Applied Linguistics Volume 1, No.2, 1980

Applied Linguistics Vol. I, No.2, Summer 1980 CONTENTS Page A R T I CL E S The Essentials of a Communicative Curricu...

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Applied Linguistics Vol. I,

No.2,

Summer 1980

CONTENTS Page A R T I CL E S

The Essentials of a Communicative Curriculum i n Language Teaching. By MICHAEL P. BREEN and CHRISTOPHER N. CANDLIN Sociolinguistic Surveys: the State of the Art . By ROBERT L. cooPER Speech Acts and Second Language Learning. By RICHARD w scHMIDT and JACK C. RICHARDS

89 113 1 29

D I S CU S S I O N

Being interdisciplinary-Some Problems Facing Applied Linguistics. By C. J. BRUMFIT Models and Fictions. By H. G. WIDDOWSON

1 58 1 65

R E V I EW S

Evelyn Hatch, Second Language Acquisition: a Book o f Readings. By H. DOUGLAS BROWN

Betty Wallace Robinett, Teaching English t o Speakers of Other Languages. By cHRISTOPHER BRUMFIT Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production. By MICHAEL FISCHER

Peter Strevens, New Orientations in the Teaching of English. By ROBERT B. KAPLAN

Malcolm Coulthard, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. By GILLIAN SANKOFF

Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics; Roger Fowler, Linguistics and the Novel; E. L. Epstein, Language and Style. By M. H SHORT

171 1 73 1 75 1 77 1 79 1 80

A new description of intonation ... * takes into account the interactive significance of intonation * relates intonation to an existing description of discourse

structure * discusses the general place of intonation in language teaching

and how this particular description might be taught

Discourse Intonation and Language Teaching David Brazil, Malcolm Coulthard and Catherine Johns 224pp

ISBN 0 582 55366 0

£3.00 net

... and a new rationale for contrastive analysis * highlights bilingualism and language pedagogy * includes a wide range of examples, encouraging readers to

carry out their own analyses * assesses, for the first time, the research potential of

contrastive 'communicative' analysis within the macrolinguistic area of text analysis, discourse and pragmatics.

Contrastive Analysis Car/James 216pp

ISBN 0 582 55370 9

£3.00 net

Two new titles in the Longman Applied linguistics and language

Study Series. For a full list write to: Longman English Teaching Services Longman Group Limited, Burnt Mill, Harlow, Essex CM20 2JE

.. Ill ...

Longman=:

THE ES SENTIALS OF A COMMUNICATIVE CURRICULUM IN LANGUAGE TEACHING M I C H A E L P . B R E E N and C H R I S T O P H E R N . CAN O L I N University ofLancaster

I N T R O D U CT I O N

Applied Linguistics, Vol. I, No. 2

Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011

AT a time when there i s a recognised need i n language teaching t o give adequate attention to language use as well as language form, various 'notional-functional' or so-called 'communicative approaches' to language teaching are being advocated. In this context, the present paper is offered as a set of proposals in an effort to define the nature of communicative language teaching. Any teaching curriculum is designed in answer to three interrelated questions: What is to be learned? How is the learning to be undertaken and achieved? To what extent is the former appropriate and the latter effective? A communicative curriculum will place language teaching within the framework of this relationship between some specified purposes, the methodology which will be the means towards the achievement of those purposes, and the evaluation procedures which will assess the appropriateness of the initial ' purposes and the effectiveness of the methodology. This paper presents the potential characteristics of communicative language teaching in terms of such a curriculum framework. It also proposes a set of principles on which particular curriculum designs can be based for imple mentation in particular situations and circumstances. The diagram summarises the main areas with which this paper will deal. In discussing the purposes of language teaching, we will consider (I) communication as a general purpose, (2) the underlying demands on the learner that such a purpose may imply, and (3) the initial contributions which learners may bring to the curriculum. In dis cussing the potential methodology of a communicative curriculum, we will consider (4) the process of teaching and learning, (5) the roles of teacher and learners, and (6) the role of content within the teaching and learning. Finally (7) we will discuss the place of evaluation of learner progress and evaluation of the curriculum itself from a communicative point of view. 1 Inevitably, any statement about the components of the curriculum runs the risk of presenting in linear form a framework which is, in fact, characterised by interdependence and overlap among the components. In taking purposes, methodology, and evaluation in tum, therefore, we ask readers to bear in mind the actual interdependence between them. What follows is a consideration of those minimal requirements on com municative language learning and teaching, which, in our view, must now be taken into account in curriculum design and implementation.

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4 . The classroom

I. Commumcat1on

process

2.

Demands on the--� learner

3.

Learner's an1t1al contnbut1ons

6.

1.

Ofleamer

Ofcumculum

W H A T I S T H E P U R P O SE O F T H E C U R R I C U L U M ?

The communicative curriculum defines language learning as learning how to communicate as a member of a particular socio-cultural group. The social conventions governing language form and behaviour within the group are, therefore, central to the process of language learning. In any communicative event, individual participants bring with them prior knowledge of meaning and prior knowledge of how such meaning can be realised through the con ventions of language form and behaviour. 2 Since communication is primarily interpersonal, these conventions are subject to variation while they are being used. In exploring shared knowledge, participants will be modifying that knowledge. They typically exploit a tension between the conventions that are established and the opportunity to modify these conventions for their par ticular communicative purposes . Communicating is not merely a matter of following conventions but also of negotiating through and about the con ventions themselves. It is a convention-creating as well as a convention following activity. So, in learning how to communicate the learner is confronted by a variable process. In communication, speakers and hearers (and writers and readers) are most often engaged in the work of sharing meanings which are both dependent on the conventions of interpersonal behaviour and created by such behaviour. Similarly, the ideas or concepts which are communicated about contain dif ferent potential meanings, and such potential meanings are expressed through and derived from the formal system of text during the process of com munication. To understand the conventions which underlie communication, therefore, we not only have to understand a system of ideas or concepts and a system of interpersonal behaviour, we have to understand how these ideas and this interpersonal behaviour can be realised in language-in connected texts. Mastering this unity of ideational, interpersonal and textual knowledge allows us to participate in a creative meaning-making process and to express or inter pret the potential meanings within spoken or written text . 3 There is an additional characteristic of this unified system of knowledge. The social or interpersonal nature of communication guarantees that it is


7

Role ofcontent

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2.

WHAT U N D E R L I E S T H E U L T IMATE DEMANDS O N T H E LEAR N E R ?

A language teaching curriculum, from a communicative point o f view, will specify its purposes in terms of a particular target repertoire. 4 Different curricula will hopefully select their own particular repertoires from a pool of communicative performance on the basis of a sociolinguistic analysis of the target situation. This does not imply that any one curriculum will be neces sarily entirely distinctive in the target repertoire to which it is devoted . At the surface there will be inevitable overlap among different repertoires. However, underlying any selected target repertoire there will. be an implicit target com petence. It is this target competence which we may define as the capacity for actual use of the language in the target situation. So, in specifying the purposes of the curriculum, a requirement for the communicative approach would be to make an initial distinction between the target repertoire ultimately demanded of the learner and the target competence which will underlie and generate such a repertoire. How can we characterise this target competence? We have already proposed that learning to communicate involves acquiring a knowledge of the con ventions which govern communicative performance. In addition, we have proposed that such communicative knowledge can be seen as a unified system


permeated by personal and socio-cultural attitudes, values and emotions. These different affects will determine what we choose to communicate about and how we communicate. The conventions governing ideas or concepts, inter personal behaviour, and their realisation in texts all serve and create attitudes, judgements and feelings. Just as communication cannot be affectively neutral, learning to communicate implies that the learner will come to terms with the new learning to the extent that his own affects will be engaged. At that point, the learner's affects become further involved in a process of negotiation with those affects which are embodied within the communicative performance of the target community. So, affective involvement is both the driving-force for learning, and also the motivation behind much everyday communication and the inspiration for the recreation of the conventions which govern such communication. Communication in everyday life synthesises ideational, interpersonal, and textual knowledge-and the affects which are part of such knowledge. But it is also related to and integrated with other forms of human behaviour. In learning how to communicate in a new language, the learner is not confronted by a task which is easily separable from his other psychological and social experiences. The sharing and negotiating of potential meanings in a new language implies the use and refinement of perceptions, concepts and affects. Furthermore, learning the conventions governing communication within a new social group involves the refinement and use of the social roles and the social identity expected by that group of its members. Thus, learning to com municate is a socialisation process. In much of his previous experience the learner has seen communication as the basic means whereby human activity and consciousness is shared and reflected upon socially. Therefore, it makes sense for the teacher to see the overall purpose of language teaching as the development of the learner's communicative knowledge in the context of personal and social development.

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o f ideational, interpersonal, and textual knowledge, which incorporates a range of affects. We have also suggested that communication and learning how to com municate involve the participants in the sharing and negotiating of meanings and conventions. Such sharing and negotiating implies the existence of particular communicative

abilities as an

•

essential part of competence. Therefore,

we may identify within competence both the knowledge systems and the abilities which call upon and act upon that knowledge. These abilities can be distinguished within competence more precisely. In order to share meaning, the individual participant needs to be able to interpret the meanings of others and to express his own meanings. However, such interpretation and expression will most often take place in the contex,t of interpersonal and personal

participants in communication negotiate with one another. But, in en deavouring to interpret and express with a new language, the learner will himself negotiate between the communicative competence he already possesses and that which underlies the new learning. s We suggest, therefore, that the communicative abilities of interpretation, expression, and negotiation are the essential or 'primary' abilities within any target competence. It is also likely that these three abilities continually inter relate with one another during communicative performance and that they are complex in nature. They will involve psychological processes for the handling of rich and variable data-the attention and memory processes for example and they may contain within them a range of secondary abilities. 6 The use of these communicative abilities is manifested in communicative per formance through a set of skills. Speaking, listening, reading and writing skills can be seen to serve and depend upon the underlying abilities of interpretation, expression and negotiation. In this way we are suggesting that the skills repre sent or realise underlying communicative abilities. The skills are the meeting point between underlying communicative competence and observable com municative performance; they are the means through which knowledge and abilities are translated into performance, and vice versa. In selecting any target repertoire, therefore, a communicative curriculum also distinguishes and specifies the target competence on which the er

p

formance of such a repertoire depends and through which it is achieved. This specification would indicate the ideational, interpersonal and textual con ventions-and the affective aspects of such conventions-as a related and underlying system of knowledge which is shared and developed within the target community. The specification would also indicate the demands upon the learner's communicative abilities of interpretation, expression, and negotiation similarly underlying communicative performance in the target community-and the range of skills which manifest these abilities. Such a specification would account for what the learner needs to know, and how the learner needs to be able to use such knowledge. The ultimate demands on the learner in terms of some specific target repertoire will, in our view, derive from and depend upon this underlying competence of communicative knowledge and communicative abilities.


negotiation. The ability to negotiate operates between participants in com munication and within the mind of the individual participant-the latter negotiation is perhaps more conscious during new learning. More obviously,

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3. W H A T A R E T H E L E A R N E R 'S I N I T I A L C O NT R I B U T I O N S ?

A communicative curriculum will focus on the learner from the very beginning by relating the initial contributions of the learner to the ultimate purposes of the curriculum. More precisely, the communicative curriculum seeks relationships between any specific target competence and relevant aspects of the learner's own initial competence. We need to ask: What com municative knowledge-and its affective aspects-does the learner already

roots of our objectives can already be discovered in our learners-however beneath the surface of the actual target repertoire these roots may be. We need to try to recognise what the learner knows and can do in communicative per formance with the first. language and not assume that the learner's ignorance of the target repertoire implies that the learner is a naive communicator or someone who evaluates communication in only a superficial way. This principle, which seems to require us to credit the learner with a highly relevant initial competence of communicative knowledge and abilities, has often been overlooked or only partially applied in language teaching. In the past, it has seemed easier to somehow separate the learner from the knowledge to be learned-to 'objectify' the target language as something completely unfamiliar to the learner. This objectification of the language in relation to the learner has perhaps been encouraged by a narrow definition of what the object of learning actually is, and by an incomplete view of what the learner has to offer. We have tended to see the target only in terms of 'linguistic competence' or textual knowledge, and we have limited such knowledge to the level of syntax without reference to structure above the sentence. Thus, ideational and interpersonal knowledge, which continually interact with textual knowledge and from which textual knowledge evolves, have tended to be overlooked or neutralised. We have often seen the learner primarily in terms of the frrst language, and we have often assigned to it 'interference' value alone-again taking a narrow textual knowledge as our criterion. More recently, due to developments within sociolinguistics, we have recognised the significance of 'sociolinguistic competence' and also of the 'functional' aspect of language. 7 However, a partial and knowledge-based view of learner competence seems to remain with us and the learner's communicative abilities underlying the initial repertoire still need to be more thoroughly exploited. Rather than just allowing the use of the frrst language in the classroom, we should perhaps be more con cerned with activating that which underlies the initial repertoire of the learner, and to evoke and engage what we may describe as the learner's ongoing or process competence. 1 Once we define the object of learning as communication, then we are enabled to perceive the learner in a new light. His initial textual


possess and exploit? What communicative abilities-and the skills which manifest them-does the learner already activate and depend upon in using and selecting from his presently established repertoire? Also, can the curriculum build upon features of that performance repertoire which we describe rather narrowly, perhaps, as the learner's first language or mother tongue? Similarly, can the curriculum build upon what the learner may already know of and about the target repertoire-however fragmentary or 'latent' such an awareness may be? A communicative specification of purposes supports the principle that the

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knowledge is placed in its proper perspective-it is merely the tip o f the ice berg. Language teaching need no longer be primarily concerned with 'linguistic competence'. We can begin with the assumption that text is the sur face realisation of communicative knowledge and abilities and that text is used and created-and learned-on the basis of them. The communicative curriculum seeks to facilitate-even guarantee-the involvement of the learner's communicative knowledge and abilities from the outset rather than overlook them for the sake of some apparent 'fluency' with text. If we present the learner with language only as an object, as if it was separable from the learner's relevant psychological and social experience, we are almost certainly postponing development of the learner's ability to communicate through the language. We may be divorcing language learning from its essential inter personal nature and offering it as a static object to learners who have them selves experienced the use of their first language as very much an interpersonal undertaking. The purposes of the communicative curriculum will incorporate that which the learner already knows and can do as a communicator from the very start. However, learners not only contribute prior knowledge and abilities, they also have expectations about the learning of a language. What the curriculum seeks to achieve in terms of any specified purposes must be balanced by what the learner personally expects of the curriculum. Perhaps the current interest in teaching language for 'special purposes' may eventually reveal the chalienge to curriculum designers: that all learners regard themselves as learning a language for some special purpose. We can identify several types of learner expectations and these may, of course, influence one another. We can ask: What is the learner's own view of the nature of language? What is the learner's view of learning a language? (The answers to these questions may lie in the learner's previous formal education, and how he reacted to that experience.) We can also distinguish between, first, how the learner defines his own language learning needs; secondly, what is likely to interest the learner both within the target repertoire and the learning process; and, third, what the learner's motivations are for learning the target repertoire. All these initial expectations are distinct and need to be discovered in some way so that areas of potential match and mis match between learner expectations and the selected target repertoire and its underlying competence can be best anticipated. Two important problems need to be identified here in accounting for learner expectations. These expectations are inevitably various and-more signi ficantly-they are subject to change over time. So, the curriculum will need to accommodate and allow for a heterogeneity of learner expectations. It will also need to allow for changes in different learners' perceptions of their needs, in what interests different learners, and in the motivations of different learners. In this way, curriculum purposes should account for initial ex pectations of learners and anticipate changes in expectations during the learning-teaching process. Such an account and such anticipation may appear to be an impracticable dream when confronted with the variety and fluctuation in the real expectations of learners. That we should try to account for and anti cipate these is a further motivation for a communicative curriculum, and more particularly-for a communicative methodology (see sections 4ff). How-

'

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ever, there is a second important aspect of learner expectations: expectations can be educated. For this to happen, learners need to be enabled to express their own expectations; to explore them and the sources from which they derive. They also need to be enabled to interpret the expectations which the specific purposes of the curriculum make upon them as learners. They need to interpret-at the start of the learning-teaching process and throughout this process-what the target repertoire and its underlying competence demands of them. However vague a learner's initial interpretation may be, he is not going to learn anything unless he has an idea of what he is trying to achieve. There fore, a process of negotiation between the learner's contributions-including expectations-and the target repertoire, and the means by which these two are brought together, is likely to be characteristic of a communicative metho

these subjective contributions of the learner and, thereby, call upon the genuine intersubjective responsibility of that learner.

4.

H O W A R E T H E C U R R I C U L U M P U R P O S E S TO BE A C H I E V E D ?

4.1 Methodology as a Communicative Process Language learning within a communicative curriculum is most appro priately seen as communicative interaction involving all the participants in the learning and including the various material resources on which the learning is exercised. Therefore, language learning may be seen as a process which grows out of the interaction between learners, teachers, texts and activities. This communicative interaction is likely to engage the abilities within the learner's developing competence in an arena of cooperative negotiation, joint interpretation, and the sharing of expression. The communicative classroom can serve as a forum characterised by the activation of these abilities upon the learners' new and developing knowledge. This activation will depend on the provision of a range of different text-types in different media-spoken, written, visual and audio-visual-which the participants can make use of to develop their competence through a variety of activities and tasks. 9 The presence of a range of text-types acknowledges that the use of communicative abilities is not restricted to any one medium of communication. The earlier distinction we saw between underlying abilities and the set of skills which serve and depend on such abilities enables us to perceive that the learner may exploit any selected skill or combination of skills to develop and refine his inter pretation, expression and negotiation. The learner need not be restricted to the particular skills performance laid down by the target repertoire. Because communicative abilities permeate each of the skills, they can be seen to under lie speaking, hearing, reading and writing and to be independent of any prescribed selection or combination of these skills. Similarly, just as no single communicative ability can really develop independently of the other abilities, so the development of any single skill may well depend on the appropriate development of the other skills. In other words, a refinement of interpretation will contribute to the refinement of expression, and vice-versa; just as a refine ment of the skill of reading, for example, will contribute to the refinement of 10

the skill of speaking and vice-versa. Classroom procedures and activities can involve participants in both


dology. Curriculum purposes inform and guide methodology, and an account of lea�ner expectations within purposes can enable.methodology to involve

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communicating and metacommunicating. We have referred to the charac teristics of communicating in section 1 of this paper. By metacommunicating we imply the learner' s activity in analysing, monitoring and evaluating those knowledge systems implicit within the various text-types confronting him during learning. Such metacommunication occurs within the communicative performance of the classroom as a sociolinguistic activity. in its own right. Through this ongoing communication and metacommunication, learners not only become participants in the procedures and activities, they may also become critically sensitised to the potential and richness of the unified system of knowledge, affects and abilities upon which their communication depends.

cipants in a process of communicating through texts and activities, and meta communicating about texts, is likely to exploit the productive relationship between using the language and learning the language.

4.2 Methodology as a differentiated process The emphasis given in the previous section to the interactive nature of the communicative curriculum suggests, in turn, the need for a communicative curriculum to be differentiated. A communicative curriculum begins with the principle that we should differentiate within purposes between the target repertoire and the communicative knowledge and abilities which underlie it. A second principle is that the learner's process competence needs to be dif ferentiated from the target competence, and that different learners may exploit different process competences as the means towards some particular target. These kinds of distinctions involve differentiation at the curriculum level between purposes and the methodology adopted to achieve such purposes. Within methodology, differentiation is a principle which can be applied to the participants in the learning, the activities they attempt, the text-types with which they choose to work, and the ways they use their abilities. It is worth considering differentiation within these areas in more detail: (a)

Learners' Contributions:

Individual learners bring individual contributions to the language learning process in terms of their initial competence, their various expectations about language learning, and their changing needs, interests and motivations prior to and throughout the language learning process. Also, within the language learning process, different learners develop different process competences different degrees of communicative knowledge and different ways of using their abilities in acting upon and with such knowledge. We can recognise that, even in the achievement of some common target competence, different learners may well adopt different means in attempting to achieve such com petence.

(b) Routes: The emphasis within a communicative curriculum on the communicative process of language learning, with the consequent emphasis on cooperative learner activities, offers a natural means for differentiation. Different learners need the opportunity of following different routes to the accomplishment of


Thus, in working together upon the target competence in a context of class room communication, learners may constantly refine their own awareness of its potential, make links to their initial competence, and develop and exploit their own process competences. In particular, the involvement of all the parti


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some individual or common group objectiv-e. Such variation in choice of route typically involves selection among alternative skills or combinations of skills, and hence the choice of alternative media. The variation may be motivated by the need to work at a different pace from other learners, or by the desire to pursue alternative content. This selection among routes can itself be open to joint interpretation, the sharing of expression and cooperative negotiation.

(c) Media:

(d) Abilities:

Whatever the route chosen or the media and text-types selected for com municative learning, different learners will have differentiated ways of making use of the abilities within their communicative competence, and will therefore adopt different learning strategies. 11 Such heterogeneity is often seen as problematic for the teacher, but a communicative methodology would take advantage of this differentiation among learning strategies, rather than in sisting that all learners exploit the same kinds of strategy.

These four illustrations of the principle of differentiation within a com municative methodology imply more than merely offering to individual learners opportunities for differential communication and learning, or acknowledging differences between performance repertoires and the developing competences underlying them. Differentiation demands and authenticates communication in the classroom. The various perspectives offered by alternative media, the accomplishment of shared objectives through

a variety of routes, and the opportunities for exploiting different learning strategies, all facilitate the conditions for authentic communication among the participants in the learning. Differentiation also enables the learner to authen ticate his own learning and thereby become involved in genuine com munication as a means towards it. Further, if we confront learners with texts and text-types which are alsp authentic, this obliges us to allow for different interpretations and differences in how learners will themselves negotiate with texts. Generally, then, the search for authentication during language lear ning-for the individual and the group-and the need for differentiation are complementary.

4.3 Methodology exploits the communicative potential of the learning

teaching context

We are easily tempted to excuse the classroom as an artificial or synthetic


In order to allow for differences in personal interest and ease of access, or to permit the search for alternative perspectives on the content, learners should be offered the possibility of working with one or more of a range of media. Each medium will have its own distinctive set of authentic text-types. For: a text-type to be authentic it must obey the principle of verisimilitude-or truth to the medium. We mean by this that learners would be expected to act upon text-types in the appropriate medium: written texts would be read, spoken ones listened to, visual ones seen. Just as communication is governed by con ventions, so we can see that the different media represent and obey con ventions specific to themselves. Learning dialogue by reading, for example, may neutralise the authentic conventions of spoken discourse, and we may be asking the learner to become involved in using and applying knowledge in a distorted way.

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language learning context-as distinct from some natural o r authentic en vironment. The communicative curriculum seeks to exploit the classroom in terms of what it

can

realistically offer as a resource for learning. This would

not necessarily mean changing or disguising the classroom in the hope that it will momentarily serve as some kind of 'communicative situation' resembling situations in the outside world. The classroom itself is a unique social environ ment with its own human activities and its own conventidns governing these activities. It is cultural reality communicative be overcome or

an environment where a particular social-psychological and is constructed. This uniqueness and this reality implies a potential to be exploited, rather than constraints which have to compensated for. Experimentation within the prior constraints

learning by, on the one hand, the 'formal' language learning contexts of the classroom and, on the other, the 'informal' learning which takes place at any time, anywhere. The classroom can be characterised by the kinds of learning which are best generated in a group context, while 'informal' learning under taken beyond the classroom is often an individual commitment, especially in the context of foreign language learning. Thus the 'formal' context is one where the interpersonal relationships of the classroom group have their own potential contribution to make to the overall task. Within the communicative curriculum, the classroom-and the procedures and activities it allows-can serve as the focal point of the learning-teaching process. In adopting a methodology characterised by learning and teaching as a communicative and differentiated process, the classroom no longer needs to be seen as a pale representation of some outside communicative reality. It can become the meeting-place for realistically motivated communication-as-learning, com munication about learning, and metacommunication. It can be a forum where knowledge may be jointly offered and sought, reflected upon, and acted upon. The classroom can also crucially serve as the source of feedback on, and refinement of, the individual learner's own process competence. And it can serve as a springboard for the learner's 'personal curriculum' which may be undertaken and developed 'informally' outside the classroom. As a co participant in the classroom group, the learner's own progress can be both monitored and potentially sustained by himself on the basis of others' feed back and by others within some shared undertaking. To ensure that the special and differing contributions offered by both 'formal' and 'informal' contexts of learning can be fully exploited, a com municative methodology has to try to relate the two. The classroom can deal with and explore phenomena which are significant in the experienced 'outside world' of the learner, and it can become an observatory of communication as everyday human behaviour. As well as looking outwards, the classroom has a reflexive role as a laboratory where observations can become the means for the discovery of new knowledge and the development of abilities. A communicative methodology will therefore exploit the classroom as a resource with its own communicative potential. The classroom is only one resource in language teaching, but it is also the meeting-place of all other


of any communicative situation is, as we have seen, typical of the nature of communication itself, and the prior constraints of classroom communication need be no exception. We can make a distinction between the different contributions offered to

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resources-learners, teachers, and texts. Each of these has sufficiently hetero geneous characteristics to make classroom-based negotiation a necessary undertaking. The classroom is 'artificial' only if we demand of it that which it cannot achieve-if, for example, we treat it as a rehearsal studio where 'actors' learn the lines from some pre-scripted target repertoire for a performance at some later time and place. The authenticity of the classroom lies in its dual role of observatory and laboratory during a communicative learning-teaching process.12

5.

WHAT ARE T H E

R O L E S OF T H E T E A C H E R A N D T H E L E A R N E R S

W I T H I N A CO M M U N I C A T I V E M E T H ODOLO G Y ?

5.1 The Teacher


Within a communicative methodology the teacher has two main roles. The first role is to facilitate the communicative process between all participants in the classroom, and between these participants and the various activities and texts. The second role is to act as an interdependent participant within the learning-teaching group. This latter role is closely related to the objective of the first role and it arises from it. These roles imply a set of secondary roles for the teacher: first , as an organiser of resources and as a resource himself. Second, as a guide within the classroom procedures and activities. In this role the teacher endeavours to make clear to th _ e learners what they need to do in order to achieve spme specific activity or task, if they indicate that such guidance is necessary. This guidance role is ongoing and largely unpredictable, so the teacher needs to share it with other learners. Related to this, the teacher-and other learners-can offer and seek feedback at appropriate moments in learning-teaching activities. In guiding and monitoring the teacher needs to be a 'seer of potential' with the aim of facilitating and shaping in dividual and group knowledge and exploitation of abilities during learning. In this way the teacher will be concentrating on the process competences of the learners. A third role for the teacher is that of researcher and learner-with much to contribute in terms of appropriate knowledge and abilities, actual and ob served experience of the nature of learning, and organisational capabilities . As a participant-observer, the teacher has the opportunity to 'step back' and monitor the communicative process of learning-teaching. As an interdependent participant in the process, the teacher needs to actively share the responsibility for learning and teaching with the learners. This sharing can provide the basis for joint negotiation which itself releases the teacher to become a co-participant. Perceiving .the learners as having im portant contributions to make-in terms of initial competence and a range of various and changing expectations-can enable the teacher to continually seek potential and exploit it. A requirement on the teacher must be that he distinguish between learning and the performance of what is being learned. The teacher must assume that the performance within any target repertoire is separable from the means to the achievement of that repertoire. Also, he must assume that learners are capable of arriving at a particular objective through diverse routes. The teacher needs to recognise learning as an interpersonal undertaking over which no single person can have full control, and that there will be differences between ongoing learning processes. The teacher has to

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accept that different learners learn different things in different ways a t dif ferent times,' and he needs to be patiently aware that some learners, for example, will enter periods when it seems that little or no progress is being made and that, sometimes, learning is typified by silent reflection. 13

5.2 The Learner Regardless of the curriculum in which they work and regardless of whether or not they are being taught, all learners of a language are confronted by the task of discovering how to learn the language. All learners will start with dif fering expectations about the actual learning, but each individual learner will be required to adapt and continually readapt in the process of relat�ng himself

Within a communicative methodology, the role of learner as negotiator between the self, the learning process, and the object of learning-emerges from and interacts with the role of joint negotiator within the group and within the classroom procedures and activities which the group undertakes. The implication for the learner is that he should contribute as much as he gains, and thereby learn in an interdependent way. The learner can achieve interdependence by recognising responsibility for his own learning and by sharing that responsibility with other learners and the teacher. A further implication is that the learner must commit himself to undertake com municative and metacommunicative acts while working with other participants in the group, and while working upon activities and texts. This commitment


to what is being learned. The knowledge will be redefined as the learner un covers it, and, in constructing and reconstructing his own curriculum, the learner may discover that earlier strategies in the use of his abilities need to be replaced by other strategies. Thus, all learners-in their own ways-have to adopt the role of negotiation between themselves, their learning process, and the gradually revealed object of learning. A communicative methodology is characterised by making this negotiative role-this learning how to learn-a public as well as a private undertaking. Within the context of the classroom group, this role is shared and, thereby, made interpersonal. If we recognise that any knowledge which we ourselves have mastered is always shared knowledge and that we always seek con firmation that we 'know' something by communicating with other people, we have to conclude that knowledge of anything and the learning of anything is an interpersonal matter. Also, if we recognise that real knowledge is always set in a context and this context is botli' psychological and social-what is known will always be contextualised with other knowledge in our minds and will always �arry with it elements of the social context in which it was experienced-then we also have to conclude that a significant part of our learning is, in fact, socially constructed. These justifications for a genuinely interpersonal methodology are quite independent of the nature of what is to be learned. If the object of learning is itself communication, then the motivation to enable the learner to adopt an interpersonal means to that learning is doubly justified. Quite simply, in order to learn to communicate within a selected target repertoire, the learner must be encouraged to communicate-to communicate about the learning process, and to communicate about the changing object of learning on the basis of accepting that 'learning how to learn' is a problem shared, and solved, by other learners.

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6.

WHAT

IS THE

ROLE

OF

CONTENT

WITHIN A COMMUNICATIVE

M ET H ODOLOGY?

Language teaching curricula have often been traditionally defined by their content. Such content has itself been derived from a target repertoire in terms of some selected inventories of items analysed prior to the commencement of the teaching-learning process and often acting as predeterminants of it. Similarly, sets of formal items taken from an analytic gr ammar of the language, or sets of 'functions' taken from some list of semantic categories, have been linked to themes and topics deemed in advance to be appropriate to the expectations of the particular learners. Communicative curricula, on the other hand, do not look exclusively to a


can be initiated and supported by a milieu in which the learner's own con tributions-interpretations, expressions, and efforts to negotiate-are recognised as valid and valuable. Such a context would be typified by the acceptance of ongoing success and failure as necessary prerequisites towards some ultimate achievement, where it is assumed that learners inevitably bring with them 'mixed abilities' and that such ·a 'mixture' is, in fact, positively useful to the group as a whole. Commitment to communication on the lear ner's part need not be regarded as something unattainable or threatening even for the 'beginning' learner-because he is expected to rely on and develop that which is familiar: his own process competence and experience of com munication. As an interdependent participant in a cooperative milieu where the learner's contributions are valued and used, the individual learner is potentially rewarded by having his own subjective expectations and decisions informed and guided by others. In a context where different contributions and dif ferential learning are positively encouraged, the learner is allowed to depend on other learners and on the teacher when the need arises, and also enabled to be independent at appropriate moments of the learning. He can feel free to exploit independent strategies in order to learn, to maintain and develop per sonal affective motivations for learning, and to decide on different routes and means which become available during learning. The paradox here, of course, is that genuine independence arises only to the extent that it is interdependently granted and interdependently accepted. Learning seen as totally a personal and subjective matter is seeing learning in a vacuum; indeed we may wonder whether such learning is ever possible. Learners also have an important monitoring role in addition to the degree of monitoring which they may apply subjectively to their own learning. The learner can be a provider of feedback to others concerning his own inter pretation of the specific purposes of the curriculum, and the appropriateness of methodology to his own learning experiences and achievements. In ex pression and negotiation, the learner adopts the dual role of being, first, a potential teacher for other learners and, second, an informant to the teacher concerning his own learning progress. In this latter role, the learner can offer the teacher and other learners a source for new directions in the learning teaching process of the group. Essentially, a communicative methodology would allow both the teacher and the learner to be interdependent participants in a communicative process of learning and teaching.

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selected target repertoire as a specifier o f curriculum content, for a number of reasons. First, the emphasis on the process of bringing certain basic abilities to bear on the dynamic conventions of communication precludes any specification of content in terms of a static inventory of language items grammatical or 'functional'-to be learned in some prescribed way. Second, the central concern for the development and refinement of underlying com petence as a basis for a selected target repertoire requires a distinction between

(a) Focus From what has been proposed in this section so far, it follows that content within communicative methodology is likely to focus upon knowledge-both cognitive and affective-which is personally significant to the learner. Such knowledge would be placed in an interpersonal context which can motivate personal and joint negotiation through the provision of authentic and problem-posing texts. If content is to be sensitive to the process of learning and to the interpersonal concerns of the group, it needs to reflect and support the integration of language with other forms of human experience and behaviour.

(b) Sequence If we accept that the communicative process requires that we deal with dynamic and creative conventions, we cannot assume that any step-by-step or cumulative sequence of content will necessarily be appropriate. In learning, the various and changing routes of the learners crucially affect any ordering of content, so that sequencing derives from the state of the learners rather than from the implicit 'logic' of the content itself. Just as any movement from


that target and any content which could be used as a potential means towards it. Third, the importance of the curriculum as a means for the activation and refinement of the process competences of different learners, presupposes dif ferentiation, ongoing change, and only short-term predictability in what may be appropriate content. The communicative curriculum would place content within methodology and provide it with the role of servant to the learning-teaching process. Thus, content would not necessarily be prescribed by purposes but selected and organised within the communicative and differentiated process by learners and teachers as participants in that process. Therefore, the learner would use the content of the curriculum as the 'carrier' of his process competence and as the provider of opportunities for communicative experiences through which per sonal routes may be selected and explored as a means to the ultimate target competence. From this concern with means rather than ends-with the process of learning-teaching rather than with the product-the communicative curriculum will adopt criteria for the selection and organisation of content which will be subject to, and defined by, communicative learning and teaching. The content of any curriculum can be selected and organised on the basis of some adopted criteria, and these criteria will influence five basic aspects of the content: its focus, its sequence, its subdivision (or breakdown), its continuity, and its direction (or routing). We will now consider the possible criteria for the selection and organisation of content within the communicative curriculum with reference to each of these five aspects in turn:

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'simple' to 'complex' is a very misleading way of perceiving the relationship between any text and its meaning potential-a simple text may realise complex

(c) Subdivision

Traditionally content has been subdivided into serialised categories of structures or 'functions'. A communicative view of content precludes this fragmentation and argues for subdivision in terms of whole frameworks wherein there is interaction between all the various components of the know ledge system-ideational, interpersonal and textual-and all the abilities involved in using such knowledge. Content would be subdivided or broken down in terms of activities and tasks to be undertaken, wherein both know ledge and abilities would be engaged in the learners' communication and meta communication. The various activities and tasks would be related by sharing a holistic 'core' of knowledge and abilities. So, we would not be concerned with 'units' of content, but with 'units' of activity which generate communication and metacommunication.

(d) Continuity

The need to provide continuity for the learner has, in the past, been based upon content. Within a communicative methodology, continuity can be identified within at least four areas. First, continuity can reside in the activities and the tasks within each activity; and from one activity to another and from one task to another. An activity or task sets up its own requirements for its progressive accomplishment, and it is the pursuit of these requirements which can provide tangible continuity for the learner. Second, continuity potentially resides within communicative acts during the learning and teaching: either at the 'macro' level in terms of the whole lesson and its 'micro' sequences of negotiation, or within the structure of discourse in terms of the 'macro' com municative act with its own coherent sequence of utterances. 14 Third, con tinuity is provided through the ideational system which can also be seen in terms of 'macro' and 'micro' levels. At the 'macro' level the learner may have access to continuity of theme, while at the 'micro' level the learner can have access to conceptual or notional continuity. Because ideational continuity is realised through a refinement of textual knowledge-the refinement of a concept, for example, can imply a refinement of its linguistic expression, and


meaning, and vice-versa-so it may be wrong to assume that what may be 'simple' for any one learner is likely to be 'simple' for all the learners. Sequencing in communicative content is therefore likely to be a cyclic process where learners are continually developing related frameworks or aggregations of knowledge and ability use, rather than accumulating separable blocks of 'static' knowledge or a sequence of ordered skills� Learners would typically move from global to particular perspectives-and vice-versa-in their negotiation with the content. Thus, content becomes something which learners move into and out from, and to which they return in a process of finer analysis and refined synthesis. Curriculum designers cannot, therefore, predict with any certainty the 'levels' of content on which learners will decide to evolve their own sequencing in learning. All such designers can do is to anticipate a range of content which will richly activate process competences so that the ultimate target repertoire becomes accessible and its specific demands recognised by the learner.

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(e) Direction Traditionally, learners have been expected to follow the direction implicit in some prescribed content. Typically an emphasis on content led the learner from the beginning, through the middle, to the end. From what has been indicated so far, a communicative methodology would not exploit content as some pre-determined route with specific entry and exit points. In a com municative methodology, content ceases to become some external control over learning-teaching procedures. Choosing directions becomes a part of the curriculum itself, and involves negotiation between learners and learners, learners and teachers, and learners and text. Who or what directs content becomes a justification for communication about the selection and organisation of content with methodology, and about the various routes to be adopted by the learners through any agreed content. Content can be predicted within methodology only to the extent that it serves the communicative learning process of the participants in the group. It might well be that the teacher, in negotiation with learners, will propose the adoption of aspects of the target repertoire as appropriate content. However, the teacher would recognise that the central objective of developing underlying communicative knowledge and abilities can be achieved through a range of alternative con tent, not necessarily including aspects of the target repertoire. Such 'carrier' content can be as diverse as the different routes learners may take towards a common target: perhaps content can be more various and more variable. Also, the teacher would remain free to build upon the contributions of learners their initial competences and expectations-and exploit the inevitably different ways in which learners may attain the ultimate target. Further, the teacher would not regard any surface performance as synonymous with its underlying knowledge and abilities, and he will avoid transferring this possible confusion to the learners.


vice-versa-there i s a parallel continuity of ideation and text. Fourth, and finally, continuity can reside within a skills repertoire or a cycle of skill-use during an activity. For example, there could be a progression from reading to note-taking to speaking for the achievement of a particular activity. A com municative methodology would exploit each of these areas of continuity as clusters of potential continuities, rather than exploit any one alone. All can be inherent in a single activity. These kinds of continuity offer two important advantages. They can serve the full process competences of learners-know ledge systems and abilities-and they can allow for differentiation. Learners need to be enabled to seek and achieve their own continuity and, therefore, the criteria for their own progress. In the process of accomplishing some im mediate activity, learners will impose their own personal and interpersonal order and continuity upon that activity, the communication which the activity generates, the interpersonal, ideational and textual data which they act upon, and on the skills they need to use in the activity's achievement. As a result, the progressive refinement of the learner's own process competence can provide an overall /earning continuity. Once the teacher can accept that each of these areas provides potential continuity for different learners, it ceases to be a problem if different learners pursue several routes or progress at different rates.

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H O W IS T H E C U R R I C U L U M P R O C E S S T O BE E V A L U AT E D ?

Criteria for eventual success-in some particular task-could be initially negotiated, achievement of the task could be related to these agreed criteria, and degrees of success or failure could be themselves further negotiated on the basis of the original criteria. Evaluative criteria, therefore, would be established and applied in a three-stage process: (i) What might 'success' mean? (ii) Is the learner's performance of the task successful? (iii) If so, how successful is it? Each stage would be a matter for communication. Instead of the teacher being obliged to teach towards some externally imposed criteria manifested most o ften by some external examination or standardised test-he can exploit the interpretation of these external or standardised criteria as part of the joint negotiation within the classroom. The group's discovery of the criteria inherent in such end-of-course or summative assessment would be one means for the establishment of the group's own negotiated criteria and, crucially, for the sharing of responsibilities during the learning-teaching process. In a communicative curriculum we are dealing with an interdependence of the curriculum components of purposes, methodology, and evaluation. It follows that any evaluation within the curriculum also involves an evaluation of the curriculum itself. Any joint negotiation among the various participants within the curriculum may obviously deal with the initial purposes and on going methodology which have been adopted . Indeed, communicative evaluation may well lead to adaptation of initial purposes, of methodology, and of the agreed criteria of evaluation themselves. Evaluation within and of the curriculum can be a powerful and guiding force. Judgements are a crucial part of knowledge, learning, and any educational process. By applying judgements to the curriculum itself, evaluation by the users of that curriculum can be brought into the classroom in an immediate and practical sense. Once within the classroom, evaluation can be made to serve as a basis for new directions in the process of teaching and learning. A genuinely communicative use of evaluation will lead towards an emphasis on formative or ongoing evaluation, rather than summative or end-of-course


The communicative curriculum insists that evaluation i s a highly significant part of communicative interaction itself. We judge 'grammaticality', 'ap propriateness' , 'intelligibility', and 'coherence' in communicative per formance on the basis of shared, negotiated, and changing conventions . Evaluation within the curriculum can exploit this 'judging' element of every day communicative behaviour in the assessment of learners' communication and metacommunication. The highly evaluative aspect of communication can be adopted as the evaluation procedure of the curriculum. If so, the essentially intersubjective nature of evaluation can be seen as a· strong point rather than , possibly, a weakness. How might we evaluate learner progress? Evaluation of oneself, evalua tion of others, and evaluation of self by others is intersubjective. In this way, evaluation need not be regarded as external to the purposes of the curriculum or external to the actual process of learning and teaching. In recognising that relative success or failure in the sharing of meaning, or in the achievement of some particular task, is most often an intersubjective matter, the com municative curriculum would rely on shared and negotiated evaluation .

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evaluation which may b e based on some prescribed criteria. I f evaluation is accepted as an immediate and ongoing activity inherent in communication and in learning to communicate, then it is very likely to be genuinely formative for both the individual learner and the whole curriculum. That is, it can shape and guide learning and guide decisions within the curriculum process. Any shared and negotiated evaluation within the classroom will generate potentially formative feedback for and between learners and between learners and the teacher. Formative evaluation may not only indicate the relative successes and failures of both learner and curriculum, it can also indicate new and different directions in which both can move and develop. Such evaluation can be an almost inevitable product of a differentiated methodology, just as it can act as a motivating force for differentiation.

8.

A C H I E V I N G CO M M U N I C A T I V E L A N G U A G E T E A C H I N G

We emphasised at the outset of this paper that any curriculum framework for language teaching and learning · necessarily involves designers, materials writers, teachers and learners in a process of relating the three components of purpose, methodology and evaluation. Even so, we need to acknowledge that any curriculum-including a communicative curriculum-cannot strictly be designed as a whole from the start. We can only deduce and propose the principles on which a variety of communicative; curricula may be based. Any curriculum is a personal and social arena. A communicative curriculum in particular, with its emphasis on the learning and teaching of communication, highlights a communicative process whereby the interrelating curriculum components are themselves open to negotiation and change. From this it follows that the communicative curriculum-no more than any other-can never be one uniquely identifiable language teaching curriculum. In a real sense there can be no such thing as an ideal and uniquely applicable


This placing of evaluation within the communicative process as a formative activity in itself does not necessarily invalidate the place of summative evaluation. Sumniative evaluation becomes valuable if it can reveal the learners' relative achievement of a particular target repertoire. However, we have already proposed that any target repertoire needs to be seen as the tip of an iceberg. Therefore, an essential requirement on any summative evaluation would be that it can adequately account for the learner's progress in the refine ment of a particular underlying competence-the communicative knowledge and abilities which provide the capacity for the use of a target repertoire. Sum mative evaluation, in other words, needs to be sensitive to differential com petences which may underlie some common target. As such, summative evaluation within a communicative curriculum needs to focus on the assess ment of the learner's developing communicative knowledge and abilities as well as on his actual performance within the target repertoire. Summative evaluation has still to account for developed knowledge and abilities in ad dition to the surface manifestations of such development. Therefore, the essential characteristics of evaluation within a com municative curriculum would be that such evaluation is itself incorporated within the communicative process of teaching and learning, that it serves the dual role of evaluating learner progress and the ongoing curriculum, and that it is likely to be formative in the achievement of this dual role.


107

language teaching curriculum since any realisation of the curriculum must reflect a realistic analysis of the actual situation within which the language teaching will take place. To cope with this requirement of appropriateness to situation, the communicative curriculum has to be proposed as a flexible and practical set of basic principles which underlie a whole range of potential com municative curricula. It is this set of principles which we have tried to present in this paper, in the knowledge that such proposals need to be translated into action in the classroom in order to test their own validity. This is, after all, the only means by which curriculum theory and practice can develop. Even though the curriculum designer may have taken account of the actual language teaching situation, he has to recognise that from design to implementation is itself a communicative process . J . M. Stephens (1 967) identified this process when he said:

While Stephens, in talking about stimuli, does not emphasise transactions as a two-way process, he clearly implies that the translation from principles through design to implementation is most often a process of reinterpretation of the curriculum, and a process of negotiation between the curriculum and its users. If adopted within the design and implementation procedure, the con ditions or minimal requirements on any communicative curriculum must take account of those situational constraints which are unchangeable. However, such minimal requirements should also serve as the general criteria against which any situational constraints will be tested in order to assess whether or not the constraint is genuinely immutable or whether it may be overcome. If a curriculum based upon the principles which we have examined here is not implementable within a particular situation, then it may be that a genuinely communicative curriculum is simply not viable. It may be the case that curriculum designers and teachers in such a situation need to consider whether the achievement of language learning as communication is ap propriate. Communicative curricula need-through time and according to situation to be open and subject to ongoing developments in theory, research, and practical classroom experience. Communicative curricula are essentially the means of capturing variability. Variability will exist in selected purposes, methods, and evaluation procedures, but variability must also be seen as inherent in human communication and in the ways it is variously achieved by different learners and teachers. The classroom-its social-psychological reality, its procedures and activities-is potentially a communicative environ ment where the effort to pull together such variability is undertaken. The


The curricular reforms emanating from the conference room will be effective only insofar as they become incorporated into the concerns that the teacher is led to express. Any statements or decisions coming from the curriculum committee will not be transported intact into the lives of pupils. Such statements must work through a complex chain of interactions. The original statements of the com mittee will act as stimuli for one set of people such as subject-matter supervisors. These people, in turn, will react to the stimuli, possibly merely mirroring what they receive, more likely, incorporating much of themselves into the reaction. Their reactions will then act as stimuli for a second set of people who will also react in their own way. After a number of such intermediary transactions some one, the teacher, will apply some stimuli to the pupil himself. (pp. 1 2- 1 3)

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learning-teaching process in the classroom is the meeting-point of all curriculum components and it is the place where their coherence is continually tested . The learning-teaching process in the classroom is also the catalyst for the development and refinement of those minimal requirements which will underlie future curricula.

(Received September 1979)

NOTES 'Curriculum' can b e distinguished from 'syllabus' i n that a syllabus i s typically a specification

Content and its organisation is subsumed within a curriculum as part of methodology (Section 6 of this paper). A syllabus 1s therefore only part of the overall curriculum within which it operates. For mteresting discussions of curriculum theory and design see, inter alia, Lawton, 1973; Stenhouse, 1 975; Golby et al. , 1975. 1

Here the term 'conventions' may be more appropriate than the term 'rules' for they are

socially and personally agreed, acted upon and recreated rat her than merely followed or obeyed as i f external to social and personal influence. Such conventions would embrace lingu1suc rules, sociolinguistic rules and psycholinguisuc constraints and the interrelationships between these systems underlying communication. ' This distinction between the three knowledge systems denves from Halliday ( 1973). Halliday descnbes the three as 'macro-functions' of language, and proposes that any linguistic unit

IS

the

simultaneous realisation of the ideational, interpersonal and textual. In this paper we take the v1ew that text, seen both in terms of ind1v1dual sentences and structures above the sentence, acts as the embodiment of, and resource for, particular ideas·and interpersonal behaviour. Discourse can be seen as the process of deriving and creating meanings-ideational and interpersonal-through text (Widdowson, 1 978). In adopting th1s definition, we are, of course, aware that the term discourse is also sometimes used for suprasentential structure, i.e., the ways in which paragraphs and other large units are organised (Halhday aqd Hasan, 1975). Such structures and their organisation remam, in our view, within text, and knowledge of the rules wh1ch govern these make up textual k nowledge. •

The concept of 'target repertoire' is preferred to the notion of 'target language' because the

latter narrowly emphasises form, while being unspec1fic as to the inevitable selection that any curriculum makes from a language. The concept of 'repertoire' denves from sociolinguistics (Gumperz, 1964) and captures the fact that a speaker/hearer typically controls a selection of language varieties. ' This negotiative interaction w1thin the learner between pnor knowledge and the new learning has been a concern within psychology for many years. The work of Piaget ( 1953) on 'assim1Iauon' and 'accommodation' and the proposals of Jerome Bruner ( 1 973), on how learners go beyond the informauon given, exemplify this interest. More recently, Ulric Neisser ( 1976) develops Tolman's ( 1 948) theory of 'cognitive maps' and proposes-in an mteresung and provocative way-the nature of interaction in perception, both between the perceiver and the object of perception and within the perceiver. The present authors believe the possible relationships between com muni cative negotiation between people and negotiative interaction between the mind and the external world offer a rich area for psycho-socio-linguistic research. ' Such secondary abilities would include, for example, 'coding' (Bernstein, 1 97 1 ) or 'repre sentation' (Bruner et al., 1 966); the ability to 'code-switch' (Hymes, 197 1 ) including 'style shifting' (Labov, 1970); and the ability to JUdge commumcative performance m a var1ety of ways against a variety of criteria (Labov, 1966; Lambert, 1967; Hymes, 197 1 ; Giles and Powesland,


1

of the content of the teaching and learmng and the organisation and sequencing of the content.

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1975). It seems that we can regard the primary abilities of mterpretation, expression, and negotiation as themselves complexes of secondary abilities which mterrelate with one another. Further we can assume that the primary abilities may not necessarily be specific to linguistic communicauon. 1

'Sociolinguistic competence' (knowledge of the rules governing speech evems) was originally

proposed as 'communicative competence' by Dell Hymes ( 1 97 1 ) but the present authors would want to regard it as one aspect of interpersonal knowledge. The 'functional' aspect of language seems, at first sight, a more reaiiSiic basis for language teaching. However, It seems to us that recent efforts to incorporate 'Functions' into language teaching materials are based upon inap propriate and quite misleading assumptions. First, that Functions are 'items' like categories of gramf!lar or rules of syntax; second, that an utterance 1s hkely to be associated with a single Function; and, third, that there is a predictable relationship between a Function and its symactic or textual realisation. These assumptions seem to denve from the tendency to apply textual criteria alone to every aspect of language use. For a more detailed examination of the components of the knowledge systems underlying commumcatlve competence, see Breen and Candlin (forthcoming) 1

Th1s 'process competence' is the learner 's changing and developing commumcative knowledge

and abihties as the learner moves from initial competence towards the target competence. It is partly revealed through a senes of ' lmerlanguages' (Selinker 1 972, Tarone 1 977, Corder 1 978). It is also revealed by the commumcative strategies (particular use of abilities) of learners in discovering and exploiung the meaning potential of texts. Sections 4 and 5 of this paper consider this 'process competence' in more detaiL •

Within the spoken medium, for example, different 'text-types' would include newscasts, con

versations, radio commentaries, public speeches, announcements over public address systems, etc. For a discussion of the term text-type, and a classificauon of possible text-types m language learnmg, see Protoko/1 9 of the Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft Engllsch an Gesamtschulen 1976, (*Federal Working Party for English in Comprehensive Schools) which is avrulable from the Hessisches l nstitut fur Lehrerfortbildung, 3501 Fuldatal, Federal Republic of Germany. For an inventory of communicatively-oriented exercises using a ·variety of text-types see Bundesarbeits gemeinschaft Englisch an Gesamtschulen (eds) Kommumkativer Englischunterrtcht: Prinztpien und Obungstypologie, (*Communicative English Teachmg: Principles and an Exercise Typology)

Munich, Langenscheidt-Longman 1978. 1 0 Regardless of the ability used or the medium through which the ab1hty works, what seems to matter for the user, and the learner, is meaning-making or the search for meanmg potemial (see,

for example: Johnson-Laird, 1974 and Smith, 1971). Further, it is very likely that the ability to interpret, for instance, exists m an interdependent relationship with the ability to express (see, for example: Clark et al. , 1 974 and Ingram 1974). Similarly, the skills of speaking and listening are themselves mterdependent, and the acquisition of literacy skills have, in turn, a dependence on these. Once basic literacy IS mastered the four skills conunually interact. 11

Learning strategies are how learners use their abilities in order to learn: therefore they are one

defining feature of process competence. These strategies are revealed by learners' 'interlanguages' and

learners'

tendencies

towards

simplification,

over-generalisation,

and

'idiosyncratic'

regularisation of the target language (Siobin, 1973; Dulay and Burt , 1975; Richards, 1975; Gat bouton, 1978 offer some of the evidence). Learning strategies can exemplify more general and di ffering 'learning styles' (Marton, 1975 and Krashen, 1977 discuss interesting variables, whilst Rubin, 1975 and Naiman et a!, 1978 reveal strategies wh1ch typify the 'good' language learner). 1

2

On the d1fferemial contributions of the ' formal' and 'informal' language learning en

vironments, Krashen ( 1 976) makes a number of very interesting observatiOns on the advantages of a ' formal' environment in terms of, specifically, the self-monitoring activity of the learner. A communicative methodology would, of course, exploit monitoring as both an individual and shared undertaking when appropriate to an activity and to pamcipants in an activity. Krashen 's 'monitoring' relates closely to what we have described as communication-about-learning and meta-communication (see Sections 4. 1 and 7). I I So me readers may fee) that the main rOles Of facilitatOr Of and interdependent partiCipant


Ch . I and other sources there referred to.

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E S S E N T I A L S O F A COM M U N I CA T I V E CU R R I CU L U M

within a communicative methodology present teachers with unaccustomed challenges. However, if we more closely consider the problems for the teacher within more traditional methodologies (see for example: Rogers, 1969; Allwnght, 1978), we can d1scover quite separate motivations for the roles suggested here. " On lessons seen in terms of 'macro' and 'micro' levels see Sinclair and Coulthard ( 1 975). On discourse

as

'macro speech acts' and ' m1cro speech acts' see van D1jk ( 1977).

R E F E R E N CE S

Bernstein, B., 1 97 1 . Class, Codes and Control, Volume I : Theoretical Studies towards a Sociology ofLanguage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Breen, M . P. and Candlin, C. N., forthcoming. The Communicative Curriculum in Language Teaching. London: Longman. Bruner, J. S., Olver, R. and Greenfield, P . , 1 966. Studies in Cognitive Growth . New York: John Wiley & Sons. Bruner, J. S . , 1 973. Beyond the Information Given. London: George Allen & Unwin. Clark, R . , Hutcheson, S . , Van Buren, P . , 1 974. ' Comprehension and production in language acquisition' Journal of Linguistics, 1 0, 1 974. Corder, S. P . , 1 978. 'Error analysis, interlanguage and second language acquisition' in Kinsella, V. (ed.) Language Teaching and Linguistics: Surveys. Cambridge University Press. Dulay, H . and Burt, M . , 1 975. 'A new approach to discovering universal strategies of child second language acquisition' in Dato, D. (ed.) Developmental Psycho linguistics. Georgetown University Press. Gatbouton, E . , 1 978. ' Patterned phonetic variability in second language speech' Canadian Modern Language Review, 34, 3: 1 978. Giles, H . and Powesland, P . , 1 975. Speech Style and Social Valuation. London: Academic Press. Golby, M . , Greenwald, J. and West, R . , (eds.) 1 97 5 . Curriculum Design . London: Croom Helm in association with the Open University Press. Gumperz, J. J . , 1 964. 'Linguistic and social interaction in two communities' in Gumperz, J . J. and Hymes, D. (eds.) A merican A nthropologist 66 (6 ii): 1 964. Johnson-Laird, P . , 1 974. Psychology 25 , 1 974.

'Experimental psycholinguistics' Annual Review of


Allwright, R . L. 1 978. 'Abdication and responsibility i n teaching' . Paper presented at the Berne Colloquium on Applied Linguistics to be published in a special issue of Stud1es in Second Language AcquiSition. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

M I C H A E L P . B R E E N A N D C H R I ST O P H E R N . C A N D L I N

Ill

Halliday, M . A . K., 1 97 3 . 'The functional basis of language' in Bernstein, B. (ed.) Class, Codes and Control, Volume 2: Applied Studies towards a Sociology of Language. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hymes, D., 1 97 1 . 'On communicative competence' in Pride, J. and Holmes, J . , 1 972. Sociolinguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Ingram, D. , 1 974. 'The relationship between comprehension and production' in Schiefeldbusch, R. and Lloyd, L. (eds.) Language Perspectives: Acquisition, Retardation and Intervention. London: Macmillan. Krashen, S . , 1976. ' Formal and informal linguistic environments in language acquisition and language learning' TESOL Quarterly, 10, 1 976.

Lambert, W. E . , 1 967 . 'A social psychology of bilingualism' in Macnamara, V. (ed.) 'Problems of Bilingualism' Journal of Social Issues 23, 1 967. Labov, W., 1 966. Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics. Labov, W . , 1970. 'The study of language in its social context' Studium Generale 23, 1 970. Lawton, D., 1 973. Social Change, Educational Theory and Curriculum Planning. London: University of London Press. Marton, F., 1 975. 'What does it take to learn?' Paper presented for Council of Europe Symposium 'Strategies for Research and Development in Higher Education' . University of Gothenburg, September 1 97 5 .

·

Naiman, N . , Frohlich, M . , Stern, H . H . and Todesco, A . , 1 978. The Good Language Learner. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Neisser, U., 1 976. Cognition and Reality. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co. Piaget, J . , 1 953. The Origins of Intelligence in the Child. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Richards, J . , 1975. 'Simplification: a strategy in adult acquisition of a foreign language' . Language Learning 25 , 1 975. Rogers, C., 1 969. Freedom to Learn. Columbus: Ohio, Merrill. Rubin, J . , 1 975. 'What the "good language learner" can teach us' . TESOL Quarterly 9, 1 975. Selinker, L., 1 972. ' lnterlanguage' . IRAL 10: 3 , 1 972. Sinclair, J . McH. and Coulthard, M . , 1 975. Towards an Analysis of Discourse. London: Oxford University Press.


Krashen, S., 1 977. 'The monitor model for adult second language performance' in Burt, M . , Dulay, H. and Finnochiaro, M . (eds). Viewpoints on the Acquisition of English as a Second Language. New York: Regents.

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Smith, F . , 1 97 1 . Understanding Reading. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston Inc. Stenhouse, L . , 1 975. An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development. London: Heinemann. Stephens, J. M . , 1 967. The Process of Schooling: A Psychological Examination. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Tarone, E . , 1 977. 'Conscious communication strategies in inter-language: a progress report' . Paper presented at the 1 1 th TESOL Convention, Miami, Fl. 1 977. Tolman, E . C . , 1 948. 'Cognitive maps in rats and men' Psychological Review 55, 1 948 . van Dij k, T. A . , 1 977. Text and Context: Explorations in the Semantics and Pragmatics ofDiscourse. London: Longman. Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011

Widdowson, H. G . , 1 978. Teaching Language as Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

S O CIOLINGUIS TIC S URVEYS : THE STATE OF THE ART ROBERT L . COOPER Hebrew Umversity ofJerusalem

T H E N A T U R E OF S U R V EY R E S E A R C H

Varying grounds have been used to distinguish survey research from other types of social science research. Survey research is sometimes characterized as exploratory in nature, as being especially useful at the preliminary stages of an investigation, when the investigator is o ften ignorant of the relevant variables. While sociolinguistic surveys can be preliminary in nature, more often they are not. Scotton's (1972) sociolinguistic survey of Kampala, for example, was carried out after extensive fieldwork had determined the categories to be embodied in her interview schedule. Similarly, Labov's ( 1 966) survey of New York's Lower East Side was undertaken after . the phonological and social variables to be studied had been isolated on the basis of previous fieldwork. Applied Linguisllcs, Vol. I , No. 2


S O C I A L science survey methods, as old as the social sciences themselves, have been continuously developed and refined . Any paper on the state of the art of sociolinguistic surveys, therefore, invites the accusation of disciplinary in sularity. There is, after all, an extensive literature on social science survey methods. Those who wish to learn about survey design , instrument con struction, sampling, data collection, and data analysis can choose among dozens of books _for instruction (see, for example, Jahoda, Deutsch, and Cook 195 1 ; Lindzey and Aronson 1969; Moser 1 958; Warwick and Lininger 1 975). While it is true that sociolinguistic surveys adapt the technology found in social science surveys more generally, one can justify their separate treatment on several grounds. For one thing, sociolinguistic surveys, like surveys under taken from any disciplinary perspective, reflect the theoretical orientations and empirical concerns of their practitioners. Thus the aims of sociolinguistic surveys can be distinguished from those of other types of survey. Second, some of the techniques associated with sociolinguistic surveys, if not originating with such surveys, have been developed in connection with them. Third, unlike most social science surveyers, many of the practitioners of socio linguistic surveys are essentially self-taught with respect to social science research methods. Finally, widespread interest in sociolinguistic surveys is new, paralleling and stemming from the relatively recent interest in socio linguistics itself. Just as many sociolinguistic studies antedate the early 1 960's, when recognition of sociolinguistics as a field of inquiry began to grow, so sociolinguistic surveys are not a new phenomenon (Jernudd 1 975). Nonethe less, almost all of the sociolinguistic surveys reported in the literature have been carried out since the mid- 1960's, and the number of new surveys seems to grow at a geometric rate. Thus, while the technology of sociolinguistic surveys derives from social science surveys more generally, they have features which justify their separate consideration.

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S O C IO L I N G U I S T I C S U R VEYS

GOALS

The goals of sociolinguistic surveys can b e analyzed i n at least two ways . First, we can categorize the behaviors which such surveys are designed to assess. Second, we can classi fy the reasons for assessing such behaviors .


Sometimes survey research is distinguished from experimental research. The former is said to be correlational, i.e. , associations but not causal relationships are established among variables . Experimental research, in contrast, establishes causal relationships by comparing the effects of differing treat ments, either on subgroups which are equivalent with respect to all relevant characteristics, except exposure to the treatments of interest, or on res pondents who are exposed to all treatments and thus serve as their own control. It is probably true that most sociolinguistic surveys are correlational in nature, although inferences of causality can sometimes be drawn from correlational data (see, for example, Cooper and Horvath 1 973; Lieberson 1 970; Weinreich 1 957). However, some sociolinguistic surveys are experi mental in character. Thus in surveys carried out by Labov ( 1 966) and by Ma and Herasimchuk ( 1 97 1 ), the effects of differing elicitation procedures on the production of phonological variables were described and compared. The distinction between survey and other types of research which will be followed here is based on the obtained results ' generalizability to a target population. Survey research is defined here as research carried out with respect to an entire population, whether as small as a hundred neighboring households (Fishman et a/. 1 97 1 ) or as large as a nation (Ladafoged et a/. 1 97 1 ) . Thus censuses are surveys as are studies whose samples are drawn so as to represent a defined population. Because of the constraints imposed by limitations of time and money, there is often a trade-off between the number of cases that can be observed and the number of questions which can be asked about each case. Inasmuch as studies of whole populations, whether by complete enumeration or by sample survey, typically involve large numbers of cases, the number of questions asked about each case is often smaller than the number which can be asked by other types of study. Thus a survey is sometimes what the literal meaning of the word suggests, an 'overview', an examination which obtains breadth of observation at the expense of depth . That this is not a necessary characteristic of survey research, however, can be seen from the surveys conducted by Das Gupta et a/. ( 1 972), Fishman et a/. ( 1 97 1 ) , Labov ( 1 966), and Le Page ( 1 972, 1 975), among others, which obtained both minutely detailed and voluminous data. Survey research, therefore, is defined here not according to the degree of detail it obtains, nor according to its correlational or experimental nature, nor according to the stage of in vestigation it represents , but rather it is defined in terms of the generalizability of its results to a specified population. Sociolinguistic surveys gather information about the social organization of language behavior and behavior toward language in specified populations. Because such behaviors encompass multitudinous phenomena and because populations vary in size, complexity, and basis of organization, sociolinguistic surveys vary widely in the questions which they ask, the ways in which they answer them, and the uses for which their results are intended. This paper out lines some of the major goals and procedures of such surveys.

R O B E RT L. C O O P E R

l iS

Surveys designed to measure the same behavior might be differently motivated and conversely surveys motivated by the same purpose might assess different behaviors. Thus for example information with respect to a population' s

second language proficiency i n various languages can b e collected t o help formulate language policy, e.g., the language varieties to be chosen for use in radio broadcasting, or to help test a hypothesis, e.g . , with respect to language spread. Conversely a survey carried out for the purpose of formulating language policy might gather information about second-language proficiency or it might collect data with respect to language attitudes. We shall first classify the behaviors assessed by sociolinguistic surveys and then we shall categorize the purposes for collecting such data. B E H A V IORS ASSESSED

p


A convenient dichotomy for discussing sociolinguistic behavior has been proposed by Agheyisi and Fishman ( 1 970), namely the distinction between language behavior and behavior toward language. The language behaviors assessed by sociolinguistic surveys can be classified into three major categories: proficiency, acquisition, and usage. Proficiency refers to what has been learned; acquisition refers to the sequence of learning, particularly what has been learned first; and usage refers to what is typically done. Each of these broad classes of behavior can be examined at either of two levels of ab straction. At the 'microsociolinguistic' level of observation surveys are con cerned with particular features of language. With respect to the variants of a phonological, lexical, or syntactic variable, for example, a survey might describe which variants different groups of speakers can use (proficiency) , which they learned first (acquisition), and which they typically use in different types of speech situation . or communicative context. At the 'macrosocio linguistic' level of observation, surveys describe what languages or language varieties different groups of speakers know (proficiency), the order in which they learned them (acquisition), and the contexts in which they use them (usage). The intersection of three ty es of behavior with two levels of ob servation creates six cells into which the language behaviors assessed by socio linguistic surveys can be classified. With respect to behavior toward language, it can be classified as either attitudinal or implementational. Language is an attitudinal object concerning which people have opinions and feelings and towards which they may be pre pared to act. While attitudes are unobservable constructs whose characteristics must be inferred on the basis of observable behavior, implementational behavior is itself observable. That is to say, people act overtly toward language. For example, they may voluntarily enroll their children in schools in which the language of instruction differs from that used in the majority of a community's schools; they may participate in organizations whose purpose it is to accomplish spelling reform; they may struggle to maintain or to change the status of their mother tongue by participating in organizations devoted to such purposes or by lobbying or petitioning legislators; they may correct another speaker's use of forms which they consider to be nonstandard or improper; they may work in language planning agencies or participate in activities sponsored by such agencies; or they may be actively involved in language policy decisions.

SO C I O L I N G U I S T I C S U R V E Y S

1 16

Both attitudinal and implementational behaviors can b e directed toward microsociolinguistic as well as macrosociolinguistic objects, thus creating four cells for the classification of behaviors toward language. If we add these to the six cells specified above, we have a taxonomy of ten cells into which the behaviors assessed by sociolinguistic surveys can be categorized (see Figure 1) .

Figure 1: Behaviors Assessed by Sociolinguistic Surveys Behavior

Level of observation Macro Micro

Language behavior

Behavior toward language Attitudinal Implementational

Although sociolinguistic surveys sometimes are directed to behaviors which fall within only one of these ten cells, more commonly such surveys measure behaviors from each of several cells. One example of a 'multicelled' survey is the International Research Project on Language Planning Processes (Das Gupta et at. , 1 972; Fishman 1 975). Among the data gathered by this survey was information collected from high school and university students and their teachers in India, Indonesia, and Israel. Information was sought with respect to the languages the respondents could speak and read (macro-proficiency), the languages they spoke first as children (macro-acquisition) and the languages they used for various specified contexts (macro-usage). In addition, respondents were tested with respect to their knowledge of certain technical terms in the standard (planned) language (micro-proficiency); they were asked if they know any alternative terms and if so when they learned them (micro acquisition); and their responses to word-naming tasks were scored for the proportion of language academy-approved terms they employed (micro usage). The project also assessed behaviors toward language. Respondents were asked their opinions about a sample of language academy-produced words in the fields of chemistry, civics, and language and literature (micro attitudinal) and about various languages and language planning (macro attitudinal), and they were asked about their participation in language planning organizations (particularly corpus planning agencies) or in the ac tivities sponsored by these organizations (macro-implementational). In ad dition, textbook writers were asked about the source and degree of control to which they were subjected with respect to their use of technical terminology (micro-implementational) . Thus the International Research Project on Language Planning Processes tapped behaviors from all ten cells of the taxonomy. This survey was unusually comprehensive in the behaviors it assessed. None theless, sociolinguistic surveys often encompass more than one cell. That they


Proficiency Acquisition Usage

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P U R POSES

Sociolinguistic surveys have been undertaken for a variety o f reasons, and often a survey is motivated by more than one of them. Some of the major motivations are described below.

Language Policy Decisions

In linguistically heterogeneous polities, it often becomes necessary to decide what languages or language varieties will be used for various purppses. In making decisions of this sort, it is useful to know what segments of the population can speak and understand each of the languages or language varieties among which a choice is to be made and the attitudes of the public towards their use for various purposes. While language policy decisions are often made on irrational grounds, decisions presumably are sounder if they are based on accurate and relevant information (Ferguson 1 966). An example of the use of sociolinguistic surveys for language policy decisions can be found in the work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Mexico (Casad 1 974). The S.I.L. was faced with the problem o f choosing among various vernaculars for Bible translations and literacy campaigns. The extent to which various language varieties can be understood by speakers of related varieties is one factor which can appropriately be considered when deciding what varieties


do so is not surprising. Just as the order o f language acquisition, language proficiency, and language usage are related to one another, so language behavior and behavior toward language are intertwined. Th� problems or issues which motivate the description of behaviors from one cell therefore often motivate the description of behaviors from another. Because the relationships among these behaviors is often weak, it is sometimes the case that whichever of the behaviors is of crucial interest can be best explained in terms of a combination of the others. This can be seen most clearly in multiple regression analysis, inasmuch as cumulative prediction succeeds to the extent that the predictor (independent) variables are strongly related to the criterion (dependent) variable but weakly related to each other. Thus a survey of a Puerto Rican neighborhood in Jersey City found that proficiency criterion scores could be successfully predicted by a combination of variables which were maximally independent of one another (Fishman et a/. 1971). For example, almost 75o/o of the variation in respondents' Spanish repertoire range (the number and fluency of speech styles observed in Spanish, as rated by two linguists who based their j udgments on tape-recorded samples) was explained by a combination of seven predictors. Some of these were microsocio linguistic, e.g., the frequency of particular phonological variants observed, others were macrosociolinguistic, e.g. , literacy in Spanish. Some were pro ficiency scores, e.g. , number of words produced in a Spanish word-naming task, and others were usage scores, e.g., self-report ratings of the frequency with which specified words dealing with the work sphere were encountered. When such predictor items, which had low correlations with each other, were combined they accounted for an unusually high proportion of the criterion's variability. Thus the measuremen� of behaviors from several cells of the behavioral taxonomy is likely to improve the survey's contriblltion to the issues or problems which motivated it.

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S O C I O L I N G U I ST I C S U R V E Y S

Program Planning

Once language policy has been formulated (whether or not on the basis of relevant data) , it must be implemented, and the planning of the imple mentation often requires basic information about the language situation among the people with whom the policy is to be carried out. The Work Oriented Adult Literacy Project in Ethiopia provides one such example. Sponsored by the United Nations Special Fund and by the Ethiopian Ministry of Education and Fine Arts, the project's job was to determine the potential effectiveness of adult literacy campaigns based on vocationally-oriented teaching materials. Accordingly, several trial campaigns had to be set up. In order to plan these campaigns, it was necessary to determine what proportion of the population in these areas to be served by the campaigns would be likely to enroll in literacy classes. Thus the planners needed to know what proportion of the population in these areas was not literate; what proportion of the illiterate adults would attend classes if the times and location of classes were convenient; how many hours a week potential students were willing to attend class; and the amount of time potential students were willing to spend walking to and from class. In addition, because the medium of instruction was to be Amharic, the program planners had to know what proportion of the potential learners could understand Amharic. This information was obtained by means of sample surveys in the trial campaign areas (Cooper et a/. , 1 976; Cooper and Fasil, 1 976). Another example is the national survey to- be carried out by the U.S. Bureau of the Census of 1 976 for the purpose of estimating the proportion of the population which has ' limited English speaking ability' , particularly with respect to schooling in which the medium of instruction is English. Such in-


should b e used s o a s to reach the largest number of people at a given cost. Accordingly the S.I.L. undertook an extensive set of intelligibility studies among the local varieties of each of many Indian languages spoken in Mexico. Other factors, particularly language attitude and political pressure, may prove to be of greater importance (the S.I.L. surveys included some language at titude data), but intelligibility was clearly relevant to the language policy decisions to be made. A second example of a sociolinguistic survey undertaken to facilitate language policy decisions is the Survey of Language Use and Attitudes towards Language in the Philippines (Sibayan 1 975; Sibayan, Gonzalez, and Otanes 1 975; Tucker 1 975). Among the persons interviewed were over 2,300 ho�se holders, in communities scattered throughout the country, who were asked questions about their language background, opinions and preferences with respect to language use, attitudes towards variation in language, and pre ferences concerning the use of language in the schools. In addition, a similar number of teachers were interviewed with respect to their use of languages in teaching and the languages they preferred or discouraged for particular subjects . The Board of National Education, the nation's education policy making body, endorsed the survey and resolved to use the results as guidelines for policy decisions regarding language. Among the changes made on the basis of the survey's results was the Bureau of Public Schools Director's order per mitting the use of Pilipino as the medium of instruction in the first grades of schools located in non-Tagalog speaking provinces.

ROB ERT L . COOPER

1 19

formation can help the Congress, which mandated the survey under Section 73 1 (c) (1) (A) of Title VII ESEA, plan remedial educational programs.

Evaluation ofLanguage Policy

study of a large number of Jordanians from varying educational and oc cupational backgrounds. In this study, the relationships among a number of variables were examined, including demographic characteristics, self-reported English proficiency, self-reported English usage in specified contexts, and attitudes towards English and English instruction. The survey' s authors proposed a number of recommendations, based on their findings, with respect to English-language policy, curriculum change, teacher training, and research. Although, according to one observer, some of the recommendations are unlikely to be implemented and others are likely to have been implemented even if there had been no survey, some changes were made as a direct result of the survey (Ibrahim 1 975). It can be pointed out in passing that the Irish and Jordanian studies illus trate the fact that language policy surveys need not be confined to linguistically heterogeneous settings. From the point of view of mother-tongue distribution, both countries are quite homogeneous, although the situation in Jordan is complicated by the presence of a classical variety. The examples cited thus far demonstrate that sociolinguistic surveys which yield data that can be used for one of the three purposes listed above (language policy decisions, implementation planning, and evaluation) can often be used for one or both of the others as well. Thus information collected for purposes of policy evaluation can serve as guidelines for the formulation of new policies or the modification of old ones. Information gathered for purposes of language policy formulation can sometimes be used for planning the im-


The formulation o f language policy and the planning of its implementation are two aspects of language planning. A third aspect is the evaluation of the effectiveness of language policy (Rubin 1 97 1 ; Gorman 1 975). One of the best examples of a survey designed to evaluate the outcomes of language policy is Macnamara's study of Irish children's achievement in school. His primary objectives were to determine (1) the effect on arithmetic achievement of teaching arithmetic via the medium of Irish to children whose first language is English and (2) the effect on the level of English achievement of the program to revive Irish through its promotion in the schools. Among his conclusions were the following: (1) teaching arithmetic through the medium of Irish was associated with retardation in problem (but not mechanical) arithmetic; (2) native-English speakers in Ireland who had spent 42% of their primary-school years learning Irish did not achieve as well in written English as their mono lingual British peers; and (3) the written Irish attainment of the native-English speakers was below that of the native-Irish speakers. His results, then, strongly suggest that the policy of promoting Irish through its study and use in the schools was an expensive one from the point of view of educational achieve ment, and his conclusions were probably influential in the subsequent weakening of this policy. The English-Language Policy Survey of Jordan (Harrison et a/. , 1 975; Ibrahim 1 975; Tucker 1 975) serves as another example of a sociolinguistic survey conducted for purposes of policy evaluation. Here the effectiveness of the Jordanian English-language program was assessed by means of a field

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SO C I O L I N G U I S T I C S U R V E Y S

plementation of policy. Similarly, data gathered i n order t o plan the im plementation of policy may lead to the modification of policy if the data in dicate that the original policy is unworkable or too expensive. Again, in formation collected for the purpose of determining language policy or planning its implementation can serve to evaluate the impact of past policies. Thus the first three categories proposed for the characterization of socio linguistic survey uses are overlapping and complementary.

Hypothesis Testing

Language Promotion Sometimes a survey is carried out not only for the data to be collected there by but also for the opportunity to promote the surveyed language. An out-


Not all sociolinguistic surveys are conducted with immediate practical concerns in view. Some are conducted in order to test hypotheses about the relationships between social structure and language use. Labov's ( 1 966) work is a notable example of this type of survey. By means of unobtrusive ob servations and interviews, he tested the hypothesis that variations in the pronunciation of New York City English which heretofore had been viewed as ' free, random or unexplained' , was in fact a function of social stratification and the formality or casualness of the speech situation. His data clearly supported this hypothesis. Ma and Herasimchuk ( 1 97 1 ) extended Labov's techniques in a survey of a bilingual Puerto Rican community near New York City. Their hypothesis that demographic variables and contextual formality would account for phono logical variation in both English and Spanish was only partially supported by their data. Contextual formality accounted for variation in Spanish but not in English, and demographic variables accounted for variation in English but not in Spanish. The demographic variables, which were related to the opportunity to learn English and thus to proficiency in English, were not related to the opportunity to learn Spanish, and social stratification was not great enough to be reflected in the pronunciation of Spanish. Another example of a hypothesis-testing survey can be found in a study of language usage in Ethiopian markets (Cooper and Carpenter 1 969). One of the purposes of this study was to determine whether a lingua franca for trade had developed. It was hypothesized that either Amharic ·or Arabic would be ser ving this function. Amharic was predicted because of its widespread dispersion throughout the towns of the country. Arabic was predicted because in Ethiopia Muslims have traditionally dominated small retail trade and because one might expect Ethiopian Muslims to have some knowledge of Arabic through attendance at Quranic schools. Besides, there is a widespread belief in Ethiopia that Arabic is used as a trade lingua franca between Muslims. A survey of 23 markets in 8 towns suggested, however, that neither Amharic nor Arabic nor any other language was serving as a trade lingua franca. Thus the hypothesis was not supported. In the markets studied, it appeared that the seller accommodated himself to the buyer by speaking the latter's language. This suggested that languages can spread through selected routes. Amharic, which appears to be spreading through urbanization, industrialization, and education, does not seem to be spreading through trade, although trade is a classic avenue for the spread of a lingua franca.

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O AT A - C O L L E C T I O N T E C H N I Q U E S

Sociolinguistic surveys have employed all of the techniques used by surveys in the social sciences more generally: interviews, tests, questionnaires, rating scales, non-reactive observations of ongoing behavior, and content analyses of printed materials. With respect to many of the techniques which are used in sociolinguistic surveys, there is little to distinguish them from those used in other types of social science survey, except, of course, for the subject matter involved. Others, however, if not unique to sociolinguistic surveys, have been developed in connection with them. The contribution of sociolinguistics to survey methodology has been clearest for interviewing, testing, attitude scales, and non-reactive observations . Some of these contributions are outlined below.

Interviewing One problem encountered in interviewing, from the point of view of linguistic fieldwork, is that respondents tend to interpret the situation as a formal one and accordingly use speech appropriate to formal situations. One of Labov's methodological contributions is what we may call the ' socio linguistic interview' . Here elicitation techniques are employed which are designed to obtain speech which varies along a continuum of carefulness or casualness. Thus respondents are asked, for example, to read word lists and paragraphs; they are asked questions calculated to encourage them to speak in a measured, careful manner; and questions are asked or topics introduced


standing example of such a survey is the sociolinguistic survey of Barcelona by Antoni Badia i Margarit, carried out in 1 964-65 (Robinson 1975). Badia sent questionnaires to almost 22,000 people or 1 .40Jo of the city's population as reported in the 1960 census records, and about 3 ,400 completed questionnaires were returned. One goal of this survey was to obtain information on the status of Catalan in Barcelona. Accordingly respondents were asked about their knowledge and usage of Catalan and about their attitude towards its use. A second goal of the survey was to stimulate public interest in Catalan. One of Badia's reasons for selecting such a large initial sample was 'the desire that his questionnaire enter as many homes, and hence inspire as much commentary, as possible' (Robinson 1975). To promote interest in Catalan, he has lectured and published frequently on topics related to the survey. In addition, the results are being published in Catalan, the first volume having appeared in 1 969 (La Llengua dels Barcelonins: Resultats d'una enquesta sociologico lingiiistica). Although, as Robinson points out, publication in Catalan limited the book's message to those who needed it the least, the use of Catalan has had symbolic value, demonstrating that Catalan is an appropriate written medium for scientific discourse. Badia's work is remarkable when one considers not only that he was the sole investigator in this large-scale study and that he had had no previous experience with social science research methods, but also that he worked without any encouragement or support from the governmental and educational establishments. The official climate under which he worked was most unfavorable. A� the time, Catalan was not used in public life. His survey and his publicizing of it were directed towards a change in this situation, and the situation has in fact begun to change in the direction of greater public use.

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SOCIOLINGU ISTIC SURVEYS

which are designed t o make the respondent forget the constraints imposed by the interview situation and to speak freely. Thus a much more representative sample of the respondent's verbal repertoire is obtained than through con ventional linguistic elicitation techniques.

Testing


There are at least two types of test which have been developed in connection with sociolinguistic surveys. These are intelligibility tests and contextualized proficiency tests. Intelligibility tests are designed to determine the extent to which speakers of one language or language variety can understand speakers of another related language or language variety. After Voegelin and Harris ( 195 1 ) suggested that objective intelligibility tests were possible, linguists began to construct in creasingly sophisticated intelligibility measures. But intelligibility testing reached its fullest development within the context of sociolinguistic surveys, particularly in the Mexican surveys of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Mexico, described above, and the Survey of Language Use and Language Teaching in Eastern Africa. The design developed for the Ugandan survey (Ladefoged et a/., 1 97 1 ) was particularly elegant. A problem in all previous intelligibility testing was that different passages were employed to represent different languages. Thus, for example, a respondent would hear language A in passage 1 , language B in passage 2, language C in passage 3 , etc. For this reason it was never clear to what extent differences between intelligibility scores were due to differences associated with the languages and to what extent they were due to differences associated with the content of the passages . The Ugandan survey solved this problem by translating the n languages studied into each of n passages, creating n 2 texts. These texts were then distributed among n test tapes in such a way that each test tape contained an example of each language and each passage. Respondents were then randomly divided into n subgroups, each subgroup hearing a different test tape. Since intelligibility scores were determined for the group as a whole, the average score of each language was based on the same n passages, not on one passage alone. Thus differences in the content of the passages could not contribute to differences in the average score obtained for each language. Contextualized proficiency tests were developed for use in sociolinguistic surveys after Fishman ( l %8) pointed out that global tests of bilingual proficiency may mask differences that exist for some communicative functions or contexts, particularly in situations of stable societal bilingualism. A bilingual word-naming task developed by Lambert ( 1 955) for example, was modified to reflect proficiency in each of five hypothesized domains-family, , neighborhood, religion, education, and work (Cooper 1 969) . Administered to Spanish-English bilinguals representing a Jersey City neighborhood, the average score, totaled across all five domains, was the same in English as it was in Spanish. There was, however, a statistically significant interaction between domain and language so that for some domains there were more words produced in Spanish than in English whereas the reverse was true for other domains. Such differences would have been missed if only an undifferentiated, global score had been obtained for each language.

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Attitude Scales

Non-Reactive Procedures Public resistance to being surveyed is as old as surveys themselves. The Bible, for example, reports opposition to David's census (Second Samuel 24), probably because the enumeration was to serve as a basis for taxation and military levies. Respondents' willingness to answer direct questions honestly varies, of course, with the nature of the questions and the respondents' per ception of them. Even if willing, however, respondents are sometimes unable to report their own behavior accurately. This is probably the case for most phonological variation, for example. Because of limitations in respondents' willingness and ability to answer questions accurately, non-reactive pro cedures-techniques which gather data without people realizing they are being observed as part of an investigation-are quite useful. Another reason for the usefulness of such techniques is that they typically enable the investigator to gather an exceptionally large number of observations at minimum cost. Two types of non-reactive measures have been developed for use in sociolinguistic surveys. These are staged encounters and transaction counts. One of the best-known examples of a staged encounter is that invented by Labov ( 1 966) for use in his study of the social stratification of post-vocalic (r) in New York City department stores. He selected thf'ee stores each of which concentrated on goods at a different part of the price continuum and whose


Because language attitude is a central concern in sociolinguistics, language attitude measures have become associated with sociolinguistic surveys. (For a methodological and substantive review of language attitude studies, see Agheyisi and Fishman 1970; for collections of language attitude studies, see Cooper 1974; Shuy and Fasold 1973 .) Perhaps the most distinctive of these measures are those involving the use of aural stimuli. Such measures were first developed by Lambert and his colleagues (Lambert 1 967) as the 'matched guise' technique. In its classic form, this technique presents a series of tape recorded voices reading a standard passage, half the passages in one language and half in another. Respondents are asked to rate the personality of each speaker, typically on semantic-differential scales, and to use voice cues only as the basis for judgment. Unknown to the respondents, all speakers are heard in both languages, so that differences in the average ratings for each language cannot be attributed to differences between speakers. Between-language dif ferences presumably stem from attitudinal differences, either towards the languages or towards the groups represented by the languages. Variations of this technique have been developed for use in surveys in, among other places, Kampala (Scotton 1 972), Jersey City (Fishman et a/. , 1 97 1 ), and Jerusalem (Cooper and Fishman 1 974) . Another use of aural stimuli to measure language attitude is seen in Labov's use of subjective reaction tests. Here, evaluations were obtained in response to tape-recorded sentences embodying particular variants of given phonological variables. Respondents were asked to indicate the type of job for which the speech heard on the tape would be acceptable. Since the stimulus tapes were chosen so as to vary principally in the speakers' treatment of particular phono logical variables, the average ratings indicated which variants were perceived as superior and which were stigmatized.

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customers and staff presumably reflected similar differences along a con tinuum of social stratification. At each store, he asked employees for the location of an item which was sold on the fourth floor. The answer, fourth floor, contained two examples of postvocalic (r), one before a consonant and the other at the end of a word. He asked each respondent twice, the first time casually and the second time as if to suggest that he had not heard the first reply. Thus from most respondents, Labov obtained four examples of post vocalic (r) , two casually produced, in response to the first query, and two emphatically produced, in response to the second. As Labov points out, a customer's request for directions is such a familiar occurrence that the en counter barely enters the consciousness of the employee, who can scarcely have realized that he or she was a subject in an investigation. Another example of a staged encounter is one developed by Rosenbaum et a/. ( 1 977). In an effort to determine the percentage of pedestrians on a busy street in Jerusalem who could speak English, the investigators posed as tourists asking for directions in English. Half the time pedestrians were asked to give directions to an address written in English and half the time they were asked the address orally. Again, the respondents were not aware that they were participating in an investigation. Whereas staged encounters require an interaction, however minimal , between the investigator and the person observed, transaction counts do not require the investigator to participate in the observed interactions . The trans action-count procedure (Bender et a/. , 1 973) enumerates transactions, en counters, conversations, or responses observed in each of various specified languages under specified conditions . Thus for example in each of the Ethiopian markets studied in a survey of language usage (Cooper and Car penter 1 969), transactions were observed in each of the market's major com modities and the language in which each transaction was conducted and was recorded. Similarly in a survey of language usage in Ethiopian law courts (Cooper and Fasil 1976), in each court studied the languages used by the various participants in each court case were recorded (e.g., judge to witness , judge to plaintiff). A third example is the study by Rosenbaum et a/. , men tioned above in connection with staged encounters, who also recorded the languages overheard on the street, as used by pedestrians with one another, as well as the languages overheard in the shops which lined the street, as used by customers with one another and as used by customers with shopkeepers and shopkeepers with one another. All measurement procedures contain their own sources of error. Thus sole reliance on any one type is dangerous. To the extent that agreement exists among measures obtained from different types of procedure, we can be more confident in our results. The use o f non-reactive measures is relatively un common in social science surveys, so there are not many examples of the combined use of reactive and non-reactive measures. This is also true in socio linguistic surveys. However, in two of the studies cited here, both types were used and the results obtained from one type of measure were consistent with the results obtained from the other. Thus Rosenbaum et a/. , asked shop keepers what foreign language was most commonly heard in their shops and on the street outside, and the most frequently given answer (English) agreed with the results obtained from the transaction counts . Similarly, the results

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obtained by Labov from his staged encounters in department stores agreed with those he obtained from his interviews on the Lower East Side. C O N C L U D I N G R EM A RKS

(Received July 1979)

R E F E R E N CES

Agheyisi, Rebecca and Fishman, Joshua A., 1 970. ' Language attitude studies: a brief survey of methodological approaches' . Anthropological Linguistics, 12, 1 37- 1 57 . Bender, M. Lionel, Cooper, Robert L. and Ferguson, Charles A., 1 975. 'Language in Ethiopia: implications of a survey for sociolinguistic theory and method' . Lflnguage in Society, 1972, I , 2 1 5-23 3 . Also in Ohannessian Sirarpi, Ferguson, Charles A., and Polome, Edgar, (eds.), Language Surveys in Developing Nations: Papers and Reports on Sociolinguistic Surveys. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, pp. 1 9 1 -208. Casad, Eugene H . , 1 974. Dialect Intelligibility Testing. Norman: Summer Institute of Linguistics of the University of Oklahoma. Cooper, Robert L . , 1 969. 'Two contextualized measures of degree of bilingualism' . Modem Language Journal, 5 3 , 1 72- 1 78 .


Sociolinguistic surveys vary in their technical sophistication, which is not surprising in view of the fact that many of the investigators who have under taken them have had little or no training in social science research methods, particularly in the collection, processing, and analysis of mass data. Such shortcomings that result from lack of training can be and usually are overcome with experience, but the investigator who must learn for himself what could have been conveniently acquired as part of his professional training subjects himself to additional delays and frustrations. This comment is intended as a criticism not of the investigator but of the parochialism of professional training programs . Indeed, the commonly heard injunction for inter disciplinary awareness has rarely been followed as completely as it has been in the case of investigators who undertake sociolinguistic surveys. Many sociolinguistic surveys, of course, are already carried out at very accomplished levels with respect to design, data collection, and data analysis. It must be remembered, however, that technique exists for the service of ideas. Without content, technical virtuosity is barren. Sociolinguistic surveys can be useful not only to the extent thauheir techniques are appropriate and sound but, more importantly, to the extent that the information they are designed to collect is worth gathering, i.e., the hypotheses they test are worth testing, the problems which motivate them are worth solving, and the answers they seek are relevant to the issues at hand. Good questions are harder to ask than to answer. Good hypotheses and problems are harder to formulate than are techniques. The state of the art of sociolinguistic surveys therefore depends ultimately on the state of sociolinguistics itself.

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SOCIOLINGU ISTIC SURVEYS

Cooper, Robert. L . , 1 974, (eel.) 'Language Attitudes I' (Special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 1 (3).) Cooper, Robert L. and Carpenter, Susan, 1 969. 'Linguistic diversity in the Ethiopian Market ' . Journal of African Languages, 8 (Part 3), 1 60- 1 68. Cooper, Robert L . and Nahum, Fasil, 1 976. ' Language in the court' . In Bender, M. L., et al. Language in Ethiopia. London: Oxford University Press. Cooper, Robert L. and Fishman, Joshua, A . , 1 974. 'The study of language attitudes'. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 1 (3). Cooper, Robert L. and Horvath , Ronald, J . , 1 97 3 . ' Language, migration, and urbanization in Ethiopia. Anthropological Linguistics, 1 5 , 221 -243.

Cooper, Robert L . , Singh, B. N. and Abraha Ghermazion, 1 976. 'Mother tongue and other tongue in Kefa and Arusi' . In Bender, M. L . , et al. Language in Ethiopia. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 2 1 3-243. Das Gupta, Jyotirindra, Ferguson, Charles A . , Fishman, Joshua A . , Jernudd, Bjorn, Rubin, Joan, et a/. 1 972. Draft Report of International Research Project on Language Planning Processes. Mimeographed. Ferguson, Charles A . , 1 966. 'On sociolinguistical1y oriented language surveys' . The Linguistic Reporter: Newsletter of the Center for Applied Linguistics, 8 (4), 1-3. Also in Ohannessian Sirarpi, Ferguson, Charles A. and Polome, Edgar (eds.) Language Surveys in Developing Nations: Papers and Reports on SociolinguistiC Surveys. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, pp. 1-5. Fishman, Joshua A., 1 968. ' Sociolinguistic perspective on the study of bilingualism' . Linguistics, 39, 2 1 -50. Fishman, Joshua A., 1 975. ' Some implications of "The International Research Project on Language Planning Processes (IRPLPP)" for sociolinguistic surveys' . In Sirarpi Ohannessian, Ferguson, Charles A. and Polome, Edgar (eds.) Language Surveys in Developing Nations: Papers and Reports on Sociolinguistic Surveys. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, pp. 209-220. Fishman, Joshua A . , Cooper, Robert L . , Ma, Roxana et a/. , 1 97 1 . Bilingualism in the Barrio. Bloomington: Research Center for the Language Sciences, Indiana University. Gorman, Thomas P., 1 97 5 . 'Introductory essay: approaches to the study of educational language policy in developing nations ' . In Harrison, William, Prator, Clifford and Tucker, G. Richard (eds.) English-Language Policy Survey of Jordan: A Case Study in Language Planning. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, pp. xi-xii. Harrison, William, Prator, Clifford and Tucker, G. Richard (eds.), 1 97 5 . English Language Policy Survey(' of Jordan: A Case Study in Language Planning. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.


Cooper Robert L. and Singh, B. N . , 1 976. ' Language and factory workers ' . In Bender, M. L . , et al. Language in Ethwpia. London: Oxford University Press.

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Ibrahim, Muhammad H . , 1 97 5 . 'The implementation and impact of the English Language Policy Survey of Jordan' . Paper prepared for the International Conference on the Methodology of Sociolinguistic Surveys, Montrea l, May 1 9-21 . Jahoda, Marie, Deutsch, Morton and Cook, Stuart W., 195 1 . Research Methods in Social Relations with Especial Reference to Prejudice. New York: Dryden, Two volumes. Jernudd , Bjorn H . , 1 975. 'How unique are sociolinguistic surveys?' Comment prepared for the International Conference on the Methodology of Sociolinguistic Surveys, Montreal, May 1 9-2 1 . Labov, William, 1 966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Lambert, Wallace E., 1 955. 'Measurement of the linguistic dominance of bilinguals' . Journal ofAbnormal and Social Psychology, 50, 1 97-200. Lambert, Wallace E., 1967. 'A social psychology of bilingualism '. Journal of Social Issues, 23 (2), 9 1 - 1 09.

Le Page, R. B., 1 972. ' Preliminary report on the sociolinguistic survey of Cayo District, British H� nduras'. Language in Society, I , 1 55-172. Le Page, R. B., 1 975. ' "Projection, focussing, diffusion" , or steps towards a sociolinguistic theory of language, ' illustrated from the Sociolinguistic Survey of Multilingual Communities, Stages 1 : Cayo District, Belize (formerly British Honduras) and I I : St. Lucia. Paper prepared for the International Conference on the Methodology of Sociolinguistic Surveys, Montreal, May 19-2 1 . Lieberson, Stanley, 1 970 .. Language and Ethnic Relations in Canada. New York: John Wiley. Lindzey, Gardner and Aronson, Elliot (eds .), 1 969. The Handbook of Social Psychology, volume 2, Research Methods. Reading: Addison-Wesley. Ma, Roxana and Herasimchuk, Eleanor, 1 97 1 . 'The linguistic dimensions of a bilingual neighborhood' . In Fishman, Joshua A., et al. Bilingualism in the Barrio. Bloomington: Research Center for the Language Sciences, Indiana University. Macnamara, John, 1 966. Bilingualism and Primary Education: a Study of Irish Experience. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Moser, C. A., 1 958. Survey Methods in Social Investigation. New York: Macmillan. Robinson, Joy, 1 975. 'Catalan in Barcelona: La Llengua dels Barcelonins of Antoni Badia i Margarit' . Paper prepared for the International Conference on the Methodology of Sociolinguistic Surveys, Montreal, May 1 9-2 1 . Rosenbaum, Yehudit, Nadel, Elizabeth, Cooper, Robert L . and Fishman, Joshua A., 1 977. 'English on Keren Kayemet Street' . In Fishman, Joshua A., et a/. The Spread


Ladefoged, Peter, Glick, Ruth and Criper, Clive, 1 97 1 . Language in Uganda. Nairobi: Oxford University Press.

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of English: Th e Sociology of English as an Additional Language. Rowley: Newbury House, Mass.

Rubin, Joan, 1 97 1 . 'Evaluation and language planning' . In Rubin, Joan and Jernudd, Bjorn H . (eds.) Can Language Be Planned? Sociolinguistic Theory and Practice for Developing Nations. Honolulu: East-West Center, pp. 2 1 7-252. Scotton, Carol Myers, 1 972. Choosing a Lingua Franca in an African Capital. Edmonton and Champaign: Linguistic Research. Shuy, Roger W. and Fasold, Ralph W . (eds.), 1 97 3 . Language Attitudes: Current Trends and Prospects. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.

Sibayan, Bonifacio P . , Gonzalez, Andrew and Otanes, Fe T . , 1975. 'Organization and logistics of a sociolinguistic survey, the Philippine experience in part ' . Paper prepared for the International Conference on the Methodology of Sociolinguistic Surveys, Montreal, May 1 9-21 . Tucker, G. Richard, 1 975. 'Methodological aspects of data collection' . Paper prepared for the International Conference on the Methodology of Sociolinguistic Surveys, Montreal, May 1 9-2 1 . Voegelin, C . F . and Harris, Z . S. , 1 95 1 . 'Methods for determining intelligibility among dialects of natural languages' . Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 95 , 3 22-329. Warwick , Donald P. and Lininger, Charles A . , 1 97 5 . The Sample Survey: Theory and Practice. New York: McGraw Hill. Weinreich, Uriel, 1 957. 'Functional aspects of I ndian bilingualism'. Word, 1 3 , 203-233 .


Sibayan, Bonifacio P . , 1 975. 'Survey of Language Use and Attitudes towards Language in the Philippines'. In Ohannessian Sirarpi, Ferguson, Charles A. and Polome, Edgar (eds.) Language Surveys in Developing Countries: Papers and Reports on Sociolinguistic Surveys. Washington, D.C . : Center for Applied Linguistics, pp. 1 1 5-143 .

S P E E CH ACTS AND S E CON D LANGUAGE LEARNING R I C H A R D W . S C H M I DT and J A C K C . R I C H A R D S University of Hawaii and Chinese Universzty, Hong Kong

I NT R O D U CT I O N SEVERAL

1.

W H A T IS A S P E E C H ACT?

Speech act theory has to do with the functions and uses of language, so in the broadest sense we might say that speech acts are all the acts we perform through speaking, all the things we do when we speak. Such a definition is too broad for most purposes, however, for the uses to which we put speech en compass most human activities. We use language to build bridges, to conApplied Linguistics, Vol. I, No. 2


new paradigms have emerged within applied linguistics i n recent years. The Chomskyan paradigm has had a marked influence on theories of language and language learning. The goal of language learning within the Chomskyan approach is identified with the acquisition of underlying linguistic categories and systems, from which surface forms are derived through the application of transformational and other rules and processes of a universal type. Despite the addition of a philosophical framework for the theory, and . while the Chomskyan concept of language knowledge is quite different in its own terms from the concept of language knowledge implicit in pre Chomskyan theory, it is only a partial account of the knowledge required to use a language. This paper considers other areas of knowledge which con stitute an equally important dimension of the task of learning a language, with particular reference to second and foreign language learning. Sociolinguists and others have long acknowledged the limitations in the Chomskyan formulation of competence, and stressed the need to include knowledge of the rules of use and communicatively appropriate performance. Bruner, writing of first language learning, has argued that mother tongue acquisition should be looked at not as a solo flight by the child in search of dis embodied rules of grammar, but as a problem-solving transaction. The essential problems to be solved by mother and infant have to do with ' how to make our intentions known to others, how to communicate what we have in our consciousness, what we want done on our behalf, how we wish to relate to others, and what in this or other worlds is possible' (Bruner 1 978). In this paper we will consider second language acquisition from a similar perspective to that advocated by Bruner for first language acquisition, focussing on the development of communicative rather than linguistic or grammatical com petence. While communicative competence theory covers a range of different dimensions of language behaviour in the individual and in the speech com munity, we will focus on one aspect of communicative competence, namely, speech acts, and consider the contribution of speech act theory to our under standing of second language acquisition.

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solidate political regimes, to carry on arguments, t o convey information from one person to another, to entertain, in short to communicate. We use speech in ceremonies, games, recipes, and lectures. On some occasions, e.g . , social · gatherings, we use language successively to introduce one person to another, carry on conversations, tell jokes, criticize and praise third parties both present and absent, expound on favourite topics, seduce or attempt to seduce, and say farewell. We could extend such lists indefinitely, but as Halliday ( 1 973 : 1 8 , 28) has pointed out, such lists do not by themselves tell us very much, for the innumerable social purposes for which adults use language are not represented directly, one to one, in the language system. Hymes (1 972) has }:>roposed a useful distinction between speech situations, speech events, and speech acts. Within a community one finds many situations associated with speech, such as fights, hunts, meals, parties, etc. But it is not profitable to convert such situations into part of a sociolinguistic description by simply relabelling them in terms of speech, for such situations are not in themselves governed by consistent rules throughout. The term speech event can be restricted to activities that are directly governed by rules or norms for the use of speech, events such as two party conversations (face-to-face or on the telephone), lectures, introductions, religious rites, and the like. This notion of speech event is related to the traditional concept of genre, though Hymes argues that the two must be treated as analytically independent, and a great deal of empirical research is needed to clarify the relationship between the terms. Speech acts (in a narrow sense now) are the minimal terms of the set: speech situation/event/act. When we speak we perform acts such as giving reports, making statements, asking questions, giving warnings, making promises, approving, regretting, and apologizing. Sinclair and Coulthard (1975), who have analyzed classroom transcripts, also propose a 'top-down' analysis, beginning with the social occasion (the lesson) as the outermost analytic frame and successively dividing and sub dividing the sequence of discourse down to the smallest unit, the act, which they define as the minimal unit of speaking which can be said to have a func tion. Acts are labelled according to discourse function, e.g . , elicitation, question, etc. In this paper we will be focussing primarily on individual speech acts. How ever, it is necessary to look somewhat beyond the isolated act represented by the individual sentence, primarily the verb. Austin (1 962) pointed out that there are a great number of speech acts (illocutionary acts, in his terminology) and in English there are a great number of verbs which refer to them. Consider for example just the related set : ask, request, direct, require, order, command, suggest, beg, plead, implore, pray. Austin claimed that there are over a thousand such verbs in English. But while English verbs provide a useful initial taxonomy for speech acts , the acts are not in fact equivalent to the verbs which frequently name them. Searle (1976) points out that many verbs are not markers of illocutionary force, but of some other feature of the speech act. Insist and suggest, for example, mark degree of intensity, but do not mark separate speech act functions or illocutionary points. Both may be used with directive function ('I suggest/insist that we go to the movies') or with repre sentative function ('I suggest/insist that the answer is found on page 16'). We need to recognize also that speech acts are not identifiable with the sentence, or

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any other level of grammatical description. Hymes' (1 972) position is that the level of speech acts mediates between the usual levels of grammar and the rest of a speech event in that it implicates both linguistic form and social norm. Whether or not a particular utterance has the status of a request, for example, may depend upon a conventional linguistic formula ('How about picking me up early this afternoon? '), but it may also depend upon the social relationship between speaker and hearer. It needs to be recogitized too that speech acts occur within discourse, and that the interpretation and negotiation of speech act force is often dependent on the discourse or transactional context. As a minimum, we need to consider the fact that talk is often organized into two-part exchanges. As Goffman ( 1 976) points out, this organizing principle follows from very fundamental requirements of talk as a communication system. A speaker needs to know whether his message has been received and understood; a recipient. needs to show that he has received and understood the message. We therefore must recognize such 'adjacency pairs' as summons-answer (Schegloff, 1 968), statement-reply (Goffman, 1976), question-answer, request-refusal of request, and the like. An investigation of speech acts therefore leads naturally into questions of act sequencing (events) and contexts (speech settings or situations). Rehbein and Ehlich, quoted in Candlin ( 1 978), list the different operations that may take place inside a restaurant when the activity is ordering a meal: entering, looking around, judging, taking a seat, wanting the menu, asking for the menu, wanting information, asking for information, consulting, deciding, ordering, transmission, production, delivery, serving, consuming, wanting to pay, asking for the bill, drawing up the account, getting/presenting the bill, accepting the bill, paying, leaving. Norms of linguistic behaviour identify various parts of the sequence. Different participants have different amounts of talking to do and different types of talking, as well as different topics to talk about. Within speech events there are norms for opening and closing sequences, sequencing rules, and distribution frequencies and probabilities for particular speech acts. 'Assigning the value command to any of a range of possible utterances ("hot dog", "that one", "please bring me X" , a deictic gesture) is a function of recognizing the social world of the restaurant with the rights, duties and social relationship between the participants, as well as that of being aware of the discoursal position of the "act of commanding" within the transactional process. ' (Candlin, 1978, p. 17 .) Both speech acts and speech events have been studied extensively in recent years and have constituted topical foci for scholars from a great number of disciplines. Speech events have been investigated by anthropologists and ethnographers (Albert, 1964, Gumperz and Hymes, 1972, Sanches and Blount, 1 975), folklorists (Abrahams, 1 962, Dundes et al. , 1972), literary critics (Pratt, 1 977), and sociologists (Allen and Guy, 1974). The most detailed and perhaps the most provocative analyses of speech events have been provided by those sociologists who work within the area of sociology termed ethnomethodology, the primary goal of which is to give rigorous sociological formulation to the interactional basis of the things people say and do in the settings of everyday life. Working primarily from transcripts of natural conversations, charac terizations have been developed for a variety of conversational activities : turn

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taking (Sacks et a/. , 1 974), story telling and identity negotiations (Sacks, 1 972), opening and closing conversations (Schegloff and Sacks, 1 973), telephone conversations (Schegloff, 1 968), and many other aspects o f the establishment and management of social relations through conversational roles (Sudnow , 1 972, Schenkein, 1978, Garfinkel, 1 967, Goffman, 1 972 and 1 976). Speech acts, on the other hand , have been studied primarily by philosophers of language (Austin, 1 962, Searle, 1969 and 1976, Grice, 1 968 and 1 975) and linguists (Ross, 1 970, Gordon and Lakoff, 1 97 1 , Cole and Morgan, 1 975).

2.

T HEORETICAL QUESTIONS

The following are some o f the major theoretical issues discussed i n the speech act literature. For linguistic analysis, the units of concern are sentences . Contrasts between well-formed and ill-formed (ungrammatical) sentences are primary data. While the grammatical paradigm has been followed by many linguists who have dealt with issues in speech act theory (see most of the papers in Cole and Morgan, 1 975) and while basic semantic differences are indeed likely to have . syntactic consequences (Searle, 1 976), speech acts are in essence acts, not sentences. Speech acts cannot be equated with utterances either, for we often perform more than one act (e. g . , inform and request) with a single utterance ' I ' m hungry' . Finally, speech acts cannot be equated with the notion of turn as an interactional unit, as it may take several speaker turns to accomplish a single act, or, conversely, several acts may be performed within a single speaker turn. So far we have presented only a very vague description of what speech acts are. Perhaps the notion is best clarified by examples, with some effort to group together illocutionary acts into major types. Searle ( 1 976) presents the clearest taxonomy. For Searle, the basis for classification is 'illocutionary point' or purpose of the act, from the speaker's perspective. According to Searle, speech acts can be grouped into a small number of basic types based on speaker intentions : One of the basic things we do with language is tell people how things are. We assert, claim, say, report, and the like. The point or purpose of this class of representatives is to commit the speaker in varying degrees (suggest, doubt, and deny are members of this class also) to the truth of something. One test of a representative is whether it can be characterized as true or false.

Representatives.

When we use language, we do not j ust refer to the world and make statements about it. Among our most important uses for language is trying to get people to do things. The class of directives includes all speech acts whose primary point is that they count as attempts on the part of the speaker to get the hearer to do something. Suggestions, requests and commands are all directives. They differ in the force of the attempt, but are all attempts by the speaker to get the hearer to do something.

Directives.

Commissives.

Commissives are those illocutionary acts whose point is to


2. 1 Units and categories

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commit the speaker to do something. Promises and threats both fall into this category, the difference between them being the speaker' s assumption about whether or not the promised action is desired by the hearer. Searle makes the interesting point that there is a difference in the direction of fit between the words of a speech act and the state of affairs in the world when comparing representatives with directives and commissives. With repre sentatives the direction of fit is words-to-world, i.e., what is at issue is whether the words uttered ('The world is flat') match the world. With both repre sentatives and commissives the direction of fit is world-to-words. Future actions are to be done in accordance with words previously uttered. The basic distinction between requests and commissives is that hearer actions are the point of requests and other directives, while speaker actions are the issue with promises and other commissives.

actions, regret, thank, welcome, etc. With expressives there is no direction of fit, but the state of affairs specified in the following proposition is simply assumed to be true. Note also that while representatives, directives and com missives are all associated with a consistent psychological dimension (belief, by expressives wish and intent, respectively), the psychological states expressed · are extremely varied.

Declarations. Some speech acts bring about changes in the world simply through their successful execution. 'You're fired,' says the boss, and the employee must start the search for a new position. 'I do,' say the bride and groom, and after the presiding official (secular or clerical) says his part the marriage has taken place. The defining characteristic of this class is that the performance brings about the correspondence between the words and the world. This class is closest to Austin's ( 1962) original notion of a per formative, an act of doing something in the world rather than an act of saying alone.

Other classes, major and minor. Several taxonomies have been proposed in addition to that of Searle. Fraser ( 1 975) adds a few categories. In addition to acts of asserting ( = Searle's representatives), he includes acts of evaluating, the point of which is to express the speaker's assessment of the truth of a proposition and the basis of the judgement, e.g., analyse, conclude, hypothesize. In addition to acts of requesting ( = Searle's directives), Fraser has a category of acts of suggesting, e.g., recommend, suggest, urge. Acts of stipulating express a speaker's desire for the acceptance of a naming con vention expressed by the proposition, e.g., call, classify, designate. Hancher ( 1 979) has suggested two additional kinds of acts, those that combine com missive with directive illocutionary force (e.g. , offering, inviting, challenging) and those that require two participants (e.g., giving, selling, contracting). While the great majority of speech acts can probably be analysed as examples of Searle's major classes, or Fraser's somewhat longer list, there are doubtless some speech acts which are outside these particular taxonomies. Greetings and farewells, for example, constitute a small category (or categories) of acts which are not generalizable as major classes, but which


Expressives. The point of this class is to express feelings and attitudes about states of affairs. We apologize for things we have done, deplore other people's

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S P E E C H ACTS AND SECO N D L A N G U A G E L EA R N I N G

deserve attention. I t is also useful t o mention such acts as

refusal of a request,

although utterances which fall into such a category will in most cases be already classifiable in terms of the basic act types: 'I'm sorry, but I can't' expressive + representative; ' I ' ll be able to see you tomorrow' (not today) commissive; ' Do it yourself directive. =

=

=

2.2 How to perform a speech act Searle ( 1 965) has attempted to provide analyses of various illocutionary acts, asking what conditions are necessary and sufficient for a particular act to have been performed by the uttering of a particular sentence. For promises, the conditions are identified as follows:

Normal input and output conditions obtain, i.e., the speaker and hearer are not insane, they are not play acting, etc. A speaker expresses a sentence, the propositional '

Applied Linguistics Volume 1, No.2, 1980

Applied Linguistics, Volum1 , Issue 1, 1980

Applied Linguistics, Volume 31, issue 1, 2010