The Language Teacher
July 2002
The English We Teach
Henry Widdowson
It seems obvious on the face of it that the English we teach should be the real language that occurs naturally in contexts of use. We might otherwise be accused of practising a deception, fobbing our learners off with a kind of fake. There is, however, the (equally obvious) difficulty that we cannot just reproduce the natural occurrence of user English in the classroom. It has to be modified in some way to make it appropriate for learning. In other words, we have to make it into a subject: something that has to be constructed into courses of lessons on a timetable. English as a subject does not naturally occur: it has to be deliberately designed for learning.
It is English the subject we teach. The question is what do we need to take into account when designing it. Grammatically speaking, teach is a transitive verb and therefore takes an object. The objects can be of two different kinds. Consider the following examples:
1. She teaches English. (TE)
1. She teaches students. (TS)
When combined, the second of these becomes an indirect object, as in
1. She teaches students English.
2. She teaches English to students. (TES)
We might define our subject TES by reference to the direct object, E: English. The direct object, we may say, is our objective: what the students are eventually to attain, and this, we might argue has to be something resembling as closely as possible, the naturally occurring English of user experience. But there are difficulties here. In the first place, whose user experience are we talking about? If you learn the language of its users, you bid to become a member of their community. The user communities of English are many and varied, and what makes the language a reality for them is the way it keys in contextually with culturally specific assumptions and values. If learners are to achieve the goal of communicative competence in real English as appropriately used in the contexts of particular native-speaking communities, they would need to be made familiar with the complex cultural conditions that define these contexts. This would be a difficult enough task even if we knew what the target communities were that learners are bidding to join. Generally speaking, we do not. So there seems to be no point in trying to specify the goals of the subject in reference to the use of a particular community of native speaking users. This is particularly the case when one considers that English is increasingly being used as an international lingua franca by people who are not native speakers of the language at all, and who do not identify with, and owe no allegiance to, the cultural norms of its native speaking communities.
It does not seem to make much sense to rehearse students in particular user roles, much of the subtlety of which is unteachable anyway. It would surely be a more reasonable objective to invest in a more general capability in English for students to exploit as and the occasion subsequently arises. It is this general capability that needs to be defined as the goal of the subject to be taught, and this then serves as the basis for further learning whereby learners themselves adjust to particular cultural conditions of use, and fine-tune the language so that it is appropriate to particular contexts of use.
To specify native speaker use as the content to be taught in effect defines objectives in reference only to the direct object, English, and in disregard of the indirect object, the students. If we consider the students, we need to ask what it is reasonable to specify as an attainable objective--how the E is to be defined as goal, given the particular students we are teaching and what they need to be provided with at the end of the course as a basic resource they can draw on in subsequent learning. For most students, I would argue, real English is unrealistic English. In defining the relationship between the direct object E and the indirect object S, we need to consider not only the goal (what we want to get students to have learnt at the end of the course) but also the process of learning that gets them there. In other words, we need to think about the E as language that can engage the learner so that they can effectively learn from it.
I have talked about our subject as TES, and have argued that in defining the E we have to consider what we want the S to achieve. But our subject is generally referred to as the teaching of English for speakers of other languages, TESOL or teaching English as a foreign language, EFL. Here we come to another crucial factor we need to consider in defining the English we teach. As a subject, it is not English to speakers of other languages (E_SOL) but English for speakers of other languages (ESOL). This formulation implies that what is to be taught is not English as it is actually occurs in native speaker use, but English as expressly designed for those who do not speak it. Or, to take the other abbreviation, EFL, the subject is not just the E in isolation. What is taught is not English as such, but English as a foreign language.
We have two quite different realities here. What makes English real for its native users is its familiarity, but the most obvious reality for learners is that it is unfamiliar, foreign, alien indeed. The most obvious thing that the subject has to be designed to do is to somehow make the language less foreign. This means that the way the language is presented and the way language activities are designed in class have to meet two essential conditions. Firstly, it has to motivate the students, capture their interest, make them feel that here is something which, though new and strange, they can make meaningful as having a purpose of some kind. In other words, the language has to engage them so that they can make it real for themselves. This does not mean that it should correspond with how language is used as authentic communication in the real world. On the contrary, an attempt to replicate this user reality is likely only to make the language more alien. The reality we need to be concerned with is that which keys into the students' world and can be created in the classroom. This first condition seeks to make the cultural foreignness of English less threatening, allows the students to take to, play with it, appropriate it on their own terms. The second condition reduces the linguistic foreignness by getting the students to take control of it through learning, by getting them to notice how it works, how its forms can be manipulated.
These conditions do not naturally occur in class. They have to be specially contrived. That, I think, is what language pedagogy is all about. It is about artifice, the designing of English as a subject, for speakers of other languages, as a foreign language. And we should note that English is foreign in very different ways depending on who the students are, their socio-cultural assumptions and values, the other language or languages they speak, and so on. It is worth making the point, obvious though it may be, that you can only define the foreignness of a language by reference to a language, or languages, which are familiar. It follows that in defining ESOL or EFL at least one other language is implicated. If you separate the E from the SOL or the FL, then you can maintain the illusion that the subject is a monolingual one, only concerned with English. But if you integrate the E with the SOL or the FL, then it becomes clear that the subject is in certain respects bound to be a bilingual one, and to the extent to which foreignness is also a cultural phenomenon, a bicultural one as well. What this means in the present case is that in defining English as a subject in Japan, Japanese language and culture are also bound to be implicated and need to be incorporated into the design of instruction. What this means, indeed, is that we should not think in terms of the English we teach in general, but of the English you teach here in Japan: a foreign language subject which has to be designed so as to be locally appropriate to the contexts of Japanese classrooms.
All materials on this site are copyright © by JALT and their respective authors.
For more information on JALT, visit the JALT National Website