The Language Teacher
November 2001

Future History of the Theory-Practice Relationship

Marshall R. Childs

Katoh Lynn College



An ideal theory-practice relationship would be like what happens in some fields of medicine, say pediatric medicine. The point of end use in such a relationship is clinical practice, where the doctor meets the patient and strives to give the best possible care. But the clinical practitioner is not alone; he or she is backed by an extensive cast of researchers. By reason of training in a common body of knowledge and a variety of methods, practitioners and researchers can talk to each other in more or less the same language. And, best of all, useful information flows both ways -- from practitioner to researcher and from researcher to practitioner, if, indeed, they are not the same person.

In language learning, such an ideal theory-practice relationship has not been the case. There are several reasons for this. Many of the conditions that are true of medicine are not true of language learning. You can spot them in the previous paragraph. Language teachers are often self-taught and do not generally consider themselves backed by an extensive cast of researchers. Teachers and researchers have had little in the way of a common body of knowledge or of methods, and there has been little useful communication between teachers and researchers (Ellis, 1997).

Help is on the way, however. Certain rigidities in theory and methods are giving way to broader understandings. And researchers and teachers are beginning to find common grounds for mutually productive communication. We may expect that the target population -- language learners -- will begin to feel, to a greater extent than previously, that they are submitting themselves to the best of informed care.

Phase shifts in thinking

There are two primary changes in the traditional ways of thinking. First, understanding of the human mind is moving away from the metaphor of stored-program logic. Second, there is a widening of the range of knowledge accepted as relevant to language learning and teaching.

Since the 1950s, the stored-program metaphor has underlain studies of language in the mind. Chomsky's (1957) manifesto asserted the value of analyzing linguistic processing as a series of logical steps like those of a computer (although Chomsky said himself that logical processing wasn't the whole story, just the part that lent itself to the best analytical tools). Perhaps the full flowering of the stored-program approach is to be found in works like that of Levelt (1989), which depicts language processing in large diagrams with boxes and arrows -- marvelous confections, but of little use; when you turn the crank, they don't go.

The best alternatives to stored-program logic are to be found in the maturing fields of dynamic systems analysis and chaos theory. These and related approaches view mental functions as more analogous to weather than to computer programs. It is difficult to offer references in this fast-growing area, but two important applications to language processing are Elman (1995) and N. C. Ellis (1996), particularly Ellis's rejection of the Universal Grammar idea that grammar is innate: "I am sufficiently agnostic not to acknowledge the last possibility until it has been shown that distributional, prosodic, and semantic sources of information are clearly insufficient to cue syntactic class" (p. 117). The general drift is toward the view that whatever goes on is a flow, and that perceived structures such as grammar, are patterns ("attractors" in chaos theory) of fluid movement.

The effect on teaching is to change from a focus on language as rules to a focus on developing conscious and unconscious skills. Practices that good teachers have known all along were beneficial are at last justified in theory. Memorizing points about language is of limited value; meaningful participation within a language is valuable, the more the better. The new insights heighten the roles of phonology and some kinds of repetition.

The second change in traditional ways of thinking is the enlarging of the number of disciplines and methods of analysis that are considered acceptable in analyzing how we do language. Now, fields such as neuropsychology, anthropology, and psychiatry, which formerly stood beyond the pale of politely received theory, are accepted as relevant and useful. An emerging style of professional scientific reporting is making results available to an educated audience that no longer must spend a lifetime mastering each detailed discipline (Brockman, 1995).

Now, too, methods of analysis such as clinical observation and computer modeling are taking their place alongside the familiar parametric statistics of the educational researcher and the growing practices of case studies, participant observation, and cooperative learning. The fruits of the new analytical attitude are already evident in results bearing on such matters as the optimal time for language learning and efficient ways of organizing language learning in schools (Childs, 2001).

An interesting example of the confrontation of old and new methods occurred in studies of extraordinary language-learning ability associated with a rare but favorable development of the brain. Obler (1989) discussed one such case, that of "CJ," an American raised in a monolingual environment who learned several languages easily, with the result that at age 29 he possessed native-like fluency in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic. Humes-Bartlo (1989) followed with a study of 71 Spanish-speaking New York City school children who were learning English, comparing the grouping of children into fast- and slow-learner categories with some "Geschwind-Galaburda factors," such as allergies and left-handedness, that sometimes accompany exceptional language-learning ability. She reported only grouped data, finding no overall correlation. Obler (1993) later commented that Humes-Bartlo had "found a high incidence of the Geschwind-Galaburda factors in the single most exceptional second-language-learning child," but treated the case as a statistical outlier. One imagines that if Humes-Bartlo approached the problem now, 12 years later, she would drop her parametric approach and clinically study the daylights out of that one child.

Practical Linguistics

All during the last 50 years there has been an undercurrent of interest in process approaches to what Lee (1996) called "languaging." Nowadays, however, we see ever-more-insistent proposals for a phase shift. Generally the idea is to bring theorists and practitioners together in an endeavor that embraces new ways of working. To create a symbiosis of practical affairs and theory, van Lier (1994) proposed "educational linguistics," which "uses participation in the practical affairs of the field to fuel theory, which then is put back into the service of progress of practical affairs, and so on, in reflexive ways." Lieberman (2000), in synthesizing turn-of-the-century knowledge of how the brain processes language and meaning, proposed the new field of "biological linguistics," by which he meant to include cooperative work among linguists, cognitive scientists, and neurobiologists.

The most direct path to our goals would be to embrace both van Lier's (1994) vision of interaction between theorists and practitioners and Lieberman's (2000) union of scientific fields. We might call the activity "practical linguistics" (Childs, 2001). Intended to embrace the theories and methods discussed above, practical linguistics is broader than traditional "applied linguistics," and broader also than what R. Ellis (1997) termed "second language acquisition research." A particular benefit is that modern theories employed in practical linguistics seem intuitively comprehensible to practitioners, upon whom reality has imposed dynamic views of language learning even without theoretical support. We may expect that, increasingly, theorists and practitioners will be able to speak the same language and contribute to each other's work.

References

Brockman, J. (1995). The third culture. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Childs, M. R. (2001). Toward a discipline of practical linguistics: Blending theory and use. Fuji Phoenix Review, 9, 1-14.

Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton.

Ellis, N. C. (1996). Sequencing in SLA: Phonological memory, chunking, and points of order. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18, 91-126.

Ellis, R. (1997). SLA and language pedagogy: An educational perspective. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19, 69-92.

Elman, J. L. (1995). Language as a dynamical system. In R. F. Port & T. van Gelder (Eds.), Mind as motion: Explorations in the dynamics of cognition (pp. 195-225). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Humes-Bartlo, M. (1989). Variation in children's ability to learn second languages. In K. Hyltenstam & L. K. Obler (Eds.), Bilingualism across the lifespan: Aspects of acquisition, maturity, and loss (pp. 41-54). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lee, P. (1996). The Whorf theory complex: A critical reconstruction. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From intention to articulation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Lieberman, P. (2000). Human language and the reptilian brain: The subcortical bases of speech, syntax, and thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Obler, L. K. (1989). Exceptional second language learners. In S. Gass, C. Madden, L. Preston, & L. Selinker (Eds.), Variation in second language acquisition: Vol. 2. Psycholinguistic issues (pp. 141-159). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

van Lier, L. (1994). Forks and hope: Pursuing understanding in different ways. Applied Linguistics, 15, 328-346.



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