Chapter 3 applied linguists and foreign language teacher FULL

3 The applied linguist and the foreign language teacher: can they talk to each other? Claire Kramsch The possibilities of mutual enrichment between applied linguists and language teachers have thereby increased dramatically, but so have the buzzwords and shorthand verbal practices, which constitute as many opportunities for misunderstanding Applied linguists & language teachers see themselves as being in the same boat, “both oars in the water” (Lightbown 1994) Do they have a common discourse? This paper:  Review briefly the reasons for the emergence of a discourse problem in language study  Examine the nature of this problem  Suggest the ways in which applied linguists and foreign language teachers can engage in intellectual dialogue, putting indeed both oars in the same water Why we have a discourse problem  Developments in foreign language education  Demographic and social changes => educated elite of industrialized countries has changed  The concept of a stable, consensual discourse community => give way to regconition of a diverse population of learners with changing needs  Learning a foreign language: - A way of discovering another people's multifaceted living culture - Include the ethnographic variability of language as it is used by native speakers in the variable practice of everyday life Language educators have ceased => Look to their colleagues in literature for pedagogic guidance =>They have turned instead to applied linguists like Henry Widdowson (1975, 1984a, 1992a), to ESL and FL methodologists, syllabus desingers, and curriculum developers  The growth of the field of applied linguistics  Programmatic chart proposed by Michael Halliday in 1978 expanded the object of language study to distinct but overlapping entities Language as a system, i.e phonic and graphic system, grammar and vocabulary Language as knowledge and thought Language as behavior enacted in a social context Language as art, or as a particular way of representing and constructing reality (Halliday 1978:II)  The problem is not just that foreign language educators and applied linguists give different meanings to identical words, but that they are themselves positioned at the confluence of several discourse communities or audiences  Widdowson called for a model of language in applied linguistics that would be “congruent with the knowledge and attitudes of language users” (1984a:26) • Since 1984, other applied linguists have made Widdowson's concepts - “language use”, “procedures”, “processes vs products” - widely assessible to language educators • Educators have made these concepts relevant to other educators through the mediation of school guidelines, national standards descriptors, and global educational statements => Each mediation attempts to bring together discourse worlds separated by divergent interests and spheres of influence  In sum: Each discourse domain has it own metaphors, its own categorizations, its own way of relating the parts to the whole => the broadened intellectual agenda now available to language teachers and applied linguists has made it more difficult to communicate across historically and socially created discourses “communicative competence” • Originally coined by Hymes (1972) • Chomsky’s notion of “competence” • Was defined by Grumperz in sociological terms as ‘Ability to select, from the totality of grammatically correct expressions available to the speaker, forms which appropriately reflect the social norms governing behavior in specific encounter.’ • Redefined in social interactional terms by Savignon as: => ‘ the expression, interpretation, and negotiation of meaning involving interaction between or more person belonging to the same ( or difference) speech community.’ ‘ that the student can understand the essential points of what the native speaker says to him in a real communication situation and can response with little or no effort and without errors that are so distracting that they interfere drastically with communication’ ( Terrell, 1977:326) An individual’s linguistic ability to ‘handle every day social encounters With some degree of appropriateness’ and to ‘hold up one’s won end of the conversation by making inquiries and offering more elaborate responses’ (Omaggio 1986:16) CONCLUSION Thus, different political and professional agendas, born form differenr historical conditions, make communication between researchers and practitioners treacherous FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION AND POLITICAL/ COMMERCIAL DISCOURSE fund Economic power Foreign language Education support affect Goals & approaches of educational discourse Textbook author further muddle the mediation by applied linguists of the results of their research Publisher Applied Linguists and language teacher have crossed the disciplines and opened domain-specific discourses It also entails a mediation through language that creates its own discourse problems The deep structure of the discourse problem  In early sixties, applied linguistics chose electrical process metaphor to describe the language learning process: input-black box-output The term input became metaphor for the language to be learned The deep structure of the discourse problem  Adopting the input metaphor for language learning, applied linguistics used metonymy + synecdoche to construct its object of research  In this course movement from the part to the whole, from the particular to the general ,input affects the acquisition of a foreign language The deep structure of the discourse problem  As the applied linguistics notion of input entered the schools, it was made to reinforce the mode of consciousness through which administrators and language teachers ask the questions relevant to their own discourse community The deep structure of the discourse problem  By passing from the physical science to the language sciences and from the language sciences to the science of education ,the input metaphor has shaped discourse realities for people who, although may use the same words, end up meaning different things by these words The deep structure of the discourse prolem  What has been missing in each of these transmutations is the fourth trope of discourse, the irony Current challenges to the input metaphor in language learning all use some form of irony Conclusion  Applied linguistics and language teachers are more interested than ever talking to one another as they both have to mediate between different discourse constituencies  What is important for each to understand is not the different answers they give but the different questions they ask