which we also mentioned above) would suggest that native speakers pay more attention to second language learners' grammatical usage than to their sociolinguistic use of language. In spite of these reservations, we think it is reasonable and important to adopt the position that second language learning will proceed more effectively when grammatical usage is not abstracted from meaningful context (as pointed out by Macnamara 1974 and Oller and Obrecht 1968, for example). This seems to be what Widdowson had in mind in making the assumption that use, not usage, is focussed on in normal conversation. Thus he states:

By focussing on usage, therefore, the language teacher directs the attention of the learner to those features of performance which normal use of language requires him to ignore . . . . The way he is required to learn the foreign language conflicts with the way he knows language actually works and this necessarily impedes any transfer [of knowledge of language use) which might otherwise take place. By effectively denying the learner reference to his own experience the teacher increases the difficulty of the language learning task. A methodology which concentrates too exclusively on usage may well be creating the very problems it is designed to solve (Widdowson 1978: 17- 1 8).

To summarize, then, we find that there is little theoretical motivation for the overemphasis on language functions and lack of emphasis on grammatical complexity and the like that is characteristic of Munby's model of communicative competence and of the organization of many communicative approaches. It seems that factors such as grammatical complexity should be considered in the process of specifying the grammatical forms and communicative functions that relate to learners' sociolinguistic needs.



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2.4. General comments In guise of a conclusion to this section, we wish to make three general

comments relating to the theories of communicative competence that we have reviewed.

First, with the exception of Savignon (1972) and Stern (1978, 1979), no communicative competence theorists have devoted any detailed attention to communication strategies that speakers employ to handle breakdowns in communication: for example, how to deal with false starts, hesitations, and other performance factors, how to avoid grammatical forms that have not been mastered fully, how to address strangers when unsure of their social status-in short, how to cope in an authentic communicative situation and how to keep the communicative channel open. We consider such strategies to be an important aspect of communicative competence that must be integrated with the other components in an adequate theory of communicative competence. We only wish to call attention to the general lack of discussion of these strategies at this point; they will be discussed in the following section.

Second, few of these theories deal rigorously with a range of criteria sufficiently broad for establishing the sequencing of semantic concepts, grammatical forms, and communicative functions in a communicative approach. In making such decisions with respect to the 'semantic concepts (e.g. notions such as time, place) that are to be dealt with by the learner, reference must be made primarily to theories of cognitive psychology (cf. Piaget 1954, for example). The sequencing of grammatical forms will be informed mainly by theories of language (e.g. Chomsky 1965, Halliday 1973), language acquisition (e.g. Bates 1976, Bloom 1970, Krashen in press), and psycholinguistics (e.g. Fodor, Bever and Garrett 1974, Slobin 1971b). It is not clear in the literature how the sequencing of communicative functions is to be determined (cf. Morrow 1977 and Widdowson 1975 on this point). We have suggested that those functions whose appropriateness conditions are more universal, or at least more similar to those that hold for the learner's native language and culture, may be introduced before those functions having more idiosyncratic appropriateness conditions. The generalizability of functions from one communicative event to another, the complexity of the grammatical forms appropriate to express the functions, the range of sociolinguistic variables crucially involved in a function, and the interrelationships among these sociolinguistic variables that must be known (i.e. the delicacy of content according to Morrow 1977) are all important factors to consider in deciding on the sequencing of functions. It should be clear that the sequencing of behavioural objectives in a communicative approach must be based on the interaction of theories such as those just mentioned.

Finally, little serious attention has been devoted to criteria for evaluation and levels of achievement/proficiency with respect to a given theory of communicative competence. However, B. J. Carroll (1978b) has suggested such criteria and definitions of levels based on the notion of 'target level' that Munby (1978) has attempted to identify. Carroll has distinguished three levels of performance (viz. basic, intermediate, and advanced) with respect to the four skill areas of reading, writing, speaking, and listening. These levels are defined with reference to ten evaluation criteria: five that in Carroll's view are useful mainly in test construction (viz. size, complexity, range, speed, and



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flexibility) and five useful mainly in performance assessment (viz. accuracy, appropriacy, independence, repetition, hesitation). In addition Morrow (1977) has suggested that a discrete-point test of communicative competence may be expected to address the learner's competence in assessing a communicative interaction in the following terms:

A. The settings to which it might be appropriate. B. The topic which is being presented. C. The function of the utterance. D. The modality (or attitude) adopted by the speaker/writer. E. The presuppositions behind the utterance. F. The role the speaker/writer is adopting. G. The status implicit in the utterance. H. The level of formality on which the speaker/writer is conducting the inter

action. I . The mood o f the speaker/writer. (p. 28).

He also has suggested that 'communication tasks' be adopted to serve as integrative tests of the learner's competence to produce and understand actual communication in the oral or written mode (Morrow 1977). However, here there is no general list of evaluation criteria provided; rather, different criteria such as comprehensibility, appropriateness, accuracy, and naturalness of the learner's response are proposed for each individual communication task. We think that it is important to note that Morrow includes grammatical accuracy among the evaluation criteria for integrative tests but excludes it for discretepoint tests of communicative competence. While we support the view that an integrative test of communicative competence must not ignore grammatical accuracy (a view that follows from our definition of communicative competence in Section 1.2), we are nonetheless aware of Clark's (1972) concern that

the mixing of communicative and linguistic criteria in a single testing system or rating scheme serves only to obscure the distinction between the two types of measurement and decrease the validity of the test as a direct measure of communicative proficiency (p. 126).

Clark also points out that scoring systems such as the one used in the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) Oral Proficiency Interview (cf. Jones 1975 and in press for discussion) does not completely avoid this problem.

It would be premature to concern ourselves with evaluation criteria in more detail at this point since we have not arrived at a well-defined theory of communicative competence to suit our needs and interests. We will suggest a tentative outline of such a theory in the following section and examine some of its more obvious implications for teaching and testing communication skills. We find that the classification of language skills that Munby (1978) has proposed is a vaiuable starting point in developing evaluation criteria and that the testing formats proposed by Morrow ( 1977) are of considerable interest and use in a communicative approach. Helpful summaries of research on discrete-point and integrative tests of communicative competence have been prepared by Jones (1977) and Oller (1976), and there is a recent and representative set of papers on testing speaking proficiency in Clark (1978).



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3 . TOWA R D A N A D E Q U AT E T H E O R Y O F C O M M U N I CA T I V E

C O M P E T E N C E

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In this section we will first present a set of guiding principles for a communicative ;;tpproach to second language teaching, then outline a theory of communicative competence adequate to support such an approach, and finally sketch some of the implications of such a theory for second language teaching and testing.

3 .1. Guiding principles for a communicative approach Based primarily on the discussion so far in this paper, there seem to be five

important principles that must guide the development of a communicative approach for a general second language programme.

1 . Communicative competence is composed minimally of grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, and communication strategies, or what we will refer to as strategic competence. 4 There is no strong theoretical. or empirical motivation for the view that grammatical competence is any more or less crucial to successful communication than is sociolinguistic competence or strategic competence. The primary goal of a communicative approach must be to facilitate the integration of these types of knowledge for the learner, an outcome that is not likely to result from overemphasis on one form of competence over the others throughout a second language programme.

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2. A communicative approach must be based on and respond to the learner's communication needs. These needs must be specified with respect to grammatical competence (e.g. the levels of grammatical accuracy that are required in oral and written communication), sociolinguistic competence (e.g. needs relating to setting, topic, communicative functions), and strategic competence (e.g. the compensatory communication strategies to be used when there is a breakdown in one of the other competencies). Following Widdowson (personal communication) it is to be expected that communication needs in each of these areas will be of two types: first, those that are relatively fixed and terminal and second, those that are transitional and interim, changing with factors such as the age of the learners and their stage in the language learning process (cf. Stern 1979 for interesting discussion). It is particularly important to base a communicative approach on the varieties of the second language that the learner is most likely to be in contact with in a genuine communicative situation, and on the minimum levels of grammatical competence and sociolinguistic competence that native speakers expect of second language learners in such a situation and that the majority of second language learners may be expected to attain (cf. Van Ek 1976 on this last point). Methodologies for communication needs analyses have been suggested by Munby (1978) and Richterich (1973)-cf. the related work of Sampson (1978), Savard (1978), and Tough (1977).

3. The second language learner must have the opportunity to take part in meaningful communicative interaction with highly competent speakers of the language, i.e. to respond to genuine communicative needs in realistic second language situations . This principle is a challenging one to teachers and programme designers, but is motivated strongly by the theoretical distinction between communicative competence and communicative performance. It is significant not only with respect to classroom activities but to testing as well.



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J. B. Carroll (1961) has argued for testing in more realistic communicative settings (i.e. performance) as follows:

If we limit ourselves to testing only one point at a time, more time is ordinarily allowed for reflection than would occur in a normal communication situation, no matter how rapidly the discrete items are presented (p. 34).

Oller (in press) has expressed a similar point of view. Clark (1972) has stressed the disadvantages of measuring communication skills through indirect (e.g. pencil-and-paper) tests and the use of correlational procedures. He states:

Indirect tests of proficiency do not provide an opportunity for the student to try out his language competence in realistic communication situations. Although they may correspond in a statistical sense to direct tests of proficiency, paperand-pencil tests, tape-recorded listening and speaking tests, and similar measures cannot have the same psychological value for the student or the same instructional impact. For this reason alone, administration of a direct test of communicative proficiency at one or more points in the student's language-learning career would be a very worthwhile undertaking (Clark 1972 : 132}.

We think that exposure to realistic communication situations is crucial if communicative competence is to lead to communicative confidence.

4. Particularly at the early stages of second language learning, optimal use must be made of those aspects of communicative competence that the learner has developed through acquisition and use of the native language and that are common to those communication skills required in the second language. It is especially important that the more arbitrary and less universal aspects of communication in the second language (e.g. certain features of the grammatical code) be presented and practiced in the context of less arbitrary and more universal aspects (e.g. the fundamental appropriateness conditions in making a request, the basic rules of discourse involved in greeting a peer).

5. The primary objective of a communication-oriented second language programme must be to provide the learners with the information, practice, and much of the experience needed to meet their communicative needs in the second language. In addition, the learners should be taught about language primarily (although not exclusively) in the first language programme, i.e. taught, for example, about grammatical categories, communicative functions, appropriateness conditions, rules of discourse, and registers. The learners should also be taught about the second language culture primarily (although not exclusively) through the social studies programme in order to provide them with the sociocultural knowledge of the second language group that is necessary in drawing inferences about the social meanings or values of utterances (cf. Widdowson 1978 for discussion of these points). It is felt that such a curriculum-wide approach to the development of communicative competence in the second language may also facilitate (and perhaps encouragecf. Savignon 1972) continued study of this language (cf. VanEk 1976 on this point).

3.2. A proposed theoretical framework for communicative competence Our own tentative theory of communicative competence minimally includes

three main competencies: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. The purpose of this section is to briefly



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outline the contents and boundaries of each of these areas of competence. In proposing this theoretical framework, we have in mind several general

assumptions about the nature of communication and of a theory of communicative competence. Following Morrow (1977), we understand communication to be based in sociocultural, interpersonal interaction, to involve unpredictability and creativity, to take place in a discourse and sociocultural context, to be purposive behaviour, to be carried out under performance constraints, to involve use of authentic (as opposed to textbook-contrived) language, and to be judged as successful or not on the basis of behavioural outcomes. We assume with Candlin (1978) that the relationship between a proposition (or the literal meaning of an utterance) and its social meaning is variable across different sociocultural and discourse contexts, and that communication involves the continuous evaluation and negotiation of social meaning on the part of the participants. We also agree with Palmer (1978) that genuine communication involves the 'reduction of uncertainty' on behalf of the participants; for example, a speaker asking a (non-rhetorical) question will not know the answer in advance, but this uncertainty will be reduced when an answer is provided. Finally, in keeping with the integrative theories discussed in Section 2.3, communication will be understood to involve verbal and nonverbal symbols, oral and written modes, and production and comprehension skills.

We assume that a theory of communicative competence interacts (in as yet unspecified ways) with a theory of human action and with other systems of human knowledge (e.g. world knowledge). We assume further that communicative competence, or more precisely its interaction with other systems of knowledge, is observable indirectly in actual communicative performance. These assumptions have been discussed in Section 1.2.

The theoretical framework that we propose is intended to be applied to second language teaching and testing in line with the guiding principles presented in Section 3. 1. The communicative approach that we envisage is thus an integrative one in which emphasis is on preparing second language learners to exploit-initially through aspects of sociolinguistic competence and strategic competence acquired through experience in communicative use of the first or dominant language-those grammatical features of the second language that are selected on the basis of, among other criteria, their grammatical and cognitive complexity, transparency with respect to communicative function, probability of use by native speakers, generalizability to different communicative functions and contexts, and relevance to the learners' communicative needs in the second language. Our thinking in developing this theoretical framework and communicative approach owes much to the work of Allen and Widdowson (1975), Halliday (1970), Hymes ( 1967, 1968), Johnson (1977), Morrow (1977), Stern ( 1978) , Wilkins ( 1976), and Widdowson ( 1978).

Grammatical competence. This type of competence will be understood to include knowledge of lexical items and of rules of morphology, syntax, sentence-grammar semantics, and phonology. It is not clear that any particular theory of grammar can at present be selected over others to characterize this grammatical competence, nor in what ways a theory of grammar is directly relevant for second language pedagogy (cf. Chomsky 1973 on this point), although the interface between the two has been addressed in recent work on



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pedagogical grammars (cf. Allen and Widdowson 1975, for example). Nonetheless, grammatical competence will be an important concern for any communicative approach whose goals include providing learners with the knowledge of how to determine and express accurately the literal meaning of utterances.

Sociolinguistic competence. This component is made up of two sets of rules: sociocultural rules of use and rules of discourse. Knowledge of these rules will be crucial in interpreting utterances for social meaning, particularly when there is a low level of transparency between the literal meaning of an utterance and the speaker's intention.

Sociocultural rules of use will specify the ways in which utterances are produced and understood appropriately with respect to the components of communicative events outlined by Hymes (1967, 1968). The primary focus of these rules is on the extent to which certain propositions and communicative functions are appropriate within a given sociocultural context depending on contextual factors such as topic, role of participants, setting, and norms of interaction. A secondary concern of such rules is the extent to which appropriate attitude and register or style are conveyed by a particular grammatical form within a given sociocultural context. For example, it would generally be inappropriate for a waiter in a restaurant to actually command a client to order a certain menu item, regardless of how the proposition and communicative function were expressed grammatically; likewise, inappropriate attitude and register would be expressed if a waiter in a tasteful restaurant were to ask, 'O.K., chump, what are you and this broad gonna eat?' in taking an order. It should be emphasized that it is not clear that all of the components of speech events that Hymes and others have proposed are always necessary to account for the appropriateness of utterances or that these are always the only components that need to be considered.

Until more clear-cut theoretical statements about rules of discourse emerge, it is perhaps most useful to think of these rules in terms of the cohesion (i.e. grammatical links) and coherence (i.e. appropriate combination of communicative functions) of groups of utterances (cf. Halliday and Hasan 1976 and Widdowson 1978 for discussion). It is not altogether clear to us that rules of discourse will differ substantively from grammatical rules (with respect to cohesion) and sociocultural rules (with respect to coherence). However, the focus of rules of discourse in our framework is the combination of utterances and communicative functions and not the grammatical well-formedness of a single utterance nor the sociocultural appropriateness of a set of propositions and communicative functions in a given context. Also, rules of discourse will presumably make reference to notions such as topic and comment (in the strict linguistic sense of these terms) whereas grammatical rules and sociocultural rules will not necessarily do so (cf. Widdowson 1978).

Strategic competence. This component will be made up of verbal and nonverbal communication strategies that may be called into action to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to performance variables or to insufficient competence. Such strategies will be of two main types: those that relate primarily to grammatical competence (e.g. how to paraphrase grammatical forms that one has not mastered or cannot recall momentarily) and those that relate more to sociolinguistic competence (e.g. various role-playing



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strategies, how to address strangers when unsure of their social status). We know of very little work in this area (though see work by Duncan 1973, Frohlich and Bialystok in progress, Tarone, Cohen, and Dumas 1976, as well as relevant discussion by Candlin 1978, Morrow 1977, Stern 1978, 1979, and Walters 1978). Knowledge of how to use such strategies may be particularly helpful at the beginning stages of second language learning, and it is to be expected that the need for certain strategies may change as a function of age and second language proficiency. Furthermore, as Stern (1978) has pointed out, such 'coping' strategies are most likely to be acquired through experience in real-life communication situations but not through classroom practice that involves no meaningful communication.

Within each of the three components of communicative competence that we have identified, we assume there will be a subcomponent of probability rules of occurrence. These rules will attempt to characterize the 'redundancy aspect of language' (Spolsky 1968), i .e . the knowledge of relative frequencies of occurrence that a native speaker has with respect to grammatical competence (e .g . the probable sequences of words in an utterance), sociolinguistic competence (e .g. the probable sequences of utterances in a discourse), and strategic competence (e.g. commonly used floor-holding strategies). Proposals for the formal expression of such rules are discussed by Labov (1972), where it is claimed that various features of the sociolinguistic and grammatical contexts combine to condition the frequency of use of a given rule of grammar . The importance of such rules for communicative competence has been stressed by Hymes (1972) and Jakobovits (1970) and suggested in the work of Levenston (1975), Morrow (1977), and Wilkins (1978) . Related to the discussion of these rules is the proposal that authentic texts be used in the second language classroom from the very beginning (cf. Morrow 1977 for discussion). Although much work remains to be done on the form of such probability rules and the manner in which they are to be acquired, the second language learner cannot be expected to have achieved a sufficient level of communicative competence in the second language, in our opinion, if no knowledge of probability of occurrence is developed in the three components of communicative competence.

In proposing such a theoretical framework for communicative competence, it is expected that the classification of language skills proposed by Munby (1978:Chapter 7) will serve as an initial indication of the types of operations, subskills, and features that are involved in successful communication. Certainly there will be modifications to this classification scheme {e .g. the addition of skills relating to strategic competence), just as there will no doubt be modifications to our proposed theoretical framework. For now we would like to briefly discuss the general manner in which this theoretical framework might be applied in a communicative approach to second language teaching and testing.

3 .3. Implications for a communicative approach to teaching Adoption of the theoretical framework that we have proposed has in

teresting implications in four main areas of second language teaching: syllabus design, teaching methodology, teacher training, and materials development.

With respect to syllabus design, we acknowledge Morrow and Johnson's



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(1977) concern that a second language syllabus organized on the basis of communicative functions may be disorganized with respect to grammar. Furthermore, we have argued in Sections 2.2 and 2.3 that such grammatical disorganization may have more serious negative consequences for the effectiveness of second language learning at the introductory stages of study rather than at more advanced stages. However, there are two reasons for proposing a functionally organized communicative approach for all stages of second language learning. First, it is by no means an established fact that a functionally organized approach cannot achieve a level of grammatical organization that is adequate for effective second language teaching and learning: this is still an open question as far as we know. Although many of the functionally organized approaches that we have examined do seem to lack grammatical organization (cf. Piepho et al. 1978, Van Ek 1976, for example), there are no empirical data on the relative effectiveness or ineffectiveness of such approaches. Furthermore, there may be means of introducing an adequate level of grammatical sequencing into a functionally organized approach by: (i) making use of grammatical sequencing criteria such as degree of complexity, generalizability and transparency with respect to functions, and acceptability in terms of perceptual strategies in selecting the grammatical forms to be introduced in covering a given function; (ii) treating such grammatical sequencing criteria as an essential subset of the set of criteria used to determine functional sequencing ; (iii) making use of repetitions of grammatical forms in different functions throughout the syllabus (assuming that such forms are partially specified on the basis of their generalizability); and (iv) devoting a certain proportion of classroom time and textbook coverage to discussion of and/or practice on new or especially difficult grammatical points and on interrelationships among various points (as implemented in the course materials prepared by Johnson and Morrow 1978, for example). Other possibilities will no doubt suggest themselves in the course of research on achieving the optimal balance between functional and grammatical organization at a given stage of study.

The second, and perhaps more important reason for proposing a functionally organized approach for all stages of second language learning has to do with the 'face validity' of the materials and syllabus on which it is based. It is our view that a functionally based communicative approach-in particular, one in which units are organized and labelled with reference to communicative functions-is more likely to have positive consequences for learner motivation than is a grammatically based communicative approach-in particular, one in which units are organized and labelled with reference to grammatical forms. There are two quite subjective reasons for our view. First , Tucker (1974) has pointed out that students who are uninterested in, frustrated by, and perform poorly in a grammatically organized second language programme may be encouraged and more motivated in a programme where emphasis is put on use of language in meaningful communication. Second, Segalowitz (1976) has reported that second language learners of French who have achieved a fairly high level of grammatical competence in this language through (grammatically organized) classroom training but lack training in sociolinguistic (or communication) skills, tend to have a negative attitude toward French and toward native French speakers when required to ineract with them in this language.



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Segalowitz suggests that this negative attitude may be a form of projection of the discomfort the learners experience in being constrained by their own 'communicative incompetence'. We think, then, that a grammatically based communicative approach risks being viewed by both teachers and learners as 'more of the same', evoking all of the ancillary frustrations, negative attitudes , and low levels of motivation. On the other hand, a functionally organized communicative approach may be associated less with these negative feelings and more with a highly useful and visible purpose of second language study, namely communication.

One further point to make with respect to syllabus organization is that a more natural integration of knowledge of the second language culture , knowledge of the second language, and knowledge of language in general is perhaps accomplished through a communicative approach such as the one we have suggested rather than through a more grammatically based approach (cf. Macnamara 1974 and Tucker 1974 on this point). To the extent that the development of such knowledge is a part of the overall objectives of a second language programme, t�en a communicative approach may be preferred to a grammar based one.

With respect to teaching methodology, it is crucial that classroom activities reflect, in the most optimally direct manner, those communication activities that the learner is most likely to engage in (cf. Savignon 1972, for example). Furthermore, communication activities must be as meaningful as possible and be characterized (at increasing levels of difficulty) by aspects of genuine communication such as its basis in social interaction, the relative creativity and unpredictability of utterances, its purposefulness and goal-orientation, and its authenticity (cf. Morrow 1977 for discussion of these points). Examples of activities prepared with these characteristics of communication in mind are suggested by Candlin (1978), Johnson and Morrow (1978), Morrow and Johnson (1977), and Paulston and Bruder (1976).

There are several important implications of our theoretical framework for teacher training. First, we agree with Morrow (1977) that the role of the teacher in the second language classroom must undergo a change if a communication based approach is adopted; that is, the teacher will have to take on 'an activating role as the instigator of situations which allow students to develop communication skills' (p. 10). However, we think that it is important to emphasize that this role must be viewed as a complementary and not alternative one to the didactic role of the teacher-he/she must still teach, particularly at the early stages. Second, in view of the greater emphasis placed on the teacher's role as an instigator of and participant in meaningful communication, the teacher must have a fairly high level of communicative competence in the second language in order to carry out this role effectively. It is not clear that current teacher training provides for such levels of communicative competence or · stresses the components of communicative competence and the view of language (i.e. emphasis on use) that we have outlined in our theoretical approach. Certainly such teacher training will be crucial to the success of a communicative approach such as the one we envision (cf. Dodson 1978 on this point). The work of Palmer (1978) on classroom activities that are geared to teachers with different levels of communicative competence in the second language is especially relevant in this light.



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Finally, although perhaps most of the current textbooks now in use in second language courses will not be appropriate for the type of approach that we have suggested, we agree with Johnson ( 1977) that the development of functionally organized textbooks is still premature, owing to the lack of research on communicative syllabus design. However, some texts to be used in communicative second language courses have already appeared or are in preparation (cf. Allen and Widdowson 1978, Johnson and Morrow 1978, and Piepho et al. 1978, for example), and it is to be expected that such materials contain useful information for our purposes and will be the topic of much fruitful empirical investigation. It is also hoped that the question of whether or not native texts should be incorporated into second language classroom materials will be addressed in such investigation.

3 .4. Implications for a communicative testing programme Two important general implications of our theoretical framework for

testing communication in a second language are the following. First, the fundamental theoretical distinction that we have accepted between

communicative competence and performance suggests that communicative testing must be devoted not only to what the learner knows about the second language and about how to use it (competence) but also to what extent the learner is able to actually demonstrate this knowledge in a meaningful communicative situation (performance). It has been emphasized quite frequently (e.g. by J. B . Carroll 1961, Clark 1972, Jones 1977, Morrow 1977, in press, Oller 1976) that pencil-and-paper tests now in use do not necessarily give a valid indication of second language learners' skills in performing in actual communicative situations. Our theoretical framework suggests the general boundaries and contents of communicative competence that are necessary and important for this type of performance. We think that it is important to empirically study the extent to which competence-oriented tests are valid indicators of learners' success in handling actual performance. However, actual performance tasks such as those dealt with in the FSI Oral Proficiency Interview or those developed by Savignon (1972) would seem to have more face validity with respect to communication skills in that such tasks correspond more directly to normal language use where an integration of these skills is required with little time to reflect on and monitor language input and output (as noted by J. B . Carroll 1961 and mentioned above). One would thus not want to ignore performance tests completely in a communicative testing programme even if more competence-oriented tests that correlated highly with actual performance were developed (cf. Clark 1972-quoted above-on this point). However, one might wish to make more use of performance tests (tasks) informally in the classroom and perhaps at stages other than the initial ones in second language study so as not to risk frustrating the beginner (cf. Morrow 1977 and the findings on integrative motivation presented by Savignon 1972 and discussed in Section 2.1).

Second, although it has been argued that integrative type tests must be used to measure communicative competence (e.g. Oller 1976), it seems that discretepoint tests will also be useful in our proposed communicative approach. This is because such tests may be more effective than integrative tests in making the learner aware of and in assessing the learner's control of the separate com-



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ponents and elements of communicative competence. This type of test would also seem to be easier to administer and score in a reliable manner than is a more integrative type of test. While it also seems that discrete-point tests may be more suitable for assessing communicative competence and integrative ones more suitable for assessing actual communicative performance, this may not necessarily be a rigid division of labour. For example, a test designed to assess grammatical accuracy might be considered to have more of a discrete-point orientation if it consisted of items such as ( 1 ).

(1) Select the correct preposition to complete the following sentence: We went __ the store by car. (a) at; (b) on; (c) for; (d) to.

but more of an integrative orientation if it were composed of items such as (2) .

(2) The sentence underlined below may be either grammatically correct or incorrect. If you think it is correct, go on to the next item; if you think it is incorrect, correct it by changing, adding, or deleting only one of its elements.

We went at the store by car.

That is, it is possible to view the discrete-point versus integrative distinction as a continuum along which tests of communicative competence and tests of actual communicative performance may be arranged (cf. Davies 1975 and Morrow in press for discussion of this point).

Aside from these general implications, a more elaborate and fine-grained description of our theoretical framework will also guide selection of evaluation criteria and acceptable levels of proficiency at different stages of second language study. Such selection will be informed primarily by the specification and sequencing of behavioural objectives, cognitive-semantic notions, grammatical forms, communicative functions, and sociolinguistic variables. Work in these areas by B. J . Carroll ( 1978b), Morrow (in press), Munby ( 1978), Van Ek ( 1976), and Wilkins (in preparation) seems quite promising, and should be of help in fleshing out our theoretical framework and its implications.

There are, of course, several aspects of test development for which our theoretical framework has less than obvious implications. For example, it is not clear how reliable scoring procedures are to be established with respect to the appropriateness of utterances in various sociocultural and discourse contexts. Also, there is no obvious basis for generalizing attested performance in a given context to expected performance in another context or for weighting different aspects of the theoretical framework or different evaluation criteria. Nor is it clear that criterion-referenced testing is to be preferred to normreferenced testing on the basis of this framework; we suspect that this is a separate issue. Insightful discussion of these and other aspects of communicative test development may be found in the work of Cohen (in press) and Morrow ( 1977, in press).

4. DI RECTI ONS FOR R E S E A R C H

Throughout this paper we have suggested that many aspects of communicative competence must be investigated in a more rigorous manner before a communicative approach can be fully implemented in second language



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teaching and testing. Among the more critical research points bearing on implementation are the following:

1. Description of the communication needs of a given group of second language learners based both on factors particular to the learners (e.g. their age, background of instruction in the second language) and particular to the speech community (or communities) in which the second language is most likely to be used (e.g. what peers talk about most often, what grammatical forms and communicative functions they use most frequently among themselves and with non-native speakers or strangers);

2. the explicit statement of grammatical rules, sociocultural rules, discourse rules, and communication strategies considered relevant to learners' communication needs;

3. analysis of the similarities anc differences between rules in the sociolinguistic components (e.g. appropriateness conditions holding for a given communicative function) in the second language and in the learners' native language;

4. investigation of the optimum balance of factors such as (i) grammatical, cognitive-semantic, and perceptual complexity, (ii) generalizability and transparency of forms with respect to communicative function, (iii) probability of occurrence, and (iv) relevance to learners' communicative needs in establishing syllabus specifications and sequencing at different levels of study;

5. study of the relation between a minimum level of communication skills in the second language for students and Cummins' ( 1979) psycholinguistic notion of threshold level;

6. study of the minimum level of communication skills in the second language needed by teachers to ensure effective use of a communicative approach at a given stage;

7. development of classroom activities that encourage meaningful communication in the second language and are administratively feasible;

8. identification of the advantages and disadvantages of the use of authentic texts in addition to or in place of contrived texts at different levels of second language study;

·

9. development of test formats and evaluation criteria that guarantee the optimal overall balance among reliability, validity, and practicality in assessment of communication skills.

Of course, there are other aspects of communicative competence and communicative approaches that we have ignored in this study. For example, the theory of communicative competence that we have proposed focusses mainly on verbal communication skills; however, Jakobovits ( 1970) and Savignon ( 1972) have suggested that nonverbal communication skills should also be incorporated into theories of communicative competence. More research on the role of such nonverbal elements of communication as gestures and facial expressions in second language communication may reveal that these are important aspects of communication that should be accorded more prominence in the theory we have adopted. Furthermore, we have largely ignored the issue of whether or not a communicative approach should focus on reception skills before production ones or on oral before written ones (cf. Davies 1978 and references cited there for discussion of these points). Research findings in these areas will be useful in the implementation of a communicative approach.



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Lastly , we think that there are still several fundamental and immediate research issues that must be addressed in considering whether or not to adopt a communicative approach at all.

A. There is need for a description of the manner in which and extent to which communication is focussed ,on in different second language classes in current general programs. For example, what types of communication activities are used? What are student and teacher reactions to these activities? To what extent are these activities integrated with other aspects of the syllabus? It would be particularly interesting to observe those (unstreamed) classes that are considered by program personnel (e.g. second language consultants and teachers) to be especially successful in the second language program to find out how skilled the learners are in communication with native speakers and how the syllabus and teaching methodology used in such a class differ from those used in less successful classes.

B. One must also investigate the suitability of the different aspects of a communicative approach (such as the one we have suggested) for young second language learners. We know of no clear research results on the advantages and disadvantages of communicative approaches for students in elementary and secondary school second language programs (though see Price 1978 for relevant research). Not only may learners be cognitively unprepared to handle certain aspects of communicative competence in the second language, but native speakers of the second language may vary their level of tolerance of grammatical and sociolinguistic errors according to the age of the learner, other things being equal.

C. Somewhat related to the preceding points is the question of how to interpret the significant differences between groups of learners that Savignon (1972) found on the basis of communicative tests. What evidence is there that learners achieving significantly higher scores on such tests are perceived by native speakers as having adequate communication skills in the second language? What evidence is there that learners achieving significantly lower scores on such tests are perceived by native speakers as not having adequate communication skills in the second language? Investigation of the construct, content, and concurrent validity of various communicative tests now available will be useful in determining the extent to which levels of achievement on such tests correspond to adequate or inadequate levels of communicative competence in the second language as perceived by different groups of native speakers for different age groups of learners. This type of investigation may also provide information on how effective various (communicative or other) approaches are in satisfying the learners' communication needs in the second language.

D. It is not clear that a communicative approach is more or less effective than a grammatical approach (or any other approach) in developing the learners' 'flexibility' in handling communicative functions and interactions on which they have not been drilled. For e.xample, Savignon's ( 1972) data give no information on this point since the communicative tests she administered were based largely on the particular communication skills that her communicative competence group had practiced. This question of flexibility in handling unfamiliar communication situations is important given the complexity, subjectivity, and creativity that characterizes such situations (cf. Morrow and



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Johnson 1977). As J. P. B. Allen (personal communication) has observed, it is still not clear how to achieve an optimal balance between structure and creativity in second language pedagogy.

E. Finally, it must be determined whether or not and to what extent a communicative approach increases learners' motivation to learn, and teachers' motivation to teach the second language (as suggested by Palmer 1978). We think that it is likely that both learners and teachers will find the task of learning/teaching such communicative functions as how to greet someone more useful and enjoyable than the task of learning/teaching different grammatical points such as verb tenses . Of course, such grammatical points will be covered in the classroom, but only to the extent that they are necessary to carry out a given communicative function; in this sense a communicative approach may be likened somewhat to the coating on the pill. It is also important to remember that without motivation, learners who have an adequate level of communicative competence may not have the desire to perform well in the second language; thus such students may do quite well on more competence-oriented communicative tests but quite poorly on more performanceoriented ones. In our view, sustained learner and teacher motivation may be the single most important factor in determining the success of a communicative approach relative to a grammatical one, perhaps important enough to compensate to a large extent for the various shortcomings of communicative approaches that we have tried to identify.

(Received May 1979)

N O T E S

' See also the related and interesting ideas o f Candlin ( 1 977) on what he refers t o as an 'encounter syllabus', where emphasis is put not on communicative funcuons (or speech acts) as such but on explonng how the vanous aspects of speech events (cf. Hymes 1967) can mfluence what is sa1d and how it is Sa!d.

1 As Daina Green (personal commumcation) has pointed out to us, the relationship between appropriateness and probability of occurrence in Hymes' model is not clear. We share her view that if a given form is relatively infrequent in a cenain context, then it is also more likely (statistically) to be inappropriate in this context. However, she agrees with us that the relationship between appropriateness and probability is by no means straightforward, since it is quite normal to find a given form used appropriately m a context in which it has possibly never occurred previously; for example, the present sentence has quite hkely never been written before, but m the present context it is nonetheless appropriate, we thmk.

3 Widdowson (personal commumcation) has suggested that there IS a posstble dtscrepancy between the views of Hymes and Halliday, which can lead to what in his view is a misunderstanding about the relationship between grammatical competence and 'ability to use language' . He states:

Hymes. essentially. looks at language and usc m correlational terms-«nain forms are used for cenasn

functions because they are. There are rules of grammar here and rules of use there . . . . Halhday looks

at language and use in integrauonal terms-cenasn forms are used for certam functions because they

have the potential to be so used. The rules of grammar adumbrate rules of use. so to speak. and these

include both conceptual (tdeational) and communicauve (mterpersonal/textual) functions.



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Our own view is that the models of language and commurucation proposed by Hymes and Halliday are more similar than Widdowson's above characterization would Imply. but that Hymes (especially Hymes 1972) adopts a more psychological approach and Halliday a more sociological one. See Halliday ( 1978:37-8) on this last point.

' We are grateful to A. S. 'Buzz' Palmer (personal communication) for suggesting this term. See Palmer ( 1978) for references to his valuable work in the area of communication strategies.

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Sampson, G. P. 1 978. 'A model for second language learning' . Canadian Modern Language Review 34.3:442-454.

Savignon, S. J. 1972. Communicative competence: an experiment in foreign-language teaching. Philadelphia: Center for Curriculum Development.

Schachter, J. and W. E. Rutherford. 1 979. 'Discourse function and language transfer' . Working Papers on Bilingualism 1 9 .

Schultz, R . A . 1977. 'Discrete-point versus simulated communication testing in foreign languages' . The Modern Language Journa/ 6 1 .3 :94- 100.

Scovel, T. 1978. 'The recognition of foreign accents in English and its implications for psycholinguistic theories of language acquisition' . Paper presented at the 5th AILA Congress, Montreal, August 1978.

Searle, J. R . 1969. Speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Searle, J. R. 1976. 'A classification of illocutionary acts' . Language in Society 5 . 1 : 1 -23.

Segalowitz, N . 1973. 'Communicative competence, linguistic variability, and second language learning' . Montreal: Sir George Williams Faculty of Arts, Concordia University. Mimeo.

Segalowitz, N. 1976. 'Communicative incompetence and the non-fluent bilingual' . Canadian Journal of Behavioral Science 8 : 1 22-1 3 I .

Selinker, L . 1 974. ' Interlanguage'. I n J . C . Richards, ed. Error analysis: perspectives on second language acquisition. London: Longman.

Selinker, L., M. Swain and G. Dumas. 1 975. 'The interhinguage hypothesis extended to children'. Language Learning 25 : 139- 152.



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Shank, R . and B . Nash-Webber, eds. 1975. Theoretical issues in natural language processing. Cambridge, Mass. : Bolt, Beranek and Newman.

Sinclair, J . M. and R. M. Coulthard. 1975. Towards an analysis of discourse: the English used by teachers and pupils. London: Oxford University Press.

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Wilkins, D. A. In pr,.paration. 'The general structure of a unit/credit system for adult language learning'. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. {Cited in K. Morrow 1977.)



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ASPECTS OF PEDAGOGICAL GRAMMAR*

W I L L I AM R U T H E R F O R D

I N T R O D U C T I O N

American Language Institute

Umvers1ty of Southern California

A great deal of attention is currently being devoted to the notion that in language teaching and language learning what one is striving to achieve or impart i� after all language as an instrument of communication and not just language as the embodiment of a formal system. Virtually every student who works at learning a language does so not as a trainee for the future occupation of grammarian, phonetician, or lexicographer, but rather as a trainee for the future activity of a user of that language in either or both its spoken and written forms. Recognition of this fact has led of late to the promulgation of methodologies and to the compilation of syllabuses which give primary exposure to varieties of so-called communicative 'functions' that the language may serve and which assign a subsidiary role, if indeed any at all, to systematic inspection of that language's formal properties. It has been claimed (Newmark and Reibel 1967) that clasroom attention to language form is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for learning to take place. In arguing for an approach to language teaching which utilizes units of communication as the points of departure, they assume that grammar will, so to speak, take care of itself, as it does in the learning of a first language. Yet this assumption remains to be proven (Lamendella and Selinker 1978).

It is important to understand that even among those who argue most vehemently for a language learning experience devoid of focus upon language form there is nowhere the implication that form in and of itself is not a crucial part of language. In his pioneering work on notional syllabuses, for example, even Wilkins ( 1976) leaves the way open for some considerable attention to formal matters:

The acquisition of the grammatical system of a language remains a most important element in language learning. The grammar is the means through which linguistic creativity is ultimately achieved and an inadequate knowledge of the grammar would lead to serious limitations on the capacity for communication. A notional syllabus, no less than a grammatical syllabus, must seek to ensure that the grammatical system is properly assimilated by the learner. (Wilkins 1976:66}

Noblitt ( 1 972) identified the primary objective of language learning as ' for the

*The preparation of this paper has benefited from insightful comments by Stephen Krashen. Other helpful suggestions were prov1ded by Jacquelyn Schachter, Herbert Seliger, M1chael Sharwood-Smith, Graham Thurgood and Sheldon Wise, none of whom are responsible for whatever shortcomings are to be found herein. The origmal version of this paper was presented at the thirteenth annual TESOL Convention, Boston, 1979.

Applied LinguiStics, Vol. I, No I



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student to internalize a grammar which approximates that of a native speaker to a specifiable degree' (Noblitt 1972:3 1 5). The question then is not whether to impart to the learner a knowledge of the language system but rather how we might go about it. This is a far more complex matter than simple decisions to say something 'about' the language, or not to say something. In the remainder of this paper I would like to explore the nature of this complexity, to discuss different ways in which grammatical information can affect teaching and learning, and finally to suggest that the real potential of a 'grammatical' contribution to the language learning experience has yet to be fully realized.

The ways in which grammatical considerations have over the years been manifested in formal language learning can, I believe, be narrowed to three: the bases upon which pedagogical grammar may be conceived, the criteria upon which to exercise choices among grammatical exponents for presentation, and the manner in which grammatical competence is to be imparted.

1 . B A S E S

The linguistic or psycholinguistic concepts that have been proposed as basic pedagogic frameworks for the introduction of grammatical material cover a rather wide field. Perhaps the best known such 'applications' are those that adapt, wholly or in part, entire formal systems. We have, for example, Ann Nichols' 1965 text (English Syntax: Advanced Composition for Non-Native Speakers), based upon the principles of immediate constituent analysis and the earliest contributions of Chomsky ( 1957) . Constructing Sentences (Rand 1 969) is a direct reflection of Lees' Grammar of English Nominalizations ( 1960) and my own Modern English, in its 1 968 version, borrowed some of the transformational apparatus and generalizations from Syntactic Structures (Chomsky 1957) and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Chomsky 1965) . There have been others. However much one may find to criticize in them, what value these texts may have is the extent to which they serve the 'monitoring' capacity ot students who are more predisposed to utilize this mechanism (Krashen 1977) . The place of the monitor relative to the other aspects of a person's language learning faculty might be represented in the kind of schema proposed by Dulay and Burt (1977):

Primary Lmgu1stic Data and us SocJOhngulstic Dimensions

��}-<1l))))))) : N : Learner's

I 1 Speech I T : I Q 1 I R I L-J

The apparent lack of success of materials like those cited earlier is therefore attributable, at least in part, to their exclusive catering to the monitoring capacity, the size of which varies greatly of course from learner to Ieamer, and the effect of which may not figure at all in some of the methods for measuring communicative competence.



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It is also claimed (Diller 1975) that the aims of language pedagogy are best served by observance of the so-called 'rationalist-cognitivist' theories of language, the philosophical underpinning of transformational grammar. Cited -by Diller as embodiments of rationalist theory have been such pedagogical concepts, approaches, and methodologies as The Silent Way of Gattegno, the 'non-silent way' of Winitz and Reeds, other versions of the Direct Method, Community Language Learning, Total Physical Response, and so on. Although they all differ strikingly in many ways, two things that they apparently have in common are, according to their own claims, ( I) a high degree of success in teaching language, and (2) a recognition of the importance of grammar. It is tempting here, of course, to infer the causal relationship between the two, and yet this remains to be demonstrated. It may well be that such success as these new (and not so new) approaches have enjoyed is more attributable to the extent to which they cater to all the functions of the human language-learning faculty than it is to the fact that grammar has been taken note of by them in some way.

If recognition of language as (at least in part) rule-governed behavior is one of the hall-marks of rationalist-cognitivist theory, then it would be hard to find any language teaching methods, systems, curricula, or syllabuses that are to that extent not rationalist-cognitivist. Who among us would not agree that rule-governed behavior is an apt characterization of much of what happens when one says or writes something? The crucial questions for language teaching, I believe, do not devolve upon whether or not language is rulegoverned behavior. Those questions, it seems to me, are rather ones like (1) What kind of rules are we talking about? (2) Can they be adequately stated for pedagogical purposes (Krashen and Seliger 1975)? (3) How much of what happens in language use can we account for through such rules? (4) Are any of them teachable? (5) Could teaching them have any appreciable positive effect on learning? (6) What does 'teaching a rule' really mean? (7) Can features of a target language system be utilized pedagogically in ways other than those with which we are currently familiar (i .e. explicit statement, sequencing determined by grammatical complexity, etc.)? To talk meaningfully about pedagogical grammar, here or elsewhere, is to address oneself to, or elaborate upon, these questions .

I have a persistent feeling, with some empirical corroboration, that with the mention of grammatical rules what is usually in the back of one's mind are the rules, so to speak, of low-level syntax; that is, rules having to do, for example, with subject-verb agreement, plural markers, possessive markers , questions, tense formation, etc . ; in other words, rules whose terms are the overt markers of surface syntax or the morphological elements that are typically observed in studies of language acquisition. Yet these rules, precisely because their makeup may easily be observed at the level of surface syntax, require little or no explicit pedagogical formulation. Wilga Rivers, for example, has argued for paying less attention to such rules which, as we know, are continually.broken even by advanced learners who can use the rest of the language quite correctly. Rivers urges that more emphasis be put instead on the ways in which the target language conceptualizes reality and the grammatical-realization of those concepts. Sharwood-Smith (1976) proposes teaching the English present perfect tense 'within the framework of a more comprehensible notional system



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dealing with time reference in general' (Sharwood-Smith 1976:4). Other suggestions are to be found in Wilkins (1976) and Chu ( 1978). If French were the target language, for example, it would not mean teaching the mechanics of gender agreement so much as inculcating a thought pattern in which the whole concept of gender agreement becomes dominant. If English is the target language, it means not so much teaching the intricate rule system for deployment of definite and indefinite articles (one ESL text-Robinson 1 967-lists 44 separate rules); it means rather engendering an inclination to match certain features of the determiner system with notions of presupposition and raisingto-consciousness.

If at least some of the rules of low level syntax, are, so to speak, to be left to take care of themselves, then proposals for basing the arrangement of language content upon the findings of research in error analysis (e.g. Diller 1976) need to be re-examined, for most of this research has been concerned with precisely that area of syntax. George (1972), for example, in his pioneering work Common Errors in Language Learning, attributes to perception of redundancy some errors involving the presence or absence of such items as the comparative morpheme, personal pronouns, the copula, existential there, question words, and so on. Information of this kind seemed at the time to have some usefqlness for the d!!sign of pedagogical syllabuses, and in fact this was proposed by George himself and later echoed by Diller (1975). Valdman (1974) takes an even stronger position in stating that:

since errors reflect the way in which learners acquire linguistic competence, they must (italics added) serve as a basis for the ordering of grammatical features, and, beyond that, for the establishment of objectives and aims of instruction. (Valdman 1974:23)

More recently, however, there have come suggestions (Hakuta 1979; Huebner 1979; Schachter and Rutherford 1978) that the characterization of what can be called a learner error may be a considerably more complex matter than heretofore imagined. Preoccupation by researchers with the distributional arrangement of surface syntax ought not to conflict with the need to look carefully at other less obvious possible sources for learner errors: for example, transfer of first language discourse features, influence of broad first language typological characteristics, 'pressure' from first language abstract organization, etc. This kind of scrutiny has already led to the discovery (Schachter and Rutherford 1978) that at least one kind of 'error' , long identified as a malformed passive (e.g. Chicken have cooked already}, is in fact an attempt to impose upon English the basic topic-comment form of Chinese (Chicken, we have cooked it already). Another researcher (Huebner 1978) has traced errors in the English determiner system to influence from a learner's 'topic-prominent' first language (Li and Thompson 1 976). Clearly, it is not rash to assume that much more may be going on in the production of learner errors than we can presently understand. And it is just as clear that caution and restraint are called for in any temptation to let current error analysis research findings influence the shape of pedagogical grammars. Warnings of this kind have already been issued. See, for instance, Tarone, Swain and Fathman ( 1976), Schachter and Celce-Murcia ( 1977).

One more suggestion for the basic make-up of pedagogical grammar, and



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one which is not necessarily inconsistent with the foregoing proposals, comes from Allen and Widdowson ( 1 978): 1

The applied linguist must pick and choose among formal statements in the light of his experience as a teacher, and decide what are pedagogically the more appropriate ways of arranging the linguistic information that he derives from linguistic grammars. (Allen and Widdowson 1978:67-68)

This position has since been attacked by Sharwood-Smith ( 1978), who at AILA Montreal said that 'eclecticism as such is only a stop-gap . . . in the absence of guidelines from other disciplines' (Sharwood-Smith 1978:2). If it is 'unprincipled eclecticism' that Allen and Widdowson are advocating then this criticism would seem to be well directed. However, Allen and Widdowson, if I understand them correctly, are simply saying that whatever the applied linguist borrows from theoretical linguistics to serve the needs of pedagogy must be validated 'in the light of his experience as a teacher' . The applied linguist's 'picking and choosing' may therefore be seen as no less principled than any other means of assembling a theoretical base from which to derive the grammatical exponents appropriate for pedagogy.

2. C H O I C E S

W e tum now to the subject o f what criteria we might bring to bear in exercising choice among grammatical elements. It is important at the outset to realize that establishment of pedagogical grammar bases does not automatically prescribe the precise selection of grammatical features for pedagogical use. Such choices may be influenced by other considerations, some of which I will touch upon here.

With the current attention being paid to notions of syllabuses with a semantic as opposed to a grammatical orientation, the matter of choosing among structural elements is often constrained by prior semantic and functional choices. Since communication is established as an immediate goal very early in the instructional plan, what the student needs right away in order to engage in such communication is judged to be not so much mastery of units of language structure as mastery of 'units' , so to speak, of communication. {For the dangers inherent in a view of language use that derives from a communicative taxonomy, see Widdowson 1 978.) Can the concept of 'grammatical choice' have any meaning then within the syllabus which takes organized communication as its point of departure? The answer to this is far from certain . Grammatical considerations seem to affect all functionallybased pedagogical materials, whether or not the effect is acknowledged by the author, in at least one of two ways : (1) an implicit, mainly intuitive criterion of simplification is invoked, such that the normal frequency of appearance of certain designated structures is artificially lowered, thereby automatically increasing the frequency of appearance of other structures; (2) marked off in the materials are periodic specified gathering points for sets of oreviouslv practiced language elements which, collectively, illustrate the formal properties of a construction, extend the co-occurrence range of an already familiar structure, or display a completed structural paradigm. Nevertheless, form in all these instances, no matter what the nature and strength of its influence, clearly plays a subordinate role to that of what has come to be called language function.



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Grammatical considerations thus have generally entered meaningfully into the planning of existing functional materials only to a very limited extent. Is this indicative of a basic incompatibility of structural and functional criteria? It is probably not yet possible to answer this with any kind of assurance, simply because not a great deal of research has been undertaken to study the relation between the two, pioneering efforts like those of Munby ( 1978) and Wilkins (1976) notwithstanding. It might yet be demonstrated, for example, that corresponding to a certain small number of language functions (perhaps as ·they are defined in Van Ek 1975) are a small range of favored syntactic forms. This is what Fink claims ( 1976) is the case for syntax vis-a-vis semantics. Although there is no one-to-one syntax-semantics match-up, there are favored syntactic forms for the semantic categories 'location' , 'experiencer' , 'agent', 'benefactive' , 'instrument' , etc. Drawing on the work of Tesniere and Fillmore, Fink suggests that the nature of this relationship can be exploited pedagogically through focus on the lexico-semantic properties of verbs, which he claims will facilitate 'sentence retention and reproduction' for the learner. Nevertheless, the usefulness for pedagogy of all this, it must be admitted, is s"till a matter for some experimentation.

Choices among grammatical exponents can also be discussed with respect to their places of introduction relative to each other, i .e. sequencing. A number of studies in recent years have demonstrated that certain lists of English structures are acquired by foreign learners in the same order irrespective of teaching methods, syllabus design, or mother tongue (Krashen, Madden and Bailey 1 975; see also a summary of such research in Corder 1978). Others have shown that not only are the acquisition orders fixed for second language learning and for first language learning, but the orders in second language learning are the same, both for child learners (Burt and Dulay 1974, Fathman 1975) and adult learners (Krashen, Sferlazza, Feldman and Fathman 1976). Thus, we know in what order a specified class of morphemes is acquired by all second language learners, and we know that in the construction of pedagogical grammars we also want to arrange the presentation of such morphemes in some order. Here, it would seem then, is a prime example of research findings whose pedagogical applications are obvious. Krashen et al. (1975) put it this way:

The typical learner will have a certain difficulty order regardless of what syllabus is used, and it is plausible that using a sequence identical to that difficulty order will be more comfortable and efficient, that is, learning might proceed more rapidly and with less frustration on the part of the student and teacher. (Krashen et a!. 1975 :46)

Yet, the 'application' here may be premature. One must realize that language acquisition research has focused to date upon a very small part of the total language system (Tarone, Swain and Fathman 1976). I would stress, furthermore, that limitations of research technique have thus far confined empirical investigation largely to the one language area that is most amenable to itemization, viz. the morphological elements of low-level syntax. Without denying the value of morphological acquisition studies for gaining insight into the cognitive processes involved in language learning, one would still wish to question the wisdom of applying directly to language pedagogy knowledge about the sequential appearance of discrete low-level linguistic units at a time



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when focus i n designing curricula has moved toward greater appreciation and understanding of the importance of discourse and the specific ways that discourse is encoded into grammar for different purposes. 2 As I pointed out earlier, applications of research to pedagogy at the morphological level have other dangers that only now are beginning to be noted and investigated. These have to do with the influence of first language discourse features upon second language syntactic form, resulting in unique interlanguage characteristics which traditional research methods have thus far been unable to account for (Huebner 1 978; Schachter and Rutherford 1978; Schmidt 1978). Again, there is clearly much more to be known about how languages are learned before we would want to take serious note of such findings in choosing what grammatical material to make pedagogical light of and where and when to do it.

Having discussed at some length the conceptual bases for pedagogical grammar and the matter of choosing among grammatical exponents, I would like now to consider the question of how grammatical information is imparted within the pedagogical setting.

3 . M A N N E R

I think i t i s fair t o say at the outset that all efforts t o convey grammatical information to the learner are in effect efforts to influence learning strategies. Where this information is in any way drawn attention to-by overt arrangement, sequencing, spiraling, simplification, attenuation, explanation, or what have you-then the effort to influence is a conscious one. The conscious efforts to influence which have been recognized and identified as such often involve tampering with the well-formedness of sentences. This is done in either one of two ways. One is an attempt to anticipate stages in the development of the learner's interlanguage by incorporating these stages into the language of his input; the other is an attempt at direct guidance of the learner's hypothesistesting capacity through exposure to selected ungrammatical language for the purpose of inducing correct generalizations. I will briefly discuss these two kinds of tampering in the order just cited.

3. 1 . One of the earliest mentions of interlanguage replication for pedagogy occurred in Jakobovits' Foreign Language Learning (1970), where he speculated upon the possibility of shaping the development of the learner's competence by exposing him ' to utterances which are grammatically progressive at each stage but which fall short of having the full complexity of wellformed sentences' (Jakobovits 1970:23). Somewhat later Nickel (1973) suggested that 'language teaching materials should reflect the sequence of approximative systems of the learner to the point of actually teaching 'incorrect forms' . 3 Valdman (1974) also considers this approach. At about the same time Schumann (1974) hypothesized that the learner's successive approximative systems are similar to the widely documented language developmental sequence of pidginization followed by creolization. If this is so, then it is a very short step to suggesting that in ESL/EFL classes one should actually teach a pidginized form of English, and over a stretch of learning time gradually bring it into alignment with standard English . Widdowson (in a talk at USC in 1978) is one researcher who has made this suggestion. 4 As with any other serious proposal, however, the notion of 'pedagogical pidginization'



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needs to be thought through to all its possible consequences and ramifications. In particular, this would entail the resolution of a paradox: that whereas the communicative thrust of language teaching objectives now tends more and more toward direct consideration of the learner's early need to express his personal feelings, pidginization is a process of simplification suited to the communication not of feelings but of information. (See Schumann 1974 and references cited therein.) In other words, on the one hand assessment of language learning objectives might point to early exposure of the learner to the language redundancies (i.e. morphological inflection, grammatical complexity, etc.) required for 'integrative' and 'expressive' function (Smith 1 972), while on the other hand assessment of language learning strategies would point to a curriculum design deriving from the pidginization process, where morphological inflection and grammatical complexity are delayed until 'creolization' . This contradiction between objectives and strategies, would clearly need to be resolved before undertaking to make pedagogical use of pidginization.

3 .2. The prime advocate of the use of ungrammaticality as a direct aid to the learner's hypothesis-testing capacity is Robin Lakoff ( 1969), with actual application of this technique to be found in Rutherford ( 1975, 1977). Lakoff put the matter this way:

The teacher must give the learner a boost to making his own generalizations, to learning how the native speaker understands and intuitively uses . . . sentences. This necessarily implies that it is essential to give the learner ungrammatical sentences, so that he can study these along with the grammatical ones to decide for himself what the difference is. (Lakoff 1 969: 1 25- 1 26)

The text will be rationalistically oriented-it will encourage students to ask themselves why sentences are good and bad . . . (Lakoff 1 969: 1 17)

Not aU students will be predisposed, of course, to working with language in this way, since what constitutes a 'bad' sentence will often be one thing for the linguist and quite something else for the language learner: for example, a sentence whose propositional content is false, illogical, or even unpleasant. Furthermore, it may seem counter-productive to call much attention to isolated sentences devoid of context or relevance at a time when there is increasing interest in the teaching of language as communication. This then is another contradiction whose resolution would be a prerequisite to the presentation of selected ungrammaticality for the inductive learning of structural generalizations.

3 .3 . Throughout this discussion of pedagogical grammar I have been citing the parallel need to consider the relationship between grammar and discourse. This was touched on in discussion about the teaching of conceptual systems, about the transfer of first language function, about lexico-semantic properties, and so on. Left unspecified, however, and only implied, is how the features of the grammatical system and of the realm of discourse might be learned relative to each other, i.e. sequencing again, but at the very highest level of language organization. Others have turned this implication into an assertion-that language learning in terms of the acquisition of structures makes sense only within the framework of discourse, wherein the structures are seen as serving a



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communicative function . Hatch (1978) states the premise as follows: In second language learning . . . it is assumed that one first learns how to manipulate structures, that one gradually builds up a repertoire of structures and then, somehow, learns how to put the structures to use in discourse. We would like to consider the possibility that just the reverse happens. One learns how to interact verbally, and out of this interaction syntactic structures are developed. (Hatch 1 978:403-404)

If in fact language learning proceeds in this way (and of course this has yet to be demonstrated) then for language teaching to pursue methods that project a view of language which runs counter to what the learner already knows intuitively would seem not to be sound pedagogy. The conclusion to be drawn here then is that presentation of syntax should derive, wherever possible, from the organization of discourse. All well and good. But the extent to which we are able to accomplish this on a principled basis will be a direct reflection of our understanding of how grammar encodes discourse for communication, an area of language research which is as yet little understood. Hakuta and Cansino ( 1 977), for example, suggest that 'tracing the development of the linguistic forms that the learner uses for the expression of a (pragmatic) function might well reveal orderly and lawful patterns' (Hakuta and Cansino 1977:310) a �ine of investigation which they regret has not yet been pursued. 4. C O N C L U S I O N

I would like t o finish this paper by returning to some earlier issues that require more elaboration. There is no question that, whatever else the use of language represents, some part of that use is rule-governed behavior. No one would deny that. But what we do not agree upon is what pedagogical use is to be made of these 'rules ' . It is a question, in other words of how we go about making language system serve the needs of language learning. Part of the problem is to be found in what we perceive to be language system; part of it is to be found in what we do with that perception.

A fairly typical view of what our language is made up of and how it is put together can be obtained from inspection of most English-teaching materials, both first and second language. Although no two sets of materials will be based upon the same inventory of language categories, what most of these materials do have in common is the utilization of language categories themselves as units of learning. The role of grammar in particular has been viewed in this way. It is tempting to conceive of grammar as a language system composed o f discrete units, and it is then but a short pedagogical step to let such units constitute something which is to be, so to speak, 'mastered' . Lending itself especially well to this notion of formal elements translating into learnable elements is surface syntax. (See also Noblitt 1972.) Yet the justification for this translation still awaits empirical validation. The forms of surface grammar are, for example, not even co-extensive with functions which they seem to encode and which represent a new kind of 'learnable' unit in recent EFL syllabuses. But notwithstanding the pedagogical status of surface syntax, if considerations of this kind are taken to be the extent of the grammatical contribution to pedagogy, then I would have to say that grammar has been given short shrift .



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The grammatical system of English, or any other language, is still very far indeed from being fully understood. What we do know, however, is that grammatical organization exists on deeper levels than have been recognized by most pedagogical research and that the ways in which this deep organization bears on language learning is as yet little known. The kind of deep English grammar I am referring to is exemplified by the fundamental principle that word order is used almost exclusively to signal grammatical relationships and not-as in for example Russian, Chinese, and to some extent Spanish-to signal pragmatic relationships (Thompson 1 978). Again, the kind of deep grammar I am referring to is further exemplified by the fact that basic to the English sentence is the notion 'subject' and not 'topic' , as in say Chinese, or both subject and topic, as in say Japanese (Li and Thompson 1976). Thompson (1978) points out that it is from these principles that English derives the need for certain kinds of grammatical features (e.g. articles: to mark subjects that are not at the same time topics) and rules (e.g. movement rules: to keep subject position filled).

It is all too obvious that the (presumably unconscious) grasp by the learner of such principles as subject-prominence and grammatical word-order is affected by the corresponding organizational principles of the learner's mother tongue. This fact is most clearly demonstrated by the simple act of correcting the surface errors, both ' local' and 'global' (Burt and Kiparsky 197�). in a piece of written English produced by any foreign learner. When everything correctable has been corrected, what is usually left is a stretch of English that not only still tells us that it was written by a non-native speaker but also still leaves clues as to that speaker's mother tongue. If the writer were Japanese, for example, we would be interested to know in what ways, subtle or not, that stretch of English could have been affected by typological characteristics of Japanese such as topic- and subject-prominence and the fact that it is left-branching and rigidly verb-final. This of course presupposes that we already have the corresponding typological information for English. But it is precisely this kind of grammatical knowledge, I would like to stress once more, that should be examined for its pedagogical usefulness and significance.

We are all aware of the advances that have been made in recent years in the understanding of the language learning process. We are nowadays accustomed, in routine fashion, to formulating theories, conducting experiments, testing hypotheses, and so on. And we have witnessed methodological break-throughs, innovative classroom techniques, and principled syllabus design. Yet, pedagogical grammar of late seems to some extent to have been left at the starting gate. The grammatical contribution to pedagogy seldom ventures beyond an inventory of constructions and sentence types that are considered to be of high frequency and representative of the language and which await incorporation into the syllabus at designated points, from there on to be practiced and hopefully mastered. This is as true for syllabuses with a functional orientation as for those with a grammatical orientation. But neglected so far have been the crucial questions of deep grammatical organization, of the discourse function of grammatical rules, and of what kinds of 'meanings' are conveyed by grammatical forms themselves. Thus, despite real evidence of some serious attention, pedagogical grammar has a potential which is yet to be fulfilled .



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The fulfillment of this potential will depend heavily upon the extent to which we can start thinking of grammar in broader terms. This does not mean that the already complex grammatical statements to be found in most textbooks should be further complicated through the addition of more and more facts. That is not what is needed, however insightful the facts may turn out to be. On the contrary, one indeed might easily question the very assumption that the only way grammatical information can be utilized pedagogically is through overt factual presentation in 'teachable units' , so to speak. It has yet to be proven that grammar has of necessity to call attention to itself in order to be pedagogically useful, and with the curricular goals of language for communication the deeper grammatical organization of the syllabus might well be accomplished in such a way as to be invisible to the untrained eye. Grammar in this more sweeping sense would thus play a different kind of role in the language learning experience, and one that is more consistent with the concept of language as a vehicle for communication. The kind of role I am speaking of would be one which focuses as much attention upon what we use a grammatical construction for as upon how that construction is put together. Such a role would bring to consciousness the necessity for choosing among grammatical alternatives in satisfying the basic principles of information arrangement within discourse. Such a role would take serious note of the formal characteristics that distinguish the English language typologically from other languages, characteristics like the central position of the notion 'subject' as distinct from 'topic' and the use of word-order to reflect grammatical relationships. And such a role would serve to support a way of looking at and thinking about language, for teacher and student alike. It is by moving in these directions, I believe, that pedagogical grammar is most likely to realize its unfulftlled potential and to facilitate learning how to communicate in a foreign language.

(Received May 1979)

N O T E S

1 Noblitt ( 1 972) holds a similar view. 2 Krashen (personal communication) has smce modified his position to a consideration that what

might be best for sequencing is grammatical input that the learner understands. Candlin ( 1978) suggests sequencing of discourse patterns.

' This quote on Nickel's suggestion is taken from Corder ( 1 978:72). ' See also his paper Pidgin and Babu in Widdowson 1 979.

R E F E R E N C E S

Allen, J . P . B . and H. G . Widdowson, 1978. 'Teaching the communicative use of English ' . Chapter 4 of R. Mackay and A. Mountford, eds. Englzsh for Specific Purposes. London: Longman.

Burt, M . and H. Dulay. 1974. 'Natural sequences in child second language acquisition' . Language Learning 24/ 1 .



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Burt, M . and C . Kiparsky. 1974. 'Global and local mistakes' . In Schumann and Stenson 1 974.

Candlin, C. N. 1 978. 'Discoursal patterning and the equalising of interpretive opportunity' . Paper presented at Conference on English as an International and Auxiliary Language, The East-West Center, Hawaii.

Chomsky, N. 1 957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.

Chomsky, N. 1 965 . Aspects ofthe Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass. : M IT Press.

Chu, C. C. 1978. 'A semantico-syntactic approach to contrastive analysis-some 'be' and 'have' sentences in English and Chinese' . IRAL 1 614.

Corder, S. P. 1978. 'Error analysis, interlanguage and second language acquisition' . In V. Kinsella, ed. Language Teaching and Linguistics: Surveys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Diller, K. 1 975. 'Some new trends for applied linguistics and foreign language teaching in the United States. TESOL Quarterly 91 1 .

Dulay, H . and Burt, M . 1 977. ' Remarks on creativity in language acquisition' . In Viewpoints on English as a Second Language, eds. M. Burt, H . Dulay and M . Finocchiaro. New York, Regents.

Fathman, A. 1 975. ' Language background, age and the order of acquisition of English structures' . In On TESOL '75.

Fink, S. R. 1 976. 'Semantic-pragmatic aspects in foreign language pedagogy based on case grammar and valence theory ' . Linguistische Berichte 4 I.

George, H . V. 1972. Common Errors in Language Learning. Rowley, Mass . : Newbury House.

Hakuta, K. and H. Cansino. 1977. 'Trends in second-language-acquisition research. Harvard Educational Review 47/3.

Hakuta, K. 1979. 'Some common goals for first and second language acquisition research' . Paper given at TESOL Convention, Boston.

Hatch, E. 1 978. 'Discourse analysis and second language acquisition' . In Hatch, ed. 1 978. Second Language Acquisition. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House.

Huebner, T. G. 1 978. 'Order-of-acquisition vs. dynamic paradigm: a comparison of method in interlanguage research'. Paper given at TESOL Convention, Mexico City.

Jakobovits, L. 1 970. Foreign Language Learning. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House.

Krashen, S. , C. Madden, and N. Bailey. 1 975. 'Theoretical aspects of grammatical sequencing' . In M. Burt and H. Dulay, eds. On TESOL '75.

Krashen, S. and H. Seliger. 1 975. 'The essential contribution of formal instruction in adult second language learning' . TESOL Quarterly 912.



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Krashen, S. , V. Sferlazza, L. Feldman, and A. Fathman. 1976. 'Adult performance on the SLOPE test: more evidence for a natural sequence in adult second language acquisition' . Language Learning 261 1 .

Krashen, S . D . 1 977. 'The monitor model for adult second language performance' . In Viewpoints on English as a Second Language, eds. Burt et al 1977.

Lakoff, R. 1969. 'Transformational grammar and language teaching' . Language Learning 1 91 1 -2.

Lamendella, J . and L. Selinker. 1978. 'Two perspectives on fossilization in interlanguage learning' . Jnterlanguage Studies Bulletin 3/2. Utrecht.

Lees, R. B. 1 960. The Grammar of English Nominalizations. IJAL 26/3, part I I .

L i , C. and S. Thompson. 1976. 'Subject and topic: a new typology of language' . In C. Li, ed. Subject and Topic. New York: Academic Press.

Munby, J. 1 978. Communicative Syllabus Design. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Newmark, L. and D. Reibel. 1967. 'Necessity and sufficiency in language learning' . In M. Lester, ed. Readings in Applied Transformational Grammar. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Nichols, A. 1 965. English Syntax: Advanced Composition for Non-Native Speakers. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Nickel, G. 1 973. 'Aspects of error analysis and grading'. In J. Svartvik, ed. Errata: papers in error analysis. Lund: Gleerup.

Noblitt, J. S. 1 972. ' Pedagogical grammar: towards a theory of foreign language materials preparation' . IRAL 10/4.

Robinson, L. 1 967. Guided Writing and Free Writing. New York: Harper and Row.

Rutherford, W. E. 1 968. Modern English. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.

Rutherford, W. E. 1 975, 1977. Modern English, Second Edition, Volumes 1 and 2. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

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Schachter, J . and M. Celce-Murcia. 1977. 'Some t:eservations concerning error analysis ' . TESOL Quarterly 1 114.

Schachter, J. and W. Rutherford. 1978. 'Discourse function and language transfer' . Paper given a t AILA Congress, Montreal.

Schmidt, M. 1 978. ' Coordinate structures and deletion in learner English' . Masters thesis, University of Washington.

Schumann, J. 1 974. 'Implications of pidginization and creolization for the study of adult second language acquisition' . I n Schumann and Stenson 1974.

Schumann, J. and N. Stenson, eds. 1974. New Frontiers in Second Language Learning. Rowley, Mass. : Newbury House.



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Sharwood-Smith, M. 1976. ' Pedagogical grammars and the semantics of time reference in English' . Linguistic Agency University of Trier. Series 8, paper 1 7 .

Sharwood-Smith, M. 1978. 'On the future o f pedagogical grammar' . Paper given at AILA Congress, Montreal.

Smith, D. M. 1 972. 'Some implications for the social status of pidgin languages' . In D. M . Smith and R. Shuy, eds. Sociolinguistics and Cross-Cultural Analysis. Washington: Georgetown University Press.

Tarone, E. , M. Swain and A. Fathman. 1 976. 'Some limitations to the classroom applications of current second language acquisition research' . TESOL Quarterly 1 0/ l .

Thompson, S . 1978. 'Modern English from a typological point of view: some implications of the function of word order. Linguistiche Berichte 54.

Valdman, A. 1974. 'Error analysis and pedagogical ordering' . Linguistic Agency University of Trier. Series 8, paper I I .

Van Ek, J . 1975. The Threshold Level. Strasbourg: Council of Europe.

Widdowson, H. G. 1978. ' Notional syllabuses, part 4' . Paper given at TESOL Convention, Mexico City. Published in Charles H. Blatchford and Jacquelyn Schachter, eds. On TESOL '79 and in Widdowson. 1979.

Widdowson, H. G. 1979. Explorations in Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wilkins, D. A. 1 976. Notional Syllabuses. London: Oxford University Press.



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FOREIGN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: WHERE THE REAL PROB LEMS LIE*

W I L G A M . R I V E R S Harvard University

In the last twenty years we have seen a shift of emphasis in linguistics from a predominant interest in phonology and morphology, and later syntax, to a lively concern with semantics and pragmatics. This has been paralleled in psychology by a move from the consideration of language as an accumulation of discrete elements in associative chains to the study of human conceptual and perceptual systems and a growing interest in the pragmatics of language in situations of use.

This direction of change can be observed in first-language acquisition studies. We see the move from the view of such psychologists as Skinner ( 1 957), Mowrer ( 1 960) and Staats (197 1 ) that the acquisition of a language is a matter of conditioned habit formation (a position easier to demonstrate with examples drawn from phonology and morphology), to the interest of McNeill ( 1 970) in an innate language acquisition device programmed to identify the form of the grammar to which it is attending. Bever (1 970) turns our attention to the perceptual and semantic strategies which facilitate language acquisition. In the later work of Brown (1 973) we find the emphasis has also moved to a consideration of semantic as well as grammatical relations. Semantic complexity has now become an important consideration in studying the order of acquisition of linguistic forms in the early stages.

As early as 1 970, Bloom drew attention to the intersections of cognitive-perceptual development, linguistic experience, and non-linguistic experience in the language development of children. ' Induction of underlying structure, ' she says, 'is intimately related to the development of cognition' ( 1 970:232}, and further, 'children's speech is very much tied to context and behavior . . . children learn to identify certain grammatical relationships and syntactic structures with the environmental and behavioral contexts in which they are perceived and then progress to reproducing approximations of heard structures in similar, recurring contexts' ( 1970:233) .

With a similar appreciation of the importance of context, Bruner ( 1 974175) and Halliday ( 1 973) have sought to identify the communicative needs of infants as revealed in their prelinguistic and early linguistic behavior. In this behavior they find early indications of the functions of language in use in speech acts (see Rivers 1 976b). 'Use, ' as Bruner has said, 'is a powerful determinant of rule structure' ( 1 974175 :283). Bruner prefers to turn his attention to the role played in the development of syntactic competence by the uses to

*This is a revised versiOn of a paper presented at the Fifth International Congress of AILA, Montreal, 1 978.

Applied Linguistics, Vol. I , No I .



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which language is put in different contexts. ' Initial language at least,' he says, ' has a pragmatic base structure' (Bruner 1974/75:261).

As infants grow in experience in social interaction, they gain insight into linguistic ways of expressing ideas they previously held by other than linguistic means; in other words, they learn 'who is doing what with what object toward whom in whose possession and in what location and often by what instrumentality' (Bruner 1974/75:271).

Semantically based relations such as these, which derive from the work of Fillmore (1 968) and Chafe (1970), have been found useful in the study of child language by researchers other than Bruner. Brown (1973) and Schlesinger (1977) have also found them more descriptive of what the child is acquiring than the syntactic relations basic to the now classical form of transformational-generative grammar. Once the notion that the child's first linguistic task is the acquisition of an abstract system of syntactic relations is rejected in favor of an acquisition based on the functions of language in use, the theoretical assumptions are more easily aligned with the stages of cognitive development from infancy to maturity postulated by Piaget (1953) and with his emphasis on the operative aspect of the symbol (Furth 1969:99-105). Giving orders, asking for things, stating who does what to whom, and expressing needs and wishes are all possible at the stage when language is being acquired, whereas ability to recognize and express abstract relations comes nearer puberty.

Research in first-language acquisition has always held great appeal for foreign-language teachers. Parents are bemused as they watch their young children acquire with ease and rapidity a level of operation in a language which they themselves took years to achieve. Teachers become wistful as they compare this apparently effortless learning with the struggles of their adolescent/adult students. It is inevitable, then, that we yearn to find immediate answers to our problems in this fascinating first-language acquisition research.

Here we touch on the most ancient and vigorous controversy in the whole area of language-related studies. Is the process of learning a second language similar to or even the same process as learning a first language? In discussing this question people become dogmatic on what is for the most part anecdotal evidence or analogizing. The apparent insolubility of the controversy can, to some extent, be traced to the differing levels of generality at which the various disputants are developing their arguments. Do they mean, for instance, that adolescent/adult students of English learn to use the copula 'is' in English in exactly the same progression, making the same errors along the way, as do children growing up in English-speaking families? Or, on the other hand, are they maintaining that adolescent/adult students learn to use a new language through practice in its use in the normal functions of communication, as do young children, rather than through detailed explanations of the rule system? That the acquisition of precise structures runs parallel in first and second

- language learning has yet to be conclusively demonstrated. The second position, that we learn a language by using it, rather than by studying it, is overly simplified and dichotomous. To some extent a further extension of the old educational adage: 'we learn what we do' , it ignores the varying linguistic capabilities and experiences, the learning preferences, and the individual



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motives and goals o f mature students i n widely diverse circumstances . Unfortunately, the 'language-learning situation' at all levels and in all circumstances cannot be simplified and unified to this degree, as all experienced teachers are aware.

Until we can agree on what is meant by the similarity or identity of first and second language learning processes, we shall probably continue quite happily to extrapolate or to refuse to extrapolate from first-language acquisition studies. The answer must be found elsewhere. Research into the process of acquiring or learning a second language is urgent and important. But again, we must be cautious. Much of the second-language acquisition research to date has been directed to the understanding of the process of acquisition of a second language by young children in informal settings or bilingual classes . The same caveat applies here. Should we expect these findings to cast much light on the learning of new languages by adolescent/adult students in formal instructional settings: the most usual settings for foreign-language learning. We need more studies of actual foreign-language learners, like the avoidance studies of Schachter ( 1 974). These provide a useful complement, if not corrective, to the general preoccupations of most contemporary second-language acquisition research.

The earliest second-language acquisition studies of the recent cycle focused to a great extent on the plausibility of the notion of transfer, particularly negative transfer or interference, from what was learned in the first language. This was to some extent a reaction to the overly optimistic emphasis on transfer in the preceding decades that had led to, or paralleled, a plethora of contrastive studies of pairs of languages which, in some cases, attempted to predict problem areas for the learners of these languages. Without wishing to cover the ground already comprehensively covered in the very thorough evaluative review of 'Trends in second-language acquisition research' by Hakuta and Cancino ( 1 977), I shall make here certain personal observations on the directions and implications of this research and indicate where I feel energy might more fruitfully be expended, if improvement of foreign-language learning is the goal.

Controversy has raged on whether errors made by second-language learners represent negative transfer (interference) from first-language habits of use or are really developmental errors of a universal character, since they often seem similar to those made by first-language learners at a comparable stage in their control of a language (Dulay and Burt 1975:24-25) . Even errors which seem to provide clear evidence of the use of first-language grammatical rules in the second language have been taken by some writers to be the result of the active process of testing the hypothesis that the second language operates on similar principles to the first language, rather than as the transfer of first-language habits (Corder 1967) . This parallels the theoretical position (derived from Chomsky 1 965:30), that first-language learners are testing hypotheses as to the nature of the language they are learning.

Corder's hypothesis-testing assumption attempts to provide an alternative explanation for the same observable phenomenon which others have been calling transfer, but an explanation based on a different theoretical orientation. It is of interest, before we reject one view and accept another, to look more closely at the basic theory (in this case, hypothesis-testing in general) in



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relation to those aspects of foreign-language learning and use which the supporters of transfer theory were trying to explain, to see whether the hypothesis-testing view can deal more convincingly with the empirical data.

One important fact about hypothesis-testing is relevant in this regard. When one is testing a hypothesis, a serious disconfirmation makes one seek immediately another hypothesis which seems to fit the facts. In using a foreign language, however, one often continues to make the same error, even when one knows that the foreign and native languages operate differently for expressing this particular meaning. The notion that repeated errors of this type can result from the learner testing the hypothesis that the two languages operate in a parallel fashion at this point (the usual explanation of the hypothesis-testing theorist) is difficult to sustain in light of the fact (frequently observed and experienced) that one is constantly repeating the sanie error and then immediately correcting oneself, often with a sense of mortification and exasperation at one's inability to perform according to foreign-language rules one has studied and feels one 'knows' . (Transfer theorists, of course, have no problem with this phenomenon, since they consider it to be due to interference from the habits of use of another language or from earlier imperfect learning, based sometimes on defective materials.) For those interested in foreignlanguage learning and teaching, this is a most persistent problem and one which must be adequately· accounted for in any theory which purports to explain foreign-language learning and use.

Krashen (1978) considers this phenomenon to be indicative of the operation of two separate systems: language acquisition and language learning. Language acquisition is considered to be implicit, subconscious learning which develops from natural communication; it follows a fairly stable order of acquisition of structures. This acquired system is the initiator of performance, which may be self-corrected on the basis of ' feel' for grammaticality. Language learning is explicit, conscious learning which is helped by error correction and the presentation of explicit rules. It does not contribute directly to acquisition of the language or to performance, since utterances are initiated by the acquired system. Conscious learning is available to the learner only through a Monitor which operates to improve accuracy through selfcorrection. Conscious learning of this type, according to Krashen, is possibly unnecessary for most language acquirers, except for certain aspects of language use, such as formal speaking or writing, since, to operate, the Monitor needs time that is not available in normal communication, which is focused on meaning not form.

Personally, despite my years of fluency in French and my many close personal and informal relationships, I find myself conducting a rapid monitoring during normal communicative speech (and I speak fast). I become conscious of this monitoring especially at problem points where I know the rules are tricky for me as a native speaker of English. I find myself, at these choice points, running through the rules, even lengthening a syllable ever so slightly as I select the correct morphological segment or syntactic arrangement (for a gender agreement, for instance, or the position of an adverb in a multisegment verbal group) . According to Krashen, I am, as an individual, presumably ' focussed on form or correctness' ; my French friends, however, consider me 'completely involved' with my message (Krashen 1978:2).



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The Monitor Model, at this stage of its development, provides a novel attempt at describing what foreign-language learners experience ana foreignlanguage teachers observe, but it cannot be considered explanatory. Explanations given by Krashen are tied directly to the developmental, 'creative construction' position theoretically, a position still to be satisfactorily validated empirically. (For 'creative construction' , see Dulay and Burt 1 975.)

From the psychological point of view it is difficult to distinguish between self-correction by 'feel' and self-correction by 'rule', in the sense in which Krashen uses these terms. McLaughlin ( 1978) points out that at least some of the students in the Krashen, Butler, Birnbaum, and Robertson study (in press), who claimed to be self-correcting by ' feel' rather than 'rule', may have felt uncertain about how to verbalize the 'rule' satisfactorily, as they were required to do if they admitted to 'rule' as their self-correction device. It is difficult to take this introspective report of acting by 'feel' or by 'rule' as indicative of the kind of difference which Krashen makes basic to his model, until we are sure of the psychological difference between the two. This problem is reminiscent of Carroll's 1 97 1 discussion of the distinction between 'habits' and the 'internalized rules' of 'rule-governed' behavior. Carroll maintained that a 'rule' was a construct independent of actual behavior, whereas a 'habit' was what the person had actually learned, that is, the behavioral manifestation of the internalization of the rule (Carroll 197 1 : 104). An extension of Carroll's approach might well apply to Krashen's ' feel' and 'rule' .

From the psychological point of view it also seems highly improbable that acquisition and conscious learning, as Krashen describes them, could be noninteractive, totally separate systems, separate not only from each other but apparently from any previous learning. Such a model simply does not tally with the great body of recent research in cognitive processing. Until we can find psychological support for these basic elements of the theory, it remains an interesting, carefully elaborated metaphor of limited scope.

McLaughlin ( 1978) proposes that we substitute for conscious learning and acquisition the terms (and concepts) of controlled and automatic processes, which have been developed in recent information-processing theories, with the changes in implications these require, since 'a model that focuses on behavioral acts is falsifiable-a property that is unfortunately lacking in models that depend on appeals to conscious experience' ( 1978:330). Furthermore, we do have considerable knowledge of the operation of these processes. In 1968, Chomsky claimed for the study of language a central place in general psychology (1968:84). Since then, language-related studies have proliferated. This is hardly the moment for second-language acquisition researchers to cut themselves off from the intense research into cognitive processes, which are surely highly relevant to any consideration of language acquisition and use.

Continuing with our search for enlightenment with regard to the persistent problems foreign-language learners face, we may question the level at which evidence for 'interference' or transfer is sought by investigators in error analysis studies. ('Transfer' is the preferable term, since it includes positive, or facilitative, transfer as well as negative transfer, or interference. Without including positive transfer in examinations of data, any conclusions as to the amount of transfer rest moot.)

The investigator may be looking for evidence of transfer at the morpho-



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logical level, as some have done. Let us consider the situation of an English speaker learning a Romance language. In the subject's first language, in this case English, the third person singular of the present tense of most verbs takes an ending which is not used for the other persons for which an unmarked form is used. In the second language, the student does not attempt to add an ending to the third person of the verb while continuing to use the unmarked form for the other persons. As a result, it may be asserted by some that there is no evidence of transfer from first-language habits of use.

The discussion may, however, be conducted at a higher level of conceptualization. The subject, we may say, is not accustomed to using in the first language forms of the verb which are marked for person, number, and tense, except in one or two very frequent positions which have been learned through constant use as exceptions to the general rule. In a foreign language the student therefore finds it difficult to develop an awareness of the necessity to attach a variety of endings to verb stems to make these distinctions. As a result, when trying to communicate in the new language, the student tends to use unmarked forms as he or she would usually do in the native language. (This tendency is regarded in many current studies as simplification of the type used by children learning their first language.)

To take a further example, other second-language learners may have developed, while learning their first language, the concept that gender makes a clear semantic distinction, with rare exceptions, as in English. When these learners find that grammatical gender distinctions, apparently unmotivated, pervade the second language, they may find it hard to conceive of these distinctions as important enough to affect practically every part of speechnouns, adjectives, articles, pronouns, and even some forms of the verb. Although this has been explained to them, they still have to make a conscious mental effort to keep this all-pervading concept in mind when applying lowerlevel rules of agreement in all kinds of positions and relationships. Specific errors these learners make in omitting the morphemes indicating such agreement may be interpreted as intralingual, as simplification, or as overgeneralization errors, whereas the basic problem is an interlingual conceptual contrast . (For terminology, see Selinker 1972.)

To my mind, much more attention should be paid in classroom teaching to the comprehension and thorough assimilation of these fundamental conceptual differences between languages, so that students are learning to operate within the total language system, rather than picking up minor skills in its application. In the same vein, it is essential that the student acquire an understanding of the different way a new language sees and expresses temporal relationships across the language system, rather than concentrating exclusively on particular' uses of specific tenses and the correct forms for these uses (see Rivers 1968). Without a conceptual grasp of such overriding interlingual contrasts, the second-language learner will be unable to use effectively the lowerlevel knowledge of paradigms and rules which have strictly limited application.

A similar psychological problem is demonstrated in the common phenomenon of English-speaking students of French who find it hard to comprehend what the use of the subjunctive rather than the indicative conveys to a native speaker of French. They have never internalized the overriding concept that the subjunctive mood in French usage conveys a subjective view of



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the situation (that is, a personal opinion) as opposed t o the objective view of the indicative. Thus, Je ne pense pas qu 'i/ soit parti implies that I am not giving factual information, but my own assessment of the situation, whereas Je pense qu 'il est deja parti is based on some objective clues and may well be followed by an explanation like Parce que fa porte de son bureau est fermee. Because they lack this conceptual understanding of its use, English-speaking students of French tend to spatter subjunctive forms everywhere in the hope that some will stick in the right places . This insecurity and uncertainty about the extent of applicability of new rules, because of a lack of knowledge of how they fit into the meaning system of the new language, is a distinctly different psychological phenomenon from that of over-generalization, which is described by Selinker ( 1 972:21 8) as the extension of a newly acquired secondlanguage rule 'to an environment in which, to the learner, it could logically apply, but just does not ' . (Selinker would categorize as over-generalization the extension of the use of the past tense of walk/walked, to golgoed: an error commonly made by English-speaking children, even though they may previously have known and used went.) Psychologically, the phenomenon I am discussing seems to share some of the features of the native-language phenomenon of hyper-correction and may perhaps be better described as overcompensation: an attitude of better more than less. The reader will think of many other cross-linguistic conceptual problems like those of aspect in Chinese and Russian, and the problems Japanese speakers have with the use of the definite and indefinite articles in English (although the actual forms in this case are simple).

Experimentation conducted at this level of conceptualization, rather than at the level of the morpheme, might produce more interesting insights into the problems of adolescent/adult second-language learners. Whether one is referring here to habits of thought and approach to language use developed through using the first language or to hypotheses the second-language learner is making about the new language is difficult to say. Perhaps we should ask

· them, as is done in some other psychological experiments with mature subjects (see Schachter, Tyson, and Diffley 1976). Until errors can be identified as interlingual (due to transfer from the first to the second language) or intralingual (deriving from elements within the second language itself) by some more clearly demonstrable psychological criteria, interpretation of research in this area will remain somewhat hazy. Once we can clarify what we are dealing with, we may find, as Hakuta and Cancino maintain, that 'interference errors in second-language learning are fine examples of language transfer and . . . strongly point to areas of dynamic interplay between the two languages' ( 1977:299) .

Do we have any psychological justification for viewing the problems in this way? In other words, what can be the meaning of 'conceptualization'? Several recent directions in cognitive research hint at an answer.

In his most recent work (1977), Schlesinger has hypothesized a model of speech comprehension and a model of speech production, both of which are comprised of three essential components: cognitive structures, semantic structures, and surface structures. Children develop cognitive structures, which consist largely of relations between aspects of the environment, through their experiences and also through the categorizations they acquire as they learn a



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language. They learn to categorize relations and concepts semantically as they learn a specific language. Through this language they learn to express their intentions in accordance with the restrictions , or realization rules, the language imposes. This implies that persons speaking different languages may share cognitive structures or notions, yet ' for the purposes of speaking, a given situation may be perceived differently by speakers of two languages' (1977:94), that is, they adopt a different point of view. This different point of view is expressed in the surface structure realization their language requires. According to Schlesinger, 'each language prescribes which relations have to be mastered by the child' (1977:96) . Non-linguistic concepts also occur in cognitive structure and to express these may involve a clumsy circumlocution.

In Schlesinger's model, then, learning another language means acquiring new categorizations of semantic relations in accordance with the realization rules of the new language. This can result in the development of new cognitive structures (new ways of perceiving relations) or the opportunity to express relations dimly perceived which could not be put into words in the native language.

Although the concepts are not identical with those of Schlesinger, work in semantic memory also lends support to the notion that it is conceptual differences which have to be mastered if one is to become fluent in expressing one's meaning in another language. According to these theorists, no word or group of words has a discrete meaning which can be attached like a label that one can learn to use. Neither do specific grammatical forms always convey one identifiable meaning. Words and grammatical structures all acquire meaning within networks of conceptual relations which have been built up through the experiences of life, including ringuistic experiences, and these constitute our long-term memory. The networks consist of primitive meanings connected by relatiQns and language forms become associated with these networks so that the use of words in context activates interrelated concepts to produce the intended meaning. (See Klatzky 1975, and Melvin 1977.)

In this paradigm, the problem of learning to operate within the system of a new language is one of developing new networks, or extensions and modifications of existing networks, to express the interrelationships represented by the grammar and lexicon of the new language. These interrelationships will not at first be independent of the conceptual networks already established. Some of the latter will be facilitative where the conceptualization of the two languages is reasonably similar (this constitutes positive transfer). When sufficient interconnections are established for the new language system, it may be expected to operate autonomously, although associations with the old system will remain, so that we are able to say: 'Of course, in my first language the conceptualization of this set of meanings is different. It would be expressed thus and so. '

Interconnections also remain for other languages we have learned and until the new system is firmly established these can be activated and expressed at unexpected times and in unexpected ways. The writer can remember producing on one occasion, when learning Spanish, the conglomeration 'mais, aber, sed, pero' to the mystification of the listeners.

Adult learners are particularly conscious of deviations from the established networks and will seek to understand the nature of the system within which



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they should operate. If the teacher or teaching materials do not make this clear, the adult learner will seek a systematic explanation elsewhere-in an old textbook or from another person (Rivers 1979, and Fields 1978) .

Further evidence that the adolescent/adult learner is very conscious of the points where the rule system of the second language diverges from that of the first language is provided by Schachter's avoidance. studies ( 1974) . In an interesting investigation using written compositions in English, she found that while it appeared in quantitative data that a group with a contrasting relative pronoun rule system in their first language made fewer errors than a group whose first-language relative pronoun rule system was similar to that of English, another approach to the data revealed that the first group were avoiding the use of rules to which they were not accustomed and which they therefore found difficult. Ipso facto, fewer uses of relative pronouns by the subjects yielded fewer errors in their use. Schachter (1974:213) concluded that if students find particular constructions in the target language difficult to comprehend, it is very likely that they will try to avoid producing them.

Clearly we need to analyse much more comprehensively what may be considered transfer from first-language learning and use to second-language learning and use.

It is interesting to note that as with first-language acquisition studies, second-language acquisition research has been moving from an almost singleminded emphasis on the acquisition of the syntactic and morphological rules of the second language to strategies of language-in-use to meet the needs of communication. It is here that we can place Hakuta's prefabricated utterances, which are learned as units to be plugged into speech acts (Hakuta and Cancino 1977:309-3 10), and Hatch's discourse analysis (Hatch 1978) which examines, in second-language situations, communicative exchanges which recall the joint 'action dialogue' of Bruner's studies (1974175:283) and what Brown calls 'episodes' .

I t must be emphasized that studies with very young children in bilingual situations do not produce particularly relevant insights into the strategies employed by linguistically and conceptually mature adolescent/adult foreignlanguage learners (see Rivers 1978). The input of the latter is determined by their textbooks and other learning materials and they have well-established patterns of interaction from much experience in communication in their first language. Research into strategies of language use within the corpus with which the student has become acquainted at a particular stage of classroom learning would be very interesting and enlightening for hard-pressed classroom teachers. A full-time teacher carrying the typical school teaching load and teaching the usual large group is far too busy interacting with many students during ·class hours to study the linguistic and pragmatic reactions of individuals analytically. What I am proposing here is not the study of the 'interlanguage' of particular students at specific points in their acquisition of the foreign language (although this can be enlightening). I am referring rather to strategies foreign-language learner-users employ to make 'infinite use of finite means' (Chomsky 1 965 :8, quoting Humboldt) . When these strategies have been identified and described, they may be encouraged or even taught and incorporated into teaching materials . (For a study along these lines, see Hosenfeld 1 979.)



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This rapid survey demonstrates the interest of second-language acquisition studies for those of us who teach languages, yet far too little is known about them by language teachers, programme designers, and materials writers. Certainly this is a burgeoning field and much has been but sketchily researched at present; positions are taken and abandoned somewhat rapidly as experimental data are re-examined and reinterpreted. Yesterday's dogma may be devalued currency before it can receive serious applied consideration. Yet, as with all psychological research, much that is fundamental will be retained and recombined in the evolution of theory. As Neisser has'expressed it: 'the cognitive theorist . . . cannot make assumptions casually, for they must conform to the results of 100 years of experimentation' (Neisser 1967:4-5).

It is from solid research in this area and in related fields of cognition that we may hope to develop criteria by which to evaluate the appropriateness and potential effectiveness of the many techniques of language teaching which seem to rise and recede like the tide at regular intervals-serving_ their purpose of refreshing the scene, but often carrying away with them indiscriminately both useful and dispensable practices.

As teachers of second and third languages, we seek to provide for everyone who seeks such knowledge the most effective learning situation we can devise. For this, we need knowledge, not hunches. As in every other field of endeavor, nothing comes without effort and helping another person to acquire another language will never be easy.

(Received June 1979)

R E F E R E N C E S

Bever, T . G. 1 970. 'The cognitive basis for linguistic structures' . I n J. R. Hayes, ed. Cognition and the Development of Language. New York and London: John Wiley and Sons.

Bloom, L. 1 970. Language Development: Form and Function in Emerging Grammars. Cambridge, Mass. : The M. I.T. Press.

Brown, R. 1 973. A First Language: The Early Stages. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press.

Bruner, J. S. 1 974/75. 'from communication to language-a psychological perspective'. In Cognition 3/3:255-287.

Carroll, J. B. 197 1 . 'Current issues in psycholinguistics and second language teaching'. TESOL Quarterly 5: 103- 104.

Chafe, W. L. 1 970. Meaning and the Structure of Language. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Chomsky, N. 1965 . Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: The M.l.T. Press.



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Chomsky, N . 1 968 . Language and Mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

Corder, S. P. 1 967. 'The significance of learner's errors' . IRAL 5: 1 61-1 70.

Dulay, H. C., and Burt, M. K. 1975. 'Creative construction in second language learning and teaching' . In M. K . Burt and H. C. Dulay, eds. New Directions in Second Language Learning, Teaching and Bilingual Education. Washmgton, D.C.: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages.

Fields, C. M. 1 978. 'How Berlitz taught me Spanish rapidamente' . In The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 1 7 , 1978.

Fillmore, C. J. 1968. 'The case for case' . In E . Bach and R. T. Harms, eds. Universals of Lir.guistic Theory. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Furth, H . G. 1 969. Piaget and Knowledge: Theoretical Foundations. Englewood Cliffs, N . J . : Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Halliday, M. A. K. 1973. Explorations in the Functions of Language. London: Edward Arnold.

Hakuta, K . , and H. Cancino. 1977. 'Trends in second-language acquisition research' . I n Harvard Educational Review 41, 3 :294-3 1 6 .

Hatch, E . M . , ed. 1978. Second Language Acquisition: A Book of Readings. Rowley, Mass . : Newbury House Publishers.

Hosenfeld, C. 1 979. 'Cindy: A learner in today's foreign language classroom'. In W . C. Born, e d . , The Foreign Language Learner in Today's Classroom Environment. Middlebury, Vt. : Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

1nhelder, B . , and J. Piaget. 1958. The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence. Tr. A. Parsons and S. Milgram New York: Basic Books.

Klatzky, R . L. 1975. Human Memory: Structures and Processes. San Franc1sco: W. H . Freeman.

Krashen, S. 1 978. 'The Monitor Model for second-language acquisition' . In R. C . Gingras, ed. Second-Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Teaching. Arlington, Va.: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Krashen, S . , Butler, J . , Birnbaum R. and Robertson J. (In press.) 'Two studies in language acquisition and language learning ' . IRAL.

McLaughlin, B. 1978. 'The Monitor Model: some methodological considerations' . In Language Learning 28, 2 :309-332.

McNeill, D. 1 970. The,Acquisition of Language: The Study of Developmental Psycholinguistics. New York: Harper and Row.

Melvin, B. S. 1977. ' Recent developments in memory research and their implications for foreign-language teaching' . Studies in Language Learning (Urbana, Ill .) 2, 1 :89- 1 10.



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Mowrer, 0. H . 1960. Learning Theory and the Symbolic Processes. New York: John Wiley.

Neisser, U. 1967. Cognitive Psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Ritchie, W. C . , ed. 1 978. Second Language Acquisition Research. Issues and Implications. New York: Academic Press.

Rivers, W. M. 1968. ' Contrastive linguistics· in textbook and classroom' . Reprinted in Rivers, 1 976a.

Rivers, W . M. 1976a. Speaking in Many Tongues: Essays in Foreign-Language Teaching. Expanded 2d ed. Rowley, Mass. : Newbury House Publishers.

Rivers, W . M. 1976b. 'The natural and the normal in language learning' . In H. D. Brown, ed. Papers in Second Language Acquisition. Language Learning, Special Issue No 4.

Rivers, W. M. 1978. ' Language learning and language teaching-any relationship?' In W . C. Ritchie, ed. 1 978.

Rivers, W. M. 1979. 'Learning a sixth language: an adult learner's daily diary' . Canadian Modern Language Review 39, 1 .

Schachter, J . 1974. 'An error i n error analysis' . I n Language Learning 24:205-214.

Schachter, J . , Tyson, A. F. and Diffley, F. J. 1976. ' Learner intuitions of grammaticality'. Language Learning 26:67-76.

Schlesinger, I. M. 1977. Production and Comprehension of Utterances. Hillsdale, N . J . : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Selinker, L. 1972. ' lnterlanguage' . ln iRAL 10:219-23 1 .

Skinner, B. F. 1957. Verbal Behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Staats, A. W. 197 1 . ' Linguistic-Mentalistic Theory versus an explanatory S-R learning theory of language development' . In D. I . Slobin, ed. The Ontogenesis of Grammar. New York: Academic Press.


Applied Linguistics

Volume 1

1980

Reprinted with the permission of the original publisher by

Periodicals Service Company Germantown, NY

200 1

Printed on acid-free paper.

This reprint was reproduced from the best or�gina/ edition copy available

Applied Linguistics Volume I 1980

Sponsored by the American Association for Applied Linguistics and the British Association for Applied Linguistics and published by OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

EDITORS J. P. B. Allen Modern Language

Bernard Spolsky Department of

H. G. Widdowson Department of

English as a Foreign Language

University of London

Centre English The Ontario Institute

for Studies in Education

Bar-Ilan University Ramat-Gan

252 Bloor St. West Toronto Canada M5S 1V6

EDITORIAL BOARD

Israel

Alison d'Anglejan, Universite de Montreal

H. Douglas Brown, University of Illinois (AAAL representative)

C. N. Candlin, University of Lancaster

Robert L. Cooper, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

S. P. Corder, University of Edinburgh Nils Erik Enkvist, Abo Akademi J. Fisiak, Adam Mickiewicz Univer

sity, Poznan Francisco Gomes de Matos, Univer

sidade Federal de Pernambuco M. A. K. Halliday, University of

Sydney Robert B. Kaplan, University of

Southern California Wolfgang Kiihlwein, U niversitiit

Trier Simon Murison-Bowie, English Lan

{}Jlage Teaching for the Arab World : Oxford University Press, Beirut

Institute of Education

20 Bedford Way London WClH OAL

Jack C. Richards, Chinese University, Hong Kong

R. R1chterich, Universitiit Bern Wilga Rivers, Harvard University Marilyn Rosenthal, Oxford Univer-

sity Press, New York J. M . Sinclair, University of Birming

ham H. H. Stern, Ontario Institute for

Studies in Education Peter Strevens, Wolfson College,

Cambridge J. Svartvik, Lund University J. Trim, Centre for Information on

Language Teaching and Research, London (BAAL representative)

G. Richard Tucker, Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, D.C.

Albert Valdman, Indiana University D. A. Wilkins, Unit•ersity of Reading

Oxford Uruverslty Press. Walton Street, Oxford ox2 6oP

OXFORO LONDON Gl-ASGOW

NEW YORk TORONTO MELBOUR,..,E WELUNC1'0N

kU,.LA LLWPLR Sl!'o<GAPORE HONG kONG TOKYO

DELHI OONBAY CALCUnA MADRAS kARACHI

NAIROBI OAR ES SALAAM CAPE TOWN

Index to Volume 1

Articles

BACHMANN, CHRISTIAN. Le Social Pese Lourd sur Ie Discours : un cas D'inegahte lnteractionnelle 217

BREEN, MICHAEL P. and CANDUN, CHRISTOPHER N . The Essentials o f a Communi-cative Curriculum in Language Teaching 89

BRUMFIT, C. J. Bemg Interdisciplinary-Some Problems Facing Applied Linguistics 1 58 CANA LE, MICHAEL and SWAIN, MERRILL. Theoretical Bases of Communicative

Approaches to Second Language Teaching and Testing CANDLIN, CHRISTOPHER N. see BREEN, MICHAEL P.

COOPER, ROBERT L. Sociolinguistic Surveys : the State of-the Art 1 13 COSTE, DANIEL Analyse de Discours et Pragmatique de Ia Parole dans Quelques

Usages d'une Didactique les Langues. 244 EDMONDSON, WI LLIS J. Some Problems Concerning the Evaluation of Foreign

Language Classroom Discourse 271 GREGORY, MICHAEL Language as Social Semiotic : the recent work of M. A. K.

Halliday 74 HARDER, PETER. Discourse as Self-Expression : on the Reduced Personality of the

Second Language Learner 262 HOLEC, HENRI. You Did Say 'Oral Interactive Discourse?' 189 RICHARDS, JACK C. see SCHMIDT, RICHARD W.

RILEY, PHILIP. When Communication Breaks Down : Levels of Coherence In Discourse 201

RIVERS, WILGA M. Foreign Language Acquisition : Where the real problems lie 48 ROULET, EDDY. Interactional Markers In Dialogue 224 RUTHERFORD, WILLIAM. Aspects of Pedagogical Grammar 60 SCHMIDT, RICHARD W. and RICHARDS, JACK C. Speech Acts and Second

Language Learning 129 SINCLAIR, JOHN MCM. Applied Discourse Analysis: An Introduction 185 SINCLAIR, JOHN MCM. Some Implications of Discourse Analysis for ESP

Methodology 253 SWAIN, MERRILL See CANALE, MICHAEL

WIDDOWSON, H. G. Models and Fictions 165 WIDDOWSON, H. G. Conceptual and Communicative Functions in Written

Discourse 234

Reviews

ANSHEN, FRANK. Statistics for Linguists (Robert L. Cooper) 82 COULTHARD, MALCOLM. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (Gillian Sankoff) 179 EPSTEIN, E. L Language and Style (M. H. Short) 1 80 FOWLER, ROGER. Linguistics and the Novel (M. H. Short) 1 80 HALLIDAY, M. A. K. Language as Social Semiotic: the Social Interpretation of

Language and Meaning (Michael Gregory: Review Article) 74 HATCH, EVELYN. Second Language Acquisition : a Book of Readings {H. Douglas

Brown) 1 7 1 HAWKEs, TERENCE. Structuralism and Semiotics (M. H. Short) 180 MACKAY, RONALD and MOUNTFORD, ALAN. English for Specific Purposes

(A. P. Cowie) 83 MACKEREY, PIERRE. A Theory of Literary Production ( Michael Fischer) 175

INDEX TO VOLUME I

ROBINElT, BETTY WAlLACE. Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (Christopher Brumfit) 173

SPOI..SKY, BERNARD. Educational Linguistics : An Introduction (H. H. Stern) 85 STREVENS, PETER. New Onentations in the Teaching of English (Robert B. Kaplan) 1 77

Applied Linguistics Vol. I, No. 1, Spring 1980

CONTENTS

A R T I C L E S Theoretical Bases of Communicative Approaches to Second Language

Teaching and Testing. By M I CHAEL CANALE and M E R R I L L SWAIN

Foreign Language Acquisition: Where the real problems lie. By W I LGA M. RI VERS

Aspects of Pedagogical Grammar. By W I L L IAM RUTHERFO R D

R E V I EW ART I CL E Language as Social Semiotic: the recent work o f M. A. K . Halliday. By

Page

48 60

M ICHAEL GREGORY 74·

R E V I EWS Frank Anshen, Statistics for Linguistics. By ROBERT L . cooPER 82 Ronald MacKay and Alan Mountford, English for Specific Purposes. By

A. P. COWI E 83 Bernard Spolsky, Educational Linguistics: An Introduction. By

H. H. STERN 85

RUTH CRYMES

The editors note with deep regret the death in an airplane accident on October 3 1 1 979, of Ruth Crymes, Professor of English as a Second Language at the University of Hawaii since 1 958, President of International TESOL, and, from 1 973-78, Editor of the TESOL Quarterly.


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REVIEW ARTICLE

The recent work of M. A. K . HALLIDAY: Language as Social Semiotic

1 . Language as Social Semiotic: the Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning ( 1 978) is the fifth book in five years presenting M. A. K. Halliday's developing functional and social theory of language. The others are Explorations in the Functions of Language ( 1 973), Learning How to Mean: Explorations in the Development of Language ( 1 975), Halliday: System and Function in Language, selected papers edited by Gunther Kress ( 1 976), and (with R. Hasan) Cohesion in English ( 1 976). This review article will discuss the major terms and components of the developing theory with reference to all five books where appropriate; present a specific review of Language as Social Semiotic; and finally will comment on Halliday's work in the context of that of some select contemporaries. 2. The perspective on language maintained throughout the five books has been called 'social-functional' (cf. 1 978:36-60). Halliday maintains that approaching language as social semiotic means 'interpreting language within a sociocultural context in which the culture itself is interpreted in semiotic terms-as an information system; if that terminology is preferred. At the most concrete level this means that we take account of the elementary fact that people talk to each other' ( 1 978:2). This means that language is seen more as an inter-organism phenomenon, that is as something that happens between people, rather than as an intra-organism phenomenon, what happens inside people, particularly their heads. Functionalism is seen as a perspective for describing language both externally as a social and cultural phenomenon and internally as a formal system. It means: ' first of all, investigating how language is used: trying to find out what are the purposes that language serves for us, and how we are able to achieve these purposes through speaking and listening, reading and writing. But it also means more than this. It means seeking to explain the nature of language in functional terms: seeing whether language itself has been shaped by use, and if so, in what ways-how the form of language has been determined by the functions it has evolved to serve' ( 1 973:7) .

The language system i s treated as being basically tristratal: semantics, lexicogrammar, phonology. Each of these strata is seen as a system of potential of the social semiotic of behavior, what the speaker can do; behavior which involves language is the result of linguistic or semanuc potential-what the user can mean; this meaning potential is realized in the next strata of the language system as lexicogrammatical potential, which is what the user can say. Phonology is concerned with the potential of what we can 'sound' in a given language (cf. 1 973 :48-7 1 , 1978:39ff).

The relationship between these systems and the concept of function is best approached through Halliday's important case-study of the development of a child's language in Learning How to Mean ( 1 975) and the first two papers 'Relevant Models of Language' and 'The Functional Basis of Language' in Explorations in the Functwn of Language ( 1 973). A child's early language development (up to eighteen months of age) is described as a process of his 'learning how to mean' through gaining control of some basic uses (or microfunctions) of language: the instrumental ('I want'), the regulatory ('do as I tell you'), the interactional ('me and you'), the personal ('here I come'), heuristic ('tell me why'), the imaginative ('let's pretend') and the informative ( 'l 'w: got something to tell you'). There is a tendency for the young child during this process to use language for just one function at a time and to have only a few items for each function so there is a reasonably direct semantic function-linguistic item




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M I C HA E L G R E G O R Y 75

relationship. This contrasts with the multitudinous, potentially infinite uses or macrofunctions of the adult speaker who operates simultaneously within language's metafunctions: the ideational (language as 'content, reflection on things'), the interpersonal (language as ' inter-action', action on things) and the textual (language as 'texture' , structurer of messages). The role of lexicogrammar for the adult or formed speaker is to act as 'the linguistic device for hooking up the selections in meaning which are derived from the various functions of language and realizing them in a unified structural form' ( 1973 :42, see also fig. 5, 43). So, discussing the sentence 'Balbus built a wall' , Halliday points out that 'this sentence embodies a number of structures all at the same time; there are represented . . . at least three . . . different structural configurations, each one of which corresponds to a different function of language. On the one hand, there is a transitivity structure . . . we could characterize this as Agent + Process + Goal of Result. Now this configuration represents the function of language expressing a content, what I prefer to call the ideational function: language as expressing the speaker's experience of the external world, and of his own internal world, that of his own consciousness. But that clause has structure also in the modal sense, representing what I would call the interpersonal function of language, language as expressing relations among participants in the situation, and the speaker's own intrusion into it. So the clause consists simultaneously of a modal element plus a residual element. The modal element expresses the particular role that the speaker has chosen to adopt in the situation and the role or role options he has chosen to assign to the hearer. At the same time the clause has a third structural configuration, that in terms of a theme and a rheme, which is its structure as a message in relation to the total communication process . . . all these three [structural configurations) are equally semantic; they are all representations of the meaning of that clause in respect of its different functions' ( 1978:46, see also sections I and 3 in Kress 1 976).

This is a rewarding and revealing way of approaching the independent clause/simple sentence and sidesteps the problem as to whether the initial split structurally should be binary (as in Noun Phrase + Verb Phrase, or Subject and Predicate) or otherwise (Subject, Verb, Object, or Subject, Predicator, Complement, Adjunct), but Halliday's social and functional approach to language behavior cannot be content with this as the key unit of description. Sentence is recognized as being a grammatical unit, a construct of the linguist. People do not behave linguistically in sentences; they are choosing a form of doing that involves linguistic meaning, they are acting semantically. So it follows that the most important unit in a functional, socially oriented description has to be a semantic unit. In Halliday and Hasan ( 1976) the unit text is suggested. Text is not meant to be understood.as a kind of super-sentence, something longer than a sentence but of the same kind; rather it is the basic unit of the semantic process not a grammatical unit. Viewed as physical events, texts themselves are 'instances of linguistic interaction in which people actually engage' ( 1978: 108). More abstractly, a text is 'what is meant' and is the consequence of a set of choices from the total set of options that a language makes possible, the range of semantic choices members of a culture have access to in their language. Halliday ( 1978: 109) points out that interpreted in terms of Malinowski's concept of the context of culture this means the entire semantic system of the language, which is 'a fiction, something we cannot hope to describe. Interpreted in the context of situation, it is the particular semantic system, or set of sub-systems, which is associated with a particular type of situation or social context. This too is a fiction; but it is something that may be more easily describable' .

In the Malinowskian and Firthian tradition text is seen to be embedded in a context of situation and interpreted in the light of that context of situation. The context of situation of a text is in turn, 'an instance of a generalized social context or situation type' which is 'not an inventory of ongoing sights and sounds but a semantic structure' (1 978: 1 22). Halliday's suggestion is that a particular situation-type can be regarded as a semiotic structure represented as a complex of three dimensions: the on-going social



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activity, the status and role relationships involved, and the symbolic or rhetorical channel. These dimensions are handled by the diatypic categories of field, tenor and mode first introduced and developed in language variety description (cf. Halliday, Mcintosh and Strevens I 964, Spencer and Gregory 1964, Catford 1965, Gregory 1967, Gregory and Carroll 1 978). Halliday's point is that field, tenor and mode can be considered as not just ' kinds of language use' or simple 'components of the speech setting' but rather as 'a conceptual framework for representing the social context as the semiotic environment in which people exchange meanings' . Register, the most abstract diatypic variety category, can then be seen as 'the configuration of semantic resources that the member of a culture typically associates with a situation type'; he points out that 'both the situation and the register associated with it can be described to varying degrees of specificity' and that 'the existence of registers is a fact of everyday experience-speakers have no difficulty in recognizing the semantic options and combinations of options that are "at risk" under particular environmental conditions' ( 1978: 1 09- 1 1 0).

Field, tenor and mode when viewed as semiotic components of the situation, as they are now by Halliday, can then be systematically related to the functional components of the semantics: field to the ideational function, language as content-carrier, speaker as observer of life's rich pattern; tenor to the interpersonal function, language as participation, speaker as intruder into other people's lives; and mode to the textual function, the actualizing of the other functions. However it is important to note that mode and the choice of mode do also relate to the ideational function by way of field of discourse: there are those things we tend to write about. Modes also relate with the interpersonal function by way of personal and functional tenors: formal and wntten tend to go together as do informal and spoken, and the phatic function is common in the spoken mode as the descriptive is in the written (cf. Gregory and Carroll op. cit: 46-47).

To return to text: it is to be seen as a piece of language that forms a unified whole and not just a collection of sentences: it has the quality of texture, that is, it functions as a unity with respect to its environment. It hangs together internally by way of cohesion (Halliday and Hasan op. cit; Halliday 1978 : 128-154 particularly). Cohesion is involved when the interpretation of an element in the text presupposes something other than itself and that something is also explicitly realized in the text; the two elements, the presupposing and the presupposed, form part of the same text and constitute a cohesive 'tie'. Reference, ellipsis, substitution, conjunction and lexical cohesion are, in English, the sources of text formation beyond sentence boundaries: the structures of grammatical units like sentences, clauses, groups, words are, of course, themselves text-forming. In deciding, consciously or unconsciously, whether what we hear or read is text or random bits of language, we not only respond to linguistic clues, but also to situational clues. So Halliday and Hasan (op. cit:23ff) see text, the crucial unit of language, as a passage of discourse which is both consistent in register and so 'coherent with respect to the context of situation' and which is coherent with respect to itself in so far as it displays cohesion. It has been pointed out elsewhere (Gregory and Carroll op. cit:41) that 'what is more important than text/non-text decisions in a consideration of language variety and social contexts is the more or less of texture, and how much of the interpretive weight is internal and how much external . . . . The recognition and the description of the internal and external conditions for text have high potential for use in linguistic pedagogy and applied stylistics' .

Function and use, ideational, interpersonal and textual functions, semantics, lexicogrammar, phonology, system, text, context of situation, situation type, register, field, mode, tenor, cohesion-these are the key items in the coherent 'context of Situation' of Halliday's output of the last five years, in which, as he says 'language is used reflexively to explore itself' (1978:5) echoing J. R. Firth's well known 'linguistics as language turned back on itself' remark. With the exception of the collaborative one



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with Hasan, the books discussed are collections of articles and papers so there is the inevitable repetition of key concepts. However, apparent repetitions are often accompanied by changing insights and extensions of meaning and application without losing consistency with earlier uses of the terms. 3. Language as Social Semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning (1978), the latest collection, is well organized and contains some important clarifying passages. The first section, The socio-linguistic perspective, contains the discussion between Hermann Parrett and Halliday on 'A social-functional approach to language' (36-58) first published in Parrett (1979). Here the distinction between the 'experiential' and ' logical' sub-components of the ideational function is most clearly presented (48-49). The distinction can be discerned in the lexicogrammar's realization of them by way of different types of structure. The experiential is the 'content' function of language proper, expressing processes and phenomena of the external world 'including the world of the speaker's own consciousness, the world of thoughts, feelings and soon' and these are expressed through non-recursive structures such as those which realize transitivity in the English clause. The logical component, on the other hand, is expressed through recursive structures, parataxis and hypotaxis, involving apposition, co-ordination, condition and reported speech. These constitute the logic of natural language. Halliday sees the distinction as necessary 'partly because logical meanings are clearly distinct in their realization . . . and partly because one can show that the logical element in the linguistic system, while it is ideational in origin in that it derives from the speaker's experience of the external world, once it is built into language becomes neutral with respect to the other functions, such that all structures whatever their functional origin can have built into them inner structures of a logical kind' (49). Significantly, Halliday is against imposing any hierarchy on the functions; he does recognize that in order to answer to certain purposes and pre-occupations it can be convenient to single out one function rather than another, but theoretically he finds it important to give equal status in the linguistic system to all functions and points out that traditional grammar with its emphasis on the mood system which is 'purely interpersonal, concerned wiih the social-interactional function of language' was not as ideationally biased as often assumed. As might be expected he resists 'treating the social meaning of language as some kind of optional extra' (59).

Indeed the distinguishing characteristic of Halliday's current work is the very opposite of such a stance. Much socio-linguistics exhibits an uneasy sending out of feelers from a confident sociological position to a hesitant linguistic one or vice-versa. But Halliday's tieveloping theory is one in which social and linguistic, external and internal aspects of language behavior are intimately and mutually related and descriptively tied together through the concept of networks of choice: semantic networks, lexicogrammatical networks, and phonological networks. This is abstractly described (40-41). Each level or stratum is seen as a network of paradigmatic relations (Firth's system). Each network is a set of interrelated systems, sets of options with conditions of entry, so it is both a representation of options and of the inter-relations among options. Two detailed papers 'Language as social semiotic' ( 108-126) and 'The sociosemantic nature of discourse' (128- 1 5 1 ) exemplify the relationships between the strata and system choices. Particularly clear and useful are the tables (1 17-120) illustrating the 'determination of semantic features by elements of the semiotic structure of situation' , 'semantic systems and their realization', 'interpersonal and textual systems and their realization' in the text of the speech of a two year old boy. Reviewing Halliday (1973) I remarked that ' important questions remain . . . particularly as regards the precise relationship between meaning potential and its realization at the level of form and the nature and detail of the realization rules which convert the two, and the place of both within a comprehensive social theory of language' (Gregory 1 976: 1 98-199). These two essays and chapters 9- 14 in Kress ed. (op. cit) go a long way towards answering these questions.



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Welcome too are clarifications and developments of Bernstein's concepts of code, 'principles of semiotic organization governing the choice of meanings by the speaker and their interpretation by the hearer' {67), and critical socializing contexts, such as the regulatory one between parent and child. These are touched upon not only in the essay 'The significance of Bernstein's work for socio-linguistic theory' which will be familiar to many as the foreword to Benistein {ed.) 1 973 but in several other essays and most intriguingly in 'Sociological aspects of semantic change' : 'If there are changes in the social structure, especially changes affecting the family role systems, these may lead to changes in the child's orientation towards or away from certain ways of meaning in certain types of situation; and this, particularly in the environment of what Bernstein calls the "critical socializing contexts", may lead to change in learning strategies, and hence to change in the meaning potential that is typically associated with various environments-i.e. in the semantic system' (91) . It is pointed out that such changes would be gradual and would not necessarily entail discontinuity, most likely involving a shift in preference as regards semantic choice. This opens up a fruitful way of investigating the history of a language and could be particularly rewarding in the diachronic study of English where there is a wealth both of text and social and cultural information.

Beyond all Halliday's theoretical and descriptive work·'lies an outer context, that of language and the human condition' (5). This means that his motivations and ultimate concerns are 'applied' ones, focusing particularly on education both as process and experience; and the final section of the book contains three essays on sociolinguistics and education reflecting his work for the Schools Council and the Nuffield Linguistics and English Teaching Programme and his enduring concern for the teacher and student at all levels of education. Moreover, because his orientation is so consistently functional and social all his essays are relevant to understanding the nature and centrality of language in the educative process. He deals with complex matters complexly but this book should be rewarding and enlightening for any teacher of language (and all teachers are in a sense language teachers) who reads it with care. The closing sentence of his own introduction is apposite: 'If some of the argument seems remote from everyday problems of living and learning, this is because these problems are not simple, and no simple account of what happens at the surface of things is likely to be of much help in solving them' (5).

4 . Halliday places himself in the ethnographic-descriptive tradition in linguistics associated with Saussure, Hjelmslev, the Prague School, Malinowski, Firth, Boas, Sapir and Whorf {1978:5) and it follows that he rejects th� type of high idealization associated with Chomskyan linguistics. As he sees it this is characteristically expressed in the competence-performance distinction: competence referring to the natural language in its idealized form; performance, a 'ragbag' referring to everything else. This is not much use to the investigator who sees language inter-organistically and who is interested in linguistic interaction; and Halliday also rejects Dell Hymes' solution to the problem. Having noted that the competence-performance distinction idealizes 'out of the picture' most of the distinctions he is interested in, he goes on to ask 'What can you do about this? You can do one of two things. You can say . . . "I accept the distinction but I will study performance" ; you then set up "theories of performance", in which case it is necessary to formulate some concept (which is Hymes' communicative competence) to take account of the speaker's ability to use language in ways that are appropriate to the situation . . . . You say there is a "sociolinguistic competence" as well as linguistic competence. Or you can do what I would do, which is to reject the distinction altogether on the grounds that we cannot operate with this degree and this kind of idealization. We accept a much lower level of formalization: instead of rejecting what is messy we accept the mess and build it into a theory (as Labov does with variation) . . . . There is no need to bring in the question of what the speaker



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knows; the background to what he does is what he could do-a potential which is objective, not a competence, which is subjective. Now Hymes is taking an intraorganism ticket to what is actually an inter-organism distinction . . . I find it an unnecessary complication' ( 1978:38). But Halliday is aware of the degree of overlap of interest and concern with Hymes; he notes the rough correspondence of Hymes' referential with his ideational and socio-expressive with his interpersonal (cf. Hymes 1969) and sees Hymes' eight components of speech: form and content, setting, participants, ends, key, medium, genre and interactional norms (Hymes 1967) as one way of handling context of situation and text ( 1978:61) .

Significantly Halliday pays tribute to William Labov noting that 'he has uncovered new facts about language (a rare accomplishment) and led the subject along new and rewarding paths' ( 1978:5). Such Labovian positions as that on the 'rich and highly structured' language which surrounds the child (Halliday 1978:54 and cf. Labov 1970), and the importance of the degree of attention paid to speech in matters of variation both accord well with Halliday's positions. He does, however, take Labov to task for his ' ill-formed and ill-documented' attacks on Bernstein ( 1978:87) and argues that Labov needs Bernstein's theory of cultural transmission and social change to make sense of his own work ( 1 978:98 and cf. also 1978:67).

There is also no doubt that Bernstein's work has profoundly influenced Halliday's recent thinking. In the late fifties and early sixties the strongest influences in his work were those of Malinowski and, most particularly J. R. Firth. He extended the latter's concepts of 'system' and 'structure' and 'modes of meaning' into what came to be known as 'scale-and-category' or Neo-Firthian linguistics, helped pioneer work on diatypic varieties and on stylistics (e.g. Halliday 1959, 1 96 1 , 1 964, 1967 and Halliday, Mcintosh and Strevens 1964). By the later part of the sixties Prague Circle influences, particularly as regards functional sentence perspective, and the ideas of Sydney Lamb on strata and realization were reflected in his modification of scale and category into what might best be described as functional systemics (e.g. Halliday 1969, 1 970). He has also been associated, directly and indirectly with research projects concerned with the description of curpora of language in action. This dynamic experience with developing theory and description and the ability to synthesize creatively seems to have been given its greatest b.>ost by finding in Bernstein a sociolinguist who is not afraid of theory or description, who has indeed advanced strong hypotheses about the nature of social semiotics by way of his work on acculturization, socialization, and the role of language in both. This has helped Halliday work with confidence towards a general sociolinguistic theory, to take firmer steps towards what Pike ( 1967) attempted: an approach to language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behavior.

We have for some decades witnessed an emphasis on the investigation of language as an individual possession. It is to be hoped that the coming decade will show a preoccupation with language as a shared possession, as a social inter-activity uniquely central to men and women's existence among other men and women. ' In this regard the importance of Halliday's work can hardly be overestimated: it attempts to penetrate the mysteries of language at the same time as it is open to use for many socially important purposes: it respects the untidiness of what happens when people speak and write at the same time as it sets out to tame this wilderness in a socially meaningful way' (Gregory 1976: 199).

(Received July 1979) MICHAEL GREGORY Glendon College, York University, Toronto



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R E F � R E N C E S

L A N G U A G E A S S O C I A L S E M I O T I C

Bernstein, Basil. (ed.) 1 973. Class, codes and control 2: applied studies towards a sociology of language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Catford, J. C. 1 965. A Linguistic Theory of Translation. London: Oxford University Press.

Gregory, Michael. 1 967. 'Aspects of Varieties Differentiation' . Journal of Linguistics 3 .

Gregory, Michael. 1976. Explorations in the Functions of Language. (M. A. K. Halliday) Canadian Journal of Linguistics 2 1 :2.

Gregory, Michael and Carroll, Suzanne. 1978. Language and Situation: Language Varieties and their Social Contexts. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Halliday, M. A. K. 1 959. 'The language of the Chinese "Secret History of the Mongels" ' . Publications of the Philological Society 17. Oxford: Blackwell.

Halliday, M. A. K. 1 961 . 'Categories of the Theory of Grammar' . Word 17 .

Halliday, M. A. K. 1964. ' Descriptive linguistics in literary studies' . English Studies Today, Third Series. Edinburgh: University Press.

Halliday, M. A. K. 1969. 'Options and Functions in the English Clause' . Brno Studies in English 8.

Halliday, M. A. K. 1 970. 'Functional Diversity in Language as seen from a consideration of Modality and Mood in English' . Foundations of Language 6.

Halliday, M . A. K. 1973. Exploratzons in the Functions of Language. London: Edward Arnold.

Halliday, M. A. K. 1975. Learning how to mean: Explorations in the Development of Language. London: Edward Arnold.

Halliday, M. A. K. 1976. System and function zn language: selected papers ed. by Gunther Kress. London: Oxford University Press.

Halliday, M. A. K. 1978. Language as Social Semiotic: the social interpretation of language and meaning. London: Edward Arnold.

Halliday, M. A. K. and R. Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman.

Halliday, M. A. K. , A. Mclntosch and P. Strevens. 1964. The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching. London: Longman.

Hymes, Dell H. 1 967. 'Models of interaction of language and social setting' . Journal of Social Issues 23.

Hymes, Dell H. 1 969. ' Linguistic theory and the functions of speech' . In International days of sociolinguistics. Rome: Luigi Sturzo Institute.

Kress, Gunther. (ed.) 1976. Halliday: system and function in language. London: Oxford University Press.



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Labov, William. 1970. 'The study oflanguagein its social context' . Studium Generate 23 .

Parret, Hermann. 1 974. Discussing Language. The Hague: Mouton.

Pike, K. L. 1 967. Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behaviour. The Hague: Mouton.

Spencer, John, and Gregory, Michael. 1964. 'An approach to the study of style' . In Enkvist, Nils; Spencer, John, and Gregory, Michael. Linguistics and Style. London: Oxford University Press.



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tribution. But it is not at all clear that most of the phenomena of interest to linguists, particularly sociolinguistic variation, display normal distributions.

There are numerous other examples of how the text's failure to give enough information is likely to mislead the student. In the discussion of a test of the statistical significance of a difference between the means of two groups, the reader is not told that the test assumes random samples and that the samples must be large (at least 30). Nor is the reader cautioned not to use the test for differences between means when obtained from the same sample. Another example of an omission likely to mislead the student is found with respect to the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient. The common computational formula is not provided, so that the naive reader is probably left with the impression that the extremely tedious computational routine which is displayed as a means of explaining the statistic is the usual means of computation.

As if all this were not bad enough, conscientious students who try to follow the author's examples are likely to be confused by computational and proofreading errors. For example, the data in Table 3 are inconsistent with the original data on which they are based (Table I) because the responses of one subgroup (black women) on item 9 were shown both for item 9 and for item 10. What probably began as a recording error was compounded when subsequent computations were based on the incorrect figures. Thus the statistics reported for two groups (blacks and women) and for one item are wrong and the inferences based on these statistics are faulty. Further, when the figures were then converted to scaled scores (Table 8), at least one of the conversions (black women's total score) was incorrectly computed (or misprinted) even if the figures on which they were based is assumed to be correct.

Students who feel insecure about their own computational ability (possibly a substantial proportion of those attracted to this book) are likely to believe that they themselves are at fault rather than the author when they are unable to understand how he arrived at some of his statistics . How will such students react when they encounter, for example, the presentation of the rank-order correlation coefficient? Substituting N = 20 into the formula's denominator, N{N2-l), the author gives us 20{192-1) . Such students may well despair.

In sum, the inadequacies of this book are so serious that students should be advised to avoid it and to consult instead one of the standard introductory texts on statistics.

(Received Apri/ 1979) Reviewed by ROBERT L. COOPER The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

RONALD MACKAY and ALAN MOUNTFORD, English for Specific Purposes. (Applied linguistics and language study.) London: Longman, 1978. Pp. xii, 227.

This is a book which, at first sight, seems likely to offer a good deal to the growing number of teachers of English as a study medium, both in Britain and overseas, who are called on to produce classroom materials to meet highly specific needs. It consists of a collection of papers which draw directly on experience of materials design, three papers (Part II) being contributed by a group of experienced textbook writers, and five (Part III) by university teachers professionally involved in providing special courses for overseas students in Britain. The whole is introduced by a theoretical essay by the editors (Part 1), the purpose of which is to set the more practical contributions within the framework of recent developments in communicative language teaching.

Unfortunately, the book is seriously flawed, both in conception and execution, and it suffers from the additional handicap that several other books are now available



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which fulfil its purposes more satisfactorily. The chief weaknesses are in the theoretical portions, especially the editors' preamble. This is much too long, frequently incoherent, and-oddly in a book of this kind-marred by grammatical inaccuracy and lax proofreading. The principal strength of the book lies in the case studies, but despite the individual excellence of several of these, the collection lacks a representative character, being concerned only with the needs of students in higher education, and chiefly in Great Britain. The book takes no account of the teaching of English for occupational purposes (whether in Britain or overseas) or the extent to which aims and methods at the secondary level are coming under increasing scrutiny and review.

Mackay and Mountford are no newcomers to ESP, and whatever its other limitations, their opening survey is not lacking in substance. They understand the importance of bringing course objectives into line with carefully ascertained needs, the desirability of settmg exercises which engage the cognitive ab1lities of adult students, and above all the need to be aware of the character of scientific language as the instrument of scientific exposition. Such understanding, however, is already part of the equipment of anyone likely to be drawn into teaching ESP in British universities, while teacher-trainees looking for a general introduction to the field will certainly be put off by the style of presentation, the authors' rather loose handling of key terms (see 'use', p. 8, and 'notion' , p . 1 7), and, especially, the lack of detailed exemplification. Students will not be helped, either, to find later on that the editors' article on study skills is theoretically at odds with their introduction.

The main themes of the introduction, like much of the methodological thrust of the book, derive from the work of Allen and Widdowson, and it is not altogether surprising to find that the chapter by which they are represented duplicates (though with exemplary clarity) much of what precedes it. The paper was not written especially for the collection, and it has been superseded by other published work, making comment almost superfluous. One continuing strand can, however, be picked up briefly. This is the relative neglect within the Allen and Widdowson scheme of the conceptual as distinct from the functional (of cognitive content as opposed to illocutionary force). In this respect, their work contrasts with that of Bates and Candlin.

The chapters by Swales and Bates can be considered together, since the textbooks with which they are associated originated within a few years of each other, and against similar backgrounds. They are alike, too, in their concern with the practical constraints of place and circumstance. Both papers are highly readable and refreshingly free of jargon.

The two writers take proper account of their students' bookish (rather than activitybased) approach to science, and are realistic about the overall pattern of academic study within which their teaching has to function. Both make due concessions to the bookishness, Bates by balancing mechanical against problem-solving exercises, Swales by trading on the appeal of linguistic formulae and explanations. They both make interesting adjustments to the institutional role of English as a language that is chiefly read and listened to. Swales opts for productive skills partly because his colleagues are least uncomfortable in handling them; Bates does the same because an active, productive use of language is seen as the best introduction to a reading programme.

In the first paper devoted to course materials, Straker-Cook tackles the problems of designing a syllabus in which the communicative demands of 'social survival' and academic study can both be met. His syllabus is neat and intellectually appealing in the way it integrates functions, roles and topics in a branching structure with a common spine. But the associated methodology is unimaginative (mimicry and memorization), and offers no transition to genuine interaction. Mackay and Mountford contribute a rather confused and theoretically top-heavy chapter which none the less introduces some interesting 'Focus'-style exercises, especially those which aim to develop comprehension by giving practice in discourse reconstruction (thus linking reading and writing). But generally this reads like an uneasy transitional paper, in which, for



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example, the distinction between the acts of definition and naming is blurred and differences of information structure are passed off as stylistic variants. Morrison writes a short but admirable chapter on listening comprehension, identifying the kind of informal lecture material which constitutes a recurrent problem and, by the same methodical research, those linguistic features which represent the particular difficulties. Exercises are then focused on those points, which include connectives and anaphora, as well as stress features. The substantial final chapter by Candlin, Kirkwood and Moore is impressive for the thorough airing given to problems of course design, and for the honesty with which it faces practical questions of student ability and teaching resources. The programme described here is also to be admired for the finely differentiated 'micro-skills' which are at its centre. Linguistic matters are handled less impressively, the 'notional meaning' of a sample text being identified with its key concepts and their various lexical realizations. The texts chosen to illustrate this chapter, incidentally, could not be used persuasively in any defence of 'authentic' materials.

(Received June /979) Reviewed by A. P. COWIE University of Leeds

BERNARD SPOLSKY, Educational Linguistics: An Introduction Rowley, Mass. : Newbury House Publishers

The use of the term that gives the present journal, Applied Linguistics its name has often been criticized. Yet, this term has established itself as a focus for practitioners who are engaged in a variety of language-related tasks and who want to base their professional activities on the language sciences, as well as for linguists who want to relate their scholarship to practical problems. Foremost among the problems to which the developing discipline of applied linguistics has addressed itself are those of language teaching, particularly foreign language teaching, and most commonly the teaching of English as a foreign or second language.

Bernard Spolsky, the author of the book under review, and one of the co-editors of this new journal, suggested several years ago that it is misleading to restrict applied linguistics in this way. Instead, he argued that there are areas of language education including foreign language teaching but not confined to it, such as questions of literacy, and the whole field of mother-tongue and bilingual education, which could be looked at in a coherent way without monopolizing the entire field of applied linguistics. He therefore proposed the use of the term educational linguistics to describe those scholarly activities that relate the language sciences to questions of language education. Educational linguistics would thus appear as a subdiscipline of applied linguistics, freeing applied linguistics from the 'stigma' of being exclusively concerned with language teaching. The concept of educational linguistics has always appealed to some of us a great deal and at the Modern Language Centre in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education we have adopted this designation in the naming of our specialization and some of its courses.

However, it was obvious that the idea of educational linguistics, which Spolsky had so far only developed in one or two programmatic statements, had to be spelt out. It was therefore with a great deal of eagerness that I looked forward to his elaboration of this idea in a full-size book. But even before I had time to read this work, I came across a review in the TESOL Quarterly • which not only ridiculed this book but also, to my surprise and dismay, out of hand rejected the concept of educational linguistics. The reviewer, Di Pietro, himself an applied linguist of stature for whose work I have the greatest respect, suggested that the author of Educational Linguistics was presenting himself as a kind of miracle doctor who, under a new label, was offering to an



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unsuspecting world of language teachers and applied linguistics a cheap concoction as a cure-all for all the ills of language education.

Educational Linguistics: An Introduction can be criticized on a number of grounds, but I find Di Pietro's interpretation of this work misleading and even flippant in its condemnation. There is nothing of a panacea in this book. On the contrary, the complexity of language issues is stressed and the work is an attempt to disentangle those factors in language education that the language educator can influence and shape from those which are beyond his control. Areas of ignorance or uncertainty in our knowledge are pointed out repeatedly. The work does not, nor does it claim to, offer a wonder cure.

What comes across to me in reading this book is the author's intention to bring together, if only in a preliminary way, some of his thoughts on educational linguistics which have become crystallized over the last few years in a number of papers and in his own research and scholarly activities. He draws freely on his personal and wideranging background and wealth of experience in New Zealand, the Pacific area, the United States, Canada, and Israel. His perspective is indeed world-wide and particularly in the first few chapters, the language issues of Asia and Africa are given as much consideration as those of North America.

Spolsky sees all language education as an attempt on the part of society to intervene in one way or another in natural language learning processes . In one case, such intervention may mean no more than adding a new channel of communication, e.g., learning to read; in another case it may be a question of modifying or adding a variety of the same language; in another case again it involves the addition of an entirely new language, as in bilingual education or foreign language teaching. What objectives are pursued in language education are ultimately political or philosophical decisions made by the community and not by the educational linguist. What the educational linguist can do is to point out the difficulties and complexities of all such interventions and to provide the necessary background of theory and information derived from the language sciences. The book lays in fact more emphasis on natural growth processes and the impediments and barriers to intervention than on the changes that can be guided by educational measures.

As an attempt to provide a rough sketch of the area of educational linguistics-'a preface' as Spolsky calls it (page vii)-or as studies in this field bringing together something of Spolsky's own thought, this book should be welcomed and will be looked at with interest by applied linguists and students of language policy and planning.

Judged, however, as its title demands, as an introduction to educational linguistics, this book is far less satisfactory, whether we interpret the term 'introduction' as the systematic presentation of a field new to the reader, or as an attempt to map out a new field which has not previously been described.

Above all, the work lacks proper balance in the treatment of topics that one can expect in an introductory text. In Chapter 1 the concept of educational linguistics is introduced and an important theoretical model is developed. This model very ingeniously identifies disciplines, theories, and themes which contribute the scholarly basis for activities in language education. But it is not at all clear to what extent the book itself is meant to elaborate this model in the treatment of educational linguistics and if not, why not. Chapters 2 to 6, for example, deal at great length with an aspect that has no place in the model, viz. , the language situations within which language education must operate. Moreover, while the model gives general linguistics an important role as the source of theory of language and language description, only one short chapter (7) discusses the nature of language. The illustrative and interpretive case study detail that one has been led to expect from the four chapters on the language situation is lacking in this too condensed and axiomatic treatment of linguistic theory. It is equally difficult to identify in the two psycholinguistic chapters (8, 9) the theory of learning suggested by the model in Chapter 1 .



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Furthermore, the author does not really make an attempt-except in the first and last chapter-to demonstrate the relevance of the various disciplines to the different facets of language education.

Another weakness is that the work is not clearly addressed either to the uninitiated as one could expect from an introductory text, nor is it clearly assumed that it is meant for applied linguists with a considerable background knowledge of names and concepts. One suspects that this work began (quite justifiably) as a collection of Spolsky's papers, and was then reinforced to be a more systematic text. Many applied linguists would no doubt like to see a collection of papers by someone like Spolsky who has made such a significant contribution to applied linguistics. One would also like to see a systematic sketch of educational linguistics . To combine these as was attempted in this volume does not do full justice to either purpose.

Finally, as Di Pietro has not failed to notice, there are some pretty bad errors in this book. However, it is unnecessary to take Spolsky to task (as Di Pietro does on page 465 of his review) for thinking that ulpanim (page 37) are countries, when in the context of the passage it is quite obvious that it is a misprint for certain types of courses. But the publisher has nothmg to be proud of if he allows that kind of error to slip through or if he does not notice that Lenneberg is twice misspelt as Lennenberg (pages 104, 106) or if he allows the Netherland Antilles to be introduced as the Netherlands America (p. 50).

These defects-all the more regrettable in a first work on educational linguisticsshould, however, not lead us to overlook the very important directions indicated in this work: 1 . Spolsky delineates educational linguistics, presenting it as a multi-disciplinary specialization within applied linguistics. 2. He identifies the main contributing disciplines and offers an interesting theoretical model to represent their interaction with language education. 3. He emphasizes the fundamental unity of all language education whether we practise it in the form of native language, foreign language, or bilingual education. 4. He points out the possibilities and limitations of intervention in the process of language development.

In spite of its faults, this work, as the first to put educational linguistics on the map, deserves the attention of applied linguis:s and invites discussion-not out-of-hand condemnation-of the concept of educational linguistics.

(Received July 1979)

R E F E RE N C E S

Reviewed by H. H. STERN Modern Language Centre

The Ontario Institute/or Studies in Education

' Review of Educational Linguistics by Robert Di Pietro. TESOL Quarterly, Dec. 1 978, pp.

464-469.



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REVIEWS

FRANK ANSHEN, Statistics for Linguists Rowley, Mass . : Newbury House, 1 978. Pp ix, 73 .

The book under review, which uses, for the most part, data from sociolinguistic surveys as examples, represents an attempt to help students learn enough statistics to be competent linguists. It would be pleasant to report that the attempt succeeded. It did not.

The book is far too brief to explain its subject adequately. In only 46 pages, the text covers the conversion of observations into numeric form (12 pages), statistics of central tendency and variability (3 pages), statistical inference (9 pages), correlation (9 pages), sampling (4 pages), electronic calculators and computers (6 pages), and variable rules (3 pages). In addition, there is an introduction (3 pages), a set of exercises without answers (1 1 pages), references (2 pages), and three statistical tables in an appendix (1 1 pages)-binomial probabilities, areas under the normal curve, and percentile values for chi-square. It is surely an astonishing ambition to attempt to cover so much ground in so little space.

The author would have been better advised to present fewer topics but to discuss them at greater length. His sketchy presentation is likely to befuddle anyone not already conversant with statistics, while people who have studied statistics have no need for this book. This is not to argue that linguists have to understand the derivation of statistical formulas in order to apply them appropriately. But any learner of statistics requires greater elaboration than this text provides on most of the topics it treats. For example, after introducing the reader to the notion of the variance, the text continues ( 18) :

' It turns out that the square root of the variance is a more useful statistic. I t is called the standard deviation and has the property that for large samples there will tend to be a predictable portion of observed results within a given number of standard deviation� to the mean. That is, if we have data with a mean value of 100 and a standard deviation of 10, we would expect that about 68 per cent of the observed values would be between 90 and 1 10 (i .e. , ± 1 standard deviation of the mean), that about 95 per cent of the observed values would be between 80 and 1 20 (± 2 standard deviations), that about 1 9 per cent o f the values would be between 100 and 105 ( + 0.5 standard deviations), etc. Tables are available (including one at the back of this book) which show the expected percentage of the scores occurring within a given number of standard deviations from the mean. '

This i s the entire treatment devoted to the standard deviation and to areas under the normal curve. How many students without prior training in statistics are likely to understand it? There is not even an explanation of how to read the table referred to. (None of the statistical tables in the appendix is explained. They are quite useless to anyone who has not learned-elsewhere-to read them.) When students are introduced to new concepts, they need more than the bare bones of an explanation. Instruction ought to be fleshed out with restatements and plenty of examples.

The book's brevity, even when understood, is likely to be misleading. For example, in the passage quoted above, the student is not told that the 'ponion of observed results within a given number of standard deviations to the mean' is predictable only for distributions which more or less follow a certain shape. The author may have assumed that most ' large samples' have this shape (the so-called normal distribution) and that it was therefore unnecessary to qualify his discussion by reference to the shape of the dis-




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tribution. But it is not at all clear that most of the phenomena of interest to linguists, particularly sociolinguistic variation, display normal distributions.

There are numerous other examples of how the text's failure to give enough information is likely to mislead the student. In the discussion of a test of the statistical significance of a difference between the means of two groups, the reader is not told that the test assumes random samples and that the samples must be large (at least 30). Nor is the reader cautioned not to use the test for differences between means when obtained from the same sample. Another example of an omission likely to mislead the student is found with respect to the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient. The common computational formula is not provided, so that the naive reader is probably left with the impression that the extremely tedious computational routine which is displayed as a means of explaining the statistic is the usual means of computation.

As if all this were not bad enough, conscientious students who try to follow the author's examples are likely to be confused by computational and proofreading errors. For example, the data in Table 3 are inconsistent with the original data on which they are based (Table I) because the responses of one subgroup (black women) on item 9 were shown both for item 9 and for item 10. What probably began as a recording error was compounded when subsequent computations were based on the incorrect figures. Thus the statistics reported for two groups (blacks and women) and for one item are wrong and the inferences based on these statistics are faulty. Further, when the figures were then converted to scaled scores (Table 8), at least one of the conversions (black women's total score) was incorrectly computed (or misprinted) even if the figures on which they were based is assumed to be correct.

Students who feel insecure about their own computational ability (possibly a substantial proportion of those attracted to this book) are likely to believe that they themselves are at fault rather than the author when they are unable to understand how he arrived at some of his statistics . How will such students react when they encounter, for example, the presentation of the rank-order correlation coefficient? Substituting N = 20 into the formula's denominator, N{N2-l), the author gives us 20{192-1) . Such students may well despair.

In sum, the inadequacies of this book are so serious that students should be advised to avoid it and to consult instead one of the standard introductory texts on statistics.

(Received Apri/ 1979) Reviewed by ROBERT L. COOPER The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

RONALD MACKAY and ALAN MOUNTFORD, English for Specific Purposes. (Applied linguistics and language study.) London: Longman, 1978. Pp. xii, 227.

This is a book which, at first sight, seems likely to offer a good deal to the growing number of teachers of English as a study medium, both in Britain and overseas, who are called on to produce classroom materials to meet highly specific needs. It consists of a collection of papers which draw directly on experience of materials design, three papers (Part II) being contributed by a group of experienced textbook writers, and five (Part III) by university teachers professionally involved in providing special courses for overseas students in Britain. The whole is introduced by a theoretical essay by the editors (Part 1), the purpose of which is to set the more practical contributions within the framework of recent developments in communicative language teaching.

Unfortunately, the book is seriously flawed, both in conception and execution, and it suffers from the additional handicap that several other books are now available


Applied Linguistics, Volum1 , Issue 1, 1980

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