Communicative language learning: Communicating for what purpose?
If the Communicative Approach has been superseded, what, asks Simon Andrewes, has taken its place?
There has been a debate, to which I myself have contributed previously in this publication(i), about the nature of ‘post-communicative’ English language teaching and learning. Is ‘post- communicative’ a useful concept, which refers to something real, identifiable? If the Communicative Approach has been superseded, what has taken its place, and what consequences does it have for the classroom? Has the Communicative Approach lost favour among teachers because it no longer serves their purpose, or is this just something to keep EFL theoreticians, that intellectual proletariat, occupied and in work in these precarious economic times?
If we take a step back to distinguish the wood from the trees, it seems common sense to say that we teach language for communication. Is there or has there ever been any other reason for learning a language? Even the idea of learning a foreign language ‘for its own sake’ implies an appreciation of the way it conveys meaning – through its artefacts, its patterns, its idiosyncrasies, its structural systems, and through its body of literature. It would seem to be impossible to isolate a language from its communicative purpose.
Language is communication by its very nature.
The role of communication in the grammar-translation method
Even the much derided grammar- translation method was communicative.
The question is: for what purpose was it communicative? Not for finding your way in a foreign city, of course, or for sealing that decisive business deal, or for getting the chambermaid to change your dirty towels. But if you want to communicate something from one language to another, translating it can be a pretty efficient and straightforward method.
The grammar-translation method conjures up this image for me of the erudite professor who knew every detail of the structure and the history of his subject matter language and could himself wax lyrical (in English, of course) over the beauty of some of its outstanding linguistic features and its literary masterworks, yet when he had to make a mundane utterance in the language, failed to make any concessions to its natural sounds or popular forms of expression, but rendered a grammatically correct and stylistically polished, overformal version of the written language in an absurdly anglicised and unflinchingly RP(ii) accent. He could never, convincingly, engage in small talk. This real-life image of the ivory-towered professor of foreign language encapsulates in a parodic way the essence of the grammar-translation method. Oral communication was never among the top priorities. The necessity or desire to integrate oneself into this speech community was not a major issue; one remained a sympathetic but external observer. Being understood in the market place, or at the railway station, didn’t matter much, as you would be met and taken care of by your academic peers. Communication involving the target language was largely through a written medium. In this approach, the aesthetics of the language carried much greater weight than any need to function in it at a practical level. And it required a high degree of intellectual effort to acquire the broadest possible knowledge of the subject matter and proficiency in the associated skills of linguistic analysis and translation. This knowledge and proficiency was at a superior level to that of the average native speaker. It was a communicative method for an elite.
Of course, by the time the Communicative Approach approached, the method had become the cause of complete frustration for language learners and teachers, because the communicative aims had changed. The average language learner now lacked the academic inclinations and rigour to master the techniques of the method. Its goals in no way corresponded any longer to the needs of learners in the post-World War II education system. Much of its content, canonical literature for example, seemed largely irrelevant, difficult, and obscure. The gulf between the language taught and the language of the street had become problematic. The neglect of oral skills, in particular, condemned the grammar-translation method mercifully to the scrapheap of history.
The audiolingual method
Before the Communicative Approach took hold, another methodology held sway in some sectors of foreign language teaching in the years following World War II. The audiolingual method, whose original purpose was directed towards military and political intelligence gathering and espionage, gained favour and influenced language pedagogues largely because it prioritised proficiency in listening and speaking skills. The skills were to be acquired quickly through a system of constant repetition and a barrage of intensive drilling. Accuracy through rigorous habit-formation was of paramount importance for this method, for the acquisition and taking root of incorrect structures and non- standard pronunciation could have dire consequences resulting in the agent’s cover being blown. (My French teacher impressed me with the anecdote of the prisoner-of-war escapees cleverly disguised as a married couple giving
themselves away in enemy territory by the use of male gender linguistic forms being used when addressing the ‘woman’ – a man in disguise, of course.)
This was the era of the language lab with its focus on accurately mimicking the standard pronunciation and typical grammatical structures of the foreign language. Undoubtedly, the method’s new emphasis on oral skills made it more suitable for the changed circumstances of the post-War economic boom years. Indeed, its success in improving habit-driven aspects of language such as pronunciation was generally acknowledged. However, it was not so hot on communicative strategies. I remember producing my well-rehearsed, grammatically correct and carefully enunciated utterances, learnt on a Linguaphone course, only to be dumbfounded by the native speaker’s torrential response. My interlocutor responded to the apparent fluency of my set delivery but unfortunately her response had not been scripted in the Linguaphone method’s material. Be that as it may, probably due to its new emphasis on spoken language, the method flourished and persisted for some time during the Cold War stand- off.
The Communicative Approach
Neither the audiolingual nor the grammar-translation method met the needs of language learners that had evolved by the 1970s. The communicative aims of these two language learning systems were found to be inappropriate for the new circumstances.
By the 1970s globalisation had taken on the contours that would broadly define it for the rest of the twentieth century. The social context of the rise of the Communicative Approach/CLT(iii) was the post-War economic boom in which labour mobility between nations had grown rapidly and the globalisation of industry and commerce had expanded enormously. Typical learners in this context were skilled workers whose scarce skills were required in a foreign country. The need, even the pressure, not only to master the language for work purposes but also to integrate into the foreign language speech community became a factor. Alternatively, the higher employees of USA-based multinationals would need to learn English for the purposes of training and passing on instructions in overseas branches and subsidiaries. English began its era of overwhelming domination as the foreign language everyone needed to learn.
In many ways, we have anticipated the major characteristics of the communicative approach in the above parodical description of foreign language learning in the times of grammar-translation. The history and aesthetics of language were now irrelevant. The written medium took a back seat to the exigencies of oral communication. Aspects such as mundane utterances, colloquialisms and small talk were seen as fully respectable features of language and taken seriously in practising and perfecting such communication. Grammatical correctness became subservient to getting meaning across, that is to say, to effective communication in a broadly- speaking predictable social context. A broad knowledge of language per se was looked on as less desirable than an adequate performance in such a set context. Language was looked at in terms of its function in social transactions such as shopping for fruit and vegetables in the market place or getting on the right train for your destination at the railway station. Attention was paid to a variety of register, while interest in literary styles became largely irrelevant. Close approximation to the norms of the foreign language was strived for, as integration into the foreign language speech community became a possible learning aim. Finally, this was certainly a communicative method for a much broader, if still restricted, cross-section of society than its predecessors.
The classic era of CLT in the last third of the twentieth century was the era of the native-speaker teacher par excellence. There was never any question that the language to be learnt was the English of the ‘BANA’ countries, or the countries of the ‘Inner Circle’(iv), i.e. native-speaker English. This was mainly due to the economic clout of the USA, though somewhat oddly the standards of British English maintained a prestige out of all proportion to their practical face value. The myth that British English is somehow intrinsically superior to (especially) North American English persists in a moribund form to this day.
Of course, belief in the value of the native-speaker teacher had the added convenience of keeping the business of teaching English in the hands of enterprises in the BANA countries; and very big business it became, one from which British enterprises profited considerably. Nevertheless, as long as integration as a foreign worker into a native English-speaking community remained a major goal, and as long as the multinationals were on the whole BANA-country based, there was some justification for the business of learning English as a foreign language being executed very much on native-speaker terms.
Irrespective of the place of the native-speaker model of English, the Communicative Approach inherited the audiolingual method’s greater focus on oral skills. But now a new focus turned to the functionality of language. If, in the grammar-translation era, the purpose of language learning was seen as an aim in itself, an understanding and appreciation of language for what it was, and in the audiolingual period it was a convincing if superficial simulation of native-speaker proficiency, for CLT it was first and foremost as a social tool, a means to an end, that language was to be put to use. The aim of learning a foreign language was pragmatic and success in it could be measured in the degree that you were able to use it to get what you wanted. Although the social contexts were reasonably predictable, the language these contexts generated was less so, hence the greater prominence in this method of communication strategies. Now the fear of making mistakes that imbued the audiolingual approach no longer mattered. Getting what you wanted was the ultimate test of the effectiveness of your communication strategies, now an important part of foreign language proficiency.
The Communicative Approach was promoted early on as a more natural methodology than the methods it replaced. But the extent to which language learning can be said to be ‘natural’ depends entirely, as we have begun to realise, on the context in which it is taught and learnt. The use of authentic language and real communication, or at least a convincing simulation of it, became standard classroom practice. Participation in a communicative situation on the part of the learner took centre stage. The teacher’s role, alongside presenting good and reliable language models as a native speaker, was to facilitate the learners’ performance, to help them interact in the communicative process.
We may conclude that the main aim of this method was to prepare learners for a role in the foreign language speech community, whether that community was geographically defined, or whether it was a corporate speech community, i.e. the language of communication in a multinational community. The ultimate goal was to enable the learner to operate efficiently in the said community. To this end, it required social language appropriate to that speech community and some familiarity with the culture of the language studied, which could be taken as the culture of the workplace, as well as of a nation or region.
Post-communicative English language learning: Towards English as a Lingua Franca
The social context that gave rise to classical CLT teaching can be seen to have changed discernibly in the last two decades. The aim of learning English may still be to improve communicative competence but the goals have changed. The typical scenario of the language learner is no longer that of the skilled worker sent abroad to an English-speaking country. The skilled worker-learner may still be in his/her own country, and may be working in a multinational, though not a USA-based one, yet nevertheless the language the company has chosen as the main form of communication among its workers is English: English as a Lingua Franca. This was recently my experience of teaching English to young managerial workers in a Belgian multinational cinema chain in Spain. The Spanish management were being trained by the Belgian higher management, but the language of communication was neither Spanish, nor French nor Flemish, but, for purely pragmatic reasons, English. It hardly needs to be said that the cinema chain has as yet no presence in any English- speaking country. What is happening in ELT is inextricably bound up with what is happening in the world as a whole. English has long been a tool, as we have seen ‘of international workplace/business communication’(v), through which medium workers are able to function in an English-speaking environment. Until recently, this environment was either a country (usually inner circle) or a multinational enterprise (usually USA-based).
What has happened in the last couple of decades is that market forces have driven the tendencies which gave rise to English in the CLT period further. English- speaking corporate environments have broken free of their national bases in the BANA countries and have spread to all corners of the world and economy. Today they are common in non-native as well as native-speaker global business enterprises, in which English is the means of communication without the presence of a single native speaker. Kinepolis, for example, the Belgian cinema chain referred to above, whose empire only extends from Belgium across France, Spain and Switzerland and just recently to Poland, has chosen English as the corporate means of communication. Twenty years ago, that language would surely have been French. Today, however, English is so clearly the world dominant language that future expansion perspectives make English the preferred choice. French may still be an adequate cross-cultural means of communication for Kinepolis in present circumstances but is likely to be a hindrance for future expansion.
For the power base for the world domination of English does not lie in the estimated 380 million native speakers in Kachru’s inner circle. It is not even to be explained by the further possibly 300 million fluent English speakers in the ‘outer circle’, countries like India, Nigeria, or the Philippines, where English plays an important role in the nation’s institutions for historical reasons. What has given English an edge over its rivals as a world lingua franca are the growing numbers of users and would-be users of English in the ‘expanding circle’. Kachru’s expanding circle refers to those countries where English has no historical or traditionally institutional role but has nevertheless been widely adopted as a means of communication for business and commerce, and education: countries like China, Russia, Korea, Germany, Poland, Turkey, Egypt, Libya. The list is already extensive, – and expanding steadily. Because of its fluid, dynamic nature, the expanding circle may contain anything from 100 million to as many as one billion English users.(vi)
At first, it made sense to argue, as I think Kachru did, that the inner circle was the norm-provider for English across the world and that the expanding circle was ‘norm-dependent,’ accommodating itself to the norms set by the native- speaker countries. The logic of this argument is being undermined by the newly recognised reality of international communication. It is possible that in a business/workplace context as few as 4% of exchanges in English take place exclusively between native speakers. In 22% of exchanges, both native and non-native speakers are involved. While in the remaining 74% of cases, the exchanges are between non-native speakers, with no native-speaker involvement.(vii)
The rise of English as a corporate language is a ‘natural consequence’ of the expansion of the world economy, which makes it more and more difficult for an enterprise to exist within the limits of national boundaries. For example, we learn that Japan’s top online retailer, Rakuten, is swapping Japanese for English as its official language company-wide in preparation for overseas expansion, a move ‘crucial for survival in this competitive industry’, while electronics maker Sharp will adopt English as its official language in its research and development division in Japan. Panasonic, meanwhile, says about 80 per cent of its global new recruits for white-collar positions will be non-Japanese in the financial year starting April 2011, with the aim of helping develop products that suit various local needs around the world. Few of these recruits are likely to be English native-speakers, but the language they will use for intra- enterprise communication will be English, not Japanese. Sony, in turn, says it has recruited a high number of engineers in emerging countries such as China and India in recent years. Their education as engineers will surely have included the acquisition of a thorough working knowledge of English.(viii)
It hardly needs to be said that, in spite of the injury to the national pride of rival cultures, especially the French, English is dominant in Europe. A recent Rumanian study of the globalisation of English as a corporate language recognises that the majority of foreign investors in Rumania come from non- English speaking countries such as Germany or France, yet the language they ‘prefer’ for communication is English.(ix)
It is curious in this respect that neither German nor Chinese, the languages of the powerhouse economies that drive the world markets, have been able to challenge the foothold that English has gained as the preferred global corporate language due to a particular configuration of historical and cultural phenomena.
English in education
What has happened in business and commerce is reflected in education. Basic education may be a right, but higher education is a privilege which mostly has to be paid for. This is a fact of life in most parts of the world and everything indicates that post- or extra- compulsory education will become an even more treasured commodity in the near future. We may like to think we are teaching English to the world as something empowering and liberating for all, but the fact is that proficiency in English is a liberating and empowering asset mostly only for those willing and able to pay for it.
Knowledge of English is an essential part of education in today’s world. Education is the key to access to a world that promises vocational success and financial reward in life, the inverse of which is marginalisation, exclusion, disenfranchisement. As the competition to acquire education gets more fierce, the price is going up. English has become the lynchpin in the education that is essential for access to the world of opportunity – if not one of wealth and privilege, then at least one of partial enfranchisement. Parents and learners around the world are aware that escape from the world of marginalisation and exclusion is hardly feasible nowadays without a mastery of English.
The University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations have recognised this fact and exploit it fully in their marketing programme. Its Certificate in Advanced English (CAE) is sold as ‘English for high achievers in the professional and academic world’ as well as ‘one of the most valuable English qualifications in the world.’ (My emphasis throughout.) To potential candidates it is presented as a ‘showcase’ for their outstanding English abilities which make them ‘stand out from the crowd’. It allures with its promise to help ‘open doors to international opportunity.’ For prospective employers, and higher education admissions officers, meanwhile, it offers ‘reliable proof of language skills for work and study’, such as the ability to ‘follow a course at university level, communicate effectively at managerial and professional level’ and to ‘participate with confidence in workplace meetings or academic tutorials and seminars’. If, twenty years ago, the instrumental, functional ability in everyday English vouchsafed by First Certificate in English (FCE) was generally deemed sufficient for work or study purposes, today it is considered rather as a milestone on the pathway to higher qualifications. By that Cambridge ESOL mean CAE, or possibly CPE (Certificate of Proficiency in English), although the latter has rather been sidelined in its measuring of ability beyond the ‘purely instrumental (the capacity to get things done)’; CPE demonstrates rather an ability to handle linguistic material which is academic or cognitively demanding, demanding in many cases a more advanced performance than a native speaker would be capable of.(x) We may note that the CPE is somewhat out of step with the pragmatic goals of the traditional Communicative Approach.
Hitherto, the CAE has been marketed as an exam for learners wanting to live and study in an English-speaking environment. Increasingly, though, English is being used in non-native academia, where it is being spoken in the lecture hall, even though it may hardly be heard in the street or in the home. In Norway, for example, Norwegians may still talk to one another in Norwegian, but when it comes to writing reports or sending emails in the workplace, they will do it in English! English has become so predominant in academia, as in business, that the government says it is threatening the very existence of Norwegian! English has overtaken Norwegian in many university faculties as a medium of communicating ideas. 70% of social sciences theses are written in English, as against 30% in the early 1990s.(xi)
To what extent English has come to be regarded as an essential element in higher education on the world stage is nowhere to be more clearly demonstrated than in Nottingham University’s endeavours to become ‘a truly global university for the 21st century’. The University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, which opened its doors to its first students in September 2000, was the first ever branch campus of a UK university abroad, soon, though, to be followed by many others. Nottingham itself followed up this first by setting up University of Nottingham Ningbo in China to ‘combine internationally ranked teaching and research excellence with local needs for internationalisation and globalisation.’(xii) In this way, British branch campus universities abroad give the mother university the chance to cash in on the huge global market for education in and through English by making their expertise in top-class international education more easily available to students across the world, in an environment where they can perfect their English language skills without the deterring expense and cultural upset of actually travelling to and living in the inner circle. Worldwide, English teaching is evidently undergoing a process of devolution.
Some features and priorities of English as a Lingua Franca
Corporate English and English in academic and higher professional education are then two main contexts in which English is being used today. The changing goals in post-communicative English teaching are reflected in various pedagogical features and priorities that differentiate it from the Communicative Approach.
If we start with Writing: minor grammatical inaccuracies are today considered to be tolerable, especially with regard to the idiosyncrasies of native-speaker English, such as consistent use of the third person ‘s’, our impossible prepositions, and the complicated use of articles, along with the question of the countability or uncountability of certain nouns. The clear organisation and development of ideas through logical coherence and consistency count for more than the traditional nuts and bolts of grammar. We may say there has been a shift of focus from grammatical detail to macro structures of discourse: a successful and convincing knitting together of elements achieved through satisfactory sentence construction and sequencing, and paragraphing. What here is considered to be successful, convincing and/or satisfactory is judged by the effect the writing has on the target reader rather than by any prescribed rules. Whether it involves writing a business report or an academic essay, communicating ideas with clarity is no longer so strictly governed by absolute standards of native-speaker accuracy.
Secondly, teaching English as a lingua franca has less room for idioms, and for idiomatic language in general, especially for the more obscure metaphors which give native-speaker English so much of its unique flavour, its inimitable colouring. Native-speaker cultural references, too, a bit like insider jokes, are lost on the majority of speakers of ELF and so are hardly relevant for the needs of average ELF language users. On the other hand, ELF in turn is enriched by metaphorical language imported, or quasi-translated, from a variety of L1s(xiii), which give rise to new English expressions that were previously lacking in the language, maybe gaining a freshness that they had lost in the L1. (‘Don’t look for bones in an egg,’ is a graphic Chinese expression something akin, I am told, to ‘stop nit- picking’.)
Many niceties of register go by the board, being too subtle to grasp or too tied to native-speaker cultural or linguistic conventions to be appreciated in the expanding circle. Neither do circumlocutions such as ‘not particularly very good’ meaning ‘poor’ or ‘do you think I could/I wonder if you would mind…?’ for polite requests have such a prominent position on the ELF syllabus.
As far as speaking skills and pronunciation are concerned, features of natural native-speaker speech associated with the Communicative Approach, such as the schwa, weak forms, assimilation, elision, coalescence, and linking will be given a lower priority. It has been pointed out that such features only kick in at around 300 words a minute and English used as a lingua franca is Slow English. ELF is not the communication of kitchen conversation intimacy favoured by classic CLT but more the language of public speaking, of the business meeting or negotiations, of the university seminar, where clear enunciation, a manageably deliberate and slow delivery, and rhetorical devices such as repetition and paraphrasing count for more than native speaker-like pronunciation and related communicative conventions. As such, audience awareness is a central factor in this kind of communication, in a similar way as the effect on the target reader was for writing. Native-speaker intonation is another low priority area, though with this as with other aspects of pronunciation, it is probably more important to differentiate between models of pronunciation for production and models for recognition or comprehension, than it was in the Communicative Approach.
The changing goals in post- communicative English teaching are also reflected in the extension and variety of competences that have been incorporated into teaching in the last decade or so, most notably, intercultural awareness, global issues, and study skills. In the same way, the socio- cultural competence that was already demanded by the Communicative Approach is now expected to be exercised at an intercultural global level, rather than at inner circle level.
Finally, the expected role of the English teacher has undergone some changes. Native-speaker competence no longer has the exclusively high priority it once did. The days of recruiting graduates in any academic field, not necessarily related to English or language, and training them up in a few weeks to teach EFL are numbered. Anyway, with the expansion in demand for English, there are simply not enough native speakers to cover the demand. Now that learning English to be a part of an inner circle L2 speech community is no longer such a decisive factor and English is being learnt, and later probably used, in an L1 environment, teacher competence in two languages is a more valuable asset than a high degree of native- speaker competence in one.
Another valuable asset for the English teacher in the post-communicative era would be their experience as a non- native of actually learning English and then operating in an environment or situation where it is a lingua franca. As we have implied, the communicative goals of such a scenario will not be over-the-washing-up kitchen conversation fluency, but rather the clarity of ideas and speech and the communicative sensitivity required for addressing a public audience. In an exercise I carried out with varieties of world English taken from Speak Up! magazine recordings, I found that RP, in the voice of an educated Londoner, was one of the least easily accessible accents. Easiest for students to understand was an American speaker who worked as a guide at Yellowstone Park. The point is: she was used to speaking to the public, visitors from all over the USA and the world, and she had acquired a sensitivity to their needs. Intelligibility of pronunciation does not depend so much upon regional variant as on accommodation to the listener, the interlocutor. Native speakers, confident of their ability in English, are often unable to make adjustments to their speech delivery to make themselves understood in such situations.
Conclusion
My contention is that English teaching today is sufficiently different to teaching twenty years ago to warrant the concept of a post-communicative method taking hold. Furthermore, I believe classic CLT a
