Tht Teaching of English as Communication IS

language in the community in which we work. Our objectives in

English teaching will be determined by the following:
(1) The extent to which English is known in the country as a
whole. (How many ?)
(2) The ways in which it is used. (What purpose 7)
(3) The form (or forms) of the language most commonly
employed. (What kind or kinds?)
(4) The attitudes of the community towards the acquisition and
use of English. (Why learn it?)
The first problem is to acquire the information on these factors.

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The second is to apply the information in the selection of objec-
tives, content, and method in English teaching. Both are vital
initial steps in the setting up of an effective and meaningful
ESL syllabus.

The Teaching of English as

Communication
H. G. WIDDOWSON
Department of Applied Linguistic*, University of Edinburgh

WHAT I SHOULD LIKE to do in this short article is to

consider a problem in the teaching of English which has come into
particular prominence over the past few years, and to suggest a
way in which it might be resolved.
The problem is that students, and especially students in
developing countries, who have received several years of formal
English teaching, frequently remain deficient in the ability to
actually use the language, and to understand its use, in normal
communication, whether in the spoken or the written mode.
The problem has come into prominence in recent years because,
as a result of an enormous increase in educational opportunity,
large numbers of students in developing countries are entering
universities and technical institutions to take up subjects which
can only be satisfactorily studied if the students are able to read
textbooks in English efficiently. Efficient reading involves under-
standing how language operates in communication, and it is
precisely this understanding which students appear not to acquire
during their years of learning English in the secondary schools.
It seems generally to be assumed that the reason for this state
of affairs is that secondary-school teachers do not do their job
1* H. G. WIddowson

properly; they do not follow the approach to English teaching

which is taught to them in training colleges and in-service courses,
and which is embodied in the prescribed textbooks. The assump-
tion is that if only teachers could be persuaded to put this approach
into practice, then the problem would disappear. It is seldom
that the validity of the recommended approach is called into
question. What I want to suggest is that the root of the problem is
to be found, in fact, in the approach itself.
In general, we might characterize the recommended approach
as one which combines situational presentation with structural

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practice. Language items are presented in situations in the class-
room to ensure that their meaning is clear, and then practised as
formal structures by means of exercises of sufficient variety to
sustain the interest of the learner and in sufficient numbers to
establish the structures in the learner's memory. The principal
aim is to promote a knowledge of the language system, to develop
the learner's competence (to use Chomsky's terms) by means of
controlled performance. The assumption behind this approach
seems to be that learning a language is a matter of associating
the formal elements of the language system with their physical
realization, either as sounds in the air or as marks on paper.
Essentially, what is taught by this approach is the ability to
compose correct sentences.
The difficulty is that the ability to compose sentences is not the
only ability we need to communicate. Communication only takes
place when we make use of sentences to perform a variety of
different acts of an essentially social nature. Thus we do not
communicate by composing sentences, but by using sentences to
make statements of different kinds, to describe, to record, to
classify and so on, or to ask questions, make requests, give orders.
Knowing what is involved in putting sentences together correctly
is only one part of what we mean by knowing a language, and
it has very little value on its own: it has to be supplemented by a
knowledge of what sentences count as in their normal use as a
means of communicating. And I do not think that the recom-
mended approach makes adequate provision for the teaching of
this kind of knowledge.
It might be objected, however, that the contextualization of-
language items by presenting them in situational settings in the
classroom does provide for the communicative function of lan-
guage. I do not think this is so. We need to draw a careful
distinction between two different kinds of meaning. One kind of
meaning is that which language items have as elements of the
language system, and the other is that which they have when they
are actually put to use in acts of communication. Let us, for
convenience, call the first kind of meaning signification and the
The Teaching of English as Communication 17

second kind value. What I want to suggest is that the contextual-

ization of language items as represented in the approach we are
considering is directed at the teaching of signification rather than
value, and that it is for this reason that it is inadequate for the
teaching of English as communication.
The distinction I am trying to make between these two kinds
of meaning may be made clearer by an example. Let us suppose
that we wish to teach the present continuous tense. The recom-
mended approach will advise us to invent some kind of situation
to demonstrate its meaning. One such situation might consist of

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the teacher walking to the door and saying / am walking to the
door and then getting a number of pupils to do the same while
he says He is walking to the door, They are walking to the door,
and so on. Another might consist of the teacher and selected
pupils writing on the blackboard to the accompaniment of
comments like / am writing on the blackboard, He is writing on the
blackboard, and so on. In this manner, we can demonstrate what
the present continuous tense signifies and we can use the situations
to develop 'action chains' so as to show how its meaning relates
to that of other tense forms. But what kind of communicative
function do these sentences have in these situations? They are
being used to perform the act of commentary in situations in
which in normal circumstances no commentary would be called
for. Contextualization of this kind, then, does not demonstrate
how sentences of this form are appropriately used to perform the
communicative act of commentary. What is being taught is
signification, not value.
The reaction of many teachers to this observation will be to
concede that contextualization of this kind does not teach what
I have chosen to call value, but to assert that in the restricted
circumstances of the classroom, this is the only kind of meaning
that can be taught. Furthermore, they may feel that it is not
necessary to teach value anyway; that the teaching of what I
have referred to as signification provides learners with a basic
knowledge of the essentials of the language, and that it is a
simple enough matter for the learner to put this to use when it
comes to communicating. As I have already implied, it seems
to me that it is a radical mistake to suppose that a knowledge
of how sentences are put to use in communication follows
automatically from a knowledge of how sentences are composed
and what signification they have as linguistic units. Learners
have to be taught what values they may have as predictions,
qualifications, reports, descriptions, and so on. There is no simple
equation between linguistic forms and communicative functions.
Affirmative sentences, for instance, are not always used as
statements, and interrogative sentences are not always used as
IB H. G. Wlddowson

questions. One linguistic form can fulfil a variety of communica-

tive functions, and one function can be fulfilled by a variety of
linguistic forms.
What I should like to suggest is that we should consider ways
of adapting the present approach to the teaching of English so
as to incorporate the systematic teaching of communicative
value. I would propose that in the process of limitation, grading,
and presentation, we should think not only in terms of linguistic
structures and situational settings, but also in terms of com-
municative acts.

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Let us suppose, for example, that we wish to produce an
English course for science students. Instead of selecting the
language to be taught by reference to the frequency of linguistic
forms like the universal present tense and the passive in scientific
discourse, we might make a selection of those communicative
acts which the scientist must of necessity most commonly perform:
definition, classification, generalization, deduction, and so on.
When grading, we might consider ordering such acts according
to the manner in which they normally combine to form larger
communicative units: thus, for example, we might introduce the
generalization before the observation since the latter serves as an
illustration of the former, and they combine to form a very
common unit of communication in scientific discourse. For
example:
1. Metals expand when heated.
2. Railway lines get longer in hot weather.
3. Metals expand when heated. Railway lines, for example, get
longer in hot weather.
The advantage of this kind of grading is that it quite naturally
leads the learner beyond the sentence into increasingly larger
stretches of discourse as one communicative act combines with
another.
In presentation, we can make appeal to the kind of cognitive
process which learners as students of science must develop anyway.
Thus, for example, the value of certain sentences might be indicated
by combining them into syllogisms like the following:
1. Metals expand when heated. 2. Iron is a metal.
3. Therefore iron expands when heated.
The difference between the teaching of value and the teaching
of signification becomes clear when we compare the syllogism
with action-chain sequences like the following:
1. I am going to write on the blackboard.
2. I am writing on the blackboard.
3. / have written on the blackboard.
 The Saint-Cloud Method: What It Can and Cannot Achieve 19

Whereas the action-chain sequence relates sentence forms which

do not combine to create a communicative unit, the syllogism
represents a way of using language to perform the act of deductive
reasoning. The syllogism is a particularly appropriate presenta-
tion device for the teaching of English to students of science since
it reveals the interrelationship between the subject and the
language which is associated with it. One of the advantages of
presenting language items by focussing on their communicative
value is that the relevance of the language to the subject is more
immediately apparent.

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It would, of course, be a mistake to devote attention exclusively
to communicative acts in the preparation and presentation of
language-teaching materials. In the teaching of language, one
has continually to make compromises and to adjust one's
approach to the requirements of students and the exigencies of the
teaching situation. It would be wrong to be dogmatic. All I wish
to suggest in this article is that some adjustment to the approach
generally recommended at present is needed in that it appears
not to be adequate in its present form: it does not seem to provide
for the teaching of the knowledge of how English is used to
communicate. The suggestions I have put forward as to how this
inadequacy might be made up for are only tentative and obviously
need to be explored further before their validity can be assessed.
At the same time, the problem which they bear upon urgently
needs to be solved, and it may be that a shift in orientation from
the formal to the communicative properties of language might
lead us some way towards its solution.

The Saint-Cloud Method: What it

Can and Cannot Achieve
ANDRE CUYER

IT SOUNDS FAIR to claim that Saint-Cloud students will

be able to speak and understand the spoken language faster than
those taught by conventional methods. However, even this
seemingly logical assumption happens to be a subject for contro-
versy, at least as far as comprehension is concerned. Very elaborate
comparative studies of results obtained in French after a year
and a half by two parallel groups of seventh graders twelve and