A Critical Look at the Communicative Appraoch 1

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A critical look at theCommunicativeApproach (1)Michael SwanThis (the first of two articles) examines some of the more theoretical ideasunderlying the'Com mun icative App roach'. These include the belief that weshould teach 'use' as well as 'meaning', and some attitudes regarding theteaching of 'skills' and 'strategies'. A se cond article will deal with mo repedagogical aspects of the appro ach, especially the idea of a 'sema nticsyllabus' and the question of 'authenticity' in materials and methodology.In both articles, it is argued that there is serious confusion in the com -municative view of these matters. In particular, the CommunicativeAppro ach fails to take account of the knowledge and skills which languagestudents bring with them from their mother tongue and their experience ofthe world.

Introduction There is nothing so creative as a good dogma. During the last few years,under the influence of the 'Communicative Approach', language teachingseems to have m ade gre at progress. Syllabus design has become a good dealmore sophisticated, and we are able to give our studen ts a better a nd morecomplete pictu re than before of how language is used. In m ethodology, thechange has been dramatic. The boring and mechanical exercise typeswhich w ere so common ten or fifteen years ago have virtually disap pea red,to be replaced by a splendid variety of exciting and engaging practiceactivities . All this is very positive, and it is not difficult to believe tha t suchprogress in course design has resulted in a real improvement in the speedand quality of language learning.

And yet .. . A dogma remains a dogma, and in this respect the'communicative revolution' is little different from its predecessors in thelanguage teaching field. If one reads through the standard books andarticles on the communicative teaching of English, one finds assertionsabout language use and language learning falling like leaves in autumn;facts, on the other hand, tend to be remarkably thin on the ground. Alongwith its many virtues, the Communicative Approach unfortunately hasmost of the typical vices of an intellectual revolution: it over-generalizesvalid but limited insights until they become virtually m eaningless; it makesexaggerated claims for the pow er and novelty of its doctrines; it m isrepre-sents the currents of thought it has replaced; it is often characterized byserious intellectual confusion; it is choked w ith jar go n.

In this article I propose to look critically at certain concepts which formpart of the theoretical basis of the new orthodoxy, in an attempt to reducethe confusion which surrounds their use, and which unfortunately forms aserious obstacle to sensible communication in the field. I shall discuss inparticular: (I) the idea of a 'doub le level of me anin g' associated with suchterms as 'rules of use' and 'rules of com mu nica tion', and the related co nceptof'appropriacy'; and (2) some confusions regarding 'skills ' and 'strategies'.

ELT Journal Volume 39/1 January 1985

byguestonJanuary21,2011

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In a later article, I shall deal with: (3) the idea of a seman tic ('no tion al/functional') syllabus, and (4) the 'real life' fallacy in materials design andmethodology.I shall find it convenient to argue as if the Communicative Approachwere a cohere nt and mon olithic body of doctrine . This is, of cou rse , far frombeing the case. Individual applied linguists and teacher trainers varywidely in their accep tance a nd in terpre tation of the different ideas which Ishall discuss here. Some of the views quoted are becoming ou tmod ed, andwould not necessarily be defended today by their originato rs. But w hatevertheir current status in academic circles, all of these ideas are familiar,widespread, and enormously influential among language teachers, andthey merit serious scrutiny.

Meaning and uso A basic communicative doctrine is that earlier approaches to languageteaching did not deal properly with meaning. According to the standardargument, it is not enough just to learn what is in the grammar anddictionary. There are (we are told) two levels of meaning in language:'usage' and 'use', or 'signification' and 'value', or whatever. Traditionalcourses, it app ear s, tau ght one of these kinds of mea ning b ut neglected theother.

One of the major reasons for questioning the adequacy of grammaticalsyllabuses lies in the fact that even when we have described the gram-matical (and lexical) meaning of a sentence, we have not accounted forthe way it is used as an u tter an ce . . . Since those th ings tha t are notconveyed by the grammar are also understood, they too must be gov-erned by 'rule s' which are known to both speaker and hearer. People whospeak the same language share not so much a. grammatical competence asa communicative competence. Looked at in foreign language teachingterms, this mea ns th at the learner has to learn rules of com mu nication aswell as rules of grammar. (Wilkins 1976:10, 11)

This line of argument is often illustrated by instances of utterances whichclearly have one kind of 'propositional' meaning and a different kind of'function'. The coat example and the window example are popular. If yousay 'Your coat's on the floor' to a child, you are probably telling him or herto pick it up; a person who says 'There's a window open' may really beasking for it to be closed. However, examples are not confined to requestsmasquerading as statements. All kinds of utterances, we are reminded, canexpress intentions which arc not made explicit by the grammatical form inwhich the utterance is couched.. . . this sentenc e (Thepoliceman is crossing th e road) might serve a numb er ofcommunicative functions, depending on the contextual and/or situa-tional circumstances in which it were used. Thus, it might take on thevalue of part of a commentary . . . , or i t might serve as a warning or athrea t, or some other a ct of com mu nication. If it is the case that knowinga language means both knowing what signification sentences have asinstances of language usage and what value they take on as instances ofuse, it seems clear that the teacher of languag e should be concerned withthe teach ing of both k inds of know ledge. (W iddow son 1978:19)

Put in gene ral ter ms like this, the claim ha s a fine plausible ring to itno tleast because of the impressive, if slightly confusing, terminology. There isof course no thing p articular ly novel about the two-level accoun t of mean ingA critical look at the Communicative Approach (1) 3


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given here. It has long been recognized tha t most languag e items are multi-purp ose tokens which take on their precise value from the context they a reused in. What i s perhap s m ore novel is the suggestion tha t the value of anyutter anc e in a given situation can be specified by rules ( 'rules of comm uni-cation ' or 'rules of use'), an d t ha t it is our bu siness to teach these rules to ourstudents. Neither Wilkins nor Widdowson makes it clear what form suchrules might take, and so it is a little difficult to deal adequately with theargument. However, let us try to see what might be involved in a concreteinstance.

Widdowson asserts, effectively, that a student cannot properly interpretthe utterance Th e policeman is crossing the road (or any other utt eran ce, for tha tm atte r) if he knows only its propo sitional (struct ural an d lexical) m ean ing .In order to grasp its real value in a specific situation, h e mu st have le arnt anadditional rule about how the utterance can be used. Very well. For thesake of argument, let us imagine that an international team of burglars(Wilberforce, Gomez, Schmidt and Tanaka) are busy doing over adetached suburban house. Wilberforce is on watch. A policeman comesround the corner on the other side of the road. Wilberforce reports this tothe others. Schmidt, who learnt his English from a communicatively-oriented multi-media course in a university applied linguistics department,interprets this as a warning and turns pale. Gomez and Tanaka, whofollowed a more traditional course, totally fail to grasp the illocutionaryforce of Wilberforce's remark. Believing him to be making a neutral com-ment on the external environment, they continue opening drawers. Sud-denly Wilberforce blurts out, 'The policeman is crossing the road', anddisa ppe ars th roug h the back door, closely followed by Schm idt. Gom ez andTanaka move calmly to the wardrobe. They are caught and put away forfive years. Two more victims of the structural syllabus.

Although the argument about rules of use leads to some very extra-ordinary conclusions when applied to particular cases, it occurs repeatedlyin the literature of the Communicative Approach, and there is no doubtthat we are intended to take it literally. Here is Widdo wson again, this timetalking about language production, rather than comprehension.It is possible for someone to have learned a large number of sentencepatterns and a large number of words which can fit into them withoutknowing how they are put to communicative use. (Widdowson 1978:18, 19)

Well, no doubt this can happen. But is it necessarily or normally the case?One of the few things I retain from a term's study of a highly 'structural'Russian audio-lingual course is a pattern that goes something like this: Volmoy nomer; vot moy dom; vol moya kniga; and so on. I have done no Russiansince, but I think I know when it is communicatively appropriate to say'T his is my room ', 'This is my ho use', or 'This is my book' in that la ngu age,or most othe rs. (And if I don 't , i t is not a communicative Ru ssian cou rsethat I need; it is expert help of a rather different kind.)

Here is a final example of the 'usage/use' assertion; this time the term'use potential ' is introduced.Not until he (the learner) has had experience of the language he islearning as use will he be able to recognize use potential. (Widdowson1978:118)

I h^ve just looked up the Swedish for 'Som ething is wrong with the gearb ox'Michael Swan



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in a motorist's phrase-book. It is (if my book is to be trusted) 'Nago ntingstammer inte med vaxellada'. I have no experience of Swedish 'as use'.However, I am prepared to hazard a guess that this expression's usepotential is more likely to be realized in a garage than, for instance, in adoctor's surgery or a laundry (though of course one can never be certainabout these things). I would also guess that this is true of the equivalentexpression in Spanish, Tagalog, Melanesian pidgin, or any language what-ever. And I know this, not because I am an exceptionally intuitive linguist,but because the fact in question is not ju st a fact ab out Swedish, or aboutlanguageit is a fact about the world, and the things we say about theworld. A linguist may need, for his or her own purposes, to state explicitlythat conversations about cars are likely to take place in garages, or thatwhile 'T he rain destroyed the crops' is a correct examp le of English usage, itis not an appropriate answer to the question, 'Where is the station?' But tosuggest that this kind of information should form part of a foreign-languageteaching syllabus is to misunderstand quite radically the distinctionbetween thought and language.

Foreigners hav e mo ther tong ues: they know as much as we do about howhuman beings communicate. The 'rules of use ' that determine how weinterpret utterances such as Widdowson's sentence about the policemanare mostly non-language-specific, and amount to little more than theoperation of experience and common sense. The precise value of an utter-ance is given by the interaction of its structural and lexical meaning withthe situation in which it is used. If you are burgling a house, a report of apoliceman's approach naturally takes on the function of a threat or awarn ing not because of any linguistic 'rule of com m unic ation ' tha t can beapplied to the utterance, but becau se policemen threate n the peace of mindof thieves. If you indicate that you are hungry, the words 'There's somestew in the fridge' are likely to constitute an offer, not because you havelearnt a rule abou t the way these words can be used, but simply because theutterance most plausibly takes on that value in that situation.

Of course, cultures differ somewhat in their behaviour, and these differ-ences are reflected in language . Although most utterance s will retain theirvalue across language boundaries (if correctly translated), problems willarise in specific and limited cases. For instance, there may be languageswhere all requests are marked as such (perhaps by a special particle orintonation p attern ), so that a simple unmarked statement such as 'Th ere 'sa window op en ' cannot in these languages function as a reques t. Speakers ofsuch languages who study English (and English-speaking students of theselanguages) will need contrastive information about this particular point ifthey are to understand or speak correctly. Again, there are phrases andsentences in any language which conventionally carry intentional mean-ings that are not evident from their form. (English questions beginning'Where's my .. .? ' often function as demands; 'Look here!' is an expostula-tion; 'Why should I?' is not a simple request for information.) However,both the contrastive and the idiomatic aspects of langua ge use have alreadyreceived a good deal of attention in the past. Althou gh the C om mu nicativeApproach may have some new information and insights to contribute (forinstance about the language of social interaction), there is nothing here tojustify th e anno uncem ent th at we need to ado pt a whole new approach tothe teaching of meaning. The argument about 'usage' and 'use ' , whatevervalue it may have for philosophers, has little relevance to foreign languageteaching.A critical look at the C omm unicative Ap proach (1) 5


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In a recent paper, Wilkins makes it clear that he has now come round tothis kind of view.It seems reasonable to assume that the relation of linguistic and prag-matic features that we have referred to here is characteristic of alllangua ges. If we consider second langu age learn ers, therefore, it appe arsthat although there will be values, attitudes, norms and even types ofinformation that are culturally restricted and consequ ently not known tothe lear ners, they will be aw are th at such a relation does exist in principleand that much in their previous experience will remain relevant in thesecond language. What the learners have to learn is less that there is aconnection between language and context than the forms and meaningsof the second language itself, together with w hatever differences there arein the society that m ight affect the operation of the prag m atic elem ent incommunication. The learners will also know that if they can convey themeanings that they wish, even without making their intentions (i.e.illocutionary forces) explicit, the hea rer h as the capacity to make ap pro -pria te inferences . . . Provided one u nde rsta nds the m eanin g of thesentenc es, in the na ture of things one has every cha nce of recognizing thespeaker's intention. (Wilkins 1983:31)

Appropriacy The argument about a second level of meaning often surfaces in a slightlydifferent form involving the concep t of'a pp rop riac y'. Th is is the notion thatour choice of language is crucially determined by the setting in which thelanguage is used, the speaker's relationship with the listener, and similarm atte rs. So imp ortant is this (we are often told) tha t appro priac y is the realgoal of language teaching.W ha t we wan t to do through la ngua ge is affected by (the) relationsh ip of(the) speakers, setting etc. Grammar and lexis are only a small part ofthis. (Alexander 1977)Structural dialogues lack communicative intent and you cannot identifywhat communicative operations the learner can engage in as a result ofprac tice. Th e result of purely struc tura l p ractice is the ability to produ cea range of usages, but not the ability to use forms appropriately. This istrue even in cases where it looks as if com mu nication is being taug ht. Forexample, the exclamation form 'What a lovely day' might be covered.But the interest is in the form, not on when and where to use it or whatyou achieve by using it. (Scott 1981:70, 71)

Nobody w ould deny that there are language items that are appr opriate onlyin certain situation s, or (conversely) tha t there are situa tions in which onlycertain w ays of expressing oneself are appro pri ate . English notoriously hasa w ealth of colloquial, slang, an d taboo expressions, for instance, whose useis regulated by complex restrictions. In French, it is not easy to learnexactly whom to address by the second person, singular. Ge tting people todo things for you is a delicate business in m ost culture s, and this tends to bereflected in the com plexity of the releva nt linguistic rules. Althou gh there isnothing particularly controversial or novel about this, it is an area wherethe Comm unicative A pproach (with its interest in the language of interac-tion) has contributed a good deal to the coverage of our teaching.We must und erstand, however, that 'approp riacy ' is one aspect am ongman y an impo rtant corner of l inguistic description, but not by any m eansa feature of the language as a whole. 'Appropriacy' is not a new dimension

Michael Swan



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of me aning , to be added everyw here to lexical and struc tural mea ning. It isa category that applies to certain items only: the same kind of thing as'animate' , 'countable' , or ' transitive' . Items such as the imperative, h adbetter, bloody, I want, ge t are m arked for appr opria cy in one way or the other;students have to be careful how they use them. But most items are not somarked. The past tense, for instance, or the words table , des ign, blue, slowly,natural, or the expression to Jill in a form , or the sentence She was born in 1940these items, and the vast majority of the other words, expressions, andsentences of the language, are unmarked for social or situational appropri-acy of the kind under discussion. Consequently they cause the learner nospecial problems in this area.

What has happened here might be called the 'new toy1 effect. A limitedbut valuable insight has been over-generalized, and is presented as if itapplied to the whole of language and all of language teaching. Unfor-tunately, this is a common occurrence in the communication sciences.Interestingly, the discussion of appropriacy often obscures a perfectlyvalid point about the need for increased attention to the teaching of lexis.We might begin our consideration of communicative language teaching. . . by looking at the discontent which teach ers and applied linguists inthe 1960s felt towards the kind of language teaching then predominant.This discontent is vividly expressed by Newmark . . ., who speaks of the'structurally competent ' s tudentthe one, that is , who has developedthe ability to produce grammatically correct sentencesyet who isunable to perform a simple communicative task. His example of such atask is 'asking for a light from a stranger'. Our structurally competentstud ent m ight perform this task in a perfectly g ram ma tical way by saying'have you fire?' or 'do you have illumination' or 'are you a match'sowner? ' (New mark's e xamples). Yet none of these wayshowever gram -matical they may bewould be used by the native speaker.Most of us are familiar with this phenomenon of the structurallycompetent but communicatively incompetent student, and he bearsstriking witness to the truth of the one insight which, perh aps more thanany other, has shaped recent trends in language teaching. This is theinsight that the ability to manipulate the structures of the languagecorrectly is only a part of wh at is involved in learning a lan guage . T he reis a 'something else' that needs to be learned, and this 'something else'involves the ability to be appr opr iate, to know the right thin g to say at theright t ime. 'The re ar e' , in Hym es's . . . wo rds, 'rules of use without whichthe rules of grammar would be useless'. (Johnson 1981:1, 2)

Now the 's tructurally competent but communicatively incompetent stu-dent' pictured here certainly has a problem, but it is quite unnecessary toinvoke nebulous abstractions such as 'appropriacy' or 'rules of use' toaccount for i t . Newmark's student doesn't know enough vocabulary. Hemay be structur ally com petent, bu t he has not been taug ht enough lexis. H eis unaware of the exact range of meaning of the word fire (and perhapsthinks it can be used in all cases as an e quivale nt of feu or Feuer ); he does notknow the expression a light; he is (implausibly) confused abo ut the me aningof i l lum inat ion; he has not learnt the conventional p hras e used for requestinga light. These are all lexical matters, and all the information the studentlacks can be found in a respectable dictionary. It is perfectly true that 'theability to manip ulate the structures of the language correctly is only a par tof what is involved in learning a language', and that there is a 'somethingA critical look at the Com m unicative App roach (1) 1



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else' that needs to be learned. This something else, however, is primarilyvocabulary, and the Communicative Approach can hardly take credit forthe 'insight' th at language contains words and p hrases as well as structur es.The teaching of lexis has certainly been greatly improved by the recentconcern with communicative competence. Teachers and course designersare mo re aware than before of the vast range of conven tional and idiom aticexpressions that have to be learnt if a student is to be able to performordinary communicative tasks (such as saying she has been cut off on thephone, asking a petrol pump attendant to check his tyre pressures, orindeed asking a stranger for a light). If we are now adopting a moreinformed and systematic appro ach to vocab ulary teac hing, that is all to thegood. But we should understand clearly that this is what we are doing.Inappropriate references to appropriacy merely confuse the issue.Skills and strategies Discussion of language skills is no longer limited to a consideration of thefour basic activities of reading, writing, understanding speech, and speak-ing. We are m ore inclined now adays to think in terms of the various specific

types of behaviour that occur when people are producing or understandinglanguage for a particular purpose in a particular situation, and there hasbeen something of a proliferation of sub-skills and strategies in recentteaching materials. As we have seen, it is often taken for granted thatlanguage learners cannot transfer communication skills from their mothertongue s, and tha t these mu st be taug ht anew if the learners are to solve the'problem of code and context correlation which lies at the heart of thecommunicative ability' (Widdowson 1978:87-8). If, for instance, there is aspecial 'compreh ension skill' involved in interpreting messages, then surely(it is claimed) we had b etter teach this skill to our s tud ents . Otherw ise theywill 'comprehend' the words they 'hear' as examples of'usage', but will failto 'listen' and 'interp ret ' m essages as instances of'u se '; they will respond to'cohesion' but not to 'coherence', and so on (Widdowson 1978 passim).(One of the most bizarre features of current terminology is the deliberateuse of pairs of virtually ind istinguishab le words to illustrate allegedly vitaldistinctions. Faced with terms like 'use' and 'usage' or 'cohesion' and'cohe renc e', one really finds it extraord inarily difficult to remem ber whichis which.)

On e of the comprehen sion skills which we now teach foreigners is that ofpred icting. It has been observed that native listeners/rea ders m ake all sortsof predictions abo ut the nature of what they are about to hear or read, basedon their knowledge of the subject, their familiarity with the speaker orwriter, and other relevant features. Armed with this linguistic insight (andreluc tant to believe that foreigners, too, can pr edic t), we 'trai n' s tuden ts in'predictive strategies'. (For instance, we ask them to guess what is comingnext and then let them see if they were right or wrong.) B ut I would su ggestthat if a foreigner knows something about the subject matter, and some-thing about the speaker or writer, and if he knows enough of the language,then the foreigner is jus t as likely as the native sp eaker to predict w hat willbe said. An d if he predicts b adly in a real-life com preh ens ion task (class-room tasks are different), it can only be for one of two reasons. Either helacks essential backgroun d knowledge (of the subject m atter or the interac-tional contex t), or his com man d of the language is not good enough . In theone case he needs information, in the other he needs language lessons. Inneither case does it make sense to talk about having to teach some kind of'strategy' .

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An other strategy which we are encourag ed to teach is that of'neg otiatingmeaning ' .. . . speakers and w riters perform an unconscious guessing game , becausethey have to establish what the agreed goals are (and this is not alwaysclear, especially at the beginning of the conversation), as well as howmu ch know ledge, or past experience, or und erstan ding is share d. Th us ifyou ask me where I live, I may answer 'Britain' or 'London' or 'Surrey',or the name of the exact road, depending on why I think you asked meand how well I think you know south-east Eng land. If I answer 'London'and you answer 'Whereabouts in London?' you are telling me that youwan t m ore specific information: we are negotiating abo ut the purpose ofthe conversation, for you are showing that you really want to know,rath er than ju st m aking a general social enquiry. . . . It needs to beemp hasized that ev eryone, in any lan guag e, needs to develop the skills ofadjustm ent and nego tiation. (Brumfit 1981:6, 7)

The point is not always made with such unpretentious clarity.The shift towards a balance between form and function has had impor-tan t m ethod ologica l effects. If we see languag e as one pa rt of wider so cialinteraction and behaviour, deriving its communicative value from it,then we are compelled to introduce the process of interaction into theclassroom. Learners now need to be trained and refined in the interpre-tive and expressive strategies of making sense amid a negotiable realitywhere the ground rules for understanding what partners mean are notpre-set entirely, nor unequivocal. In fact, learners have to come to copewith the essential problem of com mu nication to acquire the m utuallynegotiated and dynamic conventions which give value to formal signs.They have to learn how to agree conventions and procedures, for theinterpretation of non-verbal and verbal language, with which they tem-porarily abide. (Candlin 1981:25)

Now this is very impressive, but it is simply not true. Language learnersalready know, in general, how to negotiate meaning. Th ey have been doingit all their lives. What they do not know is what words are used to do it in aforeign language. They need lexical items, not skills: expressions like 'Whatdo you mean by . . .? ', 'Look at it this way ', 'Wh ereab outs do you me an? ', 'Ibeg your pardon', or 'No, that 's not what I 'm trying to say'. Of course,there will be cases where the mother-tongue and the foreign language differin the detailed a ppro ach used for negotiation . Whe re this hap pen s, we needto know specificsat what point, and for what purpose, does language Xoperate a different convention from languag e Y? (Perhap s in language X itis rude to ask somebo dy w hat she m eans, for instance.) Su ch specifics canbe incorporated in teaching programmes for speakers or learners of lan-guage X , and this can be very valuable. B ut in gen eral there is not the leastneed to teach our students 'the interpretive and expressive strategies ofmaking sense amid a negotiable reality', even assuming that we were ableto define wh at this involves. And to talk in these terms contribu tes noth ingwhatever to our understanding of how to teach foreign languages.Guessing, too, is something which learners are apparently unable to dooutside their mother tongue.Clearly training in mak ing intelligent guesses will play an im po rtan t p artin learning to unders tand the spoken form of a foreign lang uage . (Brown1977:162)

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Assertions like this regularly pass unchallenged at conferences. As onereads the quotation, one is inclined to nod in automatic assent from force ofhabit: the sentim ent is so familiar, so much part of the accepted orthodoxy .And yet, wh y should language students need training in making intelligentguesses? Are they less intelligent people, less good at guessing, than othergroups in the population? Than language teachers, for instance? Is thereany reason at all to suppose that they do not already possess this skill? Andif they possess it, do we have any real evidence that they cannot in generalapply it to learning a foreign language? And if we do not have suchevidence, what are we doing setting out to teach people something they cando already? M ost of the readers of this jou rna l can prob ably und erstan d thespoken form of a foreign language to some extent at least. How many ofthem h ave received sy stematic training in making intelligent guesses in thelanguage in question?

It can happen, of course, that a learner has difficulty in transferring askill from his or her m other tongu e to the foreign lang uag e, especially in theearly days of language learning. When this happens (as it can with com-prehension skills), it m ay be worth giving specific practice in the 'blocked'skill in question. However, we need to know why the skill is blocked. If alearner seems to be unde rstand ing most of the words he or she hears but notreally grasping the message (not seeing the wood for the trees), this maysimply be due to anxiety. More often, perhaps, it is a matter of overloadthe learner's com ma nd of the language is jus t fluent enough for him todecode the words, but this occupies all his faculties and he has no process-ing capacity to spare for 'interpreting' what he hears. The problem will goaway with increased fluency; practice in 'global' comprehension mayappear to go well and may increase the student's confidence, but I doubtwhether a great deal can really be done to accelerate the natural pro-gression of this aspect of learning. At higher levels, students may performbadly at classroom comprehension tasks (failing to make sense of texts thatare well within their grasp) simply because of lack of interest; or becausethey have been trained to read classroom texts in such a different way from'real life' texts that they are unable to regard them as pieces of communica-tion. Here the problem is caused by poor methodology, and the solutioninvolves changing what happens in the classroom, not what happens in thestudent. We cannot assume without further evidence that students lackcomprehension strategies, simply because they have trouble jumpingthrough the hoops that we set up for them.

This 'tabula rasa' attitudethe belief that students do not possess, orcanno t transfer from their mother tongue, normal comm unication skillsisone of two complementary fallacies that characterize the CommunicativeApproach. The other is the 'whole-system' fallacy. This arises when thelinguist, over-excited about his or her analysis of a piece of language orbehaviour, sets out to teach everything that has been observed (oftenincluding the metalanguage used to describe the pheno me na), withoutstopping to ask how m uch of the teaching is (a) new to the stude nts a nd (b)relevant to their needs. Both fallacies are well illustrated in the followingexercise (Figu re 1). It will be observed : (a) th at the p urpo se of the exercise,as stated, is to develop 'conversational strategies' (a therapeutic procedurewhich m ight seem m ore relevant to the teaching of psycho-social d isordersthan to language instruction); (b) that students are taught a piece ofdiscourse analysis and its metalanguage; and (c) that the actual Englishlangua ge inp ut seems to be the least imp ortan t p art of the exerciseit is in

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Announce anintention,make asuggestion

I'm going toa popfestival onSaturday.Do youfancycoming ?

Raise anobjection

Wh ere is it?Oh, in Essex.That's toofar.

Ag r e e .

Where is it?Oh, in Essex,lhafs notfar. We canbe there inunder anhour.

Co unt e r t heobject ion

Oh, it's notfar. Youcan be therein under anhour.

E x p r e s se n t h u s i a m .F i x a da t e .

That's great.Look at allthese groups.When shallwe meet?

Objectagain

You don'tknow myparents. Mydad would Ihave a fit. I

Fix apr e c i s et i m e .

Let's sayon Sunday,8 p.m.

Play down theargumentPam, you're nota kid any more.

Ag r e e

Well, I supposeI. could try.

Sa y G o o dby e/ ' / / go and ask Mary , then.All right. See you then.

Make othersuggestions.8 is too early.^9 would bebetter.

Agree .

Right, see you atat 9 then.

Figure 1: A 'discourse ch ain'from an exp er im ental teach ing uni t ' I wanna hav e J im ' by UlnchGraver and Terry M oston, f irs t publ ishe d in th e Protokoll of the 7th M ee t ing of the Bundes ar-be i t sgem e insch a ft Engli s ch an Gesam ts ch ulen: 'Teach ing K i t s , Di s course Struc ture and ExerciseTypologies ' , Hessen State Ins t i tu te for Teacher In-Serv ic e Training, Kasse l-Fuldatal (1975);rep r inted in C andlin (1981) and reproduced here by pe rmi s s ion of t h e publ ish e r .

fact by no mea ns clear what language teaching is going on here, if any at all.Exercises like this treat the learner as a sort of linguistically gifted idiotsomebody who knows enough language to express the (quite complex)ideas involved, but who somehow cannot put the ideas together withouthelp. Normal students, of course, have the opposite problem: they knowwhat they want to say more often than they know how to say it.Conclusion I have argued th at the 'com m unic ative ' theory of me aning and use, in so faras it makes sense, is largely irrelevant to foreign languag e tea chin g. T heseconsideration s may seem som ewh at over-theoretical. 'After all, ' it mig ht beobjected, 'what does it matter if the theory doesn't really stand up? Theo-ries about language teaching never do. The im portant thing is that students

should be exposed to app rop riate sam ples of languag e and given relevantand motivating activities to help them learn. This is what the Co mm unica-tive Approach does.' I think there is something in this, and I shouldcertainly not wish to condemn the Communicative Approach out of handbecause its philosophy is confused. No dou bt its heart i s in the right place,and in some ways it has do ne us a lot of good. B ut theore tical confusion canlead to practical inefficiency, and this can do a lot of harm, with time andeffort being wasted on u nprofitable activities while imp orta nt priorities areignored. In the second of these articles I shall focus more closely on thesepractical issues, considering in particular the validity of the 'notional-functional syllabus', the question of authentic materials, and the 'real life'fallacy in com mu nicative methodology . DRec e i v ed M arc h 1984

A c r i ti c a l look at t h e C omm uni ca t iv e A p p r oac h ( 1 ) 11



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ReferencesAlexander , L . 1977. Handout for seminar at theBritish Council, Paris.Brumfit, C. J. 1981. 'Accuracy and fluency.' Prac t i ca lEnglish Teaching 1/3.Candl in , C. (ed.). 1981. Th e Communicative Teaching ofEngl i sh . London: Longman.Johnson , K. 1981. Introduction to Joh nson and Mor-row (eds.). 1981.J o h n s o n , K . and K. Morrow (eds.). 1981. C o m m u n -ication i n th e C la s sroom . London: Longman.Scott, R. 1981. 'Speaking' in John son and Morrow(eds. ) . 1981.Widdowson , H. G. 1978. Teaching Language a s C o m -m unica t ion . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wilkins , D. 1976. Notional Syllabuses. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.W ilkins , D. 1983. 'Some issues in comm unicativ e lan-guage teaching an d their relevance to the teaching oflanguages in secondary schools' in Perspectives inCommunicative Language Teaching. London: AcademicPress.

The authorMichael Swan was formerly Principal of the SwanSchool of English, Oxford, and has taught English inBritain and France. For the last few years he hasworked full-time as a writer of EL T ma terials, an d haspublished several textbooks, mostly with CambridgeUniversity Press.

12 Michael Swan



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Documents

A Critical Look at the Communicative Appraoch 1