Applied Linguistics 1997 de BEAUGRANDE 279 313

Theory and Practice in Applied Linguistics: Disconnection, Conflict, or Dialectic?
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ROBERT DE BEAUGRANDE
University of Vienna
'We are remaining at the moment the prisoner of our own categorisations ' (Brvmfit 1980 160)
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The enduring problems of co-ordinating theory with practice in applied linguistics and language teaching are surveyed in view of the symptomatic disconnections of theory from practice in theoretical linguistics, with the suggestion that how far a theory is applicable to practice is a good measure of how far the theory is valid as a theory The basic frameworks of 'doing language science' are explored in terms of their applicability, including Krashen's theory, and an alternative programme is proposed 1 TWO WAYS OF DOING LANGUAGE SCIENCE The relation between theory and practice can be a difficult issue in nearly all domains of human activity In most domains, human practices were well established long before theones began to be provided and have also played a much more effective role in -the history of societies So we might expect that practice would play a deasive role also in deciding what sorts of theones ought to be produced In fact, however, theory has typically taken over the leading role and at times has been disconnected from practice altogether This tactic allows a society or its institutions, especially education, to maintain an official theory of humanity, equality, and efficiency, while also maintaining practices that are symptomatically inhumane, unequal, and inefficient and which consistently favour elite groups (cf Apple 1985, Giroux 1992, Beaugrande 1997) The relation between theory and practice also appears uneasy within linguistics, the 'modern science of language' In real life, we see a nch mosaic of practices relating to language, ranging from the general operations of language learning and ordinary conversation over to highly specialized strategies of communication such as translating poetry But in 'mainstream' hnguistics, we chiefly see a sparse array of theones, some of them self-consciously disconnected from all of these practices 2 A large-scale close analysis of the discourse of linguistic theonsts (Beaugrande 1991) indicates that theoretical linguistics is currently in a stagnation of cnsis proportions, though linguists are understandably reluctant to admit it With due poetic justice, the domains where theoretical linguistics has encountered recalatrant problems are typically also the domains where the theones are least suitable for applications This correspondence suggests a pnnciple which, according to H G Widdowson (personal communication), has hardly
Applied Linguistics, Vol 18, No 3 Oxford University Press 1997
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THEORY AND PRACTICE IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS
been raised in the central work on applied linguistics how far a theory is applicable to practice is a good measure of how far the theory is valid as a theory Still, I believe we can mount a fairly strong case for the principle We can start by drawing a basic distinction between the two main ways of going about constructing theories of language Fieldwork linguists, as the term says, go out to 'work' in the 'field' of cultural and social activities and carefully record and descnbe what native speakers are actually observed to say Their theones are both data-driven insofar as observation and induction exert prominent control, and practice-driven insofar as fieldwork must join in the social practices of the community of speakers in order to gather and interpret the data If your theory of the language is wrong, you will soon find out by getting misunderstood, ridiculed, or ignored when you attempt to speak it In contrast, homework linguists (to com a matching new phrase) work 'at home1 or in the office with data that may have come from a variety of sources, ranging from previously completed fieldwork, to corpuses collected from public discourse, to specific discourse types such as samples from language textbooks, and finally to data invented by the linguist during the homework process itself As we move across this range in this order, control increasingly shifts from observation and induction over to introspection and intuition, whose task is to formulate and descnbe what native speakers (including the linguists themselves) are presumed to know about their language The theones are mainly theory-driven insofar as homeworkers construct them according to predetermined methods and standards of design, such as formality, ngour, compactness, and so on In exchange, data and practice may enter only obliquely and indirectly through artificial, isolated sentences invented by the linguists expressly to make a theoretical pointa situation utterly disparate from ordinary language practices where utterances are intended to convey a message, enhance co-operation, and so forth Yet these linguists face about and assert that these artificial data are precisely the most revealing for the structure of the entire language My distinction cuts the pie a somewhat different way than does the usual distinction between the descriptive linguistics that dominated the mainstream of research until the 1960s versus the generative linguistics that moved into the mainstream thereafter Typically, we do find fieldwork methods at the base of descnptive linguistics, and homework methods at the base of generative linguistics, but not always Still, my distinction may be the more relevant one for applied linguistics and language practitioners, because fieldwork and homework correspond to two different approaches to language learning as weU 2 FIELDWORK LINGUISTICS VERSUS LANGUAGE LEARNING To explore this correspondence, we might begin by asking how far fieldwork research may offer significant analogies to ordinary language learning Before any theoretical statements can be made about the language, the fieldworker first has to learn the language reasonably well The task is most challenging
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when using the 'monolingual method* developed chiefly by Kenneth Lee Pike (1944, 1967), where the fieldworker has no prior description of the target language to be described and no helpful bilingual interpreters In return, the fieldworker has the major advantage of doing the linguistic version of'situated learning' (in the sense of Lave and Wenger 1990) within the community as fluency is gradually attained Still, the situation of thefieldworkerdiffers from that of the ordinary language learner m at least seven ways 1 The fieldworker is not accompanied into the field by an explicitly trained teacher, but tries to learn from a gradually accumulating circle of contacts and acquaintances, who represent the community's language from multiple perspectives Most language learners depend heavily at each stage on one teacher, whose version of the target language may be in some ways untypical 2 Fieldworkers are required to assemble their own systematic data corpus, whereas language learners are given textbooks compiled by other people and with means that are often rather unsystematic 3 The fieldworker is a mature and educated adult with an intense and round-theclock commitment to the task as compared to those language learners who are children and adolescents and may find themselves in second-language classrooms for a vanety of accidental or administrative reasons such as 'language requirements' Voluntary adult language learners (e g in the massive programmes in Scandinavia) fall in between the two situations 4 The fieldworker has received highly specialized training skills for writing down utterances in a reliable phonetic alphabet or for distilling out regular patterns from the data that might correspond to categones like 'nouns' and 'verbs' Most language learners are untrained and unskilled, and the teacher may be uncertain about how they perceive or organize the data from classrooms or textbooks 5 The fieldworker is operating under conditions of total cultural immersion Language is always being observed in relation to human activities that provide both important clues as to what certain utterances mean and a pervasive sensitivity to the general cultural setting of the target language, whether or not such factors are addressed in the fieldworker's official linguistic theory Learners of foreign languages may have scant contact with the culture 6 The fieldworker is conversant with explicit theoretical concepts about language, directed partly toward the native language and partly toward experience with other languages during a period of pre-fieldwork training Language learners have at most an implicit and disorganized theory of language denved only from their native language 7 The fieldworker's results are intended for presentation to a scientific community of other experts, some of whom may re-examine the data and compare it to the theoretical statements made about the language Language learners may have no clear idea where they will later display their results
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These seven factors ensure the success of thefieldworkeras an ideal language learner, whereas the prospect of failure causes widespread anxiety for ordinary classroom learners Still, the parallel between the two learning situations does bear upon the question of how a theory of language might be made to order for practitioners (see section 6) First, such a theory would have to specify the
relationships between native and second-language learning If this is done in
sufficiently concrete terras, the co-ordination of the native-language and second-language instruction could be equally attentive to the requirements on both sides We need to reassess the main differences between available theories of native-language learningor, to use the conventional term, language acquisition (cf sections 4 and 5)and of second-language learning A child learning the native language is in a situation far more similar to the fieldworker's in regard to cultural immersion, yet the social range of the child's experiences is necessarily narrower, being more focused on a single family or even on a single parent Both factors can assist the child the immersion by supplying nch clues about what things mean, and the range by allowing attention to focus on what is interesting and relevant on a daily basis Conversely, both factors are heavily reshaped during second-language learning In the standard situation, cultural immersion is not available, and the social range is limited to the classroom, where materials are to be learned by compulsion irrespective of whether the learner considers them interesting and relevant In absence of immersion, the second-language teacher in the classroom is conscnpted into the role of a representative of the.community of speakers of the second-language This role is more problematic and daunting than many teachers would probably care to acknowledge A fieldworker can circulate among farmers, shopkeepers, householders, and so on, in order to consult a cross-section of social types, each of whose perspective complements the others In contrast, the second-language teacher may have only a single perspective which is strongly determined by an academic setting and profession, and which emphasizes the reading of literary written texts and the grammatical analysis of banal sentences What would be needed here is a theoretical framework for expanding the education and training of secondlanguage teachers to provide a spectrum of cultural outlooks on the language and Us social and regional contexts and varieties Moreover, the teacher has the equally daunting task of trying to offset the learner's lack of specialized training of the kind fieldworkers have What would be needed here is a theoretical framework for attenuating this lack by training some basic techniques for describing and discussing language as language Usually, teachers have
to rely on a traditional metalanguage that is either too technical for learners (e g 'gerund' and 'gerundive') or too philosophical (e g 'a complete sentence is a complete thought') We need terms that exploit ordinary capaaties to use the language (e g 'a complete sentence is one that can be made into a sensible yesor-no question') (cf Beaugrande 1985) It is also essential that the metalanguage be designed for parallel use in both
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native-language and second-language learning within the same school system
Most schools work at cross-purposes m this regard, so that learners encounter confusion and inconsistencies in terms when moving from one classroom to another Or, terms are glibly transferred, as from Latin over to English, without appreciating the problems that can ansefor example, that English categories are much less systematically distinguished by their forms than are Latin ones The theory should further provide a framework for a concerted and continual interaction among the personnel engaged in the teaching and learning of both native and all foreign languages The various needs and issues could thereby be co-ordinated and made mto an explicit context for developing flexible and sharable methods The desirability seems plain of making a vital part of the second-language teacher's training be a period of actual cultural immersion for the learning of at least one foreign language, if at all possible the native language of the expected learner population From a practical standpoint, this requirement would not be unduly difficult to meet for second-language teachers who go abroad and take up residence in a country where the learners' language is spoken It would suffice for the host country to provide a lodging and a living stipend for an appropriate period prior to beginning actual teaching Immersion programmes in Latin America or in the Middle East would also be ideal for teachers who will later be working in the United States with the many pupils whose native languages are Latin American Spanish and Middle Eastern Arabic This tactic would compensate for the commonplace situation in which the language of the host country does not belong to the handful of languages that are traditionally taught in the schools of such countries as the United States and the United Kingdom It would not merely put the second-language teacher in a situation fairly similar to thefieldworker's, but would also involve a similar commitment to the work and a similar opportunity to attain cultural sensitivity To argue that this is not practicable or affordable for so-called 'languages of lesser diffusion' is a stingy rhetorical dodge that allows the bureaucrats in host countries to economize foolishly on the training of teachers of second languages that are vital to personal and social development, and, worse yet, it allows the bureaucrats in the 'source country' to maintain a colonial mentality of cultural and linguistic superiority in regard to the cultures and languages in the host countnes (cf Philhpson 1992, Pennycook 1994) Again from a practical standpoint, it is plainly desirable if a penod of actual cultural immersion can be made a vital part of the second-language learners' training, for at least three reasons First, the teacher would receive priceless support in the otherwise daunting task of representing the community of speakers Second, the learners would be far more motivated and committed in their home schools if they were anticipating such an excursion Third, their expenence of a foreign culture would be the best antidote in later hfe against the rising tides of disrespect for cultural and hnguistic human rights and against the language intolerance that threatens both global security and local coexistence (Philhpson, Skuttnab-Kangas, and Ranut 1994)
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Yet from a theoretical standpoint, the concept of 'cultural immersion' is not fully accounted for It is certainly not guaranteed by physical presence in the host country, visitors may simply form their own separate groups and keep their distance from the locals and the culture, chiefly for motives of language insecurity or personal anxiety Or, they may mingle but with a group of locals who want to speak their language mstead, a problem already noted by Henry Sweet (1899)3 Furthermore, the commonplace notion of culture as a unified, readily definable entity can be quite misleading In a modern society, sub-cultures are proliferated as means for seeking status or compensating insecurities (cf Apple 1985, chapters 3 and 4) The culture of adolescents is likely to differ substantially from that of their parents and their teacher (Brake 1980) And further subcultures persist within the multi-culturahsm that has reached even such officially mono-cultural societies as the US and the UK, and can be expected to rise considerably in the future (Giroux 1992) So a practice-driven theory needs to explain how cultural contacts occur and how they might be guided to meet the specific needs of second language learning Extremely valuable here would be case studies of the whole process of fieldwork not just in linguistics, but also in anthropology and sociology (see, for example, Hymes 1964, Rabinow 1977, Baugh 1983) Case studies should also be assembled of teachers or learners who have been placed in cultural immersion programmes A practice-driven theory also needs to explain how both the training of teachers and the role of learners in conventional classrooms might effectively offset the lack of opportunity for cultural immersion Here, we would create a framework for assessingfieldworkon the activities of prospective or practising language teachers and language learners (e.g. Cohen 1976) These studies would offer a vital complement to studies of the informal diaries kept by classroom learners, such as earned out by Kathleen Bailey (see survey in Bailey and Ochsner 1983), which have shed new light on such vital factors as learner anxiety (Bailey 1983) Without having undergone cultural immersion during the successful acquisition of a foreign language, teachers need guidance in appreciating the typical problems of learners arising naturally from the contact between the first and the second language A 'practice-driven' theory drawing on case studies could support an effective programme of deliberately building up cultural sensitivity This resource would be all the more vital when the learners come from a whole spread of different native languages This situation is a natural reflex of the mobility and multi-culturalism in a 'modern' society The first phase might be to sort the learners out by cultural areas, such as Latin America, Northern Africa, or Southeast Asia A language teacher with a knowledge of only one of the languages of the area could still attain a cultural sensitivity that would go a long way toward appreciating the situation of the learners and putting them more at ease A practice-dnven theory should also describe methods whereby ordinary
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learners can attain at least some indirect access to cultural immersion via the classroom Practical materials have long been available, such as films and videos, but, to my knowledge, we still lack a theoretical framework indicating how such materials and technical resources might best be exploited, and what further materials should be developed and distributed Video-taped television programmes sent out from the US and the UK to Africa or the Middle East might well be both culturally inappropriate to the host country and culturally distortive or disadvantageous for their image of the source country, particularly in respect of the wanton and graphic violence that passes for entertainment in the 'first world' as a release valve for dealing with its galloping social and economic tensions A second-language teacher whose training does not provide parallels to fieldwork methods and who has not successfully acquired any foreign language is in a position like that of a homework linguist, obliged to rely heavily on intuitions and introspections Of course, a monolingual and monocultural second-language teacher can attain successful results, just as homework linguistics can produce significant descriptions of their own .languages But due to the theoretical principles outlined above, the success rate would seldom be sufficiently reliable or widespread 3 CAN FIELDWORK LINGUISTICS DO THE JOB1* We can now total up the central requirements for a practice-dnven theory explicated so far It' should provide realistic data-driven and practice-dnven descriptions of the emergence of the language system at various stages of fluency in both native and second languages and in both natural and pedagogical settings, plus an account of the more effective and expedient means of moving from a less advanced stage to a more advanced one A body of such theorizing should be closely co-ordinated with a library of fieldwork and case studies on the actual activities of participants, made widely accessible and expandable via Internet What are the prospects of fieldwork linguistics supporting an 'applied linguistics' able to provide such a theory 9 In section 2,1 have suggested some ways in which fieldwork linguistics could be a highly valuable source Yet fieldwork linguists are hardly prone to go offering theory for its own sake in the academic marketplace, least of all if doing so means ignoring the different conditions between their own situation and that of teachers and learners of language Their sense of professionalism rests on the sound conviction that a theory must be a guide for data-driven practice, and must therefore be datadriven itself (I shall return to this in section 4) Even the most monumental and ambitious theoretical framework m the fieldwork tradition, Pike's (1967) 'unified theory of the structure of human behaviour', clings tenaciously to the data It chiefly explores the methods of phonology and morphology and only occasionally and cautiously reapphes them to the description of other modes of behaviour (overview in Beaugrande 1991) So the applied linguistics deriving from fieldwork linguistics has tended to
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favour sparse and sceptical theorizing with a mechanical and behavioural emphasis The 'audio-lingual' method followed these tendencies to such an extent as to senously misrepresent the fieldwork tradition in at least three ways First, its taboo on giving learners any descriptions and explanations of the target language put them in the bizarre position of fieldworkers with no training or guidance Second, it equated language learning with imprinting behavioural patterns and sequences, thereby starving out the nch and explicit cultural onentation of fieldwork And third, the method failed to appreciate the nature of the classroom itself as a culturally depnved behavioural ambience wherein nch clues about what to say and what other people mean may not be available to compensate for the sparseness of matenals and activities like pattern dnlls In all three ways, the audio-hngual method was a practice actually at vanance with the body of theory from which it was officially denved Still, fieldwork methods from phonology and phonetics have contnbuted enormously to the teaching and learning of pronunciationsurely the most successful application of linguistics so far (see now Dalton and Seidlhofer 1994) Morphology and syntax made a smaller impact, partly just because fieldwork had concentrated on lesser-known languages that are seldom taught as second languages in schools, and partly because many teachers kept on relying upon the numerous traditional grammars devoted to the languages that are frequently taught What still remains to be done for the application offieldworklinguistics is to supply a detailed theoretical and empincal account of the ways in which fieldwork both resembles and differs from ordinary language learning and from organizing language matenals for the classroom As suggested in section 2, the issues are complex and have not received the consideration their potential importance would ment, mainly due to the practical difficulty imposed by the conditions for explonng themfor example, the labour of doing large-scale case studies of cultural immersion among different groups of teachers or learners Future work may profitably be invested here
4 CAN HOMEWORK LINGUISTICS DO THE JOB?
Now, what are the prospects for the application of homework linguistics? Its mainstream branch has professed a lively interest in language acquisition, but has pointedly used this term in a rather different sense from language learning A detailed analysis of their own theoretical discourse has led me to conclude that this interest and this difference were chiefly rhetoncal moves in their campaign to gain control over theoretical linguistics while discrediting fieldwork Chomsky's followers evidently believe that they have accomplished this high-minded goal Newmeyer's (1980 249f) Linguistic Theory m America presented Chomsky's as 'the world's pnncipal linguistic theory', for which 'no viable alternative exists', 'the vast majonty' of linguists 'who take theory senously4 acknowledge (explicitly or implicitly) their adoption of Chomsky's view of language' However, this self-confidence of the Chomskyan school has
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grown increasingly brittle, nurtured mainly by not reading any linguistic research outside their own circle and by not acknowledging the burgeoning body of criticism and opposition In the late 1950s, Chomsky presented himself as a rescuer at the time when fieldwork linguistics was in trouble because its stringently data-dnven methods were not transferring smoothly from phonology and morphology over to syntax (cf Beaugrande 1997) Phonemes and morphemes are theoretical units corresponding straightforwardly to practical units (sounds, word-parts, words) that are 'in' the data and can be reliably isolated by segmenting recorded utterances into the smallest pieces Syntactic rules are not 'in' the data and must be postulated or reconstructed Chomsky's transformational grammar proposed a new and seemingly rigorous and compact way to do so design a system of rules that describe sentence structures in terms of other sentence structures Such a system would be an economical way for fulfilling the ambition of linguists to provide a complete description of a language The net effects of this research, however, have in my view amply shown that no such system exists, due to one simple fact, already noted among the Prague School inaugurated by Vilem Mathesius (overviews in Beaugrande 1992, in press (a)) the formation of sentences is not determined exclusively by linguistic rules, but also by the cognitive and social constraints of contexts (Lakoff 1987; Hams 1990, and see now Halhday 1994a, Beaugrande 1997) But a whole generation of syntactic theories, including Chomsky's, continues to search in vain for such a system, and hides the stagnation and inadequacy of their projects behind an evasive rhetorical double-tracking we shall see later on, and behind a concealing thicket of impenetrable terminologies and formalisms (cf Escnbano 1993) These moves canmly cash in on the general valuation of theory over practice in modern society and especially in universities, as I mentioned at the outset Chomsky's polemical talent for 'negative campaigning' was most conspicuous in the much-deserved deconstmction (Chomsky 1959) of the behaviourist theory of language spearheaded by B F Skinner (1957), which gave no sense of how language is organized as language and not simply as 'verbal behaviour' But more crucial to his point of gaining control over theoretical linguistics was his negative campaigning against fieldwork linguists, whose methods and cultural immersion ensured that their results would not be subject to the same strictures as Skinner's vacuous extrapolations from anunal conditioning experiments (cf discussion in Beaugrande 1984) A key argument in Chomsky's campaign was that fieldwork would never attain 'the deeper and more important notions of linguistic theory', due to its 'hmitation-in-pnnciple to classification and organisation of data' (cf Beaugrande, in press (a)) there is no reason to expect that reliable operational criteria for the deeper and more important notions of linguistic theory [ ] will ever be forthcoming [because] knowledge of the language, like most, facts of interest and importance, is neither presented for direct observation nor extractable from data by inducUve procedures of any known sort (Chomsky 1965 18f)
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This campaign was capped by the straightfaced declaration that the inadequacy of the 'grammars for natural languages' based on fieldwork had 'been established beyond any reasonable doubt' (ibid 67) Moreover, Chomsky (1957' 52f) judged it 'unreasonable to demand of linguistic theory' that it stipulate a discovery procedure 'for actually constructing the grammar, given a corpus of utterances'just what his own theory obviously could not do 'How one might have arrived at the grammar' would not be 'relevant to the programme of research', 'one may arrive at a grammar by intuition, guesswork, all sorts of partial methodological hints, reliance on past experience, etc ' (ibid 56)the most convenient 'homework' approach imaginable He promised that 'once we have disclaimed any intention offindinga practical discovery procedure', 'certain problems that have been the subject of intense methodological controversy simply do not arise' (ibid 56) In the event, however, methodological controversies got more violent because linguists no longer needed to pass through a phase of heavily data-driven and practice-dnven discovery before building a theory, so Chomsky was soon embroiled in disputes over notions of linguistic theory with other linguists, some of whom had been his own pupils and had picked up their polemical talents from watching him Naturally, the fieldwork linguists were stunned by such accusations and caught wholly unprepared They had never questioned for a moment that linguistic theory must supply discovery procedures, and had devoted their lives to developing and improving them In their eyes, the adequacy of a grammar or any other description depended directly on 'how one arrived at it'not just from 'intuition, guess-work, and hints', but from painstaking analysis of a corpus of recorded authentic data Any fieldworker would find it patently absurd to declare that we can establish the inadequacy of not just one grammar but of a whole class of grammars at one stroke, and that this class is precisely the grammars extracted through discovery procedures' The context of this campaign is vital for understanding Chomsky's professed interest in language acquisition If you roundly reject fieldwork as a base for theory, and if fieldwork resembles ordinary language learning in at least some ways, then you naturally want to invent a new theory of language learning that looks as little as possible like fieldwork and as much as possible like homeworkand that is precisely what Chomskyan linguistics did Cleared of its technical verbiage, their theory says that the acquisition of language is not primarily data-driven or practice-driven Instead, the child is cast as a miniature homework linguist and starts off with a 'universal theory of language' and specifies the theory for the native language by hypothesizing from some abstract aspects of what Chomsky calls 'primary data'what the child hears people actually say To clinch this idea, Chomsky (1965 201) pointedly devalued primary data for being, 'from the point of view of the theory he [the child] constructs, deficient in various respects', 'much of the actual speech consists of fragments and deviant expressions' Such data would therefore be inadequate for a child learning the language just as much as for a fieldworker constructing a theory of language Only if the child had a prior theory of
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language could acquisition proceed, and since no theory could be extracted from data before acquisition starts, the theory would have to be innate Each rhetorical step in this line of reasoning compelled a further step, so that the initial resolve to undercut fieldwork linguists launched a circular chain of further claims, each of which was to be made plausible by the others and not by methodical 'discovery procedures' The gap between what real native speakers say or what real children learning the language do versus what the theory said or implied about them was continually blurred by rhetorical double-tracking to combine each theoretical construct with a conveniently commonsense (mis)mterpretation The very term 'generate', technically meaning 'assign a structural description to* a sentence that has already been produced (usually invented by the linguist), invites us to think of the human acts or processes of 'producing* the sentence, Chomsky warned us not to, but he himself pictured the grammar 'producing' language or 'strings' or 'sentences', referred to 'the process of generating sentences', and equated 'generating' with 'creating' (1957 48, llf, 13, 18, 30f, 38, 45f, 103,35, 1965 135f) Of special importance for the discussion here is the double-tracking by means of 'systematic ambiguities' that seem innocuous but in fact directly incorporated the reality and validity of the linguist's account into the discourse of theoretical linguistics Using the term 'grammar' with a systematic ambiguity to refer, first, to the native speaker's internally represented 'theory of his language' and, second, to the linguist's account of this, we can say that the child has developed and internally represented a generative grammar in the sense described [ ] we are again using the term 'theory' in this case 'theory of language' rather than 'theory of a particular language'with a systematic ambiguity to refer both to the child's innate predisposition to learn a language of a certain type and to the linguist's account of this (Chomsky 1965 25) Thus, just to use the terms 'grammar' and 'theory of language' in his sense would seem to automatically equate his account with what it proposed to account for, and to assert that the native speaker does indeed hold an 'internally represented theory of his language', and that the child does indeed have an 'innate predisposition to learn a language of a certain type'assertions craftily downplayed by unobtrusive possessive constructions ('native speaker's theory', 'child's predisposition'), instead of more obtrusive subject-verb constructions ('native speaker holds a theory', 'child has a predisposition') Such discourse evades the scientific responsibility to provide empirical evidence to prove both that the linguist's account is valid, and that the 'internally represented theory of language' and the 'innate predisposition' are there in the first place to require an account Of comparable importance for our discussion is the double-tracking about 'underlying competence as a system of generative processes' (1965 4) Any interesting generative grammar will be dealing, for the most part, with mental processes that arc far beyond the level of actual or even potential consciousness Furthermore, it is quite apparent that a speaker's reports and viewpoints about his
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behaviour and competence may be in error Thus a generative grammar attempts to specify what a speaker actually knows, not what he may report about his knowledge (ibid 8)
The speaker is not aware or conscious and is thus prone to make 'statements' and 'reports' of doubtful interest and accuracy or downright 'errors' In contrast, linguists ascend to the status of exceptional human beings who are able to become aware and conscious of 'mental processes' after all, and who can ignore at will what speakers 'report' (cf Beaugrande, m press (b and c) for discussion) Technically, this rhetorical evasion was overkill, since we have already been informed that linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-hearer in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly' (ibid 3)and just try finding such a person to make 'reports' 1 It is in this rhetorical context that we can appreciate why Chomsky reanimated and reinforced the view, well established in linguistics at least since Saussure (1916), that linguistics should describe language by itself Fieldwork methods had ensured that the language was always observed in cognitive and social contexts, whence the notion of language as part of the unified system of human behaviour envisioned by Pike and cited in section 3 Because Chomsky's own theory of language gave no clue of how language relates to such contexts, he was impelled to claim, in absolute terms, that language is a separate domain or faculty of human beings The inevitable next step was to propose a theory of language acquisition also running only on languagein fact, on only those aspects of language addressed by his own theory He thus had to invent his famous language acquisition device (hereafter LAD), as a hypothetical but 'useful and suggestive framework' for posing and considering 'certain problems of linguistic theory' 'the theonst has the problem of determining the intrinsic properties of a device capable of mediating' between 'the primary data' as 'input' and the 'grammar' as 'output' (Chomsky 1965 47) For rhetorical expedience, its job was defined precisely as doing what Chomskyan homework linguistics did extracting formal rules out of sets of sentences while abstracting away from the 'deficiency' of 'primary data' (quoted above) He gave no clear notion himself of how it did the job, after all, his campaign against fieldwork linguistics had led him to dismiss the question of how a linguist 'might have arnved at the grammar', as we saw By the same token, he gave no clear notion of how a child could learn a language as a set of formal rules, witness his audaciously evasive 'instantaneous model* wherein 'successful language acquisition' happens in a single 'moment' (ibid 36) Otherwise, he would have had to specify how the LAD proceeds by building up rule after rule Doing so would have unsettled his vision of language being a formal system of rules that operate on other rules, such a system can only operate in its complete state, and is not designed to add rules but only to 'generate sentences' The alternative would be to use contexts to compensate for missing rules, just as fieldworkers do, and Chomsky's campaign precluded this
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prospect He dourly conceded that 'it would not be at all surprising' if 'normal language learning requires use of language in real-life situations', but he doubted, a bit absurdly, that 'information regarding situational context' 'plays any role in how language is acquired, once the mechanism is put to work and the task of language learning is undertaken by the child' (ibid 33)5 For good measure, the acquiring of 'grammar' despite 'the degenerate quality and narrowly limited extent of the available data' was asserted to owe the 'striking uniformity' Chomsky believed it has to being 'independent of intelligence, motivation, and emotional state' (ibid 58) I have recalled these well-known and often-cited lines of argument in order to highlight the rhetorical double-tracking whereby Chomsky came to propagate a 'theory of language acquisition' which was expressly not a practice-dnven 'theory of language learning' His campaign depended critically on the bald assertion that data-dnven practical discovery procedures are forever cut off from the 'deeper and more important notions of linguistic theory', which he simultaneously claimed the right to identify and define, and he cynically, and rightly, expected ardent support from upcoming homework linguists who had no taste for the arduous labours of fieldwork and who were delighted to find intuition and guess-work so nicely legitimized This assertion and this claim authonzed his own school to invent 'notions of linguistic theory' in advance of data, along with a forbiddingly complicated apparatus for relating the theory to data in technical and evasive ways that are deliberately hard to pin down and challenge Further authonzation was naturally sought by means of a theory of 'language acquisition' being a similar mode of theorizing done by the child m advance of data and with a complicated apparatus furnished by geneticsthe LAD Ironically, whole branches of research psychohnguistics and second language acquisition have sprouted up, taking it as given that the LAD exists and only explonng miscellaneous claims about how it works or in which order As time passed, all these confident, untested, and largely circular claims were entrenched by constant repetition and citation and were passed on to new waves of linguists and language specialists who were not properly aware of the original rhetorical context dunng an aggressive academic campaign The claims provided the background and terminology in which further discussion were routinely earned on, like a dominant but invisible ideology that passes for reality and the natural order (cf Fairclough 1995) The participants in the discussion might then be quite unaware of how many untested theoretical claims they were taking as given when the real issue should be to subject the claims to empirical justification or practical evidence Here, theoretical linguistics has already begun to make us 'the pnsoner of our own categonsations', as Brumfit (1980 160) commented on applied linguistics Today, the onginal rhetoncal context for Chomsky's theory is rarely appreciated for what it was a campaign for building a theory while discrediting a whole class of competing theones Chomsky was strangely eager to throw out the baby with the bathwater and the bathtub as well, because he had a new
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bathtub to sell, which later became a whole series with a luxurious range of fixtures and attachments, and he had a new baby to put in too, one equipped with the LAD at no extra cost It seemed like a good-news, bad-news situation The bad news was that the 'important notions of linguistic theory' would have to be reformulated essentially from the ground up, irrespective of the impact on the careers and publishing opportunities of linguists using descriptive fieldwork approaches, who were firmly given to understand that their professional work in the 'coverage of a large mass of data' was not 'an achievement of any particular theoretical interest or importance' (Chomsky 1965 26) Furthermore language learning would have to be reconceptuahzed as a heavily theoretical operation called 'language acquisition' and related in abstract, complicated ways to ordinary encounters with language data The good news was that you could jump right into linguistic theory without the intense labours of being trained and tested in fieldwork and of applying scrupulous analytic methods to large corpuses of authentic data, you could just invent a few sentences in your own native language and set to work inventing formal rules to assign them structural descriptions Moreover, you could jump nght into language acquisition theory without the labour of teaching anybody a language or doing large-scale longitudinal studies of language learners And best of all, your theory would be nearly immune to empirical or practical refutation because it would be encircled by protective theoretical constructions, abstractions, and idealizations founded upon double-tracking dichotomies (competence vs performance, generate vs produce, learning vs acquisition, deep structure vs surface structure, etc , etc), which all imply that, in Widdowson's (1980 166) words, 'language, like God, moves in a mysterious way and outside the range of the common man's awareness' Unfavourable evidence in primary data could easily be deflected as mere performance or 'surface structure', for which the theory could not be held accountable We might well ask here whether Chomsky's proposals even qualify as a theory, given these largely untestable factors A number of prominent linguists, including Wallace Chafe, Michael Halliday, John Sinclair, Frantisek Danes, and Ruth Wodak, hold (as I do myself) that this 'good news' has in the long run turned out to be very bad news for the field as a whole The homework linguistics of Chomsky's school has fostered an unfortunate rhetorical ambience of top-heavy, divisive theorizing and gratuitous confrontations, turning every theoretical issue of question into an occasion for vigorous sparring matches It has become unreasonably hard to take a stand on any important issue without being promptly attacked or co-opted (or both) for implying a position on endlessly disputatious topics like 'universal grammar' or 'deep structure' In such an ambience, a theory is prone to be designed chiefly as a weapon, not to descnbe or explain language as we find it in the world of real people, but to make language out to be exactly the opposite of whatever your opponent says, or (what is more to the point) whatever you allege your opponent is saying Fieldwork linguistics never claimed to be a theory of language acquisi-
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Uon, but rather a theoretical guide for discovery and description, and as such it remains unexcelled It had no great affinities for notions of linguistic theory as an end in themselves, precisely because it had to be established in the sparse and sceptical environment of 'unified science' centring on the 'hard sciences', where it was academically prudent as well as productive to stick very close to observed data Hardly had linguistics become fully established and begun to offer wellpaying jobs when a crew of self-proclaimed 'revolutionary' homeworkers appeared with the plan to ignore the significant success offieldworklinguistics in describing hundreds of previously undescnbed languages, many of them threatened with extinction, and to denounce fieldwork for being incapable of attaining a set of 'deeper and more important notions of linguistic theory' whose necessity had not been realized before and has, I submit, never been convincingly shown since then, but merely imposed by self-confident handwaving rhetoric of the type we have seen here Sadly, this campaign on behalf of chimerical and divisive 'deeper notions' has distracted many linguists, both theoretical and applied, away from the really urgent issues, such as the massive communication problems in our increasingly global, multicultural, and multilingual societies (cf Halhday 1994b, Pennycook 1994, Beaugrande 1997) We should devote our efforts to a generation of practice-dnven theories that are 'deep' and 'important' not just because they serve the rhetoric and academic interests of one cadre of theoretical linguists over the others, but because they account for the rich diversity of languages and of their connections with society and cultures, including the processes of learning to speak and learning to speak better Some of the learning is biologically prepared and genetically transmitted as innate capacities, some of it is derived from experience in real-life situations, and some of it is explicitly and consciously learned from parents, siblings, friends, teachers, and so on So humans come by their 'language competence' partly by subconscious, automatic processes, partly by conscious learning, and partly by making canny guesses about what words or people mean in the contexts where you hear or read them We can now return to the principle proposed at the outset how far a theory is applicable to practice is a fairly good measure of how far the theory is valid By this standard, far from being an explanation or account of language and language acquisition, Chomskyan theory is a static enclosure of circular technical constructs created chiefly to subserve academic politics If we ask, 'can this homework linguistics do the job for language teaching?', the answer is likely to be according to this linguistics, there is no job, because acquisition is in the competent hands (or cogs) of the LAD that always works and in the same way for everybody, serenely undaunted by the woeful 'deficiencies', 'fragments, and deviant expressions' in actual speech Perhaps our job would be to make language learners conscious of these deficiencies in the hope of getting them to match up better their performance with their competence, and their 'surface structure* with their 'deep structure'which would be, under more technical terms, essentially what authontanan traditional grammar proposed to do But
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how we would go about it is totally unclear insofar as we can't get a good look at competence, and deep structure, because they have always been abstract idealizations belonging to the 'ideal speaker-hearer in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly'and whom we'll never get to see or hear, not even in the most elite departments of linguistics and philosophy
5 A CASE STUDY THE DISCOURSE O F STEPHEN KRASHEN
Interestingly, the theory of Stephen Krashen proposed to be an application of this homework linguistics after all He claims his theories 'support Chomsky's position, and extend it to second-language acquisition' (1985 3 ) 6 Finding such an enterprise paradoxical and anticipating some interesting rhetoric, I have earned out a discourse analysis of his 1985 volume The Input Hypothesis Issues and Implications He certainly does follow Chomsky by mounting a campaign to gain control by means of complicated theoretical arguments, albeit this time over applied linguistics His discourse is a bit less self-confident than that of Chomsky's school (e g Newmeyer's cited m section 4) about whether he has achieved this To be sure, he equates 'current second-language acquisition theory' with his own work (e g 1985 100) But the extreme difficulties of extending Chomsky's position this way have rendered him a bit more cautious than Chomsky's school and have impelled him to read linguistic research outside his own circle in his continuing campaign to show that it either supports his theory or at least doesn't contradict itwhich he likes to suggest is much the same thing Like Chomsky, Krashen has launched his campaign by telling people practitioners and teachers this time rather than fieldworkersthat what they have been doing all along is at odds with linguistic theory, l e with Chomsky's Doing so capitalizes on Chomsky's own prestige on the canny (and justified) assumption that many practitioners have no clear idea of what Chomsky's theory really says (after all, they were never supposed to) The ones who do, like myself, won't be impressed of course, but the number of those who don't, or who don't feel competent to challenge Chomsky, might suffice to muster a substantial following, as Krashen apparently has Just as Chomsky presented himself as a rescuer when fieldwork linguistics was in trouble with syntax, Krashen has exploited the insecurities and uneasiness of language practitioners and teachers who had long been discontented with the otherwise sparse and sceptical applied linguistics and were thus eager for change They were on the rebound, as it were, from various theories and methods whose results had proven disappointing Krashen easily profited from Chomsky's well-orchestrated rebuke of Skinner's behaviourism, and on the growing perception that its widely accepted audio-hngual method had not fulfilled its promises The newer theories that had been put forth in the interim had not managed to achieve an equally wide acceptance or to provide a new consensual framework the 'cognitive code-learning theory' because the notion of 'language as code' is not very helpful or well-defined, and the communicative
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approach because so much of both theoretical and applied linguistics had not yet dealt with communication in realistic and productive ways (cf Beaugrande, in press (b)) Krashen fervently adopted Chomsky's (1965 47) language acquisition device, which, as I noted, had originally been proposed as a hypothetical framework during Chomsky's plan to invent a theory of language learning that looks like homework linguistics The frank resemblance between what the child was claimed to do and what the homework linguist actually does do was handled not as a self-serving cagey move to replace the child with an idealization and replace the hard labour of studying real children with glib speculation based on what linguists do, but as a senous argument for the validity of Chomsky's theory Besides, hearing that children will automatically and inevitably learn their language, thanks to the stalwart LAD, has immense appeal for pedagogues and teachers, even when, for reasons I hope to have made clear, they are not told how the device does the job This strategic hypothetical device has gradually moved out of its original rhetorical context of theoretical argument and switched from a 'hypothetical framework' to a separate 'mental organ'. This odd term would seem to designate a piece of the human anatomyKrashen (1982 96) at one point portrayed the LAD as 'a part of the bram'but one that cannot even be detected, let alone observed It is not a physical organ, yet is claimed to resemble one by only 'functioning automatically* and 'subconsciously' (Krashen 1985 4, 100, citing Chomsky 1975) So learners could never even become aware of this 'organ', let alone control it, any more than 'certain cells in the embryo choose''to become an arm'(Chomsky 1975 71) Equally expedient was the implication of 'uniformity in the language faculty', such that 'the language acquisition device operates in fundamentally the same way in everyone' (Krashen 1985 3) This proviso authorizes you to disregard variations in personality, social status and so on, about which Chomsky's 'theory' had nothing to say anyway The LAD became an anchor-point for Krashen's own static enclosure of technical constructs, these too, like Chomsky's, evasively disconnected from real data These constructs too prop each other up in circular waysfor example language must be acquired by the LAD, the LAD must exist because language gets acquired Just in one book, it is easy to spot Krashen's blunt rhetorical strategy of promoting his theseshe calls them 'hypotheses', though they are not tested but merely imposed by his own rhetoric, again like Chomskysimply by repeating them like mantras, especially when he wants to reject an alternative account As for Chomsky's proposals, we might well ask here whether Krashen's even qualify as a theory, given the obstacles to testing it, surely brute repetition cannot replace empirical validation In sum, Krashen has transposed, with minor modifications, Chomsky's theory of first language acquisition over into a theory of second language acquisition composed largely of hypothetical processes and undetectable operations and programmatically disconnected from the ordinary observable
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realities of deliberate language learning The most breathtaking property of this brave new world (that has strange people in it) is its resolute disconnection from the ordinary world of teachers and learners To 'support Chomsky's position* and his own, Krashen is prepared to declare acquisition completely independent of learning So Krashen presents a theory which, at one and the same time, purports to explain the results of practices, 1 e the fact that humans do various activities and at some point have learned a language, while expressly denying that the usual practices can have led to that result Such a theory, for which I know of no parallel in any science, requires a divisive, confrontational rhetoric of affirmation (my way is how acquisition does and must proceed) plus exclusion (their way is how acquisition does not and cannot proceed) Applied to language pedagogy, the theory views acquisition as an 'automatic' and 'subconscious' outcome serenely indifferent to what teachers and learners are 'consciously' doing Like Chomsky, Krashen equates the acquisition of language with the acquisition of grammar rules, and competence with the person's set of acquired rules He also invokes a 'natural order' prescribed by Mother Nature herself and presumably programmed into the 'mental organ' of the LAD, where we will never get a good look at it 'We progress along the natural order' by 'understanding input that contains structure at our next "stage"structures that are a bit beyond our current level of competence' (2) Since the child can't know what rules are yet to be acquired, this order must somehow be managed by the LAD, yet, if so, it would apparently have the same order for all languages, because the LAD can acquire any one of them7 That implication seems highly suspicious, the more so when Krashen defines the natural order in terms of 'structures' and avows that 'natural orders have been found' for several languages that were 'investigated' (2, 20) Actually, these findings bear only on the 'acquisition' of certain morphemes (cf Gregg 1984, White 1987), and not on the rest of the grammar, and even less on lexicon or vocabulary At all events, a damaging contradiction impends competence is the human ability to understand language, yet humans somehow proceed by understanding things beyond their competenceunless competence is defined more evasively not as the ability to understand but as an entity merely 'underlying' that ability8 But, as with Chomsky, we may detect some rhetorical doubletracking here to combine a theoretical construct with a conveniently commonsense (mis)interpretation, namely the ordinary sense in which a real person who has learned a second language would be judged 'competent' to actively speak it and not just, say, to passively get the gist of other people's speech A problem arises insofar as the theoretical construct of competence, being a system of formal rules, is deterministic, it could not allow for (or 'underlie') the understanding of structures for which no rules have been 'acquired', except by analogy to those it has 9 Kr ash en's solution is to modify Chomsky's denial, cited in section 4, that use of language in real-life situations 'plays any role in how language is acquired' 'we are able to understand language containing unacquired grammar with the help of context, which includes extra-linguistic
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information, our knowledge of the world, and previously acquired linguistic competence' (2) Significantly, Krashen invokes 'evidence' that the natural order is 'independent of the order in which rules are taught in language classes' (1) So 'the language teacher need not attempt deliberately to teach the next structure along the natural orderit will be provided in just the right quantities and automatically reviewed if the student receives a sufficient amount of comprehensible input' (2) I do not see how one structure could be 'provided in quantities', perhaps Krashen means it will be exemplified by quantities of input But if so, the quantities could hardly be called 'just right', seeing that he nowhere gives us measures of quantity and generally just implies the more the better At all events, Krashen roundly avows, in magisterial tones reminiscent of Chomsky's rhetoric about the 'deeper and more important notions of linguistic theory', that the role of comprehensible input is 'the fundamental principle in secondlanguage acquisition' and therefore 'the most important part of the theory of second-language acquisition' (vn, 3) His Input Hypothesis states that humans acquire language in only one 'amazingly simple way''by understanding messages',' or 'by receiving comprehensible input' (vn, 2) He sells thus idea with a grandly confident promise to the extent his Input Hypothesis is applied, 'to that extent will our language programmes be more productive and efficient for our students and easier and more pleasant for teachers' (vui) Despite objections made on practical grounds, 'the theory promises much more successful language acquisition in the classroom, both in fluency and accuracy, and is far easier to apply than any of the alternatives' (54) Stated in these 'amazingly simple* terms, what Krashen offers is not a hypothesis at all but an incontestable truism (cf Gregg 1984) Of course people must' have input in order to learn, otherwise they would be cut off from the outside world And of course the input must be comprehensible, what is incomprehensible would not be input at all except in the technical or mechanical sense, in communications engineering, that a system can receive an input of mere 'noise' How then can Krashen claim that comprehensible input is 'the one essential ingredient' that 'has escaped us all these years' (n)? The answer would seem to be that comprehensible input has a more technical and evasive meaning not so much the messages you do understand in practice, as the structures you can understand in theory by virtue of your competence, l e your set of-'acquired rules' This account brings back the same problem of a deterministic competence that would rule out learning in principle if you could only comprehend what is already comprehensible So, as we saw, Krashen pnmly makes allowance for a narrow margin where extra-linguistic information from 'context' and 'knowledge of the world' enables people to 'understand language containing unacquired grammar' But he unwisely retains the stringent restriction that this margin can absorb only a 'rule' that is *i + 1*, i e next m line within the natural order (39) Unwise because he might be asked to say just
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what the natural order is and not just that 'natural orders have been found' and that the 'natural order is independent of teaching order' Yet Krashen is so intent on establishing his theory over all others that he feels impelled to fend off any prospect of 'beating the natural order' whereby 'any rule can be acquired at any time* (41) He does so by boldly denying that learning can become acquisition, lest there be 'two paths to acquisition, one way via comprehensible input, and another via conscious rules' Here, Krashen's self-centred exclusion of rival theories animates his rhetoric to create an unbridgeable split between conscious learning versus unconscious acquisition In a stern warning, any approach assuming the correctness of the 'learning becomes acquisition1 view is accused of 'creating an impossible situation for teacher and student, not only do we have to teach and learn all the rules of grammar, we must also teach and learn the subtle and numerous rules that relate language functions and grammatical rules' (55) 'If sentencelevel grammar is too difficult and complex to teach and learn, which it is, adding sociohnguistic rules to the students' burden can only make the situation worse In reality, many of these rules are acquired, both in the language classroom and in the real world Our responsibility in language teaching is only to put the student in such a position that he can continue to acquire such rules outside the language class' (55f) The rhetorical work achieved by these discourse moves is further animated by the prospect that Chomsky's own theory projects a view of sentence-level grammar that really is far too 'difficult and complex to teach and learn'a problem that probably helped compel him to propose the LAD in the first place, as I suggested in section 4 Also, Chomsky's theory is notoriously shy on 'rules that relate to language functions', and even more on sociohnguistic rules So the major gaps in Chomsky's theory become for Krashen the issues that should not or cannot be taught, and teachers are warned to fear and shun them or suffer 'impossible' consequences The warning both plays on teachers' present insecurities and purports to explain why the teaching of rules has not done so well in the past I have already stated what I submit is the real reason much of language use is simply not governed by linguistic rules at all but by strategies for fitting utterances to contexts and to cognitive and social constraints Besides, 'providing more contextualised practice of grammatical rules' and 'teaching sociohnguistic rules' are hallmarks of the communicative approach, Krashen's main and strongest nval upon which he visits the unintentionally comic dismissal that it does not 'fit the theory' (55), whereas this theory was of course designed such that it would not fit the communicative approach In real practice, though, good teachers frequently do provide functional and sociohnguistic information, though they may well not call it by those terms, for example, whenever they indicate that a certain expression is 'colloquial', 'slang', 'respectful', 'old-fashioned', and so on Since neither Chomsky's nor his own theory takes account of all that, Krashen advises teachers to leave it all to 'the real world' and to teach only what is 'necessary to avoid truly insulting and
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impolite behaviour' (56) Evidently, the lesser penis of seeming nosy, quaint, foolish, snobbish, and so on, would be matters for students to learn the hard way, out on their own Yet another self-centred rhetorical exclusion is performed against the 'output hypothesis' he ascribes to 'communicative theories of acquisition' (35, 55), his leading nval There, 'competence develops via output practice in communicative situations Specifically, the performer acquires rules by "trying them out" in communicative situations when he experiences communicative success, his hypothesis about the rule is confirmed, if this happens often enough, the rule is acquired' The output hypothesis is made into an obvious straw man a flat denial that input alone can ever do the job and that 'input-type teaching methods' can have any success (36) This straw man 'predicts that language acquisition is impossible via listening alone, that radio and television are always useless, that acquisition via subject-matter teaching will occur only when the student talks, and that reading is never helpful' (35f, I a , italics added) Krashen does hedge, but only a little a 'denial of the Output Hypothesis is not a denial that language acquisition involves hypothesis-testing This hypothesis-testing, however, according to the Input Hypothesis, takes place on a subconscious level In addition, it does not require production, nor does it involve communicative success' (36) Moreover, he does not deny that 'the performer's own output can serve as comprehensible input to his own language acquisition device Even if rules are consciously learned by the performer, if he uses them correctly, he conceivably understands the message he conveys [I cannot conceive how the 'performer' could be said not to 'understand the message''] and thus provides himself with comprehensible input containing a structure he had not yet acquired ' But here too, 'the performer's own output will "count" as input for language acquisition only if the structures involved happen to be at the acquirer's current I + 1' These predictable hedges enable Krashen to steer clear of a genuine compromise by making modest expropriations from output strictly on his own terms- by emphasizing the 'subconscious' activities over 'production' and 'communicative success', and by circuitously interpreting output as input Compare also his stark opposition 'the crucial element that peer interaction provides' 'is not output practice but low-filter comprehensible input' (66), we shall examine his 'filters' in a moment Self-centred rhetorical exclusion wins out once again, albeit less openly, when theory and practice get placed in opposition. 'Much of the difficulty we experience in language education comes from our efforts' to 'develop speaking skills via speaking practice', and to 'develop grammatical accuracy via grammar drill and error correction, this tendency is encouraged when we use tests that require and focus on output and grammatical accuracy' (92). Why attention to output must produce a 'focus on grammatical accuracy' is not explained, learners can surely focus just as well on its 'communicative success', another factor Krashen has uncompromisingly rejected, as we saw (cf Widdowson 1990 21) In an afterthought unobtrusively placed in a fine-print footnote at the end of the book, he concedes he 'does not mean that output
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practice should be avoided, some practice in producing language may help the student gain confidence, and in the case of wnting may help the student develop an efficient composing process' (93) But his 'theory predicts that a programme emphasizing only output will not be effective, even if the students' goals are only wnting or speaking, without comprehension' (91) Of course, only a tiny handful of radically behaviounst programmes ever proposed to disconnect output from comprehension in order to emphasize pure conditioning, once more, Krashen unfairly overstates nval positions to make them obviously untenable Taken together, all these rhetoncal exclusions make ordinary language learning seem both hornbly difficult and rather irrelevant to what Krashen calls language acquisition Apparently, we should just regale our 'acquirers, no longer calling them "learners'" and now viewing them as 'humanoid receptacles in a maximum state of receptivity' (Widdowson 1990 21), with torrents of comprehensible input and let the LAD do its job We might even conclude that 'matenals, lesson plans, etc are not necessary', and Krashen calmly tells us that 'theoretically, this is so' (55)a stupefying move if you do not know that he is building up a sales pitch for his own favoured method No one seems to notice here, and Krashen would be crazy to say so, that, by the same logic, his theory also predicts that we couldfireteachers and replace them with automatic inputproviding devices like radios and televisions, or with naive native speakers brought in off the streets of foreign cities, who would work for low wages and would require no expensive training in pedagogical methods he has declared to be all wrong anyway How could Krashen's theory account for the fact that many would-be acquirers do not succeed so 'automatically', even when input is comprehensible7 He cannot say that the LAD doesn't work so well for some people, he will not even allow that it works in different ways, as we saw After all, his brash good news that it uniformly and automatically must work is one of the theory's big selling points, because it predicts that we could totally eliminate failure So he has to introduce some additional mechanisms that intervene between the LAD plus competence versus the outside world where real learners do real things His proposals have vaned in the past, in our discourse sample, he has three mechanisms, one on the input side and two on the output side The imbalance of one against two is an interesting feature, as we shall see On the input side, Krashen postulates a filter that can prevent some comprehensible input from getting in to the LAD, incomprehensible input needs no filter because it couldn't get in anyway (This design does not allow the possibility that input might be noticed but not comprehended until a later time and then acquired, as I have observed in my own learning of languages, especially using wntten matenals) He builds in, on the ground floor of his theory, 'the Affective Filter Hypothesis' stating that 'comprehensible input is necessary for acquisition, but it is not sufficient, the acquirer needs to be "open" to the input' (3, I a) The affective filter is a mental block that prevents acquirers from fully utilizing comprehensible input for language acquisition
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When it is "up", the acquirer may understand what he hears and reads, but the input will not reach the LAD This occurs when the acquirer is unmotivated, lacking in self-confidence, or anxious, when he is "on the defensive", when he considers the language class to be a place where his weaknesses will be revealed The filter is "down" when the acquirer is not concerned with the possibility of failure in language acquisition and when he considers himself to be a potential member of the group' I have postponed mentioning this main hypothesis until a point where we can better see Krashen's rhetorical motives for needing it He cannot simply deny, in the face of practice, that language learners can and do attain widely varying degrees of success and failure, yet Chomsky's idealized theory making uniform competence be the 'automatic output' of the LAD predicts they should all do much the same, and this uniformity is taken over by Krashen too, as I noted Nor can Krashen allow for such prune factors as varying degrees of consciousness attention or varying amounts of deliberate practice in giving output, because his self-centred rhetorical exclusions deny the relevance of all these factors in principle, as we have seen So he constructs hypotheses that contribute blocking factors that are not defined in terms of language and especially not in terms of Chomsky's theorythey are plainly 'outside the language organ' They are performance factors, although they are not actually among the ones cited in Chomsky's (1965 3) Aspects model, namely 'memory Limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic)' For Chomsky (1965 4), such factors affect output in natural speech, producing 'false starts, deviations from rules, changes of plan in midcourse, and so on' But he did not, indeed dared not, imply that such factors materially affect input while 'the child learning the language' is 'determining from the data of performance the underlying system of rules' (1965 4) Instead (as quoted in section 4), he stressed the robustness of the process whereby 'children acquire first or second languages quite successfully', even when 'actual speech consists of fragments and deviant expressions' Moreover (again as quoted above), Chomsky salvaged the 'striking uniformity of the resulting grammars' by declaring them 'independent of intelligence, motivation, and emotional state' (1965 58)the latter two being factors Krashen now invokes as major determiners of acquisition In effect, Chomsky's theory had saddled Krashen's with a LAD that is just too robust to be seriously marketed among experienced practitioners Since the robustness is a big selling point that cannot be sacrificed, Krashen can only adduce a set of exclusionary performancebased constraints and 'filters' to exonerate the LAD for not doing in practice what the theory says it should Empirical research on cognition hasfirmlyestablished that both learning and performance are indeed significantly supported by motivation, self-confidence, and a sense of belonging to a group, and impeded by anxiety and defensiveness, feelings of weakness, and expectations of failure (cf surveys and references in Beaugrande 1980, 1984, 1997) But the research takes all these factors to apply to human capacities at large, and does not give them the special job of filtering
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the input to an independent 'device' or 'language organ' that would otherwise 'automatically' do perfect work The consensus is rather that processing resources are always limited, models which, like Chomsky's, ainly set aside factors like 'memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention', are unrealistic and unproductive, anda main point in my argument hereuntestable Krashen either does not see the danger, or hopes we will not, of admitting on principle that performance can crucially determine the development and quality of competence, seeing how critically his theory hinges on the thesis that the usual performance tactics in language classrooms definitely cannot do soonly comprehensible input can, and it is determined by competence If performance can, then communicative success and 'output practice in communicative situations' can help competence develop after allif not directly, then indirectly by building self-confidence, lowering expectations of failure, and so forth Such activities would exert not a filter effect, but a booster effect on both competence and performance But Krashen cannot allow an input booster that could justify classroom methods he has disdained So, opposite to just one filter on the input side, he installs two mechanisms on the output side a filter and a booster With a mild show of 'reluctance' (44), he adds an 'output filter hypothesis' (64) but does not capitalize it or enshrine it among the official five hypotheses of the theory (1-4) As he did when contemplating two 'language acquisition devices', one for native and one for non-native language, he coyly protests that 'the prevailing philosophy of science encourages us to use a minimum number of theoretical constructsthe "simplest" theory to account for existing data is considered to be the one closest to reality' (44), where we again have to wonder which data and reality can be meant He invokes 'largely non-experimental evidence' he finds 'nevertheless compelling' (45) The output filter is a handy 'device that attempts to explain why secondlanguage users do not always perform their competence', it also helps out by 'adding another explanation for variation in performance' (45, 64) despite the striking uniformity inherited from Chomsky's LAD Again, the LAD is exonerated 'there has been real acquisition, but affective forces' 'prevent us from showing this competence'presumably 'just those factors responsible for the input or affective filter' (46) too 'The output filter' 'prevents acquired rules from being used' (45) The output booster does get a place of honour in the main theory under the title of the Monitor Hypothesis 'stating how acquisition and learning are used in production' and how 'the output of the acquired system' is changed 'before we speak or write' (If) The Monitor is free to apply all the 'learning' and 'conscious knowledge' Krashen's rhetoric of exclusion has strictly sealed off from 'acquired competence' and 'subconscious knowledge' This Hypothesis offers yet another chance to recite his twin mantras, 'claiming' that 'acquiring via comprehensible input* and 'learning via conscious rule teaching' are two systems 'used in very different ways', and that 'learning cannot become acquisition' (22, 24) Krashen even contemplates enshnnmg his exclusions in an anatomical split 'Monitor use involves the left cerebral
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hemisphere* and gives an 'advantage' for 'listening' with the 'right ear', whereas dichotic listening with both ears 'taps only acquisition', though he admits he is on 'far shakier ground' here than with his 'non-interface' position (64f) Indeed By now, his rhetorical motives should be transparent Denying conscious control altogether would be far more audacious for giving output (which can be closely observed) than for getting input (which cannot), and would lose credibility among teachers So Krashen admits it but wants it kept tightly contained He at once imposes 'two conditions', 'both difficult to meet' l0 'the performer must be consciously concerned about correctness, and he or she must know the rule' (2), later in the book, he imposes three conditions 'focus on form, rule knowledge, and time' (22) He also stipulates that 'the gain in grammatical accuracy achieved by utilising the conscious Monitor is modest' (21) He decries 'Monitoring while performing' as a risk against which only 'very advanced linguistically sophisticated second-language performers' can 'succeed' (22) Or, to criticize 'drill and conscious attention to form' once more, he warns that 'using the conscious Monitor will only cover up the error temporarily' because (cue the mantra) 'learning does not become acquisition' (48) To further conjure the dangers of Monitor-overuse, he links his output booster with his output'filter by saying that both can impede fluency (38, 64) In place of Monitor use, he recommends lowering the output filter by 'focusing off form and on meaning' (64), though we might wonder if focusing does not entail some conscious attention Yet the split-up exclusionary design of his theory impels him to claim that the 'operation of the output filter does not affect the Monitor', and the claim causes problems for at least two reasons First, an experienced teacher knows that 'affective forces' can easily hamper second language learners from watching their grammar when they speak (give 'output') Second, Krashen's counsel for acquisition with optimal efficiency is to 'temporarily forget' you are using another language (101), and his leading piece of evidence for his output filter was a case where students were impelled to 'forget' because of 'strong feelings about the topic' (45) So the same factors that lower the filter would also affect the Monitor Indeed, 'lowering the filter1 and 'raising the Monitor' might be corresponding descriptions or explanations of the same operation if Krashen were not so determined to split them apart Trying to teach to an LAD so hemmed in with input and output gadgetry might seem a parlous venture But it is another good-news, bad-news situation quite like the one I diagnosed for Chomsky Krashen too is eager to throw out the baby with the bath water and the bathtub, because he too has a new bathtub to sell, namely a teaching method 'If the Input Hypothesis and Fundamental Principle are correct', runs his forecast, 'we may be facing a "period of adjustment"' (57f ) 'If the theory is correct, it will find its way into general education, and language students will no longer expect learning to be the central component of their language course' (58) The Natural Approach (1983) he has developed along with Tracy Terrell and others bears a label which
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was already found in the writings of Henry Sweet (1899 [reprinted 1964] 74f), who roundly rejected it for 'putting the adult in the position of an infant* and 'not allowing him to make use of his own special advantages' of'generalisation and abstraction', and 'greater powers of concentration and methodical perseverance' Now, the same label hints the method is meticulously designed to follow the 'natural order' in which Krashen claims rules must be 'acquired', as we have seen But our discourse sample gives little evidence that he has specified (or knows how to) m any detail what that order might be, and gives many arguments against teaching rules at all Without those specifications, the label is hardly more than a catchy brand-name like breakfast cereals have, and slyly implies that teachers who do not use it might be performing unnatural acts in the classroom' The design of the method is actually quite spontaneous and informal, and by no means so different from the 'communicative approach' as his exclusionary rhetoric implies 'It uses a semantic, or notional, syllabus, simply a series of topics that students will find interesting and that the teacher can discuss in a comprehensible way, supplemented by games, tasks, and other activities that provide comprehensible input' (55) Not at all surprisingly, it 'de-emphasises production' (34) (I e 'output') We are assured it has 'been compared to traditional approaches and demonstrated to be significantly and clearly better' (13) After a 'year' in this approach, 'an adult foreign-language student' 'will be able to converse comfortably with a native speaker (who adjusts his speaking a bit to the level of the student) on a variety of everyday topics, this is a great success when compared with the results of the usual second-language class' (71) 'Involvement m a topic of real interest has a chance of resulting in the students' focusing on the messagea prerequisite' 'for real language acquisition' (74) Moreover, interesting materials 'should be far easier to create* than 'bone-dry exercises' with a grammatical focus, 'there is no need to ensure that particular grammatical rules or vocabulary are practised, and initial field testing need determine only whether the materials are interesting and comprehensible for the intended student audience' (56) Unlike most of Krashen's claims, these are easily testable either the approach works as advertised or it does not But its success rate is in no way a test of the sole validity of Krashen's theory It offers no proof of fostering an 'acquisition' that does not pass through 'learning', nor of bypassing 'conscious monitoring', nor of getting around the various 'filters' to and from the LAD At most, students soon get the message that they had better not do things in class that look like conscious learning or monitoringand that message already came packaged with the audio-lingual method too'11 The success is far more likely due to creating a relaxed, non-threatening environment wherein students are not just passively regaled with 'comprehensible input', but are doing interesting activities instead of doing grammar drills, like discussing their own topics and playing 'games', where there is a deal of output practice, albeit of a more spontaneous kind I submit that interest is the real key, and that it is not a concept accounted for
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by Krashen's theory, and still less by Chomsky's Interest is not a linguistic category, and Chomsky's Aspects model (1965 3) expressly excluded it as 'irrelevant' for linguistic theory, as I have shown Moreover, since the LAD is exclusively a 'language organ' and (Chomsky says) does its work without having to rely on real-life situations, it would be incapable m principle of ranking input by interest It can only rank by comprehensibility assessed in terms of current competencea set of language rules And a great deal of comprehensible input is not at all interesting, as almost any commercial language textbook can demonstrate Nor does 'interest' appear in Krashen's opening procession of five hypotheses constituting 'an overall theory of second-language acquisition' (1-4) Instead, it blithely pops up halfway through the book 'according to the Input Hypothesis, we need simply present students with messages that are interesting and comprehensible' (55, I a ) An equally sly alteration happens to his flamboyantly heralded 'fundamental principle in second-language acquisition', at first it says that 'people acquire second languages only if they obtain comprehensible input and if their affective filters are low enough to allow the input in' (3) Later on, it stipulates that 'a language teacher is first of all someone who can present messages of interest, help make them comprehensible, and put students at ease, in short, a communicator' (57f)even though we recall Krashen castigating the rival communicative method for promulgating a 'futile approach' on the wrong assumption that 'competence, develops via output practice in communicative situations' and by achieving 'communicative success' (35, 55) These are certainly not equivalent formulations of his Hypothesis or principle, and .the discrepancies among them are essential because, if taken literally and practised radically, Krashen's theoryand not the communicative method he accuses of doing soreally does 'create an impossible situation for teacher and student' As teachers, we would have to continually assess comprehensibility without letting learners consciously monitor whether they are comprehending We would have to assess the competence level of an inaccessible LAD hedged round with filters that can visibly misrepresent its 'real acquisition' We would have to actively discourage learners from learning explicit rules by rebuking them that they are just wasting their time if not indeed hurting themselves And we would heavily emphasize input at the expense of output Only a vehemently t/nnatural Approach would even try to do all these things, and would certainly not have 'great success when compared with the results of the usual second-language class' The most flagrant restrictions and pressures would result for teaching or learning vocabulary Chomsky's Aspects model made no mention of vocabulary (except as a technical term of the theory),12 and certainly not in his account of acquisition, which is all about 'grammar' and 'syntax' And his dim view of the lexicon can be plainly seen when he said that 'the lexical entnes constitute the full set of irregularities of the language' (1965 142) The same argument implies that the acquisition of vocabulary cannot in principle be entrusted to the LAD. If not even formal linguistics attnbutes the acquisition of vocabulary to
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'unconscious rules', then the only alternative, obvious to anyone who has successfully learned a second language, is that vocabulary items must be learned in the conscious awareness that they are vocabulary items and not just some spontaneous mumbles or some mistaken pronunciations of other items So the 'comprehensibihty' of input does not automatically lead to the 'acquisition' of vocabulary items but presupposes the learning of the items, just as no LAD can supply an innate dictionary of words, even if it can supply some principles for organizing input that consists of words Krashen's theory leads to the queasy conclusion that acquired rules are constantly interactmg with learned items, in open defiance of his mantra, cited repeatedly here, that the two domains have 'no interface' And, in fact, Krashen does associate the use of second-language vocabulary with the use of the Monitor as 'a way of outperforming one's competence' and 'sounding far more advanced than the users really are' (13, 26), and he even describes teaching vocabulary as 'relying on deception' (28) But unless vocabulary has been learned, there would simply be no comprehensible input for the LAD to do its unconscious handiwork You may forget the experience of having learned the items as you become more fluent, though some cognitive theories suggest that the contexts of learning persist as robust memory traces, e g the 'encoding specificity principle' of Tulving and Thomson (1973) But somehow, consciously learned items must get into unconscious competence, most probably by a gradual lowenng of the consciousness threshold The plain conclusion is not so much that 'learning becomes acquisition' but that learning is the front end of acquisitionjust as practice is the front end of theory, at least in real life if not in linguistics When theory tries to throw out the front end of practice or to take over its roleas have the theories of both Chomsky and Krashen in their self-centred exclusionary campaignsthis can only lead to practices that are either inconsistent with the theory or else downright impossible So to the degree that the Natural Approach does succeed, it is not an application, let alone a test, of Krashen's split-up theory and provides no 'support for Chomsky's position' Instead, the whole theory has been a rhetorically driven promotional campaign contrived to do in applied linguistics just what Chomsky's theory was contrived to do in theoretical linguistics, as shown in section 4 to justify for the theorist a leading role in theorizing and to make everyone else feel pressured to cite him and adopt his terminology Chomsky has evidently been much more successful After all, his theory was expressly crafted to be untestable and irrefutable, it legitimized large savings of labour for linguists, and it brought no obligation to produce any practical results such as teaching methods Krashen's job is much harder, since he is resolved to exploit Chomsky's theory while producing a method Doing both at once is so hard that he has split his job into two jobs and hopes practitioners won't notice that his theorizing doesn't at all enforce his teaching method nor make him the chief architect of the 'period of adjustment' we would all agree we are 'facing' The zeal of Krashen the theoretician to totally exclude all other accounts and seal them off from his own puts an divisive strain on Krashen the practitioner
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Why should other practitioners flock to a theory (or to public lectures about it) implying that most of what they have been doing is irrelevant to language acquisitionin fact, as I see it (though Krashen of course does not say so), implicitly providing a rationale for a mass firing of well-trained teachers and hiring naive ones or just buying television sets and VCRs1* The chief attraction no doubt lies in the theory appearing both to explain why conventional second language teaching methods have been so disappointing, and to open up a brave new world of 'language programmes being more productive and efficient for our students and easier and more pleasant for teachers' (Notice that the 'efficiency' goes to the students, while the 'ease' and 'pleasantness' go to the teachers') The ensuing euphoria has no doubt helped to paper over the extent, shown above, to which the theory does not underwrite the practice in any but the most general and evasive terms Not surprisingly, Kr as hen's theory signally fails to meet the requirements advocated in the foregoing sections of this paper Instead of specifying the relationship between native and second-language learning, Krashen simply equates the two as twin jobs for the LAD His theory would strongly discourage the use of a metalanguage in second-language learning and the training of basic techniques for describing and discussing language as language, on the grounds that it is all too 'conscious' and fosters 'monitoring' He gives no guidance to teachers for appreciating the typical problems of learners arising naturally from the contact between the first and the second language, but remarks glibly, and a bit absurdly, that 'pedagogy does not need to help the acquirer fight off the effects of the first language1 (Krashen and Terrell 1983 41), he presumably expects the LAD and 'universal grammar' to overcome all such problems He does not reflect upon how a teacher might better be able to act as representative of the community of speakers of the second-language, 'comprehensible input' could just as well come from anybody, a principle which, as I said, secretly implies that we can largely dispense with teachers-and with teacher training, too And worst of all, this theory is silent about cultural outlooks on the language, social1 and regional contexts and varieties, and on ways for guiding how cultural contacts can meet the specific needs of second language learning Like Chomsky's 'theory' with its 'completely homogeneous speech-community', Krashen's theory projects language learning to be an unconscious process in a cultural vacuum But surely learning about other cultures and interacting with them are pnme motivations for learning a second language7
6 BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD
I hope to have shown that the application of theones taken over from theoretical linguisticswhat Widdowson (1980) calls 'linguistics applied' as compared with 'applied linguistics'has, aside from phonology and phonetics for pronunciation, been a problematic enterprise to be approached with cautious attention to terms and concepts and to their rhetorical contexts and implications The theones of fieldwork linguistics are tailored to the situation
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of the specializedfieldworker,who is a language learner with special qualifications, such theones might be extended to developing methods that give secondlanguage teachers and learners at least a modest proportion of the advantages fieldworkers enjoy (section 3) The theones of 'homework' linguistics of the Chomskyan type are tailored to the situation of fiercely competitive theoreticians who do not need to have learned any more languages than their native language, such theones frankly work at cross purposes with the development of either fieldwork methods or teaching methods (section 4) Fieldworkers would nghtly scoff at the notion that their work follows some 'natural order' genetically programmed into their LAD, instead, they proceed according to the quality and quantity of the data as it happened to be collected, depending on which persons or groups in the community are disposed to be recorded Pending much better evidence, teachers should also scoff at the notion that their learners follow some 'natural order' but that we needn't follow it in our teaching So we are back to the question of how an applicable theory might be made to order for practitioners (section 1), and how we may cease to be, in Brumfit's (1980 160) words, 'pnsoners of our own categorisations' Instead of descnbing a language in its full and finished state, as theoretical linguistics almost always has, such a theory needs to descnbe the degrees of approximation to the language that are appropriate and manageable for communication from th very earliest stages onward Here, the implications for practice seem to be somewhat radical and disorienting from the standpoint of conventional pedagogy Such a theory could specify a succession of mterlanguages that share features both of the native language and of the second language These would differ from the 'mterlanguages' as the term has usually been used (e g Selinker 1972) in having been expressly and strategically designed on a theoretical foundation rather than being spontaneously produced by individual learners or learner groups in real-life situations The charactenstics of the native language would be heavily represented in the early stages and gradually phased out over a suitable penod of time in favour of second language featuresnot in a hypothetical 'natural order* but in a demonstrably workable
order
However unorthodox this approach may sound, it might offer some significant advantages 1 It resembles the way languages are normally acquired in authentic multilingual settings both by children or adults, much more than do conventional classroom methods The strategies people naturally select when left on their own resources to do their best job are surely obvious candidates for renewed attention from a theoretical standpoint 2 All the learners could freely participate in communication, rather than restncting their contnbutions to the small handful of occasions where they feel reasonably secure of the second language vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation 3 The typical stress and anxiety expressed for instance in learner diaries would
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be considerably lessened because distinctions between 'correct' versus 'incorrect' usage would be made only to the degree that is appropriate at a particular stage The criteria of native speaker 'correctness' would only become significant in the more advanced stages We cannot predict on theoretical grounds alone how long the progression would take before we could expect learners to perform within a reasonable approximation of the performance of native speakers of the second language But I would predict that at the end of that period of tune,fluencyand self-confidence would be on the average considerably higher than what we are obtaining now, and would be much more democratically distributed among the general population of learners and not just among the modest portion that are obtaining reasonable fluency with current methods To sum up if the prospects of application were determined before the theories were built, we could expect a generation of theories that share the following features 1 The theories would be not just descriptive for current, ordinary practices but also instrumental in the development of more powerful practices 2 The theories would give higher priority to criteria of effective application than to idealized standards such as theoretical formality, rigour, or compactness 3 They would not be theories of language separated off by itself but theories of language as it is organized partly by its own criteria and partly by its use in organizing people's models of world and society 4 The role of the theoretician and the practitioner would be explicitly accounted for within the theories, stipulating under what conditions a theory or practice is related to a given language or to language as general conception, and how the theoretician and the practitioner can claim to represent a language community or its knowledge of the language 5 The cycles of theory and practice would dialectically feed back to and refine each other as the theory becomes steadily more able to specify their respective roles, and as the practice brings steadily more evidence to bear on the requirements for the applicable theory Once theory and practice each has the job of writing and rewriting a script for the other, their interaction would finally take on a systematic continuity often lacking in the past 6 The theories would be 'driven' by large corpuses of authentic data, such as the International Corpus of Learner's English (ICLE) being assembled for eight language groups and banked at the University of Louvain Such data would help us to build a series of models of the language at various stages and in various settmgs to take into account the age of the learners, their social background, their native language, their culture, and the environment in which acquisition or learning occurs 7 The theories would also be 'driven' by corpuses of case studies of people learning languages in various situations such as fieldwork linguists, Ian-
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guage teachers in training, learners in language classrooms, and work trainees learning new special-purpose languages on the job 8 The theories would seek to specify the correlations among various modalities of spoken and written language, which have traditionally been crudely divided into 'four skills' New theories will doubtless show that 'speaking', 'writing', and so on are not unified blocks of activity but subtly nuanced complexes of activities keenly sensitive to the respective practical uses they serve 9 The theories would draw together observational studies of conventional classrooms and experimental classrooms, attempting to reason back from the more successful practices toward theories that can account for them 10 The theories would indicate the position of second-language learning within the overall curriculum, especially in respect to the native-language curriculum and to those subject areas in which the second language will later be used, e g when students in South-East Asia learn English as a step toward careers in the computer industry At the start of this paper, I remarked that practice has usually preceded and determined theory, but theory has typically taken over the leading role and at times has been disconnected from practice In this respect, education and linguistics reflect the priorities of society I cannot help wondering if the low importance some 'mainstream' linguistic theories assign to practice, and the problems of domg applied linguistics at cross-purposes with theoretical linguistics have not ominously encouraged the stingy commitment of resources by governments and institutions to language pedagogy, on the assumptions that the elites who need the language will learn it anyhow by studying abroad or hiring special tutors, and that the development of genuinely new theories and methods is not likely to result from increased investment At all events, theories which sharply raise the status of practice are one indispensable prerequisite to improving public and institutional attitudes A generation of theones that can put language back into authentic cognitive and social contexts and can demonstrate the merits of multilingualism for the future well-being of our increasingly global society will also create an ambience in which theory and practice can finally be united as equals and dialectical partners in the enterprise of guiding the teaching and learning of languages
(Revised version received October 1996)
NOTES
This is a revised version of a paper presented for the 1994 AAAL and TESOL Conventions in Long Beach but informally summarized there rather than read out I am deeply indebted to Prof Barbara Seidlhofer and to Prof H G Widdowson for discussions of this topic and for carefully reading and assiduously commenting upon earlier drafts of the paper, and to three anonymous referees of this journal for their helpful advice 1 The term 'mainstream linguistics* is used here merely heunstically for conventional
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notions which have been either stated in central works and frequently cited from these or else taken for granted, and which have dominated the agendas in academics, universities, professional conferences, and so on (see my survey in Beaugrande 1991 for specific sources and quotes) Pennycook (1994 25) observes 'there has clearly been a rejection of connections between language and its contexts in much of mainstream linguistics' 1 For example 'it is often almost impossible for an Englishman to learn educated colloquial German m the country because all the Germans want to practise their English upon him' (Sweet 1899 [reprinted 1964) 76) 4 Insofar as the book directly equates 'theory' with Chomsky's, the claim is a.mere tautology, since there would be nothing else left to 'take seriously1 J He presumably meant 'language acquisition* rather than 'language learning1, but his phrase 'undertake the task1 inappropriately suggests that the child makes a'deliberate effort 6 For compact citation, I shall omit the '1985' in references to this one volume, and I also omit a reference when it is identical to the one just before it I Widdowson (1990 18) draws the same conclusion and points out that the 'evidence' actually bears'on 'consistency in accuracy' and not on 'internahzation' Conversely, Gregg (1984 97) argues that the natural order cannot be 'explained' via the LAD, but neither he nor Krashen explains how it could possibly operate without the LAD ' I am indebted to one of my reviewers for pointing out this possibility 9 This prospect was in fact entertained by the Chomskyans for a tune as a promising way to get 'semi-sentences' or 'partially well formed sentences' mto the theory, but Krashen does not pursue it in the discourse I analysed 10 Elsewhere, Krashen (1982 18) says that 'most people, even university students', need 'a real discrete-point grammar-type test to meet all three conditions for Monitor use', if so, it could not be so grave a 'risk' as he alleges II Widdowson (1990 25) notes some interesting 'similarities' between Krashen's 'theory' and behaviourism, including the 'capacities for making mischief I would add that some key terms, such as 'input', 'output', and 'affect', were also made current by behaviourism, though in more precise and operational senses than Krashen's 12 As in 'the grammatical formativcs and the category symbols' 'are selected from a fixed universal vocabulary 1 (Chomsky 1965 65f) (
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Theory and Practice in Applied Linguistics: Disconnection, Conflict, or Dialectic?

THEORY AND PRACTICE IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

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THEORY AND PRACTICE IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

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native-language and second-language learning within the same school system

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THEORY AND PRACTICE IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

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Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

THEORY AND PRACTICE IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

THEORY AND PRACTICE IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

THEORY AND PRACTICE IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

THEORY AND PRACTICE IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

THEORY AND PRACTICE IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

THEORY AND PRACTICE IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

THEORY AND PRACTICE IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

THEORY AND PRACTICE IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

THEORY AND PRACTICE rN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

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Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

THEORY AND PRACTICE rN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

THEORY AND PRACTICE IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

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THEORY AND PRACTICE IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

THEORY AND PRACTICE IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

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Downloaded from applij.oxfordjournals.org by Daniela Schamne on April 13, 2011

THEORY AND PRACTICE IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

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